Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Thou Shalt Not Share

Thou Shalt Not Share
But the sharing economy is winning
Conspiracy Theorist
By Mark Luedtke
Publication date: 120616

Taxi companies have declared war. In a handful of years, Uber and its ridesharing model went from nothing to the most valuable startup in history. Two and a half years ago, Uber was worth $18.2 billion. The New York Times valued Uber at $62.5 billion in December of 2015. Clearly this valuation is a product of the bubble, but there’s no arguing with Uber’s stratospheric growth.
There’s a reason for this. Uber is superior to taxi companies. That’s because taxi companies are organized and cartelized by governments. Uber’s cars tend to be cleaner, the drivers friendlier, and the service more reliable. So for government-controlled taxi companies, there’s only one thing to do: get governments worldwide to use their power of coercion to degrade and shut down the competition, harming consumers in the process.
That plan is working well in Europe. The Stack reports, “Global ride-sharing crusader Uber, which rarely passes a day without skirmish in one of its target markets worldwide, has had a particularly tough 24 hours, as France fines it for running an ‘illegal taxi service’ and German courts uphold a protested ban on running an ‘unlicensed’ service.”
Germany, France, Spain and Italy have banned Uber. France also prosecuted and fined Uber executives. But in the European Union (EU), unelected continental bureaucrats have the final say. Fortune informs, “Uber will seek to convince Europe’s top court next week that it is a digital service, not a transport company, in a case that could determine whether app-based startups should be exempt from strict laws meant for regular companies.”
That difference is at the heart of all of Uber’s legal battles which it’s also fighting all over the US. The facts are not important in any of these cases. Neither are Uber’s social benefits, like reducing drunk driving. The only thing that matters is who pays rulers the most so rulings favor the most politically-connected party which has been the taxi companies. Uber recently figured that out and responded in kind. Now it’s winning those battles at least in the US. “The success [in Colorado], says Justin Kintz, Uber’s head of public policy for North America, is ‘a tale as old as time—it’s the power of the people,’” writes Bloomberg. “It’s also a tale about the power of backroom lobbying. Although Uber promotes itself as a great disrupter, it’s quickly mastered the old art of political influence. Over the past year, Uber built one of the largest and most successful lobbying forces in the country, with a presence in almost every statehouse. It has 250 lobbyists and 29 lobbying firms registered in capitols around the nation, at least a third more than Wal-Mart Stores. That doesn’t count municipal lobbyists.”
This illustrates how rulers drag businesses into the parasitic political economy. Rulers forced Uber to waste resources fighting coercive attacks from government that could have been used to improve the quality of life of consumers.
So far, Uber has managed to avoid being banned by major US cities except Austin, Tx. Dayton’s taxi drivers want Dayton’s rulers to do the same.
Government doesn’t just target Uber. It targets all sharing apps including Uber’s competitors and home-sharing. Home-sharing app Airbnb is under attack because it threatens the politically connected hotel companies. The Mises Institute relates, “Late last week, Governor Cuomo signed legislation which made his position on the sharing economy painfully clear to New York City residents. Capitulating to the whims of the traditional hotel industry, Cuomo made history by adopting the nation’s strictest home-sharing regulations, essentially banning the home-sharing industry from operating within city limits.”
Similarly, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) shut down flight-sharing apps. Government is about protecting the status quo from improvement by shutting down innovative competitors to politically-connected businesses. That’s why Massachusetts taxes ride-sharing to fund taxis.
Despite losing numerous regulatory battles, ride-sharing companies are clearly winning the war. Uber facilitated its billionth ride last December. Like the word google entered common lexicon as a specialized substitute for the word search, the word uber has already entered common lexicon as an alternative to the word taxi, and it’s done so more rapidly.
And Uber continues to innovate. It added technology to compete with buses. Lack of regulations in Pittsburgh convinced Uber to use the city to test its self-driving fleet. Its self-driving truck recently delivered 2,000 cases of beer.
We would live in a Jetsons’ world if we would just get government out of our way.

Originally published in the Dayton City Paper.

