Back when I was a libertarian, I was focused like a laser beam on restraining government authority. Debating the merits of such and such a policy was thus beyond the scope of my tactics in many cases. Instead, my fellow subversives and I found certain points of resistance common to most policies, and piled on the pressure at those focal points to achieve our desired outcomes in arguments.
The most common one of course, went directly to the libertarian axiom of non-aggression. Whatever policy anyone ever wanted to implement in government was inherently wicked because it necessarily involved some coercive element, even if it was something so innocuous as that it was funded by taxation. “Only a moral outcast would use VIOLENCE to achieve their desired social outcome! You Statist!”
If the target was not swayed by this borderline pacifist moral posturing, the remarkable efficiency of the free market would surely finish the job in most cases. It did not matter if the topic at hand was health care or police departments, privatization was the answer to everything. This tactic was clearly useless in debating leftists, since their wanton lust for failure made them hostile to the very concept of a coherent economic system, but you could sway a good number of conservatives this way on most topics. Like Mitt Romney, most of us like being able to fire people who do a bad job, and there never exists any shortage of government failures to point out, when making the case for market provision of services.
There was one notorious impediment to our propagandizing that many libertarians found challenging to overcome. It was so universal that all libertarians pondered the best way to respond to it. This obstacle to our anti-State agenda was not buried in a philosophy book or some article of the founding documents, but something far more universal and inseparable from the human condition. Our challenge in penetrating this barrier was neither in the complexity of the issue at hand, nor the character limit on Twitter. Indeed it was only three small words which one could find in the vocabulary of any pre-schooler. Were it not for this simple, universal, freedom obliterating phrase, statues of Ayn Rand would surely replace those of MLK, and you could shop around for police departments like you do for car insurance.
“For the Children!”
Oh, how we hated those three little words. Here we are trying to create a market Utopia, and you sheeple are talking about dependent little brats who can’t even sign contracts yet.
I didn’t have kids, and at the time I didn’t even really want them. The same, perhaps unsurprisingly, went for most of my co conspirators. So we really wouldn’t even have an answer for this concern except to repeat the same words, “for the children” in a mocking tone. We would then insist that the interests of children and parents were unworthy of differentiation. Once we had a society of morally upstanding people who did not initiate force, and free markets made us all fabulously wealthy, parents could decide on how to keep their kids away from drugs and sexual predators, if they thought such precautions were worthy of the effort.
Today I have a little bit better of an understanding as to what motivates people, but at the time I was perpetually confused as to why this did not work. Perhaps you’re a libertarian still suffering through this, so I’ll attempt to shed some light on the subject.
Every economist worth his salt knows the name of John Maynard Keynes, who proliferated many of the economic ideas which currently plague the Earth. In response to critics who warned his designs would fail in the long run, he said smugly, “In the long run, we’re all dead”. Keynes had no children of course, and some speculate this was due to his, shall we say, curious romantic choices. Were it otherwise, perhaps he would have seen beyond the horizon of his own life. Perhaps then, equally short sighted economic policy would not be the norm throughout the developed world today.
Obviously the libertarians in the audience are frustrated at this point, and cursing me for my ignorance. Milton Friedman’s famous “We are all Keynesians now” surely does not apply to them, and the fact that I’ve mentioned someone’s intimate preferences without a rainbow flag in hand obviously makes me the worst sort of ignorant fool. Fortunately, I am no dummy. I know that Keynes is the archetypal supervillain of every libertarian effort to cram economics into children’s books.
The point being made is that the same short sightedness which gives validity to critiques of Keynesian economics, is likewise endemic to the prevailing libertarian perspective on what most would describe as social issues. “My body my choice” is fine if you think your body is the only thing that matters, but for those of us with higher aspirations than our own immediate gratification, “for the children” is a very real concern which cannot be dismissed by mocking tones or moral posturing.
Moreover, “for the children” is not a concern limited to one’s own offspring. Your certainty that you would provide your kids with the best education the market can offer, or that you would teach your kids not to use drugs, or that your kids will not seek cosmetic surgery below the belt because they saw a YouTube video, is almost completely irrelevant to the maintenance of the broader population. Who we live amongst, how they behave, and what that all will lead to in three generations, is actually of the utmost importance to many adults.
Since this is so important, we cannot think of it only in simple and direct terms. The simplistic view of “I am not being stabbed in this moment, therefore there is no aggression” is rightly rejected by sane people who are capable of spotting patterns.
We do not want to wait until one of our children is harmed by a predator before we act. So if someone is discovered with videos of children being exploited, the moral theorizing of leftists and libertarians over how the non-aggression principle applies to such material is irrelevant. We want our society to be as hostile as we can make it to people with such proclivities. So even material produced without the actual exploitation of a child, such as that depicted in cartoons or digital animations, or even written fiction on the subject, is met with similar hostility. We do not want to permit the cultural acceptance of any level of child exploitation, or ideations thereof, so we suppress it through force of law.
