Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Over/Under on How Many Fascists It Takes To Destroy America?
Tucker Carlson has a powerful commentary reviewing how many people have lost their jobs or otherwise suffered personally and financially for the simple act of expressing an opinion that does not pass muster with the corporate political correctness police in Silicon Valley. He challenged Trump to make First Amendment protection a high priority of the Justice Department. He asked the rhetorical question regarding how the Holder Justice Department would have reacted to actions by Silicon Valley against an Obama supporter?
Carlson’s commentary underscored a toothless Trump Administration (press assertions of persecution notwithstanding) when it comes to the First Amendment rights of his supporters or just even free thinkers or Christian believers. Carlson questioned that if Trump cannot make those who voted for him feel that their personal liberties are more secure in 2020 due to his Presidency, then should he be President in 2021?
This highlights how strong fascism has become in our culture. And yet I firmly believe that the vast majority of Americans do not want this. So my question then becomes: How many fascists does it take to destroy America?
Published in General
Since I didn’t see Tucker Carlson, what would he want Trump to do to have the Justice Dept. make the First Amendment a higher priority? I’m not clear.
Yes.
The First Amendment speech protections apply to the federal government, not to companies or individuals. So what does Tucker want the Trump Administration to do?
But certain forms of discrimination by private entities is prohibited, therefore there are cognizable civil rights claims available. Right now individuals are pursuing those individually without the assistance and backing of Justice.
We are protected against discrimination based on race, color, religion or creed. Political philosophy is a creed, isn’t it? If I view small government and individual freedoms and individual responsibility as a creed, including ALL Lives Matter (isn’t that a part of a creedal statement?) Isn’t it protected under civil rights legislation?
And isn’t much of many conservatives’ world view based on, or expressions of, their Christian religious world view? Isn’t that protected?
@susanquinn, I have added a link to Tucker’s show to the OP. The commentary starts at 19:16.
Those things are protected from *government* actions. Private companies can do as they wish. What you can do is to get 1 of the 50 states to create a protected class for political expressions and then those companies could all be forced to bend to the will of government just like the lowly cake baker. I would try for Indiana.
Oh, it takes just 1 fascist, if they do it right. How many fascists does it take to drain the swamp and return America to the people?
So then we are all protected from workplace discrimination due to our creed and religion but not the verbal or written expression of our creed or religion? The cake baker didn’t fire anyone or block the words from being written he just refused to write them himself. You mean I can be fired for expressing my religious beliefs? I thought there was some EEOC that protected every employee, and civil rights legislation that protected every customer to hold and express for himself his religious view and his creed even if it differs from the employer’s or the vendor’s. I’m wrong?
Because this goes back to people like Damore being fired for his beliefs. I thought.
Aside from legal protections, the President has a bully pulpit from which to speak out against terminating someone for their beliefs. At a minimum, this can serve to draw attention to the issue
In addition, government agencies have considerable latitude in how they construe protections under the law, and some interpretations can be “expansive” (sexual orientation=sex for protected classification purposes). If, for example, one was to find a certain percentage of Christians adversely affected by terminations/discipline, this could be construed as disparate impact based on religion. This kind of creativity has been used for many years. Its only necessary to turn it in a different direction. You keep pushing and pushing until you win. That should be a lesson learned from those on the other side.
The first step in protecting the first amendment is to investigate payment processors; MasterCard, PayPal, etc. They are actively colluding to silence political speech that defies the “narrative “. Patreon has gotten some flak recently, but in truth it was MasterCard that was twisting their arm. If the payment processors are not dealt with, then free speech is dead.
I’d like to “like” this a hundred times. Well said. Excellent ideas that the Trump administration should work on.
Editors, please Main Feed this ASAP.
I’d like to be able to copy/paste the link to this OP and discussion thread (especially highlighting Hoyacon’s outstanding comment/guidance) and message my undergrad classmate Viet Dinh about this — it’s possible that Viet is a lurker on Ricochet (not least given that he co-authored the Patriot Act and would have worked closely at various points with John Yoo), but as a busy guy he might miss posts/threads such as this.
(Note that Hope Hicks has recently gone to work for Viet.)
Joel Kaplan — Zuckerberg’s point-man in DC — was a year behind me in undergrad and might hazily remember me from the same dorm; I have reasonable confidence that Viet could be encouraged to forward this along to him.
Well then, I guess there’s nothing but to sit back and be dominated by powerful people then. Nope, the political system can’t do anything, not anything at all.
One of the most promising cases out there would be a lawsuit against the IRS or a state for using payment systems that discriminate against non-leftists.
In pitching their services as a government payments a vendor, PayPal and Venmo have put out all sorts of propaganda stating how important their services are to both taxpayers and governments. Time to ram that down their throats.
A big problem is that non-leftists can’t get good legal representation. No major law firm will go against the SJWs, let alone do it pro bono.
Thus, we are left with the Justice Department having to do it.
One of the other things the Justice Dept. could do is crank up the antitrust division against Silicone Valley. This should definitely be a priority.
Remember when conservatives understood the Bill of Rights limited government action not private consequences for actions?
There is government action when government discriminates in its enforcement of laws.
There is government action when government colludes or even organizes such as in Operation Choke Point and its state analogues.
@klaatu, if you can push the reset button to give us 1900 government and cultural values I am all in with you. But that is not where we are after a century of creeping/galloping progressivism. Your statement works for one on one interactions but not for deprivation of property (per extant Supreme Court decisions) which is what these discriminatory acts are doing.
And, try as they might, conservative legal foundations, such as The Rutherford Institute and Pacific Legal, are really not close to being on par with the ACLU in terms of funding/staffing.