Happy New War

Happy New War
Conspiracy Theorist
by Mark Luedtke
publication date: 011315

With a doubt, the easiest prediction to make about 2015 is the US will continue its failed policy of perpetual war.
Recently, the press made a big deal about the US ending the war in Afghanistan. CBS News wrote: “The US Formally Ends the War in Afghanistan”. Hooray for President Obama. He’s earning his laughable Nobel Peace Prize. This sounds like a reason to celebrate. Except it’s not true. Even the propagandists at CBS were forced to admit: “The symbolic ceremony marked the end of the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force, which will transition to a supporting role with 13,500 soldiers, most of them American, starting Jan. 1.” The ceremony was symbolic in contrast to being real. Those 13,500 troops will continue combat.
Obama and his war profiteer allies never intended to end the war. In early December, lame duck Secretary of Defense Hagel announced the US would keep 1,000 more troops in Afghanistan than previously planned to continue the war. The Concord Monitor reports, “[Afghan President] Ghani said Afghanistan is determined to ensure that the Taliban is not able to reverse the security gains of recent years. ‘What we strive for is normalcy,’ he said.” I’m pretty sure former Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki said the same thing a few years ago. I wonder if he’s still alive.
It wasn’t too long ago all US troops were committed to leaving Afghanistan by the end of 2014. But Obama didn’t want to end the war, so he negotiated an extension. MSNBC reported in May, “The U.S. intends to keep nearly 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan after it formally ends the war later this year, Obama said. After that, the U.S. will continue an ‘advisory’ role in aiding the Afghan government, ending almost 13 years of war in the region.” “Nearly 10,000” turned into 13,500. Obama’s lies make bold headlines, and then he quietly increases the number of targets to be killed.
But the warmonger-in-chief isn’t satisfied with killing Americans and foreigners in Afghanistan. He wants to fight a third major war in Iraq. Every step he takes escalates the war as he builds support for it with reluctant Americans. While headlines proclaim Obama won’t put boots on the ground, it seems every week he quietly sends more troops to Iraq. Those US soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq know their boots are on the ground.
In November, Obama sent an additional 1,500 troops to Iraq, doubling their number. But that’s not enough. Secretary of State Kerry, who infamously voted for the last Iraq war before he voted against it, has requested funding for more troops from Congress. Our rulers intend to kill more Americans in Iraq making things worse, as if they haven’t killed enough and made things bad enough already. We can only wish for the good ol’, relatively peaceful rule of Saddam Hussein.
Obama is using the Vietnam playbook. He calls all these troops advisers. Anybody old enough to remember the Vietnam War will understand this lie. For those who haven’t learned about it - government schools won’t teach it - ask your parents. Better yet, ask a vet.
But perpetual war in the Middle East is old news. New wars are more exciting, and Obama delivers. He and his banker allies are instigating a new war against Russia on the Black Sea.
President Bush the Elder promised Mikhail Gorbachev the US would never extend NATO toward Russia. Consummate liar that he is, like all presidents are, he probably said it with a straight face. I bet he and the successive presidents have a great belly laugh together when they talk about it.
In the grand tradition of Democrat warmongers like Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton - all Democrat presidents since 1900 - Obama plans to send 150 US tanks to Russia’s border. The Straits Times reports, “The move is part of a US effort dubbed Operation Atlantic Resolve in the Baltic states and Poland to reassure allies anxious about a resurgent Russia, with American troops deploying for several months at a time to conduct joint exercises.”
The second stupidest place to fight a war after Afghanistan is the Balkans. Not satisfied with losing one war in the graveyard of empires, Obama wants to lose a second war in the next worst graveyard of empires.
And the US-backed fascist, puppet regime in Ukraine, installed by a US and European Union coup, stokes the flames while committing genocide against ethnic Russians and forcing Jews to flee. The British Broadcasting Corporation reports, “Ukraine's parliament has voted to drop the country's non-aligned status and work towards NATO membership.” Russia’s Foreign Minister called the vote counterproductive. That’s an understatement.
But the latest news says Obama secretly communicated to Russian President Putin, as he did with the Iranians to great success, I mean no avail. Putin is as susceptible to Obama’s purported charm as the oceans Obama promised to stop from rising.
But don’t despair if this isn’t enough war. Obama could invade Venezuela next.

