Can We All Admit Democrats Are Socialists?

Hillary Clinton finally secured enough delegates to win the DNC Presidential nomination, so unless the Department of Justice indicts Hillary or some other unforeseen catastrophe befalls her, it looks like Hillary has finally bested her challenger, socialist Bernie Sanders, but though Sanders and his particular version of socialist utopia might be temporarily defeated, the Sanders campaign has revealed one of the political world’s worst kept secrets, the Democrats are all socialists. 

Now upon hearing this, some people will immediately get defensive and complain that I’m resorting to name-calling, but the word socialism is not a slur. It’s simply a description of someone’s political views, and when describing the political views of Democrats, socialist is the only fitting description. 

Look at the popular vote split between Hillary and Bernie. Sanders has 43% of the support from left leaning voters, so everybody has to concede that roughly 43% of Democrats support an admitted socialist as opposed to a comparatively moderate candidate, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Over the past few months, Bernie has consistently held higher approval ratings than Hillary among Democrats and Democratic leaning voters. Since Bernie has earned 70% approval from the Democrat voters, that leaves only 30% who could possibly find socialism objectionable, and keep in mind, this approval number is measured at the heat of the campaign season when Democrats’ attitudes should be at their most divisive and hard feelings about competitors at their strongest, and therefore you would expect disapproval numbers to be at their highest. 

All this just proves that Sanders and his socialist views aren’t the fringe of the Democrat Party; they are the mainstream. 

Still, Hillary is winning, so doesn’t that show that socialist feeling in the Democrat Party, though prominent and appreciated, isn’t quite dominant? No, it doesn’t prove that at all.

Perhaps we need to refresh out memories on the actual definition of socialism. Socialism is, “a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned OR regulated by the community as a whole.”

It’s true that Hillary doesn’t advocate for the government to own the means of production, distribution and exchange (also known as business), but without question she wants to further regulate business as does every other Democrat living. Over the past hundred years, we’ve had a nigh constantly growing set of laws increasing government control over every single industry, and yet I challenge you to find a single industry that Democrats don’t want to regulate further. 

The distinctions between Hillary and Sanders are slight. Sanders wants to control the banks by nationalizing them and Hillary wants to control them with increased regulation. Sanders wants to control healthcare by making it universal whereas Hillary wants to do it while working within the confines of Obamacare. Democrats aren’t choosing between a socialist and a non-socialist but between two slightly different versions of socialism. 

For generations, Democrats have hidden behind masks of progressivism and liberalism without telling the American people their true agenda, but at this point, the Democrat ideology is clear. However they want to dress it up or disguise it, Democrats have fully embraced socialism. 

If you enjoyed this, please share it, and don't forget to follow me on Facebook and Twitter. Or don't. I'm not your socialist dictator. 

Libertarians Are Insane

I’ve been calling myself a Libertarian since 2008. I’m beginning to think I’ve made a mistake. 

For me, voting for Hillary is clearly out of the question since she’s socialist in everything but name and voting for Trump is also off the table since he’s a habitual liar and vindictive bully whose positions vary from strong conservative to left of Hillary depending on his mood and the time of day. Since I generally want the government to get out of my business, you might think the Libertarians would be a perfect fit for me, and I thought so too for a time, and yet…

On paper, the Libertarians are great. Looking over the Libertarian platform, I object strongly to abortion, but beyond that, I find myself in nigh complete agreement. Personal freedom, economic liberty and minimalist government? Sign me up!

However, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past month looking more carefully at the Libertarian movement, and sadly I’ve found that though their official positions are sound, they have an huge problem, the Libertarian Party is infested with druggies, anarchists and social imbeciles. 

Let me break it down for you. 

Druggies

The Libertarian Party supports drug legalization, and this causes a problem. The problem isn’t the position itself but the fact that this position attracts large amounts of stoners who don’t care about anything other than drugs. This stoner-centric thinking causes Libertarians to spend an unnecessary large amount of time discussing the issue. Perhaps the best example of this occurred at the recent Libertarian Party National Convention where the Libertarians got some rare coverage on C-Span. Through the entire televised portion of the convention, the Libertarians only showed one policy video, and what video did they choose as the most important thing they must tell the nation? They wasted six minutes of national air time on a mini-documentary about a pot dispensary. (11:30 to 17:30)

I think drugs should be legalized, but instead of emphasizing how it’s your right to get high, why don’t the Libertarians emphasize the fact that there are people dying of terminal diseases every year that are denied the opportunity to try experimental drugs because the FDA hasn’t approved of them? Better yet, why not take those six minutes to talk about an issue of greater importance like the national debt, domestic spying or any one of several dozen other pressing concerns? If there weren’t so many of them stoned, the Libertarians might realize how stupid it is to make pot their central issue. 

