If “climates of hate” kill, then our words, even our thoughts, must be policed: Preemptive measures must be taken, Adults must be shamed, and Children must be indoctrinated in government schools

In case you missed it, a would-be terrorist was arrested last week for allegedly plotting a massive, multi-faceted attack on the White House

On the Liberty Unyielding website, Benny Huang proceeds to explain why exactly you may have missed that piece of news: The name of the "Georgia Man" turns out to be Hasher Jallel Taheb, and his motive — which we may never learn (sic) — appears to have been jihad.

Might this story have been a tad bigger if the alleged perpetrator hadn’t been a Muslim and “person of color?” Might it have been bigger yet if the sitting president had been a Democrat?


Of course it would have. …

The reason I pose these questions is not to point out blatant media bias, which is so glaring at this point that no one who wasn’t trying could possibly miss it, but to ask how the current “climate of hate” in this country contributed to this Taheb’s blood lust, and what we as a society are doing about it.

Because if I’ve learned anything from liberals, it’s that “climates” kill people.

Until fairly recently, I strenuously disagreed with this notion, and to some extent I still do. Climates, much like guns, do not kill people. People kill people. Blaming a climate lets the perpetrator off the hook because, when the killer’s agency is minimized, so too is his culpability. What else can a passive receptor of hate-filled messaging do except to kill the person whom he is told to despise?

The other reason I have resisted the idea of killer climates is that it seems to lead, like night into day, toward censorship. If climates kill, then our words, even our thoughts, must be policed. Preemptive measures must be taken. Children must be indoctrinated in government schools to prevent dangerous ideas from occurring in the first place. Adults must be shamed, doxxed, and fired from their jobs for fear of what other people completely unknown to the speaker might do upon hearing their words. I am on record saying that the blurring of distinctions between speech and violence is eroding our right to express ourselves, and I still believe that.

But in recent years, I have started to reevaluate my beliefs about killer climates. When a soak-the-rich socialist named James Hodgkinson attacked a group of Republican congressmen and staffers at a baseball practice in 2017, I couldn’t help but notice that he was feted by certain segments of the internet, most notably the Facebook groups we know he belonged to.

James Hodgkinson doesn’t strike me as a particularly bright individual, which tells me that he probably doesn’t do much of his own thinking. We know that he was a fan of Rachel Maddow, whose program appears on the network that pioneered the “24-hour hate” — a slightly elongated version of the “two minutes hate” that George Orwell spoke of — and it seems unlikely that his suggestible mind was not affected by it.

Which leads me to a very difficult position. Is snarky Rachel Maddow to blame for the shooting? What about Hodgkinson’s internet clique? If so, why aren’t they in jail next to him? If not, then why are we even talking about the inconsequential “climate” as a factor?

My answer to these questions threads a very small needle. Yes, Maddow and other vitriolic leftists are responsible. They are not however, equally responsible. Nor are they legally responsible; but they are morally responsible. They should tone it down a little. Of course, the law should not force them to tone it down, but if they want to be Menschen, they’ll do it of their own free will.

Naturally, I understand that I’m handing liberals a cudgel with which to beat me. They want to use extreme social pressure, and sometimes even the force of law, to smother voices they don’t like. They’ll applaud when I say that people who speak mere words are at least partially responsible for the violent deeds of others because it will justify their exploitation of tragedy as a silencing tactic.

This, of course, is the perpetual problem posed by dishonest brokers — and that is exactly what liberals are. We can’t have a mutual agreement that both sides will avoid rhetorical bomb-throwing because the other side will only exploit these ground rules to their benefit.

Why? Because when tragedy strikes, they see an opportunity to make policy gains. This often involves scapegoating whole classes of people and then demanding that they speak in chastened tones, if they must speak at all. It’s high-brow “shutuppery,” but shutuppery none the less.

For a good example of this, consider the JFK assassination. Though the man who struck down the president was an unequivocal communist, this fact was quickly swept aside for political reasons. Some denied that he was a communist while others denied that he was even the assassin.

But the most curious group of people are those who acknowledged Lee Harvey Oswald as both — but didn’t care. We can count the grieving widow Jackie Kennedy among this bunch. Upon learning that her husband’s assassin was a left-wing radical, she remarked: “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist.”