Originally published in the Dayton City Paper.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Oops, They Did It Again

Oops, They Did It Again
Dayton’s rulers squander other people’s money
Conspiracy Theorist
By Mark Luedtke
Publication date: 112916

For anybody who exposes the petty and not so petty, but legal, graft that permeates government at all levels, Dayton’s rulers are the gift that keeps on giving. The Dayton Daily News reports on the latest development of its former property. “The city of Dayton will spend $294,500 to finish demolishing and cleaning up a downtown property that formerly housed the Dayton Daily News operations, in the hope of setting the stage for its redevelopment,” Cornelius Frolik recently wrote.
That might sound like good news for people who’ve driven past that eyesore for years, but it’s just another cover for armed robbery. Dayton’s greedy rulers aren’t spending their own money to clean up the property. They’re stealing money from taxpayers at the point of the government’s gun and using that money to clean up the property. This is Dayton’s super-mafia at its most transparent.
The big winner is Bladecutters Inc., the company rulers hired to clean up the property. A cynical person might wonder why a lawn care company got a contract to clean up a bunch of concrete. Enriching rulers and cronies, not providing services, is the function of government. This is a naked transfer of wealth from Dayton’s poor and middle class taxpayers to the wealthy owners of Bladecutters with Dayton’s rulers taking their cut. You have to pay to do business in their town or you end up wearing shiny bracelets with chains.
It’s instructive to recall how this boondoggle began. “An $18 million student housing complex is planned for downtown Dayton at the site of the former Dayton Daily News building and adjacent property, Cox Media Group Ohio announced Wednesday,” the DDN cooed in April, 2013. “Cox Media Group Ohio said it plans to sell the property to the nonprofit United Housing and Community Services Corporation of California, which would partner with Missouri-based Student Suites to build the 350-bed facility just a few blocks from Sinclair Community College.”
The project was a giveaway to already subsidized Sinclair. The DDN continued its propaganda, “‘This takes a block that has been neglected to a shameful extent and really gives it new life,’ said City Commissioner Matt Joseph. ‘Having residents there, having investment there … you’ve seen it before where a little bit of investment in one place really starts something.”
It continued, “‘The market is unquestionably there,’ [Dayton’s director of cronyism] Sorrell said. ‘The market studies that have been done over the years have shown a huge demand for student housing. … This project of 350 beds just scratches the surface of the demand.”
So much for socialist analysis and plans.
This project was shady from the beginning, but the DDN, which hilariously claims to hold government accountable, presented no skepticism or critical analysis of the plan. Cox donated $1 million, Dayton’s rulers donated $1 million of taxpayers’ money, and $13.5 million was to be financed through tax-exempt bonds. The developers only had to put up $2.5 million. No bankers would fund this deal because of the risk. Sweetheart deals like this are available only from governments to cronies.
Despite $1.2 million spent by city government, the project never got off the ground. “Sinclair Community College students this month were supposed to move into a 350-bed housing complex near campus that Dayton officials hoped would be a cornerstone of downtown revitalization,” admitted the DDN in August 2014. “But federal rules and financing problems have delayed the $18 million Student Suites project on Fourth Street, and the site sits empty, except for debris and a few idle pieces of construction equipment.”
The project is still stalled. Rulers are supposed to be smarter, wiser and more benevolent than the rest of us, that’s why they wield government’s power of coercion against us, but the pros from Dayton aren’t so smart after all.
Imagine you worked in the private sector, you were tasked with developing some property, and the project stalled for three and a half years despite you spending over $1 million. You’d be out of a job and rightly so. The marketplace doesn’t tolerate incompetence on that scale.
Government not only tolerates such incompetence it rewards it. During this debacle voters voted to make the temporary part of Dayton’s income tax permanent then voted to increase the income tax. They’d have been better off shooting themselves in the foot. Now Dayton’s rulers will squander more taxdollars by lining their own pockets and those of their cronies.
Never trust socialists or their propagandists.