Anarchists

Libertarianism represents small government not zero government, and yet there’s a sizable and vocal faction of the Libertarian movement usually posting under the #TaxationIsTheft mantra that believes all government is wrong. Though the anarchy position is rejected by Libertarian think tanks, anarchist ramblings among the base are significant. These words from libertarian anarchist Christopher Cantwell typify this view. “Libertarians are anarchists, whether they realize it or not…the goal is not to win your elections, the goal is to turn a large enough minority against the legitimacy of the State as to make its continued function impossible.”

I’m all for drastically reducing the size and scope of government, but anybody who thinks that we should be living in the world of Max Max is nuts. 

Social Imbeciles

The Libertarians present themselves horribly. To a certain degree, the lack of polish is understandable. After all, nobody donates money to Libertarians and few people actually are Libertarians, so they’re drawing from a limited pool or resources which partially explains why they don’t have the political and media sophistication to match the mainstream parties, yet Libertarians problems aren’t just in terms of polish but in a complete misunderstanding of the rules of polite society. 

Examples of this can be found everywhere, but the latest and greatest example was brought to light by James Weeks II who while running for the position of Libertarian Party Chair stripped on stage at the National Convention while it was being broadcast on C-Span. To their credit, most of the Libertarians in the room rejected the strip tease and jeered the juvenile display, but if the discussions I’ve seen online are any indicator, a large portion of Libertarians see no problem with Weeks’ strip routine. 

When this is allowed to happen and celebrated by a good portion of the community, it either means that the Libertarians don’t even take themselves seriously or they have no understanding whatsoever of social standards, and either way, it’s incredibly damaging to the movement. 

Conclusion

In theory, Libertarians hold most of the principles that the United States needs to adopt to get back on the right track, and for my money, the severely flawed Libertarian presidential candidate is still a much better alternative to Hillary and Trump, but I’m not sure I want to call myself a Libertarian anymore because a bunch of people in the Libertarian Party are out of their minds.

The Insidious Agenda of the Bubble Gun Ban

Another grade-schooler got suspended for bringing an obviously fake gun to school.

How many times have you heard similar stories? Once? Twice? Two dozen times?

Immediately, people start complaining about a lack of common sense and political correctness run amok, and sure, that’s fair, but let’s look a little deeper for once. 

The school sent home this five-year-old girl for the day and recorded the suspension in her permanent record because she took a transparent, plastic, bright green and orange bubble blowing gun to school, so what does this and the many cases like this teach kids? I contend it teaches two things.

First, this nonsense teaches kids that guns are bad. School is a place where are we are taught to be good little boys and girls, but guns are so horrible that even a finger or a Pop-Tart shaped like a gun has to be treated as if they might suddenly take on a life of it’s own and massacre a school full of innocent children. Any child who would dare even draw a picture of a gun clearly has animosity towards others and is a menace to any safe society, so the message is clear. “Fear the gun, fear the gun, fear the gun!”

Second, this nonsense teaches kids to blindly follow the rules and not use an ounce of critical thinking skills. Any rational society would at bare minimum call the parents and say, “Hey, no big deal, but we noticed Suzy brought a bubble gun to school, and that violates the school policy. We know it’s nothing, but it’s against our policy, so can you just double check to make sure the kid isn’t bringing any gun shaped toys to school?” but no, this zero tolerance bull crap requires suspension and a note to be placed in the child’s permanent record even though anyone with a single brain cell would know that the child is no threat, but it’s not about thinking but about rules, and the numbskulls at the school are merely pawns of the school policy. They do what they are told unquestioningly, and by unthinkingly conforming to the system, they are training up a new generation which will be even more mindlessly conformist than themselves. 

Is it any wonder that American college students are crying out for safe spaces and screaming about micro aggressions when we’ve spent over a decade training them to avoid any critical thought and freak out at anything that even remotely resembles an object that could be dangerous if used improperly? We have raised and are raising generations of cowardly morons. 

