Booker’s Racism Charge Against Trump’s ‘Go Back’ Rant is Rich

I usually avoid “whataboutism.” But sometimes it is relevant and called-for. In 'I thought our country was beyond that,’ says [New Jersey Senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Corey] Booker, condemning Trump rhetoric as racist, Jonathan D. Salant (NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) reported: 

“I thought our country was beyond that,” Booker said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “This reality is this is a guy who is worse than a racist. He’s actually using racist tropes and racial language for political gain. He’s trying to use this as a weapon to divide our nation against itself."

Booker was referring to Donald Trump’s “go back” harangue against four Democratic congresswomen (more on that later). 

I posted these comments, edited and expanded for clarity:

This is rich. Booker belongs to a political party in which racism is embedded in its ideological DNA, in the form of its collectivist group identity, including racial identity, politics. 

Furthermore, Booker just embraced slavery reparations. [Booker’s bill calls for a “study” of reparations. But give me a break.] Morally and logically, reparations are a form of restitution paid by the actual perpetrator of rights violations to his actual victims. But Booker’s reparations bill necessarily means forcing the transfer of wealth from innocent white people to non-victim black people—“to right the economic scales of past harms,” as Booker frames it. But the premise underpinning Booker’s reparations is that guilt and victimhood are transferred from generation to generation through the individual’s genetic lineage or bodily chemistry. That is biological determinism, the very definition of racism, which holds that a person’s character, ideas, actions, station, and moral standing is biologically determined and that the individual can never escape that biological legacy regardless of his personal morals, choices, or actions.

Booker’s charge against Trump is not entirely inaccurate, though not in the way he means. But if Trump’s comments are racist, he is merely ripping a page from the Democrats’ more polished and highbrow playbook. The Democrats’ collectivist “social justice” ethos—which disregards individual dignity and identifies all individuals by groups, pitting group against group regardless of the innocence or guilt of actual individuals—is the essence of dividing a nation, and the epitome of using race for political gain. 

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Exemplifying the Democrats’ collectivist/racist ethos, consider this from Rep. Ayanna Pressley:

"We don't need any more brown faces that don't want to be a brown voice. We don't need black faces that don't want to be a black voice. We don't need Muslims that don't want to be a Muslim voice. We don't need queers that don't want to be a queer voice."

In other words, you’re not an individual. You must tow the ideological line imposed by your group thought leaders.

For the record, I checked out Trump’s comments. Here they are in full:

So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

On these comments, Salant reported:

Trump was condemned by the Democratic-controlled House last week after he told four Democratic congresswomen, all women of color, to “go back” to where they came from.

Three of the four, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, were born in the U.S. and the fourth, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, was a naturalized American.

Trump nevertheless continued his attacks on the four lawmakers Sunday.

When he said:

I don’t believe the four Congresswomen are capable of loving our Country. They should apologize to America (and Israel) for the horrible (hateful) things they have said. They are destroying the Democrat [sic] Party, but are weak & insecure people who can never destroy our great Nation! 

Now consider further comments by Booker:

“The language he uses is actually tired old tropes that have been used by demagogues all throughout our country’s history,” Booker told CBS. “This president is yet another sad chapter. But what we’ve done all the time as Americans, black and white from different backgrounds, we’ve always joined together and beaten those demagogues, and and [sic] hate-mongers and fear-mongers. That’s where Donald Trump will be relegated.”

Reread the comments of both Booker and Trump, and then notice whose language injects race into the conversation. The Democratic-controlled House. Corey Booker. Not Donald Trump.

Trump’s comments are ridiculous. People (or their antecedents) come here to escape corrupt and oppressive countries and cultures, and America is better for it. It’s ridiculous to say they can’t criticize America's government unless they return to the place that they (or their ancestors) escaped from and fix those problems rather than speak their mind.

Trump’s premise reminds me of the turmoil of my youth. I initially supported the Vietnam War back in the 1960s. But I never agreed with the “love-it-or-leave-it” mantra that some on my side leveled against the anti-war activists. I’ve never bought into that tactic. 

