Top pro-Nazi tweets during the Obama shutdown of America

Jonathan Chait        ✔ @jonathanchait

Idea: fortify WWII memorial with tank traps and pillboxes manned by elderly Germans.

1:19 PM – 1 Oct 2013

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Jonathan Chait corrects our little blog

“Bit dog barks first.”

In today’s column at New York magazine, Jonathan Chait uses a factual error in this blog’s response to his lame attacks on Rand Paul and libertarians to preface his attempt to respond to the more substantial critiques of his smear pieces in The Atlantic and reason magazine.  My teeny hobby is being used by him as a rhetorical device in his response to some of my favorite writers.

I claimed he does not disclose that his wife is an Obama campaign operative.  And apparently she isn’t.  Not exactly anyway.  She was instead an “analyst” at the de facto Obama (and Hillary) campaign shop that pretends to be a think tank, the misnamed Center for American Progress, funded by the multimillionare, crony capitalist, Boomtown gravy train, lobbyist brothers John and Anthony Podesta.  Yawn.  By the way, Ms. Chait’s employer’s Kentucky affiliate, Kentucky Progress, is the group that made racial slurs against Elaine Chao, another Kentucky Senator’s Asian wife.

CHAIT, ROBIN WASHINGTON,DC 20015	CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS	4/8/08	$250	Obama, Barack (D)
CHAIT, ROBIN WASHINGTON,DC 20015	OFF STATE SUP OF EDU/INTERIM DIRECT	3/22/12	$212	Obama, Barack (D)

Additionally Mr. Chait denies being an Obama quisling.  The definition of quisling is

quis·ling

 [ kwízzling ]   

1. traitor: a traitor, especially somebody who collaborates with an occupying force
2. 
   

And Mr. Chait is a traitor to journalistic ethics in collaboration with an occupying regime that intends to erase the Bill of Rights.

Finally, Mr. Chait is part of a government class that profits off racial injustice and misery, from failed and de facto segregated public schools to the Drug War, while smearing opponents who do not support their failed statist model of so called “civil rights” and its formula for factional strife over a shrinking pie of welfare benefits.  A failed model of civil rights Americans are rejecting in recent polls, where they both favor gay marriage and oppose affirmative action.  Mr. Chait is not imaginative enough to comprehend any ways of dealing with bigotry in a multicultural society other than his old and failed statist formulae, so he smears.

The Chaits, like almost all DC leftover media and political class members, live in a lily white neighborhood, Chevy Chase, on Nevada Avenue, in an otherwise black city.  It’s what economists call demonstrated preference – meaning you talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.

Note well Chait’s overall thesis:  Rand Paul is anti democracy; people like him with wrong ideas should be disenfranchised.

Here’s Chait’s column:

My item on Rand Paul the other day, predictably, went over quite badly in the libertarian community. The Insomniac Libertarian, in an itemwonderfully headlined “Obama Quisling Jonathan Chait Smears Rand Paul,” complains that my Paul piece “never discloses that [my] wife is an Obama campaign operative.” A brief annotated response:

1. I question the relevance of the charge, since Rand Paul is not running against Obama.

2. In point of fact, my wife is not an Obama campaign operative and has never worked for Obama’s campaign, or his administration, or volunteered for his campaign, or any campaign, and does not work in politics at all.

3. I question the headline labeling me an “Obama quisling,” a construction that implies that I have betrayed Obama, which seems to be the opposite of the Insomniac Libertarian’s meaning.

4. For reasons implied by points one through three, I urge the Insomniac Libertarian to familiarize himself with some of the science linking sleep deprivation to impaired brain function.

A more substantive, though still puzzling, retort comes from the Atlantic’sConor Friedersdorf, a frequent bête noire of mine on subjects relating to Ayn Rand and Ron or Rand Paul. Friedersdorf raises two objections to my piece, which traced Rand Paul’s odd admission that he is “not a firm believer in democracy” to his advocacy of Randian thought. Friedersdorf first charges that the intellectual connection between Paul and Rand is sheer paranoia:

Chait takes the quote and turns it into a conspiracy … As I read this, I couldn’t help but think of Chait as a left-leaning analog to the character in Bob Dylan’s “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Those Objectivists were coming around/They were in the air / They were on the Ground/ They wouldn’t give me no peace. For two thousand years, critics of unmediated democracy have warned about the masses abusing individuals and minorities. The American system was built from the very beginning to check democratic excesses.

But if Rand Paul distrusts democracy he must’ve gotten it from Ayn Rand. 

A conspiracy? Am I imagining that Rand Paul has been deeply influenced by Ayn Rand? Paul himself has discussed the deep influence her work had on his own thinking. In college he wrote a series of letters and columns either quoting Rand or knocking off her theories. He used a congressional hearing to describeone of her novels at tedious length. How is this a conspiracy?

Friedersdorf proceeds to argue that Rand is not really very militant anyway:

It’s also interesting that Chait regards Rand’s formulation as “militant.” Let’s look at it again. “I do not believe that a majority can vote a man’s life, or property, or freedom away from him.” Does Chait believe that a democratic majority should be able to vote a man’s life or freedom away? …

In the political press, it happens again and again: libertarian leaning folks are portrayed as if they’re radical, extremist ideologues, even when they’re expressing ideas that are widely held by Americans across the political spectrum.

Well, here we come to a deeper disagreement about Ayn Rand. My view of her work is pretty well summarized in a review-essay I wrote in 2009, tying together two new biographies of Rand with some of the Randian strains that were gaining new currency in the GOP. My agenda here is not remotely hidden, but maybe I need to put more cards on the table. I’ve described her worldview as inverted Marxism — a conception of politics as a fundamental struggle between a producer class and a parasite class.