Captain America: Civil War - A Second Amendment Allegory

Here’s a fun tidbit for anybody wanting to start up a discussion on gun rights. 

Captain America: Civil War recently opened in theaters to great box office success continuing Marvel’s trend of making ridiculous amounts of money off their cinematic universe. As everybody knows, these characters are ripped straight from the comics, but less well known is the fact that the stories themselves are often retooled adaptations of specific comic storylines. The newest Marvel movie is based off an incredibly popular comic series called Civil War published back in 2006, and unbeknownst to the vast majority of comic book readers, it makes a nigh perfect case defending the Second Amendment. 

In the comic book version of Civil War (nothing in this article will spoil the movie), a group of superheroes who are part of a reality TV show botch an attempt to apprehend a super villain. Instead of putting down the villain quickly away from the public, the showboating heroes give the villain enough time to use his powers to cause an explosion that vaporizes a grade school and all the students inside. This high publicity incident causes a swell of popular outcry against superpowers, and the politicians soon draft the Superhero Registration Act which requires all people with superpowers to register with the government. If super powered people wish to continue using their powers, they must submit to training and work as government agents.

Iron Man becomes the leading figure for the pro-Registration movement believing that opposition to the wave of populist outcry for government oversight would be futile and thinking that as chief organizer of the movement he can create a stronger force of super heroes by making moderate and common sense reforms. In contrast, Captain America believes that people have the fundamental right to use their powers and abilities to help themselves and others and therefore refuses to support the Superhuman Registration Act condemning it for oppressing the individual and violating civil rights. The superheroes choose sides over the issue, and shortly after the government begins regulating superhuman activity, it becomes an all out superhero civil war as Iron Man’s forces begin to imprison heroes simply for defending themselves and their community. 

Ostensibly, the entire Civil War story arc presented two differing and equally defendable points of view and readers were supposed to decide which side they supported, but the story was clearly written with Captain America as the protagonist and his side as the virtuous one which left readers almost unanimously landing on the anti-Registration side of the argument, but it’s less clear how many comic readers understood how closely the Registration Act corresponded to real life gun control measures. 

Isn’t a gun basically a superpower? It grants great strength to normal people who would otherwise be at the mercy of the strong. It allows people to defend themselves and other innocents, and according to the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, gun ownership is a civil right, yet every time a mass shooting occurs at a school or any other location, some people get scared and demand stronger gun regulation. Many say guns should only be in the hands of the government, but more moderate gun control advocates say we need “common sense reforms” allowing private ownership of guns but giving government regulatory oversight of who is allowed to have guns, how you keep track of guns, what guns are allowed, what kind of training is necessary for gun possession and where and when you are allowed to use guns. It’s the Superhero Registration Act. 

This pro-2nd Amendment message can be found to a certain degree in the movie as well, but in the film, political implications are overshadowed by interpersonal conflict leaving the overall message a bit muddled. Still, the basic idea in the movie remains that the government wants all those with power under their thumb and under their control, and that’s a message that most people will reject while watching the movie and all people should reject in real life, so if you know people who like Marvel movies and support gun control, point out the similarities between regulating superpowers and regulating weapons. Maybe they’ll see the hypocrisy in opposing jail time for someone who has a suit of armor that can rip through buildings while they applauding efforts to imprison people for having a magazine with eleven rounds instead of ten. 

BTW, Tigers Kill People

Stacey Konwiser, a tiger keeper working in the tiger pen at a zoo in Palm Beach Florida, was doing last minute prep work for an upcoming “Tiger Talk" last month. Though extremely experienced and widely praised as a “tiger whisperer,” Konwiser inexplicably entered the tiger pen while knowing the tiger had access to it, and one of the tigers attacked. Though the zoo staff immediately tranquilized the rogue animal, the keepers had to wait for twenty minutes while the darts took effect before they were finally able to pull Konwiser out of the pen and rush her to the hospital. Sadly, Konwiser later that day from a bite wound. (for clarity, the picture alongside is not of the attack on Konwiser but of a stuntman with a trained tiger)

By all reports, Konwiser was a lovely person who truly loved her work and her tigers, and I have nothing but respect for her. She did all in her power to raise these majestic creatures, lovingly care for them and preserve this endangered species, and I respect her dedication to her career and the spirit of her goals. 