Trump’s comments are uncalled-for. He should be countering the congresswomens’ arguments for “how our government is to be run” with intellectual arguments of his own. His response to these Democrats is ideological, in a shallow sort of way, but ultimately empty. And they are childish. And yes, they are offensive, and can even be characterized as demagogic. If someone told me to “Go back to Italy” from which my grandparents emigrated, I’d be furious. It may be that Trump is racist; a lot of people more knowledgeable than I, other than Leftists, think so. But Trump’s comments, in and of themselves, are clearly not racist. Racism belongs primarily to the other side, which “sees” racism where none exists or exaggerates the lingering racism that does exist. Race has become a major political tactic—an argument from intimidation—of the American Left. As proof, I give you the Democrats’ reaction to Trump’s inane comments.

Related Reading:

‘Reparations’; Another Leftist Path to Socialism

Identity Politics: America’s ‘Pre-Existing Condition’, and the Cure

Racism—Ayn Rand

Pharma Can’t ‘Bargain’ With a Medicare Monopsony

I was disappointed to read Paul Mulshine’s column advocating a change in the law allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices with private drug makers (The Medicare drug issue: ‘Conservatives’ who don’t want to bargain for better prices? No way). He criticized other conservatives for labeling such “bargaining” as price controls. But that is precisely what this would be--back-door price controls.

Mulshine did make the valid point that America doesn’t really have a functioning free market in drugs, and did advocate for free market reforms:

The genuinely conservative position on Medicare is to call for the entire program to be privatized so private insurance companies can make whatever deals they want with the drug companies.

But if we’re stuck subsidizing those drugs, the very least we can demand is that the government pay the lowest price possible to the drug companies.

It’s the “But if we’re stuck” phrase that stuck in my craw.

I left these comments:

Medicare is a monopsony--a legally protected exclusive buyer of drugs for the senior market. It is also part of an institution that determines what drugs can be sold--and that has regulatory, taxing, and prosecutorial powers through multiple agencies--not to mention Congress. What “bargaining” power can a private company have with Medicare, a part of the whole coercive federal establishment? “Take-it-or-leave-it” is no choice at all for a drug company “dealing” with a government monopsony.

The solution to the problems caused by creeping socialism and government interference is not more socialism and government interference. That’s how, after decades, we have gotten to the point that a movement openly advocating full, totalitarian socialism is gaining traction in America by arguing that the whole point of the growing welfare state was precisely that--undiluted totalitarian socialism.

The solution is not to “defend the current system.” It is to take a stand against socialism and government interference and in favor of reforms geared toward more individual freedom. Privatizing Medicare is a good place to start. That will take guts, and may cost an election. But it’s the right thing to do, and will at least offer voters an alternative vision and choice.

Related Reading:

Farmer's "All-American Socialism"

Blaming the Remaining Fragments of Healthcare Freedom for Problems Caused by Government

The Elephant ‘Suggests’ Free Market, Not Single Payer, Healthcare

Moral Health Care vs. Universal Health Care, by Lin Zinser and Paul Hsieh

‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

Democrats seek Green New Deal to address climate change

A group of Democrats unveiled their “Green New Deal” (GND) that calls for a “‘10-year national mobilization’ on the scale of the original New Deal” geared to “transform the U.S. economy to combat climate change.”

Remember that the 1930s FDR New Deal was a catastrophic failure if the goal was economic well-being. But it was a smashing success at expanding the power and scope of government interference in the economy. The drastic transformation of the U.S. economy would require, against the choices that Americans would otherwise make, would do the same, this time likely on the scale of totalitarian power. If the climate is in a “crisis” that is an imminent “‘existential threat’ to the planet,” and human activity is the cause, then what control can’t the government impose on us? What limits on government power will be left under the government-imposed mobilization plan? None--and that’s the point.

