Libertarian transgender precipitates one day government shutdown

A different, less snarky, version of this was published yesterday at Breitbart.

If Julia Roberts wants to play a transsexual in the middle of a conspiracy theorist’s dream I have a treatment ready for her.

Monday someone who was first reported as suicidal woman, and then rumored to be a man with a rifle, shut down a huge section of downtown DC.  Police refuse to comment on any questions and the mainstream media refused to mention that the culprit, Sophia Dalke, 31, was transgender, which was also left out of the police report.

The result is that people are free to speculate.

Initially I was as much of a mind to indulge in very black humor.  I came up with two jokes:

1) 2015 is the year transgender people became the new face of conservative politics.  First Caitlyn Jenner declared herself to be a Christian, constitutionalist, Republican, and now Sophia Dalke has engineered a one (transgender) woman government shut down.

And

2) Aerosmith releases a new single, “Trannies got a gun.“

But investigating further, finding coincidences, and having the police refuse to answer simple questions makes one speculate about all kinds of things.

At 6:42 am Monday  the D.C. Police department tweeted out a picture of nine blocks of downtown Washington, D.C.. announcing they were under lockdown Monday morning.   From the World Bank at 18th and I Streets NW, near the White House, to the Social Security Administration at 21st and M Streets NW, two blocks from Senator Harry Reid’s Ritz Carlton condominium on 23rd Street, much of the K street lobbying corridor was closed to buses, cars, and pedestrians.

Monday there was almost no coverage of just what was involved, other than that it was a mentally ill woman, as both cars and pedestrians were denied the ability to enter the K street lobbying area.  Later in the day rumors were that it was a man with a rifle.

On Tuesday DC’s main gay newspaper, the Washington Blade, reported that nine city blocks were closed for 10 hours for a suicidal male to female transgender with a gun – so both stories, that it was a woman and that it was a man, were  correct.  Prior to that, Monday evening, when Dalke was arrested The Washington Post and other mainstream media – and the D.C. Police report – omitted the fact that the culprit was a transexual.  Local news radio station WTOP headlined its blog post “10-hour D.C. Standoff ends with woman’s arrest.” 

The PC prudery of the mainstream media is odd.  Ms. Dalke’s Google+ profile reads “I am a pansexual transgender woman who is obsessed with history, politics, booze, and erotica with no shame about any of it.”  I first became aware of this when two different conservative Republican lesbian friends told me I should write something on the coverup of the fact that Dalke was a transexual.

I now think there could be more interesting omissions in the story.

  Dalke’s latest social media post:  “Sorry everybody, I’m dead tonight.”

None of this explained why 9 blocks would be closed, making the conspiracy minded wonder if it was something more, in the wake of recent tragedies.  Especially since police and bomb sniffing dogs were reported on local radio to be out in full force Tuesday, on D.C.’s problem ridden subway system, Metro.

Dalke had barricaded herself at 1999 K Street, a new environmentally certified modern glass office building near the Peace Corp, law firms, and the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute.  1999 K houses the Federal Agricultural Mortgage agency, which makes real estate loans to farmers and agribusiness, and the law offices of Mayer-Brown, where Richard Ben-Veniste, a Watergate special prosecuter, who also defended the Clinton’s in Whitewater, and who was also appointed to the 9/11 commission, is a partner. (Ben-Veniste’s examination of Condi Rice revealed that the government had conducted studies considering the possibility of a 9/11 style attack before it occurred).  I called the main switchboard at Mayer Brown and asked for Sophia Dalke, and instead of telling me off the nice British accented switchboard operator looked through her directory and told me Dalke worked for one of their sub tenants and gave me that phone number, whose voice mail answers “Tina Brown.”  Of course, the fact that Dalke works in a building with such unusually well connected people is probably merely a coincidence.

I contacted the public information office of the D.C. Police department Tuesday evening and asked four questions: 1) Is it standard operating procedure to shut down several blocks of downtown for one person barricaded in a building? 2) Were these extreme measures because of concerns about terrorism and the events in Paris?  3) Did Dalke work at 1999 K Street where she was apprehended, for a tenant of the Mayer Brown law firm?  And 4) Was there a reason Dalke’s being transgender was omitted from the police report.  The officer replied to each question with a firm “We have no comment on that at this time.”

I am currently contacting Dalke’s friends, who were on social media urging her to meet them or seek help after her last post, to see what information about her work at 1999 K Street they can supply.

According to Lou Chibarro, the Washington Blade reporter, a perusal of her Dalke’s FaceBook account showed that she opposed D.C. gun control, and thought transgender women experiencing violence on the streets should be armed.  I did not find that entry, but I did see that books she read included libertarian philosopher Rpbert Nozick and novelist Ayn Rand, and Dalke described her politics as “Well… I’d say I was secretly Republican… except that even beyond their onerous and animadversive religious/moralist bullshit where I’m philosophically aligned with smaller government and deregulation, Republicans are shitbag hypocrites who don’t walk the talk in office. So I’m openly Libertarian. Friendly to LGBT, business, and individuals, the best of all worlds.”  On Google+ one of the friends concerned about her is a staffer at the free market R Street Institute.  (I am often thought of us as one of the most connected D.C. libertarians, and I have never heard of Dalke until researching this story.)