That being said, has it ever occurred to anybody that perhaps big cats should be endangered? Yeah, I said it. Maybe we should be celebrating the rarity of these animals that can shred humans quicker than a sugar crazed cadre of nine-year-olds can demolish a piñata. 

Last year’s death of Cecil the Lion enraged millions of Americans who were furious that American hunter Walter Palmer would dare slay a poor, innocent, overgrown kitty cat. Palmer’s tour guides were charged of breaking poaching laws by luring Cecil out of the cat sanctuary, but the tour guides deny the charges and say Palmer was completely ignorant of the law and bore no responsibility for the alleged crime. Zimbabwe refused to press charges against Palmer and says he’s welcome back in the country, yet the animal rights activists never let the facts get in the way of a good target for their rage and consequently scoured him in the media and threatened his life. 

Here’s the thing. I get that it’s sad to see the cute little fuzzy wuzzy animals that remind you of your dearly departed kitty cat Cuddles get slabbed, but we both know perfectly well that all you people bemoaning the tragic loss of Cecil would be screaming, “Kill it with fire!” if you saw Cecil prowling in your neck of the woods. 

In case everyone forgot, big cats kill people! Sometimes they are hungry, sometimes they are territorial and maybe sometimes they just feel like having some fun. Remember that time Cuddles clawed you when you got all up in his grill? Those same basic spiteful instincts are in the big cats as well. The only difference between Cuddles and Cecil is that people die when Cecil gets in a bad mood.

Many big cat species are considered endangered, but has anybody stopped to consider that maybe there is a good reason they are endangered? People have a tendency of killing off animals that kill humans. Is that a bad thing? 

I understand there are ecosystems to maintain and that many people feel inspired by the beauty and grace of these fantastic creature. I myself am a cat lover, and there is a big part of me that would love nothing more than to spend the day playing with lions, and tigers and…well, less so the bears, but still, I get it. I too would find it a tragedy if these animals were to go extinct, so I can sympathize with a desire to save them, but shouldn’t we take a second to consider that by saving these predatory animals we are quite literally killing people? Hundreds of humans are killed every year just by lions alone, and though that’s certainly not going to drive humanity to extinction, I doubt this fact is of much comfort to the families of those who become glorified kitty chow, and let’s recall that these hundreds of human deaths are being caused by animals that are endangered and relatively rare. What happens if we succeed in increasing their population?  

It’s not the programs to save the big cats that bug me but the animal rights people who blindly support these efforts unthinkingly. It’s usually the people who live in the most urban environments far away from any animal that could be considered a threat who are the most insistent that we must save these predators and allow them to run free, but these animal rights advocates never have to deal with the consequences. These free range big cats almost universally make their homes in the backwater parts of poor countries where the locals have almost no voice with which to complain about the man-eaters. From their climate controlled houses in the suburbs, these keyboard warriors demand that dangerous animals be preserved by being dumped in the back yard of the most vulnerable peoples in the world, and all this is done so the animal rights activists can feel good about themselves as they watch the animals in documentaries from the safety of their homes where sensible people in generations past have eliminated all the dangerous animals from the local habitat. These animal rights activists’ tunes would change if they knew the lions were roaming free just ten miles from their children’s playground. Rest assured, every free lion is hunting in someone’s playground.

If communities across the world decide they want to undertake the risk of having a giant predator in their neighborhood, more power to them. I’m not trying to tell India, Zimbabwe or Uganda what they need to do with their own animals, and again, I mean no disrespect for Stacey Konwiser who chose to risk her life to work with big cats, but I am telling Americans who champion these causes that more big cats will inevitably equal more human deaths, and if you wouldn’t want these things living in the plains near your home, it’s highly hypocritical to insist they must live in the plains of Africa. 

Back to Basics - Where Do Rights Originate?

Quick Note: Back to Basics is a series of articles I’ll write from time to time covering some basic principles of liberty. For those who’ve never spent a long time thinking about politics, these are some important issues to consider, and for those who have already considered these questions and reached similar conclusions, you can use these articles to refresh yourself or send this article to someone you know who needs it. 

Seldom a day passes without someone complaining about how United States citizens are losing their rights, but how often do we take the time to think about what we mean by our rights? We need to give this some thought, and I suggest we start with the question, “Where do our rights originate?”