Originally published in the Dayton City Paper.

I Support the Rule of Law

I Support the Rule of Law
Conspiracy Theorist
by Mark Luedtke
publication date: evergreen

You can’t turn on talk radio without somebody dishonestly declaring they support the rule of law. Every time a police officer kills a peaceful individual, government’s apologists start shouting from the rooftops that they support the rule of law. Maybe they don’t know what the rule of law means, but I doubt it. I think they’re lying.
Part of the problem is people have redefined the term over the centuries to make it confusing. The Free Dictionary states: “The rule of law is an ambiguous term that can mean different things in different contexts. In one context the term means rule according to law. No individual can be ordered by the government to pay civil damages or suffer criminal punishment except in strict accordance with well-established and clearly defined laws and procedures. In a second context the term means rule under law. No branch of government is above the law, and no public official may act arbitrarily or unilaterally outside the law. In a third context the term means rule according to a higher law. No written law may be enforced by the government unless it conforms with certain unwritten, universal principles of fairness, morality, and justice that transcend human legal systems.”
Although ambiguous itself, only the last definition make sense. An exaggerated example illustrates this point: if the government passed a law saying every firstborn child must be killed, nobody would believe that law was legitimate. Nobody would believe it was consistent with the rule of law. That’s because that law violates the rights of its victims. It empowers some to legally commit crimes against others. The law is a law of aggression.
This principle extends to all laws. All laws of aggression are illegitimate and violate the rule of law. Understanding this leads to a simple, unambiguous definition of the rule of law: all laws must apply equally to every person. This is the only definition of the rule of law that makes sense. Nobody can be allowed to steal. Nobody can be allowed to threaten peaceful people. Assault and murder are illegal for everybody. The only aggression allowed would be in defense of property, self or others.
Any law that empowers some to victimize others violates the rule of law. But every government in the world violates the rule of law. The rule of law has never existed in the United States. The vaunted Constitution violates the rule of law.
The fundamental property of modern states is they fund themselves through armed robbery. Governments pass laws legalizing armed robbery from all the people by government agents. They euphemistically call this armed robbery taxation. Pay your taxes or you will be attacked by armed men, robbed, kidnapped or killed. When done by organizations other than the government, people immediately recognize this is illegitimate, but because we’ve been brainwashed by government schools and government-controlled media for generations, most people don’t recognize it’s equally illegitimate when done by government, which is the supreme criminal organization in its geographical area.
The rule of law follows from the non-aggression principle which states nobody is allowed to aggress against the property of another. Property rights follow from self-ownership. Because your body naturally responds only to you, it’s self-evident you own yourself. It follows that any good you produce belongs to you. Any good you trade for belongs to you. You can claim ownership of any unclaimed property by homesteading it. You can consume your property, invest it or save it for future use. You can give your property away. You can form any voluntary associations or contracts you like and refuse any you don’t.
But under the rule of law, nobody may steal your property or force you to do something with it against your will. Government as we know it - the aggressive, thieving state - is incompatible with the rule of law.
Note that if we enjoyed the rule of law, John Crawford III, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and so many others would be alive today, or at least their killers would be punished. Like all human endeavors, justice under the rule of law would not be perfect, but because only the inherently corrupt state can create massive, systematic violence and miscarriages of justice, it would be superior to what we have today.
The rule of law provides a consistent framework for resolving disputes. Because the state creates systematic conflict and violence by claiming rights to the property of others, constantly changing the rules, and becoming ever more aggressive against the people it preys upon, a society based on the non-aggression principle and the rule of law would enjoy less conflict and violence, greater justice, and therefore greater productivity and well-being for everybody.
So the next time you hear some talking head proclaim he or she supports the rule of law, check if he isn’t just apologizing for government aggression and violence. Maybe you’ll see that person in a new light.
I support the rule of law. That means I reject the state’s systematic aggression, theft and violence. If we all supported the rule of law, we’d be much better off.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Victory for the Forgotten Man