Questions about the effect of this or that concentration of something in a larger matrix seem to attract my attention. Society is a complex and occasionally chaotic system. It can’t be modeled by purely statistical approaches like atoms in a gas, because the individual elements have memory and so can’t be predicted by their current state. On the other hand we are very many, so there are many people with memories that are functionally equivalent for any particular question, so we can use statistics in situations of carefully limited scope.
Society can’t be modeled by a deterministic analysis either because there are too many elements and we can’t even solve a three-body problem. But again we can use that kind of linear causal reasoning in carefully limited situations.
So we can’t say that the system will change phase when the local fascist concentration exceeds 3.2%, and we can’t say it’ll change phase when we replace this individual in that position with a fascist either.
I am going to posit that fascists (leftists) are equivalent to Muslims for the purpose of this question. A healthy society can tolerate both in limited numbers but suffers long before their concentration reaches parity with normals. Both leftists and Muslims have an outsized effect on society once their concentration reaches a point where each individual is in frequent communication with some number of others. It occurs to me that number would be a very interesting parameter to measure.
I bring up Muslims because the phenomenon has been studied a little with respect to that easily identified group. Here are a couple of links that mention the idea.
http://shoebat.org/2011/07/02/what-to-expect-the-effect-of-muslim-population-growth-on-a-society/
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/016364.html
My personal guess, arrived at by rolling last night’s chicken bones and considering the interesting pattern made by the insect I just stepped on, is that a 10 percent concentration of fascists in any highly connected part of the societal network is more than sufficient to cripple a society.
Update: I know there are professional physicists lurking here. One of y’all please say something about percolation.
Last update then I’ll quit: I’m changing that guess from 10 to 2%. On reflection I think 1) the links between connected leftists are stronger and more consequential than those between Muslims, and 2) leftists are more virulent.
Sorry, I goofed a little. Those two are essentially the same content. Just try the first one.
Now that it is on the main feed and Fox posted a video just of the commentary, I have edited the OP. These edits delete a time reference modifier at odds with the main feed publishing date and remove previous notations regarding edits to provide links to the video commentary.
Many people voted for Trump because he wanted to “drain the swamp”, reduce the size and power of government, and many of the things he’s doing are along those lines. He has reduced regulations tremendously, for example, and limited the scope of bureaucratic power. He has named justices to the court who are skeptical of the use of government power. His efforts to bring jobs to this country have been well within his proper powers according to the Constitution. So far so good.
But some of the things Trump proposes doing go in the wrong direction, toward the government exercising more power in dodgy ways, toward the direction of stomping on the Constitution. For this reason some conservatives complain that Trump doesn’t seem to have a coherent ideology and is therefore liable to do anything, possibly the wrong thing entirely. (“We told you so!”, I can hear them saying.) An example of this would be the suggestion that he could declare a state of emergency to get the wall at the border built. That would be borderline fascist, and very scary, not the least because his authority to do that is questionable.
Carlson seems to be demanding that Trump use the power of government to help his supporters in concrete and not entirely constitutional ways, like this suggestion to force private companies to follow speech rules according to our dictates. Sorry, folks, but that’s fascistic. Trump’s demand that GM “better not” move jobs overseas is another example of this. Trump doesn’t have the proper authority as President to do that.
We must avoid the temptation to be totalitarian even if, or especially when, it benefits us.
Of course. On the other hand, unilateral
disarmamentrestraint in the face of an enemy is suicide, which is much harder to recover from than the occasional incidental overreach in the fight. Slippery slope arguments in favor of restraint don’t carry much weight when we’re already careening towards a different precipice.At some point we are going to have to decide are we one country or 2 countries and act accordingly.
We can’t have one half try to push the other half into the ocean and expect this to not go very badly.
@barfly, thank you for taking a stab at my question. 2% in a country of 350 million is 7,000,000. How close are we to that now? More, less?
Let’s stipulate that they have to be dedicated fascists, i.e. they really need to be persuaded that their ideas are right and that it is critical (for whatever reason) that everyone conform. They have to believe that something they really don’t want to have happen will occur unless they get everyone in line.
Let’s also stipulate that simply endowing 7,000,000 random people with rabid fascism would not cause a society to crumble. Instead they need to be in positions of power or influence within their respective spheres. And that their distribution needs to be fairly comprehensive in our legal, social, educational, governmental, and commercial systems.
I committed suicide once — it didn’t take. But seriously, is the argument forming up here that a fascist, or support for fascist actions (such as punishing corporations in some way for their business decisions) might be the only way to stop a determined critical push by socialist anarchists and fascists off the precipice and into a more violent and enduring fascism and anarchy?
@rhfabian, that may be a bit of projection. There is a serious problem of platforms getting legal immunity on the basis that they are content neutral and then engaging in editorial censoring. Yes, there are some arguable gray areas in preventing “incitement” versus censoring passionate political discourse. But the existence of the gray area does not make it a constitutional “no go zone” for governmental inquiry. Using the power of state government to punish religious belief also involves some gray areas, but federal disinterest is problematic as the federal constitution guarantees liberty even where state government fails to do so or is the active agency of oppression.
Trade policies and jawboning businesses on job location I put in a different category. Mixing it with individual liberty issues to blunt the call for a more active Justice Department is not fair (IMO).
I would characterize it as a push for the Justice Department to do its job to protect the civil rights of the (currently) disfavored persons. If Justice does not then worse things will happen in series or contemporaneously: (1) national control by fascists, (2) loss of individual liberty, (3) fascist violence to enforce control, and (3) reactionary violent revolution.