According to Chibarro, with whom I compared notes tonight, Dalke has now disappeared from the court system, and has not been presented to a judge (I have not confirmed this yet.). It is possible she is in the system under a different (her original male) name.

For those interested in her legal defense a GoFundMe has been established.

Refugees and the tired and huddled masses

A shorter version of this appeared yesterday at the Daily Caller.

Despite the opposition of the majority of the nation’s Governors, President Obama is determined to import, at taxpayer expense, hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, who despite his administration’s assurances, they are totally incompetent to vet.  Like most Democrats advocating suicidal policies for America, Obama attempts to seize the moral high ground, accusing critics of selfishness, racism, and turning away from American traditions like the sentiments engraved on the Statue of Liberty.

Progressives have generally fallen right in line with this.  Only one lone voice, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, has called for not mocking people worried about terrorists entering the country through the refugee process, but instead for designing a tighter, better regulated process.

Sadly, as with the Iran Deal, a number of prominent libertarian writers are supporting Obama, quoting boilerplate about the “tired and huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  Although if one reads the replies they are getting from their own libertarian readers, they are being told they are full of it.  And the most libertarianish of the presidential candidates, Senator Rand Paul, has called for a moratorium on accepting Syrian refugees in the United States.

Libertarians have been defending open borders and freely given green cards, work permits, work Visas, and even permanent residency (most don’t defend easy citizenship and voting rights) for some time.  The libertarian CATO Institute has one nice, bright young man, Alex Nowrasteh, a recent graduate of the London School of Economics, who does nothing but publish op-eds and policy papers advocating freedom of immigration.  I’ve never looked closely at his work, which I assume is mainly the standard completely valid arguments about the gains of trade, in this case free trade in labor.  I suspect Milton Friedman‘s thoughts on free immigration are truer – that you can’t have completely free immigration when you have a welfare state.  While Mr. Nowrasteh is no doubt correct that immigrants increase the GDP generally, lowering the price of software or landscaping or motel cleaning for the population as a whole, I suspect they impose high costs on specific communities where their children fill up the public schools and the whole family fills up the emergency rooms.  Sacrificing some communities and the taxpayers in them to the GDP of the nation seems to me collectivist and utilitarian – the greatest benefit for the greatest number – not individualist and libertarian.

But that’s about immigration generally.  Not immigration in a time of terrorism.  This week other libertarians – my fellow libertarians – made two sets of howlingly idiotic arguments about Syrian refugees.

Sarah Harvard is a young Muslim libertarian writer lots of people are going to hear about one suspects.  Barely out of American University, where I knew her as an undergraduate, she decided to become a political journalist despite a stereotypical Asian tiger mom’s desire that she be a medical doctor.  In her early 20s, Ms. Harvard has already interned at Slate, and now is a staff writer at The Atlantic and Teen Vogue.  In the wake of the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, Ms. Harvard shared her fears about Islamophobia on social media:

After seeing all the anti-Muslim attacks and to the extent of how far racialized Islamophobia has gone in this society, I’m reminded — once again — of my privilege as someone who is racially ambiguous. ‪#‎AmbiguouslyMuslim‬

Since I don’t wear the hijab and I don’t “look” Muslim, I don’t hold the same fear as my friends who do. I don’t have to worry about being stabbed when someone asks me if I’m Muslim. I don’t have to worry about someone threatening to behead me and throw a metal trash can in the street of New York City. I don’t have to worry about someone shouting slurs at me while riding on the subway.

Whether you identify as Sikh, Muslim, Arab, or South Asian, please be careful in our fragile and hostile world. Your bravery and resilience inspires me.

When I told Ms. Harvard I thought she had lost touch with reality (asking her where it was that a Muslim had been beheaded recently by a non-Muslim), she provided me with three links to stories – of which I was unaware – of Muslims or Arabs being stabbed in the U.S.   Three stories.   Over the past couple of decades. The first of which, a Daily Beast article on a Muslim immigrant killed in Dallas, said “Now there’s no specific evidence yet that he was murdered because he was Muslim.”  As he had, like many immigrants, moved into a violent, crime ridden neighborhood.  Which makes it sound to me like gun control, not Islamophobia, killed him.

Likewise, the almost always brilliantly balanced house libertarian at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf, chides conservative writers for whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment.  We wouldn’t want a racist backlash, now would we?