Drugs, no matter how much propaganda is pedaled by the now booming marijuana industry, are bad. Mmmkay? The lifestyle that comes along with using drugs is harmful enough before we discuss the health impacts of individual substances. Debates over the disparate impacts of marijuana vs. alcohol vs. cocaine are thus not central to the issue at hand. The society at large is best served by sober young people growing up to be sober adults, and the best way to accomplish this is to prevent drugs from becoming culturally acceptable. Thus we suppress both supply and demand through force of law. If we had our wits about us, we would suppress it in media and culture as well, just like we do with child exploitation.
Pro-drug propaganda parading as free speech or political debate, is no less harmful than media portraying the exploitation of children. We can see this with today’s widespread acceptance and even celebration of marijuana. Just a few short years ago, this was a completely fringe idea being circulated in obscure magazines and on Internet message boards. Of course, as those magazines and message boards reached more and more people, ideas changed, and laws followed. First we got so called “medical marijuana” which was prescribed for everything from stress and headaches to cancer and AIDS. Once the scam nature of those initiatives was on full display, everybody admitted that this was about recreational use the entire time, laws were altered again, and now even the former Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner is running around lining his pockets with legalized recreational drug money.
Does it stop there? Of course not. Some US states and localities have just decided that enforcing their drug laws isn’t worth doing. Some of have established “safe” injection sites where junkies can come to get a fix with the assistance of a medical professional. Others hand out clean needles at taxpayer expense. Some have even hired government employees whose only duty is to run around picking up used needles. Last November, Oregon approved language for a ballot referendum which her citizens will vote on in 2020, that would legalize hallucinogenic mushrooms in that state if successful. Anybody who thinks it will stop there, would do well to remember how far the rainbow flag wavers have pushed their agenda.
How many of you remember the good ole days when the discussion of intimacy between two men or two women was limited to what consenting adults did in the privacy of their own bedrooms? Our younger listeners might have trouble remembering a day with out so called “Pride” parades, but people my age and older don’t. Recall that just a few short years ago, Barack Obama knew he had to say “marriage is between one man and one woman” to get elected as President of the United States. Before the end of his second term, the Obergefell vs. Hodges decision came down from the Supreme Court, and the White House was lit up with rainbow lights of celebration. Kim Davis, an elected Democrat in Kentucky, was jailed for obeying the constitution of her State, and refusing to issue these types of marriage licenses.
Once they had their so called “marriage equality” did they stop there? Of course not.
The newest form of bigotry, in the twisted minds of leftists, was insisting that men stay out of the ladies room. This new revolution of so called “gender identity” was perhaps the boldest we’ve ever seen. They skipped entirely the usual formalities common to the progressive initiatives of old. They never bothered to present an even slightly moderated position on the issue. They did not even bother with privacy or personal autonomy like the old libertarian scams. They went straight to forcing non-discrimination on the populace, and demonizing anyone who questioned it as a thought criminal who deserved to be assaulted without recourse to the law. So rapidly did this insanity make it to the forefront of our politics, that when Kamala Harris announced her run for the presidency, it was one of the first topics she addressed.
Remember back when they used to accuse us of paranoia for saying this ever expanding alphabet soup of intimate proclivities was aimed at poisoning the minds of our children? That’s out the window now. Today the happenings of consenting adults in their own bedrooms are taught to children in elementary schools. In public libraries throughout the country, a special “story hour” is now hosted by men in dresses who tell toddlers about gender diversity and all the wonders that become possible once biology and reproduction cease to play any part in our discussions on such subjects. Even the new face of the Democrat Party, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, a wonderfully diverse woman whose ancestors fled the Spanish inquisition for Puerto Rico generations ago, recently participated in an online fundraiser for children who might be interested in switching restrooms at some point. They raised over $340,000 in the process, you might be interested to know.
I have a question for the parents in the audience. Would you rather your child smoke marijuana, or begin taking hormones which will sterilize them before they are old enough to understand the implications of such a course?
Trick question. Now they’re going to do both, and if you don’t like it, the Democrats will send CPS to take your babies away.
Now some questions for the libertarians. Surely you share my disgust for CPS breaking up families, right? Surely you agree that parents have a right to make medical decisions for their pre-adolescent children, right? If so, would it not be better if we had stopped this insanity a dozen steps ago in the process?
All of this could have been prevented if, when somebody told us “It’s none of your business what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms!” We shouted back “Yes, actually, it is our business”. As a society, we could stand up and say, “We have standards, and if some number of our people do not meet those standards, then we have all the sympathy in the world for them, but we are not going to change the standards and sterilize our children to accommodate for those failures.”