The Founding Fathers had an answer, and they stated it explicitly in one of the most famous lines of the Declaration of Independence when they said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” In the Founding Father’s view, the fact that God gave each of us life and free will proved that these rights belong to individuals.

Though somewhat familiar today, this idea was radical at the time of Declaration. The model throughout most of the history of Europe held that God anointed the kings of the world thereby giving them the right to bestow and withdraw the rights of the citizenry as the kings saw fit. Most other societies across the world and throughout history adopted the same political dogma sometimes with and sometimes without the divine justification; almost universally, people viewed the king, emperor or czar as the supreme ruler with unchecked power over all citizens. Individual rights were not even a consideration since people believed all rights were at the whim of the ruler. You might have the ability to speak freely, but that freedom ended the second the person in power said you must be silent.

The idea that every individual had certain rights which could never be violated reversed the prevailing philosophy of the day by suggesting that the power of the government came from the rights of individuals rather than that the rights of individuals came from the power of government. If the old philosophy were true and the government gave citizens their rights, then the government must also have the ability to take those rights away whenever convenient, but if individuals had certain fundamental rights that were given to them by God, then no human government could justifiably take away that which was never theirs to give in the first place. If human rights are God given, then rights transcend the laws of man and become universal. The government may use force to punish someone for speaking freely, but the fundamental right to speak your mind still exists even when the government fails to recognize it.

Of course, faith in God is not a prerequisite for holding a strong view of individual rights. The Founders referred to these rights as, “self-evident,” and you don’t have to read the Bible or believe in God to reach the conclusion that every person has the right to live and find their own path through life though it certainly helped the Founders and many others form this view.

As long as you come to the conclusion that rights belong to the individual, then you have cornerstone off which to build a political system which will protect the rights of mankind, but if you conclude that the government determines man’s rights, then any system based on this premise must quickly devolve into oppression for the political elite can always find excuses for limiting the rights of man. 

Beware the Flag Police!

Vexillologists beware! If you fly a flag in New Jersey, you might find yourself in a jail cell.

Joseph Hornick flew a “Trump - Make America Great Again!” flag on his property only to have the police show up at his door and instruct him to remove it. It turns out a local city ordinance makes it illegal to post political signs more than thirty days before an election, so if Hornick continues to let his Trump flag fly, he could end up with a $2,000 fine, a 90 day stint in jail or both.

Now, I’m no Trump fan, but I am a fan of free speech, and telling someone they cannot fly a flag or post a sign in favor of a certain political candidate makes a mockery of our fundamental American right to speak our mind. 

Though a real problem, laws like this always make me roll my eyes for the regulations are so arbitrary. We are supposed to believe that flying a flag that supports Trump is a menace to society that must be stopped with the full force of law, and yet the same guy who is banned from flying a flag in his local neighborhood can go online and tell the entire world, “Trump will make America great again!” without consequence. We are told political signs are bad and must be stopped, but there’s no problem with people wearing T-shirts supporting Trump, so are we to believe that a stationary political message is somehow more threatening than a mobile political message? This local township is telling us that it’s a travesty of justice to post a political sign thirty-one days before an election, but thirty days before an election, the exact same act is a wonderful part of the electoral process? What nonsense! 

I think most people would agree that this law serves no purpose, and yet this is just a single example of nonsensical restrictions on the election process. There are many equally arbitrary laws which bizarrely win popular support. Why is it perfectly okay to give a political candidate $2,700 and yet completely illegal to give the candidate $2,700.01? I personally find it difficult to imagine how a single penny could pose that much of a threat to the nation. We are supposed to believe it’s totally wrong to give a dime over $2,700 to a political candidate, yet it’s perfectly okay to give an additional $5,000 to a political party or a PAC (Political Action Committee) that in turn will give a candidate that money. You can even give an unlimited amount of money to a Super PAC which will not give the money directly to the candidate but will spend every cent on ads and other political tools designed to get a single candidate elected. How does any of this make sense? 

Why have so many Americans been convinced that attempts to influence the political system are bad? Isn’t the entire point of a representative government encapsulated in the idea that citizens can influence the political landscape?

Here’s my crazy idea. People should be able to do what they choose with what is theirs. Is it your property? Then fly whatever flag you want to fly. Is it your money? Then give it to whomever you darn well please. 

How could a rational person come to any other conclusion?