But is climate change the primary factor motivating the GND? I doubt it. Remember that the Democratic Party is now a socialist party--a democratic socialist party. Socialism, according The Basics,

is a political and economic theory of social organisation which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned and regulated by the community as a whole, rather than by private individuals.

According to the website of The Democratic Socialists of America website,

working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few.

Cutting through the collectivist lingo--”the community as a whole” and “run both the economy and society democratically”--this means totalitarian control by government. The economy and society are made up of individuals living their lives. A government that runs the economy and society is a government with total control over the people’s lives. Economics is the field of activity by which people support their lives. A government that totally controls the economy has total control over people’s means of survival. A government with total control over people's means of survival is a government that has every individual by the throat. What freedom, what opposition, is possible under such conditions? Does it matter whether you have a single ruler or a politburo? Whether it is elected or not? A government, of whatever kind, that has every individual by the throat is a totalitarian state. Logic confirms this truth. History has proven this time and again.

In order to understand what this is really all about, we must take a brief look back. As thinkers such as Ayn Rand (P. 270) and Stephen Hicks (C. 5) have observed, socialists faced a crisis around the middle of the 20th Century. Marxist predictions that capitalism would lead to the few getting rich at the expense of impoverishing the many turned out to be 180º wrong: The growth of industrial fortunes was accompanied by a rising general standard of living, including the emergence of a vast prosperous middle class. Meanwhile, socialist nations collapsed into widespread poverty, one after another, accompanied by brutal repressions and often genocide. Rather than acknowledge the obvious, the socialists switched gears. Under a “New Left,” they aligned with the “ecology” movement, the precursor to modern Environmentalism, opposing capitalism for creating too much prosperity for the masses, thus ruining the Earth with pollution. When capitalist nations began cleaning up the pollution--genuine pollution--while continuing the upward trajectory of general prosperity, the socialists turned to a quasi-religion--the Environmentalists’ “climate crisis”. Capitalism-hating Naomi Klein captures the modern socialist strategy. Climate change “Changes Everything,” she writes. As Reason’s Ronald Bailey summarizes:

"Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war," she asserts. Climate science, Klein claims, has given progressives "the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism" ever. If the stresses of globalization and a massive financial crisis cannot mobilize the masses, then the prospect of catastrophic climate change must.

Canonical Marxism predicted that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its class "contradictions," in which the bourgeoisie profit from the proletariat's labor until we reach a social breaking point. In Klein's progressive update, capitalism will collapse because the pollution produced by its heedless overconsumption will build to an ecological breaking point.

[P]rogressive values and policies are "currently being vindicated, rather than refuted, by the laws of nature." [emphasis added]

Socialism is totalitarian, by design and in practice. So where does the Green New Deal come in?

Environmentalism--uppercase “E”; the ideological belief that values raw nature over human life--is fundamentally anti-human. It holds untouched nature as the moral standard. Since human beings survive and thrive by transforming the natural environment to fit human needs, Environmentalism is ideologically opposed to industrial development of any kind, and thus human well-being.

Climate change is therefor bad, not because change itself is bad, but because human-induced change is bad. Climate is so all-encompassing that there is virtually nothing that humans can do, short of reverting to a pre-fire, pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer Stone Age existence, that does not contribute in some way, directly or indirectly, to climate change. To end human caused climate change, then, is to obliterate human progress and flourishing. Energy is the industry that powers every other industry. Not just any energy. Reliable, economical, mass-scale energy. Fossil fuels are the leading reliable energy source, so Environmentalism focusses on banning of fossil fuels. To ban fossil fuels--go “carbon free”--requires the governmental power to impact every human activity. That is the very definition of totalitarian.   

So whether the goal is to “save” the Earth from human impact, or turn America socialist, totalitarian powers are needed. To avoid catastrophic climate change, governments must engineer “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” according to the recent report of U.N.’s IPCC. The American government must orchestrate a “10-year national mobilization [to] transform the U.S. economy to combat climate change,” according to the Green New Deal. Such utopian dreams are the stuff of which totalitarian dictatorships are made, because such sweeping reorganizations of the lives of 350 million--or 7 billion--human beings can only be “achieved” from the top down.