Note the dismissive tone here: a “silly little” communist. Would she would have called her husband’s killer a “silly little” right-wing zealot if it had turned out to be a John Bircher? Doubtful. More important was Mrs. Kennedy’s apparent desire to see her late husband become a martyr for some cause other than the one he died for. It clearly bothered her that JFK was a victim of the Cold War, not the civil wrongs movement.

And she wasn’t alone. In short order, America’s elite decided how President Kennedy and his murder would be recalled in popular memory, then exploited it for political gain. Less than a week after the assassination, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, addressed Congress, saying: “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought for so long.”

Johnson was referring to what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a bill that is both oppressive to the human spirit and unconstitutional on so many counts that I sometimes lose track.

For more details, check out Benny Huang's thoughts on the question:
Is The Civil Rights Act of 1964 an affront to sovereignty, privacy, dignity, and property rights? And does it exist primarily to keep an army of litigators employed?

… To this day, people still blame Dallas’s allegedly nasty, reactionary climate for Kennedy’s murder. Authors Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis even published a book for the assassination’s fiftieth anniversary called “Dallas 1963” about the “climate” in that city in the weeks and months leading up to November 22, as if it had anything to do with the actual murder.

If there was an actual patsy here, it was Dallas [and Texas], not Lee Oswald. Dallas was framed. All the people of Dallas did was to exercise their constitutionally protected rights to speak their minds about Kennedy and his policies; and for that were slandered, and continue to be slandered, as accessories to murder.

Of course, there are more examples beyond the JFK assassination to illustrate the point. …

I sometimes ask myself how any one group of people could be so utterly incompetent when it comes to assigning blame. How is it that liberals’ accusations of incitement to violence seem to contaminate the wrong people with such disturbing regularity? And then it occurs to me. They always blame the people they really want to be shamed and silenced, whether or not they are guilty of anything. Liberals don’t care how broadly blame is spread. They don’t even mind when blame is apportioned to the complete opposite target — blaming Christians for a Muslim terrorist attack, for example, or blaming John Birchers for a communist’s assassination plot.

This bad faith is why we can’t ever agree with liberals to brush up on our public civility. There can be no gentlemen’s agreement with a movement that lives and breathes on bad faith. All of this talk about watching civility in discourse is their polite way of telling us to shut up.

Walls work, and Democrats know it; in fact, they betray their cognizance of this fact every time they freak out over the very idea of a wall

In another episode of stupid “gothcha” journalism, the Washington Post recently reported that — despite what President Trump may have tweeted — Barack Obama does not have a ten-foot wall around his swanky D.C. home.

Unleashed (on the Liberty Unyielding website) at this point, Benny Huang goes on to add that

In one of the most pointless stories to appear lately in an increasingly pointless newspaper, the Post described Chez Obama’s security features while citing anonymous neighbors who said that there was no wall.

 … In an attempt to fact check the fact-checkers, the Daily Caller’s Benny Johnson dropped by the Obamas’ to find out the ground truth. What did he see?

Obama does not have one wall. He has many. He has barricades. He has armed guards entirely blocking the suburban road where he lives. Multiple cement and iron barricades block the road leading up to the Obama mansion. A Secret Service car and agent keep people from entering the stretch of road on both ends approximately 1,000 feet in both directions.

So I guess Obama’s “neighbors” are liars — if they aren’t figments of the reporter’s imagination.

What question that both the Washington Post and the Daily Caller failed to ask is why Obama would even want a wall. If I’ve learned anything about the Democrats it’s that they build bridges when other less enlightened people build walls. Why hasn’t [the lightworker] built a footpath straight into his living room? Surely there are needy people on the streets of D.C. who might need somewhere warm to stay for the night. Some of those people are probably veterans and some of those veterans were probably sent to war by none other than BHO.

 … But seriously, is there a competent adult alive who believes that a former president living in a densely populated urban area would not be protected by walls? Everyone knows that walls protect current and former presidents, though plenty of people, I’m sure, forgot this fact just long enough to sneer at Trump’s latest “lie.” After reading the Post’s coverage they shook their heads and said, “My goodness, Trump is such a liar,” when they knew darned well that that it was the Post that was lying.
As far as I can tell, Trump’s big lie was the word “around.” There is not one large wall surrounding the entire property. Instead there’s a patchwork of security measures that includes walls.