Victory for the Forgotten Man
Chapter 2: the Celebrity Apprentice wins
Conspiracy Theorist
By Mark Luedtke
Publication date: 112216

In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, mainstream commentators galore have rediscovered the term “forgotten man,” but many may be confused about what it means because, as Wikipedia documents, “It was first used by William Graham Sumner in his article The Forgotten Man (published posthumous in 1918) to refer to the person compelled to pay for reformist programs; however, since Franklin Roosevelt appropriated the phrase in a 1932 speech, it has more often been used to refer to those at the bottom of the economic government whom the state (in Roosevelt's view and in the general social humanitarian approach) needed to help.”
Another example of progressives turning words upside-down for their own benefit.
The original definition applies to Trump’s victory. The forgotten man is not a silent majority, not even a majority. Clinton won the popular vote.
You shouldn’t believe anything the media tells you before elections, after elections, or between elections. The media never mentions Clinton was a terrible candidate or the role Trump’s celebrity and demagoguery played in his victory. Get ready for angry candidate George Clooney in 2020.
Sure, Trump brought voters out who never voted before, but that happens every four years. Polls were wrong, but not by much.
Most polls had Hillary Clinton slightly ahead but within the margin of error. The RealClearPolitics poll average had Clinton ahead by about 0.5 percent. She won by 0.3 percent. That’s spot on.
The only real surprise this election was Trump won all the battleground states and more. But those state polls varied wildly, nakedly reflecting the bias of the pollsters. That’s not much of a surprise either. Like historians, pollsters try to influence the present, not publish accurate information. They’re human. They advance their own self-interest.
Clinton was supposedly shocked at the outcome. I doubt that. Internal polling in both campaigns seemed accurate. Clinton knew she was in trouble in the battleground states so she sent her best proxies including President Obama into all of them the last weekend. Trump went to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania knowing he could win those states despite their history of going blue.
Now rulers tell us Trump’s victory is a revolution. Straight from his tanning bed, former Speaker John Boehner quoted Thomas Jefferson, “... a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
I’m skeptical. I was never a Trump fan. Don’t get me wrong, I’m ecstatic one of America’s premier serial mass murderers was denied the presidency. Hundreds of thousands of lives - maybe untold millions if she had provoked a nuclear war with Russia as her aggression was leading us - were saved by preventing Clinton from directly controlling the military. But every billionaire is a ruler.
Still, as with Brexit, this was a victory for the forgotten man, waking up to resist exploitation. And we learned this election, the forgotten man is not defined by race. Trump won more votes from blacks and Hispanics than Mitt Romney by presenting his anti-establishment case. America’s division is between those who suffer and benefit from government stealing.
Trump’s victory proves a core of Americans still understand liberty and free enterprise, not government, makes America great, secure, and prosperous. America is not defined yet by race or handouts. Progressive rule by both parties has beaten, bruised, and battered the American dream, but it hasn’t killed it.
But people who believe Trump will turn things around will be disappointed. The impending economic crash still looms. Trump can’t unprint the money the Federal Reserve printed. He can’t make unprecedented debt disappear. The best he can do is allow the crash to run its course without coercive intervention, allowing the people to heal the damage in a deep, painful, but short recession.
But unlike Presidents Harding and Reagan, Trump’s ego won’t allow a crisis to run its course. Worse, NBC News reports, “But despite Donald Trump's campaign pledge to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington and his outsider campaign, many of [his cabinet picks] are clear Washington insiders.”
Lacking insider experience, the apprentice made a deal to gain the support of establishment leaders, warmongers all, and he’s paying them off. That’s why Boehner, Speaker Paul Ryan and even Obama suddenly treat him with respect. The establishment is already co-opting his presidency.
While Trump will never be as bad as Clinton - or another Bush - his deals with devils will harm us all. The forgotten man will remain exploited.