But Democrats are not primarily Environmentalists. They are socialists. They are not nihilists. They don’t intend to do away with industrialization and technology. They intend to control it. Socialism requires totalitarian powers. How to get it? The Environmentalists’ climate change agenda. “Saving the planet” sounds a lot better than socialism. They intend to gain full control by hitching socialism to Environmentalism, then riding the “save-the-Earth” totalitarianism of the “climate crisis” not to a “green” America but to a socialist America.

I have no doubt that the new Democratic Socialists are salivating over the chance to force these draconian changes on the American people. But I don’t believe it’s to stop climate change. OAC and her ilk couldn’t care less about the weather. To actually attempt to eliminate fossil fuels in 10 years would collapse the economy. It would be political suicide for the Democratic Party.

A “climate crisis”--the “end of the world in 12 years,” as OAC hysteria puts it--is a means to an end. Both the U.N. report and the GND integrate socialist goals into the climate agenda. The Green New Dealers want the totalitarian powers to transform the economy--not to save us from climate change, but to complete the transformation of America from a predominantly free capitalist nation to a socialist slave state. OAC is very open about this: “We can use the transition to 100 percent renewable energy,” says the self-described radical for socialism, “as the vehicle to establish economic, racial and social justice in America." And that’s the real motive behind the Green New Deal. "This is going to be the New Deal, the Great Society, the moon shot, the civil rights movement of our generation," she gushed. Give OAC credit for honesty. The “climate crisis” is not the end to be solved. It is the means to an end--a socialist America.

Related Reading:

The Real Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables--Michael Shellenberger

New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

The 'Watermelon' Analogy is Real, and it is Dangerous

Democratic Socialism: The Left Escalates America’s Journey to Totalitarianism

Environmentalists, Luddites, and Collectivism

Earth Day: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

QUORA: ‘What will the 2018 midterm elections mean for policy making in the US?'

With Democrats regaining the House of Representatives, I decided to take a crack at political prognostication, just for the fun of it.

QUORA *: ‘What will it mean for policy making in the US now the Democrats have taken control of the House and the Republicans have extended their lead in the Senate?’

I posted this answer:

Political prognosticators generally expect policy “gridlock.” But my guess is that more will get done legislatively, for better or for worse, than people expect. Trump is the quintessential pragmatist. He is a deal-maker. Now that the Democrats control half of Congress, he will happily collaborate with the Democrats on legislation. (Already, Andrew Cuomo announced a “productive meeting” with Trump regarding funding for the $multibillion Gateway Tunnel project.) Much as the Democrats will want to make Trump look bad by not giving him any high profile legislative successes, they’ll have to go along partly because Trump will make concessions most GOP presidents wouldn’t give, and partly to avoid being branded “the party of NO.”

Trump would never go along with any of the more radical fascist-like proposals of the socialist wing of the Democratic Party, such as Elizabeth Warren’s Nader-inspired, Mussolini style government takeover of big corporations (Accountable Capitalism Act) or Bernie Sanders’s Mafia-like extortion schemes (“Stop Walmart” Act, “Stop Bezos” Act) or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s pet scheme to force the entire medical profession into police state-like federal regimentation (Medicare-for-All). On the other hand, Republicans will be unhappy with some of Trump’s deals with the Democrats. But Trump will pressure the Republican Senate to go along, and they’ll have little choice because he’s their own president.

Politically, the Democrats’ 2018 midterm election gains changes the game for them. The Democrats will now have to get back to actually governing rather than merely bashing Trump. And behind Trump’s often inane tweeting is a politically shrewd politician. My guess is that within two years Trump will be looked upon more favorably than he is now. If Democrats work with him, he’ll look better. If they don’t, the Democrats will look bad.

With the full understanding that it is hazardous to make predictions, especially about the future, my view is that the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives will end up having increased Trump’s chances for reelection in 2020.