The point here is that the Obamas depend on walls to keep them safe. That’s because walls are pretty darned effective, and everyone knows it. It’s why the Chinese built one to keep out the Mongols, and why Hadrian had one built in northern England.

Democrats know that they work too. In fact, they betray their cognizance of this fact every time they freak out over the idea of a wall. If we had an effective barrier between us and the impoverished hordes of Latin America, the Democrats would have to appeal to actual Americans to get elected. They would not have the underclass they need to stay in power and drive an economy that works for them alone. Democrats have thoroughly pissed off moderate, middle class Americans on this issue and all they can do is pray that the demographic change they’ve planned for arrives before the backlash.

Democrats don’t want to stop the flow of illegal aliens, so we should probably stop considering their advice on how to stop it. They have an incentive to tell us that ineffective countermeasures are in fact effective, and that effective ones are not.

If the people pouring over our borders were self-sufficient, religious, conservative, white, anti-communist Poles, the Democrats might suddenly find some utility for a wall. But because it benefits them to have our country swamped with people who can’t care for themselves, they pretend that walls don’t work. Make no mistake about it: If walls were ineffective, the Democrats wouldn’t find them threatening.

Our once-again Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, recently declared a border wall to be “immoral, ineffective, and expensive.”

And I always thought that liberals liked things that are immoral, ineffective, and expensive. They like the war on poverty, don’t they? That one is now entering its 55th year with no end in sight. As of 2014, it had cost us about $22 trillion (inflation adjusted), and its effect on reducing the poverty rate had been negligible. Other expensive boondoggles they’ve championed include Amtrak and forced busing.

 … In reality, the wall is not expensive at all. It will pay for itself. Even if it ends up costing $21.6 billion, as the Department of Homeland Security estimates, it’s still a bargain. Doing nothing is costing us out the butt.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimates that illegal aliens and their citizen children cost federal and state governments about $135 billion per year. This estimate is likely a low-ball figure as it assumes only 12.5 million illegals in the country when there are likely many more.

One other reason that the $135 billion estimate is likely too low is that it doesn’t take into account the impact of illegal immigration on elections on policy. Simply put, the cost of big government liberalism is almost incalculable, and that’s what poor third world illegal aliens seem to want. Illegal aliens also warp the census data so that big, liberal states such as New York and California receive more representation in Congress than they are entitled to. They are literally stealing House seats from other states.

So no, a wall would not be expensive. It’s the most fiscally conservative idea anyone has had in a long time. The money that a wall would save us could be diverted to veterans services, education, infrastructure, paying down the debt, or it could simply be returned to the taxpayers who earned it.

Liberals call the wall “ineffective” because it isn’t foolproof. The classic argument against the effectiveness of the wall, which is always made in bad faith, is that people will just find a way to go over, under, around, or through any barrier. Again, this argument only seems to apply to walls that protect our country, not walls that protect their favorite ex-president. Those walls works just fine.

The logic of this argument is that determined people will defeat any security measures we try to throw in their way, so why even try? Let’s just make it easy for them. We will necessarily be making it easier for less determined people to succeed as well, but hey — there’s an odd fairness to that. While, we’re at it, let’s take the doors off of our houses, leave our keys in the ignition when we go into the store, and open all the jail cell doors because they aren’t really stopping the most clever and determined among us.

Yes, a certain number of determined illegal aliens would still find ways to criminally break into our country despite a wall. But how many? One percent of the current total that crosses our border? Two percent? Ten percent? A wall that stopped even half of illegal border crossings would be worth it. But liberals don’t want to stop half of them — or any of them.

The idea that a wall is “immoral” is almost too stupid to discuss. Liberals find the wall immoral for the same reason that they find anything else immoral — because it challenges their power. That’s the real reason and anyone who tells you differently is a liar.

Walls work and everyone knows it. The efficacy of walls was never in doubt until Democrats decided to bet the farm on illegal immigration changing the country so profoundly that their party could never lose. Then, suddenly, walls became supremely useless.

But they aren’t useless. If they were, Democrats wouldn’t shriek in terror at the sight of them. And they certainly wouldn’t shut down the government to prevent one from being built.