One marvels at the lack of cognitive contact with reality.  There was no anti-Muslim pogrom after 9/11, when 3,000 people were killed in the U.S. by 19 Moslem terrorists.  Where do Democrats, progressives – or libertarians – get off on guilt tripping Americans for being concerned about letting floods of people into the country among which terrorists may be hiding, given the amazingly tolerant and liberal attitudes of Americans so far?  Given that only a few decades ago a Democrat President progressives still worship as a deity was turning away boatloads of Jews fleeing Nazism while he was also putting Japanese Americans in internment camps, they have no moral right to even speak.

The other line of ludicrous libertarian argument this week is that no terrorist has ever entered the U.S. as a refugee, made by two different very nice people, both very bright, reason magazine’s science writer Ronald Bailey, and also by Niskanen Center policy analyst Dan Bier in The Freeman.  (Bier then also appeared Wednesday morning at a meeting of D.C. conservatives pitching his argument, and again received hostile questions.)  Both were slapped by their libertarian readers, who pointed out that the Tsarnaev brothers were the children of asylum seekers.  Amazingly, Bailey replied with some semantic hair splitting about what the meaning of is “is,”  as did Bier at the conservative meeting.  Being children of a Moslem refugee, who as children were never “vetted” by Obama’s State Department, proves to Bier that the vetting works.  Their readers, recognizing that in this case the blood stains on the blue dress will be blood, not other precious bodily fluids, were not persuaded.

Elsewhere some libertarians made some perfectly valid points both about ISIS having as aims that the West reject Moslems seeking freedom and that it separate Moslem refugees from Christians and other Westerners and about Arabs being radicalized when (American, French, or Russian) bombs or drones fall on them without them having any idea why.

But none of those points explain why we should accept people who might want to kill us as neighbors, especially at taxpayer expense.

In 2007 I was a refugee – from Washington, D.C. and its godawful Department of Motor Vehicles, to Annapolis, Maryland.  My driver’s license was suspended and the DMV ‘crats could not tell me why or what to do, and that tipped my decision to rent a (second) apartment in Annapolis, and attempt to get a Maryland driver’s license.  Being a home owner in D.C. I had not rented anything in years, especially from a large corporate landlord.  I had to complete a background check so the landlord would not later face litigation from my neighbors if it turned out I was a rapist,  pedophile, etc.

The Obama administration is now importing refugees who it will place in public schools other Americans are actually legally forced to attend, and house on public property in many cases, and transport on public infrastructure everyone has to use (as it’s a monopoly with no alternatives).  These refugees aren’t people brought in by local churches and synagogues or mosques who might be held accountable for their behavior.  You can’t sue the federal government easily.  If even one tenth of one percent of a 100,000 refugees are terrorists, that’s 100 terrorists – five times the number who committed 9/11 and ten times the number who just killed 120 people in Paris.

The U.S. gives Israel and Egypt each a billion dollars a year to follow America’s foreign policy agenda.  Rather than spend tax money to import refugees – which is bizarrely what these libertarians are defending – we could just as easily pay Turkey, or Jordan, or Pakistan – or Madagascar – to accept them.

CHRISTIAN AND YAZIDI CHILDREN

A GoFundMe for Yazidi and Christian victims of ISIS.

Is it a conspiracy? Why are conspiracy theorists so lazy and incompetent?

I am surprised how often a perfectly good conspiracy theory could be formulated yet no one in the biz does it. Here are two:

1) The Obama regime is aiding in introducing Ebola to Americans, so there will be more sob stories to use to demand government control of medicine (sort of Fast and Furious part 2) and another wag-the-dog distraction from the other problems the regime is causing.

2) The Obama regime and the powers that be have known about the growth of ISIS and American foreign policy failures for a couple of years. They are flaking these as news stories and policy imperatives now, as we approach an election, to promulgate the meme and paradigm that we need big activist government – and surveillance and limits on the Bill of Rights – to save us in general.

(There are obvious realities that make both of these, especially #2, more complicated.  Feel free to reply or elaborate.  I am just surprised, as I am monthly, that I haven’t heard these circulated yet.  If it paid well I could totally be a conspiracy maven.)

"Liberal education" and the desire to be moral

So maybe when you teach Westerners, especially Western males, including Western white males, that they and western liberal capitalism are evil, some of them, instead of becoming guilty and submissive, decide to become “good guys” and become (Islamic) terrorists.

 

Who knew?

The Kurds and the Libertarian Way

Obama has decided to arm the Kurds, probably one of the few intelligent “interventions” one could do in the region, and one that should have been done, if you were going to do it, over 10 years ago.

The Bush and Obama regimes never did it because it would have offended the central Iraqi government.

And now they compound the stupidity by announcing it ahead of time so ISIS can attack the Kurds — with all the American weapons they have picked up from Iraq (and Libya?) — before the Kurds are armed. (And for libertarians – you know if the DOD did not have a monopoly on weapons someone other than the government might have armed the Kurds by now).

Central planning fails again; nation building just being the name for central planning of a territory where you are not the historical, “indigenous” political class.

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