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Then it got interesting. Stay tuned

Related Reading:

My Vote Will Go to . . . (ARRGGHH!) Donald Trump

* [Quora is a social media website founded by two former Facebook employees. According to Wikipedia:

Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. The company was founded in June 2009, and the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010.[3]Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers.[4]

You can also reply to other users’ answers.]

Keep Social Media Free of the ‘Wild, Wild West’ of Government Regulation

“The days of the unregulated wild west are over for the social media,” asserted Virginia Senator Mark Warner recently on CNBC. Bloomberg reported:

Mark Warner, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, said Thursday a broad bipartisan majority in Congress likely will back new regulation of social media, though such legislation might take time to come together.

"Depending on how we framed it, I think we’d have an overwhelming majority," Warner of Virginia said at a conference on digital privacy in Washington sponsored by the Atlantic magazine. "I think there is a high chance that people realize that the days of the wild, wild west are over, that there needs to be some guardrails."

“Wild west” is the statists’ derogatory term for economic freedom, implying that a free market has no “guardrails.” But that’s false. A free market by definition requires law--legal protections for individual rights. That’s not what Warner has in mind. His (and others’) term “wild west” is being used to call for government regulation of social media.

“Guardrails” is a neat little bit of verbal gaming of the language of political philosophy. Legitimate, rights-protecting laws are all about establishing limits to individual freedom of action--guardrails, one might say--in that we are free to pursue our own individual interests so long as we do not violate the same rights of others by force or fraud. The principle of individual rights, properly understood, establishes the sphere of proper individual action, while drawing a line beyond which one’s actions cannot go--specifically, where others’ rights begin. Proper, objective law defines the boundaries, or guardrails, of rights.

Regulation is different from objective law. Regulation is about control by government bureaucracy, not guardrails. It is an ongoing process of legal bureaucratic rulemaking, without principles, featuring constant alterations, additions, and shifting interpretations based on  spur-of-the-moment political pressures. Facebook and other social media companies have always been subject to the rule of law, such as laws against fraud, breach of contract, extortion, and the like. What Warner and his ilk mean by wild west is that the politicians can’t control them. Enter regulation. Unlike the proper guardrails inherent in legitimate law, regulation means arbitrary rulemaking imposed on industries prior to any wrongdoing. In other words, regulation removes the guardrails for government officials. Free markets depend on objective law. Regulated markets, not free markets, more resemble the wild west. In his book Extortion, Peter Schweizer covers the nature of government’s power of control in deep detail. Here is a sampling:

There are about 170 federal entities that issue regulations. There are about 60 federal departments, agencies, and commissions, with about 240,000 full-time employees who make and enforce them. Americans are awash in regulations that are increasingly complex and difficult for the average person to understand. [p.17]

But not just for the average person.

Famed criminal defense attorney and civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz believe that many professionals in America—particularly lawyers, accountants, bankers, and doctors—commit on average three felonies a day without knowing it [author’s emphasis, p.17].

And:

In 2011, American businesses were required to comply with no fewer than 165,000 pages of federal regulations [p 119].

Companies by and large want to comply with laws and regulations. Executives don’t want to pay fines, or worse, go to jail. Cass Sunstein served in the Obama administration as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “As OIRA administrator, I often heard the following plea from the private sector: ‘Please, tell us what you want us to do!’ On many occasions, companies said they were prepared to comply with the rules, and to do so in good faith, but needed to know what, specifically, compliance entailed [p.116]

And Sunstein, Schweizer notes, “is no free market libertarian.” Why the complexity and vagueness for the average person, professionals, and businessmen? To create post - government service career opportunities, for one.

High - powered and expensive consulting firms in Washington are littered with former regulators eager, for a nice fee, to clarify the confusing rules they once wrote [my emphasis, p.119].

