WSJ: Jan 6th Was No Coup d’état

Jul 29, 2021 | Politics

From the WSJ:

"The chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, claimed in his opening remarks Tuesday that “the rioters came dangerously close to succeeding” in their effort to “upend American democracy.” This is in service of Mrs. Pelosi’s political narrative that Mr. Trump conspired with a mob to stage a coup d’état. She wants to run against Mr. Trump again in 2022."This gives the mob far too much credit. Rioters believed Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about a stolen election, and some of them apparently thought they might stop Congress’s certification of the electoral votes. But that was an impossible fantasy. The Electoral College had already voted. Vice President Mike Pence had concluded, correctly and bravely, that he had no authority to reject the results. The rioters had no apparent leader and no coherent plan."Even if they’d managed to steal or destroy the official Electoral College certificates, do Democrats think some knucklehead in face paint and a fur hat could have simply declared the election void? The public and the courts wouldn’t have stood for a rabble overturning the 2020 result. Mr. Trump didn’t have the military on his side, or even most of his own Administration. The investigations so far have turned up no guiding cabal. Rioters have been arrested and many will go to prison."The riot was a disgrace, and it’s a stain on Mr. Trump’s Presidency. The police officers who testified Tuesday are heroes for holding the line and giving Vice President Pence and Congress time to evacuate." [Two False Narratives About the Capitol Riot, July 28, 2021]

• “If the Capitol Riot was ‘Domestic Terrorism’, Why Wasn’t the BLM Attack on the White House?”
• Was Facebook, Not Parler, The Capitol Rioters Favorite Platform?
• Tulsi Gabbard: Advocates of a U.S. Police State are More “Dangerous Than the Mob That Stormed Our Capitol”
• Capitol Riots Were Not Incited By Trump Speech But Were A Pre-Planned Conspiracy
• Salon: Facebook Played a Greater “Role” In Capitol Riots, But Only Parler Was Cancelled
• Caroline Glick: Fallout From The Storming of the U.S. Capitol

The Jan 6th Capitol Riot Show Trials Punish Political Opponents Not For Their Actions But For Their Ideas

Jul 29, 2021 | Politics

The recent felony conviction and eight month prison sentence of January 6th protester Paul Hodgkins is an affront to any notion of justice. It is a political charge and a political verdict by a political court. Every American regardless of political persuasion should be terrified of a court system so beholden to politics instead of justice.We’ve seen this movie before and it does not end well.Worse than this miscarriage of justice is the despicable attempt by the prosecutor in the case to label Hodgkins – who has no criminal record and was accused of no violent crime – a “terrorist.”As journalist Michael Tracey recently wrote, Special Assistant US Attorney Mona Sedky declared Hodgkins a “terrorist” in the court proceedings not for committing any terrorist act, not for any act of violence, not even for imagining a terrorist act.Sedky wrote in her sentencing memo, “The Government … recognizes that Hodgkins did not personally engage in or espouse violence or property destruction.” She added, “we concede that Mr. Hodgkins is not under the legal definition a domestic terrorist.”Yet Hodgkins should be considered a terrorist because the actions he took – entering the Senate to take a photo of himself – occurred during an event that the court is “framing…in the context of terrorism.”That goes beyond a slippery slope. He is not a terrorist because he committed a terrorist act, but because somehow the “context” of his actions was, in her words, “imperiling democracy.”In other words, Hodgkins deserved enhanced punishment because he committed a thought crime. The judge on the case, Randolph D. Moss, admitted as much. In carrying a Trump flag into the Senate, he said, Hodgkins was, “declaring his loyalty to a single individual over the nation.”As Tracey pointed out, while eight months in prison is a ridiculously long sentence for standing on the floor of the “People’s House” and taking a photograph, it is also a ridiculously short sentence for a terrorist. If Hodgkins is really a terrorist, shouldn’t he be sent away for longer than eight months?The purpose of the Soviet show trials was to create an enemy that the public could collectively join in hating and blaming for all the failures of the system. The purpose was to turn one part of the population against the other part of the population and demand they be “cancelled.” And it worked very well…for awhile.In a recent article, libertarian author Jim Bovard quoted from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago about how average people turned out to demand "justice" for the state's designated “political” enemies: “There were universal meetings and demonstrations (including even school-children). It was the newspaper march of millions, and the roar rose outside the windows of the courtroom: ‘Death! Death! Death!’”While we are not quite there yet, we are moving in that direction. Americans being sent to prison not for what they did, but for what they believe? Does that sound like the kind of America we really want to live in?While many Biden backers are enjoying seeing the hammer come down on pro-Trump, non-violent protesters, they should take note: the kind of totalitarian “justice” system they are cheering on will soon be coming for them. It always does.

James Grant on How Jonathan Levy’s “Ages of American Capitalism” Completely Misses The Point

May 27, 2021 | Politics

In Mr. Levy's vast mural of a book, which he ambitiously subtitles "A History of the United States," John Maynard Keynes cuts the commanding figure. A few lines from Keynes's "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" (1936), in fact, anticipate Mr. Levy's central thesis. They read: "A somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation of full employment."[...]Mr. Levy writes to advance the proposition that American capitalism is turning from investment and production to speculation and chaos.[...]Mr. Levy is less successful at developing his thesis than he is at announcing it. His haziness on the nomenclature and history of finance is one problem, his want of authorial craft is another. [...]Mr. Levy doesn't explicitly oppose the enterprise system -- he acknowledges that it lifted the world from poverty -- but he's more inclined to disparage than admire the self-organizing dynamics of market-determined prices. [...]The conclusion to which Mr. Levy's too numerous pages lead is that government is the indispensable cog in the American economy. It was World War II, a government enterprise if ever there was one, that ended the Great Depression, he contends, and it was the Federal Reserve that led us out of the Great Recession.Conventionally, the author rushes past the depression of 1920-21, a bear of a downturn that was over and done with in 18 months despite punishingly high interest rates and balanced federal budgets. Why the slump ever ended should be a matter of intense curiosity for anyone who, like Mr. Levy, puts his stock in the Keynesian nostrums of big spending and concessionary borrowing costs. "Capitalism was not going to lift itself out of the slump," the author writes of the Great Depression, yet our unstimulated capitalist forebears in 1921 somehow decided that prices and wages had fallen low enough to warrant new commitments of hope and capital. The 1920s subsequently roared.

A Lesson for Biden From Germany on IP

May 21, 2021 | Politics