Politics

Free Speech, Natural Rights and Mahmoud Khalil

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Some thoughts regarding Mahmoud Khalil, the Green Card holder who is currently being held in detention by the Trump administration pending deportation.

First, Laughing Wolf wrote about Khalil being a planned op. I have similar thoughts that this was fishy given the way the various pieces fit together, and will note my suspicions at the end.

Given that the Khalil affair deals with free speech and citizenship, it applies pressure across several points within not only Trump’s coalition but his larger base of support in the country. Trump drew on a lot of defections from Democrats, Tech, and others regarding threats to civil liberties. Now you sense a hesitancy among some of his supporters.

Khalil’s case actually has two dimensions, freedom of speech and the status of citizenship in a society with accordant rights and responsibilities.

The American concept of “freedom of speech” is held to be a sacred right, though mostly in a confused way since it is viewed mostly as a constitutional right and almost exclusively as a process.

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The Final Four of Villainy

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Two threads….

The first is that through the years I have, without quite realizing it, become a student of political anthropology. Much like an intrepid explorer in the depths of the Amazon, observing the strange rituals of local tribesmen, I observe the strange rituals and habits of the Left and their various auxiliaries.

Right now the media is playing its “French Resistance” card. No, I don’t mean by being brave and fighting the “Orange Hitler” as if it was 1942. I’m talking about finally coming out, after years of kissing up to the Left, and “breaking” stories as if they were mythical (and I’m quite serious about mythical) Woodwards and Bernsteins. Of course anybody who has connected the dots in a pre-K coloring book already figured out those stories years ago.

Take Jake Tapper, who is doing his star turn as the 21st Century equivalent of the local Gestapo officer’s girlfriend, who has decided to greet Patton by yelling “Vive De Gaulle!” In his upcoming book, Original Sin, Tapper will reveal to the world the untold story that… Biden wasn’t in the best mental shape. Sacre bleu!

This month we are observing the five-year anniversary of the COVID lockdowns, and just as impressively the media has come to life, revealing to the world things that we figured out… well, five years ago. That COVID leaked from a lab, that the lockdown policies were a 180-degree turn in long-established policy, and that it all stunk to high heaven.

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Supply, Demand, and Policy

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Back in the 1980s one of the political phrases that came into vogue was “supply-side economics.” It was demagogued by the left on two fronts. First, critics insinuated that only the rich got tax cuts; in reality, Kemp-Roth tax reduction was across-the-board. Second, they misrepresented the supply-side concept as “trickle-down economics” – wealth transfer to the rich intended to spur business activity that will “trickle down” to lower income brackets.

One problem with the slur is that it regards tax cuts as a subsidy, basically the same as funding stadiums with tax dollars. In reality, tax cuts are the opposite of wealth transfer. Quoting Rush Limbaugh from memory, “It ain’t yer [the government’s] money.” Another is that it equates supply with the rich. Many businesses are not run by the rich. There are rich people (e.g. Randi Weingarten) who may invest in producers but do not produce anything directly; their direct economic activity is limited to consumption and/or rent-seeking.

The greater problem is that the “trickle-down” canard treats tax policy as the only factor relevant to spurring or hindering supply. Even as a political novice who had yet to hear the name Thomas Sowell I was able to figure out that supply-side economics concerned all such factors, and that demand-side economics revolved around all obstacles to consumption. Taxation is an impediment to both. The other great factor that government must address is its own laws. Regulations prohibit some or all parties from entering certain industries, or (more relevant to this discussion) they impose compliance costs on producers.

Likewise, demand-side economics should also address all barriers to consumption and not just tax rates (or resort to subsidy). If some regulations can depress supply, what other regulations depress demand?

The Long Haul of Woke

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I came across this essay by N.S. Lyons and it took me a minute to realize that it was a reprint from three years ago on his Substack. Yet after all that time and all that has happened (and is happening) it remains as timely as ever.

Why?

As Lyons writes in his editor’s note to the reprint:

Today, with the second Trump administration in power, we have seen a sledgehammer taken to those DEI programs, as well as other manifestations of wokeness such as transgender mania. Again, many observers are pronouncing the demise of the revolution. It is always dangerous to declare victory prematurely, while the enemy can yet strike back.

 

Much, it is true, has changed; but much remains the same. The original essay lists twenty different reasons to be skeptical of the sudden demise of wokeness. Of those, several, including the observation that woke racial bookkeeping was effectively required by law (#15), that it maintained control of all the levers of power within government (#19), and that government was intent on leveraging the ideology to expand its bureaucratic power (#20), have perhaps now been largely overturned. But others, such as the observation that wokeness functions as a pseudo-religion that fills a spiritual and communal void in our culture, or that the “overproduction” of college-educated elites makes our society particularly susceptible to radicalization, seem as relevant as ever.

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The Amazing Journey of Stacey Abrams Through the Non-Profit World

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There’s been a lot of stuff in the news the past five weeks about public money, the political-nonprofit industrial complex, and the resulting waste and abuse.

Sometimes it’s helpful to see these things through case studies, perhaps through the experiences of a given person.

A certain name has come up several times in the news over the past month regarding non-profits: Stacey Abrams, the celebrated author and twice-failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate. No word yet if she will team up with Beto O’Rourke to do a lecture tour on how to keep losing election campaigns and still remain popular.

My bad, it’s now twice-failed candidate, celebrated author, and successful businesswoman Stacey Abrams. Because she was the senior counsel for Power Forward Communities’ parent organization, Rewiring America.

Rewiring  America went from $100 in revenue to $2 billion in three months (take that, Elon):

DOGE discovered $2 billion in taxpayer funds set aside for a fledgling nonprofit linked to perennial Georgia Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.

 

The Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration awarded Power Forward Communities the grant in April 2024 as part of the agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program. Power Forward Communities received the green energy grant despite the fact that it was founded months earlier in late 2023 and never managed anywhere near the grant’s dollar figure—it reported just $100 in total revenue during its first three months in operation, according to its latest tax filings.

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