What I really mean is, I find Rand evil. Friedersdorf’s view is certainly far more nuanced and considerably more positive than mine. He’s a nice, intelligent person and a good writer, but we’re not going to agree on this.

Friedersdorf waves away Rand’s (and Rand Paul’s) distrust of democracy as the same fears everybody has about democracy. Well, no. Lots of us consider democracy imperfect or vulnerable, but most of us are very firm believers in democracy. Rand viewed the average person with undisguised contempt, and her theories pointed clearly in the direction of cruelty in the pursuit of its fanatical analysis. A seminal scene in Atlas Shrugged described the ideological errors of a series of characters leading up to their violent deaths, epitomizing the fanatical class warfare hatred it’s embodied and which inspired Whitaker Chambers to observe, “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To the gas chambers — go!’”

Randism has never been tried as the governing philosophy of a country, so it remains conjecture that her theories would inevitably lead to repression if put into practice at a national level. But we do have a record of the extreme repression with which she ran her own cult, which at its height was a kind of totalitarian ministate. You can read her biographies, or at least my review, to get a sense of the mind-blowing repression, abuse, and corruption with which she terrorized her followers.

But the upshot is that I strongly dispute Friedersdorf’s premise that Rand’s theories are a variant of democracy, any more than Marx’s are. In fact, I find the existence of powerful elected officials who praise her theories every bit as disturbing to contemplate as elected officials who praise Marxism. Even if you take care to note some doctrinal differences with Rand, in my view we are talking about a demented, hateful cult leader and intellectual fraud. People who think she had a lot of really good ideas should not be anywhere near power.

Delegate Norton fails again; barely 6,000 gun prohibition goose steppers march to hear her speak

Thousands Attend Gun Control Rally in D.C.

A “national” goose stepping of barely 6,000 (which included dozens of pro 2nd Amendment counter protestors), the day after 400,000 people marched against abortion.  And other media, from the UK Daily Mail to the local NPR affiliate WAMU simply report over a thousand, not 6,000.  I suspect the pathetically small 6,000 figure is an inflated guesstimate from the anti-self-defense/disarmament goose stepper groups. And it was a warmer day and a weekend!

Here’s a hint for the prohibition fascists – if you had just gone the day before and found 15% of the pro-lifers who also supported gun control you could have doubled your numbers!

Local NPR affiliate WAMU interviewed one of the Bill of  Rights supporters:

Thousands of gun control advocates from across the nation rallied on the National Mall Saturday, demanding Congress and President Obama to pass gun legislation while the issue is still in the national spotlight.

Demonstrators came from across the country, including a busload of people from Newtown, Conn. One of the protesters, Eddy Sourby, is a freshman at Newtown High School.

Sourby was at the high school on Dec. 14, when, about a mile away, Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 elementary school students.

“We went into lockdown for like two hours, and everybody was like really confused,” says Sourby. “Then, when it went on for too long, our teacher, he told us there was a shooting.”

Sourby came to protest in D.C. with her mom, and about 80 others from Newtown, who say they were galvanized by the tragedy.

D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton was among the roster of local and national leaders who fired up the crowd. At one point, she asked all of the Newtown residents at the demonstration to stand up to be recognized.

“Today we join the great majority of Americans who want to move this country off of the outskirts of civilization, into the civilized world of nations who protect their children,” says Norton in a speech to the crowd.

The silent march was interrupted by a handful of counter-protestors (photo) Including Victoria Bingham, of Alexandria.

“I really believe in the second amendment because I know that living in the state of Virginia, there are so many people that do own guns, I am very safe,” says Bingham.

D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray spoke at the rally, saying cities need federal action to stop gun violence.

“This is a city that has worked hard to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them,” says Gray.

The District already bans high-capacity ammunition magazines, but the city’s handgun ban was struck down in 2008.

The gun control debate will be front and center on Capitol Hill next week: on Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing called “What Should America Do About Gun Violence?”

Postscript

I helped organize a small group of Bill of Rights supporters to educate these anti-self defense goose steppers.  They report far fewer than the measly 6,000 claimed by New York magazine:

“bruce – i think bridget already made a correction on this – there weren’t thousands of anti gun protesters… there was maybe 500 at most…. and half of them were grandmothers and children whose parents dragged them with to hold signs…. it was rather sad to tell the truth   – can you update your blog?”

Newlyweds Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman and the Freedom to Carry

McArdle Wins Worst Newtown Reaction Award

Megan McArdle, a DC libertarian writer (and wife of reason magazine editor Peter Suderman) provides a target for leftover Jonathan Chait’s continuing jihad against all things libertarian.  (Perhaps New York magazine should actually have disclosed that Chait is regularly sliced and diced in the pages of his subject’s husband’s magazine.)

There isn’t actually anything unlibertarian about gun control as long as the control is not the government disarming the citizens so it could more easily abuse them. Any libertarian will say that a shopping mall, or condo association, or homeowner, can tell you you can’t bring this or that weapon into her property. 

The problem is that government owns the streets, parks, subyways, buses, schools, airports, etc. and does a lousy job of keeping armed lunatics, and for that matter, litter bugs, rapists, mosquitos and rats, mashers, flashers, gangs, marching Nazis, and the Westboro Baptist Church, from committing crimes or just being nuisances, on public property. The solution would be to have all these things owned and run privately whether by downtown business district associations, the Nature Conservancy, or for profit companies. They would implement policies that respond to consumer demand and hazard insurance risk assessments, and would control guns on their own property while not forbidding one to have one in one’s own home (or at least if so only by condo bylaws one would choose to buy into or not.)