Happy Anniversary to the War on Drugs

Happy Anniversary to the War on Drugs
Conspiracy Theorist
by Mark Luedtke
publication date: 010615

Understanding the power to tax is the power to destroy, on December 17, 1914, Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, making the War on Drugs 100 years old. So much for Afghanistan being the longest, most wasteful war in US history.
While some think the War on Drugs was born out of a moral and health crusade, nothing could be further from the truth. Economist and War on Drugs expert Mark Thornton writes, “As written, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 was legislation that established a tax and registration requirement on narcotics and cocaine. Politicians and journalists openly targeted Chinese immigrants, Southern blacks, and Mexicans with outrageous propaganda.”
He continues, “What history does reveal is that the initial legislation that became the War of Drugs was clearly the result of bigotry and the desire to suppress minorities, and the desire to become a big player in world diplomatic affairs, not a desire to help drug addicts.”
While progressives pretend not to support it, the War on Drugs was part of the progressive agenda pushed through at that time which included the income tax, the Federal Reserve, popular election of Senators, war and empire. That agenda is destroying America and the western world today.
Wikipedia expounds, “The drafters played on fears of ‘drug-crazed, sex-mad negroes’ and made references to Negroes under the influence of drugs murdering whites, degenerate Mexicans smoking marijuana, and ‘Chinamen’ seducing white women with drugs.”
It continues, “Before the Act was passed, on February 8, 1914, The New York Times published an article entitled ‘Negro Cocaine 'Fiends' Are New Southern Menace: Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower-Class Blacks’ by Edward Huntington Williams, which reported that Southern sheriffs had increased the caliber of their weapons from .32 to .38 to bring down Negroes under the effect of cocaine.
“Despite the extreme racialization of the issue that took place in the buildup to the Act's passage, the contemporary research on the subject indicated that black Americans were in fact using cocaine and opium at much lower rates than white Americans.”
There was no need for a war on opium when the only people addicted to it were white Civil War veterans whom government had addicted to morphine as a painkiller during the war. There was no need for a war on cocaine when Sears and Roebuck sold cocaine and a syringe to administer it to white people through its catalog. America’s rulers had to resort to demonizing minorities to push through this abomination, and as with so many others, only succeeded as Congressmen were rushing out of Washington for Christmas break.
One hundred years later, the War on Drugs is still a tool for oppressing minorities and the government is still the major cause of addiction. The only things that have changed are the ferocity with which government attacks Americans, the amount of money it steals and the number of casualties.
The government singling out crack cocaine because it’s more popular with blacks parallels the lying New York Times story referenced by Wikipedia. Records show almost all federal prosecutions for crack are of blacks.
Even though a higher percentage of white people use most drugs except crack, blacks are arrested at three times the rate because white juries more readily convict blacks. It’s this blatant preying upon blacks that creates the tension that leads to riots in cities like Ferguson, Missouri.
While attacking Americans at home, the US oversees the production of the greatest amount of heroin in history in Afghanistan. The Taliban had eradicated opium production in Afghanistan, but because illegal drugs are sold in narco-dollars, that weakened the dollar in international trade. That’s why when the US invaded Afghanistan, it promoted new production of opium, and it promotes it today. It’s not an accident of war. It’s by design.
In the meantime, heroin deaths have become such an epidemic in the region, and the world, Dayton police are carrying Narcan to save people from heroin overdoses. The Dayton Daily News reports, “Officers have said due to heroin’s widespread use, Narcan has become vital to saving the lives of overdose patients. ‘I’ve found them in vacant houses, bathrooms of service stations, sidewalks, I mean just everywhere,’ said Officer Willie Hooper. Hooper adds he’s revived four overdose patients since September through the use of Narcan.”
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition advocates, “We believe that drug prohibition is the true cause of much of the social and personal damage that has historically been attributed to drug use. It is prohibition that makes these drugs so valuable –  while giving criminals a monopoly over their supply. Driven by the huge profits from this monopoly, criminal gangs bribe and kill each other, law enforcers, and children.”
When alcohol prohibition ended, people stopped killing each other over alcohol. People gave up deadly pure grain alcohol for beer and wine. Once decriminalized, the same will happen for all drugs.
It’s ironic that the people who have become the champions of the century-old progressive agenda call themselves conservatives. Supporting liberty, not the status quo, is the key to saving our country.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Progressive Bullies