The Left understands this, and if the Right hopes to save any remnant of our society, we’ll have to figure it out too.
Look at this recent mess with the boys from the Covington Catholic school. Fox News and others have been celebrating how the scam got so completely exposed as a total fraud, and we should be happy that the Left got caught in one of the countless such lies they tell each day. But too many of our friends in the conservative media seem to miss the broader strategy at work.
It turns out this supposed Native American Activist, Mr. Philips, was not in fact, a Vietnam veteran. Similarly to Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal, Mr. Philips was enlisted during the time of the war, but never actually deployed, yet this did not stop lying Leftists from calling him a war hero to further their narrative. I would also be interested to know what tribe the surname “Philips” hails from, if anybody wants to call in and tell me.
It turns out the only people hurling racial epithets were the so called “Black Hebrew Israelites” whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group, not that I usually find such designations helpful. They said things so disgusting to these young boys that I will not burden the listener with such filth.
Far from being a bunch of marauding Nazis looking for a fight, the boys were waiting for a bus to pick them up when they were confronted by these savages. No chants of “Build the Wall” were forthcoming, contradicting the story Mr. Philips told the Leftist media.
Once all of this was exposed, some commentators who had previously called for the assault and execution of these kids, quietly deleted their tweets. Some apologized, others doubled down anyway.
The expectation now is to move onto the next ridiculous race baiting lie the Leftist media infects our national discourse with, in the hopes that they’ll get away with it like they did in August of 2017 and countless other times. And of course, the so called conservative media will let them, because they would not want to risk being criticized or losing ad revenues.
Anybody who thinks this was a win for the Right missed the point. The Left terrorized these children and their families. So great was the terror, that their school closed for a day due to threats of violence. The Left specializes in this sort of terrorism, and getting caught in the act does not matter because the goal is to strike fear into the hearts of their opponents, and in this they have succeeded. Anybody who had paid the slightest bit of attention to all the so-called Nazi punching these black clad anarchists have been doing in the last sixteen months would understand this perfectly, but lord have mercy on the career of the man who was seen as siding with anyone accused of being a Nazi, no matter how much video evidence there is to back up the claim.
The Left does not wait until the supposed horrors of fascism actually arrive before they break out into hysterics. Were they to do that, they would never have the opportunity to riot. They find the first tiny spark of opposition to their hegemony, and they throw everything they’ve got at it. They analyze demographic trends, and set out to destroy entire categories of human beings before any of those people have any opportunity to even understand the conflict. With each social and political success they accomplish, they create new and increasingly bizarre categories of protected persons and behaviors to justify their violence and deception. When no opposition is present, they attack innocent bystanders, just to keep the population afraid of their wrath.
The Left hated those kids for the color of their skin, their religious beliefs, and their hats. That’s why the fake Vietnam Vet and the black supremacists accosted them in the first place. That’s why the video was deceptively edited. That’s why the mainstream media promoted this lie. That’s why social media erupted with threats of violence, and why the same social media companies who have been censoring conservatives for so called hate speech, allowed the calumnies and terrorism to go unchecked on their platforms.
Remember how they told us it was a mortal sin to criticize these Parkland kids for their political activism? As they went from coast to coast trying to drum up support for gun grabs, staged protests, and attacked conservative voices, we were told only a monster would dare mention them. But threatening to lock these kids in their school and burn it down was the pinnacle of human virtue because they were on the wrong team.
The Left won the culture war, which I ought to note is the prelude to the martial conflict, because they recognize better than anyone, that it really is all about the children. They destroy the children who might someday grow up to oppose them. Preferably they prevent the kids from being conceived at all, and in the unfortunate event of conception, they always have Planned Parenthood. Should these obstacles to their agenda survive to birth, they poison their minds in the public schools. Should the parents be fortunate enough to be able to afford a private education, they use the media to gin up the mob in the hopes of ending their lives before adulthood.
Those who witness these horrors learn their lesson, and dare not step out of line. I recently had a conversation with a man who was afraid to have children of his own, for fear that they might suffer the ordeals we’re discussing. When that takes its predictable toll and birthrates plummet, do they stop? Of course not, they never do.
They just bring in a whole new population to be enslaved upon our ashes, and they’ll keep doing this until the end of time. That is, unless somebody like you stops them.
So welcome to the ranks of the Restless Right, fellow Outlaws. I hope you enjoy the show, and I invite you to join us for the live broadcast, this and every Wednesday from 5-7pm US Eastern time. 808-4-OUTLAW if you would like to chime in, and it would be my honor to speak with you today.
[jetpack_subscription_form title=”Subscribe Via Email and Never Miss Another Post!”]
OR
Subscribe to our RSS Feed