I do not come here to haggle about the best mode of effecting compromise with a bad principle: satisfied of its badness, I oppose it entirely.
Right Hon. Charles Pelham Villiers, M.P., speech in the House of Commons, May 9, 1843.
Villiers was arguing for the repeal of Britain’s Corn Laws.
Dinesh D’Souza is tickled. You see, Richard B. Spencer, the almost-famous “alt-right”/“Sieg Heil” guy is voting, he says on Twitter, “for Biden and a straight democratic ticket.”
D’Souza, who is relentlessly pro-Republican in addition to pushing conservative values and arguments, had his dearest dream handed to him. Richard Spencer, an ethnonationalist, is loathed mightily by the left. And, frankly, by most of the right. Not to mention those looking straight-ahead and -backwards. So to have Spencer prefer the Democrats is rich.
For Republicans. (And not a few others.)
Usually, Democrats revel in lambasting Republicans for garnering support among the explicitly racist set. Now, tables turned.
Yet this is not really all that “out there.” Spencer, who is often characterized as a neo-Nazi, has admitted to many leftist sympathies in the past. His only real heresy from the left is his racist nationalism. He likes transfer programs, regulations, etcetera. Hefty-sized, all-encompassing government.
In his original tweet, Spencer explained his rationale less ideologically, though: “It’s not based on ‘accelerationism’* or anything like that; the liberals are clearly more competent people.”
Uh, what?
Oh, the heights — or depths — of irony should this election between Sleepy Joe and The Donald come down to a contest over competence. Mr. Trump’s struggles with the pandemic — as well as the economic impacts of a lockdown strategy so tightly embraced by progressives —hardly proves the competence of Democrats. Nor do riots in cities run by Democrats over alleged structural racism administered by those same Democrats.
But the Democrats were competent enough to get a Richard Spencer endorsement.
That’s something?
At least for the Republicans.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“Accelerationism” noun : the scheme to embrace one’s opponents’ ideas so that they prove themselves spectacularly bad, and one can then ride in during the ensuing chaos. [Risky maneuver.]
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On August 25, 1945, the Cold War began (some say) when, ten days after World War II ended with the Japanese surrender, armed supporters of the Chinese Communist Party killed Baptist missionary Capt. John Birch (1918-1845).
To maintain that human labor will ever come to want employment, would be to maintain that the human race will cease to encounter obstacles. In that case labor would not only be impossible; it would be superfluous.
Frédéric Bastiat, first essay, Economic Sophisms.
“In war,” Aeschylus wrote in the fifth century BC, “truth is the first casualty.”
So, too, these days, in political campaigns.
Last week, in accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Joe Biden promised to “draw on the best of us” and “be an ally of the light.” But then the 47-year Washington veteran pivoted, waving the bloody shirt from Charlottesville by claiming that President Donald Trump had declared “neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists” to be “very fine people,” and therefore “we were in a battle for the soul of this nation.”
Did Trump dub some neo-Nazis “very fine people”?
“And you had some very bad people in that group,” the president explained to a reporter. “But you also had people that were very fine people — on both sides. You had people in that group who were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statute and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”
Noting that “George Washington was a slave-owner,” Mr. Trump asked, “Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? . . .
“It’s fine, you’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people,” he continued. “And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
Unequivocal.
Outraged by the Democratic contender’s false contention, cartoonist and podcaster Scott Adams called Biden a “Brain-Dead Race Hoaxer” . . . and worse.
But Biden is hardly alone. The Democrats and most of the media join in ignoring Trump’s explicit statements, pushing their myopically malevolent misinterpretation.
Should this smear defeat Trump in November, an era of political truth-telling will not be ushered in.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Months ago, the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org determined that Mr. Biden, in asserting that President Trump had failed to condemn neo-Nazis, had made false claims against the president — ignoring numerous recordings in living color of the president making those exact censures.
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Government is naturally prodigal, for it spends other people’s money.
Yves Guyot, Principles of Social Economy (1892).
In 1814 on this day, British forces burnt down the White House. Unlike audience reaction to the 1996 movie Independence Day (pictured), there was no widespread cheering among Americans for the building’s destruction.
One year later, the modern Constitution of the Netherlands received its empowering signatures.
August 24 birthdays include that of British anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce (1759-1833), Argentine literary genius Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), and French historian and author of a magisterial study of the rise of capitalism in Europe, Fernand Braudel (1902-1985),
The Ukraine celebrates its independence from the Soviet Union with a National Day on August 24.
On August 24, 1682, William Penn received an area of territory to add it to his colony of Pennsylvania. The area comprises, today, the state of Delaware.
Paul has choice words about the biggest stories of the week:
On August 23, 1989, two million people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania stood on the Vilnius-Tallinn road, holding hands, as part of the “Singing Revolution” that helped set the Soviet Union to its implosion.
The more opportunities there are in a Society for some persons to live upon the toil of others, and the less those others may enjoy the fruits of their work themselves, the more is diligence killed, the former become insolent, the latter despairing, and both negligent.
Anders Chydenius (1739 – 1803) was a Swedish priest and politician born in what is now Ostrobothnian Finland. This quotation is from The National Gain, §20, 1765.