But that’s the least of it. As the title of Schweizer’s book implies, what he labels “the Permanent Political Class” can use the deliberately vague regulations they create to extort protection money from the regulated. And given that the regulated have fines and jail hanging over their heads, fear and panic become handy tools for politicians who wield a monopoly on legal coercion. The controlling power of the impossibly complex regulatory monstrosity is an omnipresent weapon for power-lusting politicians.

Said Senator Orrin Hatch, “If you want to get involved in business, you should get involved in politics [p. 87].” “Every aspect of regulatory life,” observes Schweizer, “is now involved in the extortion racket” [p. 122].

Welcome to the mixed economy. To what, exactly, does the wild west analogy really apply--the social media market or the regulatory state?

In the movie Tombstone, Johnny Ringo and his gang of gunslinging outlaws sweeps into town, kills the sheriff, and declares that “Law doesn’t go around here.” Ringo and his gang proceeds to rule by intimidation, fear, and violence, until Wyatt Earp rises to establish re-establish law so people can go back to living their lives in freedom and safety.

When private individuals can’t even figure out what they need to do to comply with the law until the people who write the law tells them, you are no longer talking about law. You are talking about political gunslinging. Schweizer compares the “Permanent Political Class” to a legalized Mafia. True enough. Given Senator Warner’s “wild west” analogy, one could also compare the Permanent Political Class to Johnny Ringo and is band of outlaws, with the political class ruling by intimidation and fear and where the violence is camouflaged by the highbrow superficiality of “law.” **

 .

No doubt the law must keep up with the evolution of the economic marketplace. There are legitimate issues, such a privacy breaches, that arguably could be dealt with by law. But it should be law—real, clearly understandable, objective law—not regulation. Bad as regulation is, it is especially important to keep the government’s regulatory hands off of social media companies. Given that social media is integrally intertwined with freedom of speech, the danger to our liberty of forcing the Facebooks and the Googles under the thumbs of the legalized outlaws of the Permanent Political Class is particularly acute. Facebook, Google, and other such platforms are conduits for billions of average people to express themselves and communicate with each other, so regulation is a dangerous infringement on intellectual freedom. It’s one thing to regulate an electric company. Bad as that is, the regulators are controlling only the flow of electricity. With social media, the regulators potentially gain control of the flow of news, information, and social debate. It is government censorship by proxy--that is, censorship just as sure as if we had a federal Ministry of Truth. Goodbye intellectual freedom.

As the new year and the new congress gets going, the most important issue for 2019 will be internet regulation. To put the issue in Mark Warner terms, and for the sake of our liberty and the rule of law that our liberty depends upon: Keep your wild, wild west regulatory hands off of our social media.

** [Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter distinguishes between law and regulation. From The Atlantic’s Enforcing the Law Is Inherently Violent:

He is astute to include “regulation” in his proposed debate––in recent decades, agencies in the federal bureaucracy that few members of the public would associate with law enforcement have assembled SWAT units that carry out paramilitary raids, often against unarmed citizens engaged in nonviolent transgressions.]

Related Reading:

The ‘Wild West’ of Government Regulation Caused the 2008 Financial Meltdown

Moral Rights and Political Freedom—Tara Smith

Where Does Valid Law End and Regulation Begin?

TARA SMITH DISCUSSES “HUMANITY’S DARKEST EVIL” by Tom Bowden, summary of the essay “Humanity’s Darkest Evil”: The Lethal Destructiveness of Non-Objective Law—Tara Smith, chapter 18, Essays on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

What is Objective Law?, by Harry Binswanger

NJ Government Takes First Step to Becoming ‘the Sole Arbiter of Truth’

The Banning of Alex Jones: Facebook Choice or Regulatory Extortion?

Facebook/Cambridge Analytica Data Breach Should Not Be a Pretext for Government Controls

Central Planning: The True Economic Chaos by Brian Belfour for FEE

'Fake News' Is Not an Excuse to Regulate the Internet—Zach Weissmueller for Reason.com

Both Democrats and Republicans are missing the mark when they call for the government to control the flow of information on the internet.