Progressive Bullies
Violence is at the core of leftist ideology
Conspiracy Theorist
By Mark Luedtke
Publication date: 111516

Leftists have raised bullying to an art form. They’ve managed to make themselves look like victims while they bully. With their Uggs they trampled into dust the wise old saying that sticks and stones can break your bones but words can never hurt you.
Progressives have turned free speech upside-down. In the 1960s they wanted universities to be free speech zones. Fifty years later they demand so-called safe spaces where free speech is not allowed. Progressive bullies made themselves the gatekeepers of all speech.
It started with political correctness. Those of us who criticized political correctness for decades as antithetical to free speech were poo-pooed. We were told political correctness isn’t dangerous. It is. Of political correctness following its logical course at a University of Missouri protest last year, New York Magazine described, “At the protest on Missouri’s campus yesterday, on a space that is expressly open to free expression, protesters barred journalists from covering the demonstrations. In one scene, protesters surrounded and harassed Tim Tai, a photographer with the student newspaper, chanting, ‘Hey, hey, ho, ho, journalists have got to go.’ The scene is captured on a video here, which rewards close watching until the end, where Melissa Click, a professor of mass media working with the protest movement, calls out, ‘Help me get this reporter out of here. I need some muscle over here.’”
That’s leftist strategy stripped down to its core: begin with aggression, advance to threats, then escalate to violence.
Leftist philosophy is a philosophy of barbarism. We see it all the time. Bullies regularly commit violence at protests. Protests with minimal violence are considered peaceful. Minimal violence is not peaceful. Progressives recently trashed the floor of the House of Representatives, temporarily shutting it down. They smashed Trump campaign sites and vandalized his hotel then blamed it on him. Thomas DiLorenzo noted, “The media are happy to highlight the violence as the story of the day instead of whatever Trump said during his speech. Censorship of opposing viewpoints is always the Number One Goal of the Marxist Left (or any other kind of Left).”
Progressives forced gays into a political closet. “So will gay Republicans be wearing Trump 2016 t-shirts and ‘Make America Great Again’ hats at LGBTQ Pride events this year? [A gay marine] said it's unlikely,” reported NBC News. “‘It's easy to come out of the closet,’ he said. ‘It's dangerous to come out as a Trump supporter.’”
Progressive bullies are hurting businesses and workers too. Many tech companies are hiring based on diversity instead of merit. GitHub suffers an extreme case of progressive bullying. “‘It is very hard to even interview people who are “white,”’ claimed an anonymous GitHub employee speaking to Tech Insider,” reported Breitbart. “It’s a claim that seems shocking but should come as no surprise considering [GitHub’s diversity consultant] Sanchez’s previous outspoken statements on diversity.”
Twentieth Century Fox was bullied into apologizing for an X-Men: Apocalypse poster of Apocalypse, a man and bad guy, strangling Mystic, a woman and good gal, because the bullies claimed it condoned violence against women. Fox should have ridiculed the claim instead of kowtowing and pulling the posters, costing investors money.
Progressivism is always and everywhere a philosophy of violence. It can’t be anything else because progressives want people to behave differently so they use coercion and violence to force them. Progressivism is the philosophy behind the mass murder of well over a hundred million people last century, but progressives call themselves tolerant.
Lew Rockwell comments on the unique evil of the left. “But when we compare even the worst enormities of the more distant past with the leftist totalitarian revolutions and total wars of the twentieth centuries, they are in general a mere blip. The entire history of the Inquisition, said Joe Sobran, barely rises to the level of what the communists accomplished on a good afternoon,” he writes. “Given that the left has sought the complete transformation of society, and given that such wholesale change is bound to come up against the resistance of ordinary people who don’t care for having their routines and patterns of life overturned, we should not be surprised that the instrument of mass terror has been the weapon of choice. The people must be terrified into submission, and so broken and demoralized that resistance comes to seem impossible.”
From riots to show trials to guillotines to gas chambers to gulags to death trains to mass starvation, progressives terrorize and murder en masse. Yet people still vote for them.