Jan 6 Committee Has So Far Failed To Make a Criminal Case Against Trump

Jul 25, 2022 | Politics

[...] It is difficult to make a criminal case over what an official failed to do. Yet the last hearing seemed to focus on a number of things that did not occur, from a draft tweet that was not sent to an executive order that was never signed. There were discussions of appointing Trump attorney Sidney Powell as a special counsel, seizing voting machines or replacing the Justice Department’s leadership. As unnerving as these proposals were, they also were not carried out.

It is the type of evidence used to show mens rea — “guilty mind.” However, crimes generally require both guilty minds and guilty acts. Building a criminal case on the failure to act to stop the violence is a notoriously difficult case to make.

[...] It is even more difficult when the House committee has blocked any serious investigation into the potentially contributing failure of Congress to take better precautions before the riot, another costly act of omission.

[...] Looking objectively at the evidence, the committee never supplied “credible” proof of crimes. That is not to say the evidence is not shocking; indeed, it is like a series of “jump scares” involving Trump and others raising unfounded or unconstitutional courses of conduct.

[...] The Jan. 6 committee has made a case against Trump personally and politically. It has not done so criminally.

Jordan McGillis: Climate McCarthyism

Jun 24, 2022 | Politics

In 2020, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Brian Schatz, Tom Carper, and Sheldon Whitehouse penned an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg calling on the company to toe the Democratic Party line. “If Facebook is truly ‘committed to fighting the spread of false news on Facebook and Instagram,’” the senators wrote, “the company must immediately acknowledge in its fact-checking process that the climate crisis is not a matter of opinion and act to close loopholes that allow climate disinformation to spread on its platform.”Less than a year later, Zuckerberg’s company seemingly tightened its review process to adhere to the Democrats’ wishes. In May 2021, Facebook applied the dodgy new standard against Manhattan Institute senior fellow Mark Mills’s review of a book by Steven Koonin, former undersecretary in the Department of Energy under President Barack Obama. As Koonin described the incident in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Facebook labeled postings of the Mills review as having “very low scientific credibility” and linked to a critique on the website ClimateFeedback.org, thus discouraging users from engaging with Mills and Koonin’s work—exactly as the Senate Democrats demanded. In these cases, it is easy to blame the companies that acquiesce—perhaps one large rival to Meta in the midst of an ownership change will buck this trend—but the politicians and bureaucrats doing the jawboning deserve ire, too.

Brian Simpson: Is US Constitution in Danger?

Jun 23, 2022 | Politics

The Banality of Putin and Xi

Jun 18, 2022 | Politics

Freedom fuels human progress and prosperity.

For individuals to live, think, produce, and thrive, the role of a proper government is to protect their freedom. It is freedom that fuels human progress and prosperity. No one who values human flourishing can look at Putin, Xi or any other dictator as anything but a lethal aberration....They dominate, brutalize and exploit those who think, teach, invent, produce, run businesses, create value at whatever scale. By violating the rights of their citizens, Putin, Xi and other dictatorial leaders defy the objective conditions necessary for individuals to live and prosper. They are destroyers. "To deal with men by force," observed philosopher Ayn Rand, "is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion."

Putin & Xi's regimes are geared toward parasitism and exploitation.

Putin-aligned oligarchs have ransacked the country. China's caste of party-aligned operatives have raked in billions, amid the country’s impressive economic rise. That rise, now seemingly slowing, occurred despite not because of China’s dictatorial leadership. It was a consequence of the slight degree of economic freedom the Party condescended to permit -- and which it is now undoing....Such dictators and their hangers-on are thugs, gangsters and murderers who operate under the state's (ostensible) moral authority. Human parasitism is an expression of not of efficacy, but of impotence.

Western intellectuals & policymakers have a prejudice against freedom, especially markets.

You can see it in the bias against markets, deemed messily inefficient, and in favor of central planning....many in the West are afflicted by what you might call Central-Planner Envy, and this leads them into warped thinking. It picks out supposed accomplishments  -- "Behold the highspeed trains in Xi's China!" -- while evading the full reality of the uncountable individuals whose rights are trashed in the course of maintaining the regimes system’s pervasive repression.

Western appeasement, investment, and whitewashing embolden Russia and China.

...Russia and China are afforded the undeserved moral status of civilized countries. By agreeing to sit down with them at summits and multilateral meetings, our heads of state perpetuate the fiction that Putin and Xi as efficacious and benevolent leaders that belong in the company of rights-respecting nations.The United Nations is a major culprit in whitewashing these regimes. Both have permanent seats on the UN's powerful Security Council(!), despite violating the organization’s stated principles -- flagrantly, repeatedly, and on a vast scale. What about the massacring of pro-democracy student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989? Dousing the last embers of intellectual freedom? Interning thousands of Uighurs in concentration camps? Wiping out the last vestiges of freedom in Hong Kong? Ongoing piracy of foreign-owned intellectual property? The dishonest handling of the COVID pandemic? No, China has learned that it is effectively untouchable.This official whitewashing encourages, and is reinforced by, the willingness of American and European companies to invest in China and Russia as if they were basically free, civilized, moral regimes....Putin’s regime, for example, has benefited handsomely from the inflow of foreign capital and joint-ventures with BP, Shell and Exxon. But, since the war in Ukraine, all three of these companies are frantically departing the Russian market, suffering losses in the tens of billions of dollars.When you reflect on how the U.S. and European nations dealt with Putin’s past aggression, his initiation of war against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, is exposed as foreseeable, rather than strategically shrewd let alone “genius.” Passive appeasement by the U.S. and Europe emboldened Putin...

The Problem with the Umbrella approach to Libertarianism

Jun 7, 2022 | Politics

🧵The "libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline" is a simplistic misdiagnosis of a complex and real problem.

Are there examples of libertarians who have moved into profoundly illiberal alt-right territory? Absolutely. But there are also examples of libertarians who became Marxists.

— Phil Magness (@PhilWMagness) June 6, 2022

"Hoppe's "argumentation ethics," in turn, is explicitly lifted from the Discourse Ethics tradition in critical theory. Hoppe even directly sources the origin of his "argumentation ethics" claim to his old grad school advisors Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel."..."Again, having trained directly under Habermas, Hoppe was deeply versed in critical theory, approved of it, and used it in his work. He simply gave its traditionally far-left political disposition a far-right makeover.""Hoppe also imports an eclectic mix of reactionary racial theorists that originated wholly externally to the Austrian-liberal economic tradition. You see this in his book Democracy the God That Failed, where he describes Mises's open immigration views as a relic of a bygone age.""After rejecting Mises on immigration, Hoppe replaces them with appeals to far-right racial theorists such as J. Phillipe Rushton and the novelist Jean Raspail (of "Camp of the Saints" infamy). These figures populate the footnotes of his book whenever he talks about immigration.""Like Yarvin's use of Carlyle, Hoppe's main influences are EXTERNAL to classical liberalism/libertarianism, and indeed quite a few of them are traditional ADVERSARIES of libertarian economic philosophy - Marx, Habermas & the critical theory world.""Why do figures such as Yarvin, Hoppe, and their various followers veer down this illiberal path? In each case, it stems from them finding something dissatisfying with the traditional classical liberal status quo. So they search for external authors in other traditions."

"I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."