Category Archives: Libertarianism

While pundits and scholars continue to debate the extent to which Donald Trumps time in office has eroded American democracy, what is clear is that the former presidents political rhetoric breached the boundaries of acceptable racial discourse in the United States.

Trump assailed Mexicans as criminals, called for a ban on Muslims, said African nations were shithole countries, and referred to white supremacists in Charlottesville as very fine people. In his final act as president, he showed no remorse for the deadly violence he instigated during the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots with his lies about a stolen election. In so doing, Trump mainstreamed white supremacy and a new, more aggressive racial discourse which encouraged his supporters to resist cancel culture, the woke media, and any semblance of liberal or progressive ideas around identity and race including using violent resistance to take back our country.

Take, for instance, Trumps executive order banning federal contractors from conducting racial sensitivity training which claimed that such training indoctrinated government workers with divisive and harmful sex and race-based ideologies. From banning diversity training to denouncing the New York Times 1619 Project on slavery in the US and Howard Zinns A Peoples History of the United States, which offers an analysis of US history told from the perspective of the oppressed, Trump, his allies and supporters engaged in a full-scale culture war just as a racial reckoning was taking place at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The massive protests in the summer of 2020, which came about in response to the violent death of a Black man, George Floyd, at the hands of law enforcement, sparked a backlash from the political right which took advantage of white American fears real or imagined of becoming a majority-minority.

Fearing a loss of power and influence should the government capitulate to the demands of a rapidly growing non-white majority, conservative activists like Christopher Rufo declared a one-man war against critical race theory in the federal government. Once Rufo was on Trumps radar through his appearance on Fox News in late summer 2020, the campaign against critical race theory (CRT) gained such momentum that many school boards across the US have recently voted to ban books focused on cultural diversity, gender/sexual and racial identity. The American Library Association has reported more than 300 book challenges since last autumn with that number increasing rapidly as the anti-CRT movement continues to grow.

It is important, however, that we do not overlook the fact that there is nothing new about Trumps culture war in the larger context of American political and social discourse. In fact, it is safe to say that what Trump and various conservative activists, politicians and pundits have offered is a repackaging of conservatives long-standing racial backlash strategy against groups pushing for the US to live up to its promise of equal justice and liberty for all.

To understand the strategy of conservative racial backlash, we need to look back further to understand how race factors prominently in American political culture, focusing particularly on how philanthropy was used by the American conservative movement to shape its views on race and disseminate these views to an often unsuspecting public.

The seeds of conservative discontent with American political and social institutions can be traced back to the 1940s when the three groups which unified under the term conservative libertarians, traditionalists and anti-communists banded together to undermine the influence of then-president Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR) and his brand of liberalism.

Prior to the election of FDR, liberalism was associated with laissez-faire economics and limited government in the US. What Roosevelt offered in contrast was a New Deal liberalism that promoted economic liberalism with social democratic safeguards in response to the Great Depression. For Roosevelt, the new deal for the American people meant there was a duty and responsibility of government toward economic life.

Overwhelmed by the Great Depression, bankers and businesspeople initially urged Roosevelt to take extraordinary steps to get the economy back on the road to recovery.

However, these same business leaders were appalled by the utilitarian overtones inherent in the programmes which Roosevelt proposed to reboot the American economy. First, many of these business leaders took great exception to the presidents reliance on a group of academics to serve as his key political advisers. Known as the Brain Trust, this diverse group of scholars including the presidents legal counsel Samuel Rosenman, professors Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell and Adolf Berle of Columbia University, lawyer Basil OConnor and Felix Frankfurter of Harvard Law School, offered Roosevelt a variety of approaches for handling the economy during the Great Depression.

Opponents of FDR, who were often members of the Republican Party, used the term brain truster disparagingly, believing this group of academics was steering the nation towards socialism. Secondly, the passage of the Wagner Act, which enabled workers to organise unions and call labour strikes, was bitterly contested by the Republican Party which viewed this legislation as a threat to its freedom. Some business groups like the American Liberty League encouraged its wealthy business members to file injunctions in court and refuse to abide by the legislation that was signed into law by Roosevelt in 1935.

Furthering the Republican discontent with Roosevelts New Deal policies were the overtures made to African Americans, particularly with the establishment of The Federal Council of Negro Affairs (also known as The Black Cabinet). This was a group of African American public policy advisers to President Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor from 1933 to 1945. Although the Black Cabinet was not an official organisation, by the mid-1930s, more than 40 African Americans were working in various parts of the federal government and with New Deal agencies across the country. Many white business leaders and wealthy elites were alarmed by Roosevelts allowances to African Americans, believing such actions would eventually spell their doom.

Absent from a great deal of the scholarship on the rise of the modern conservative movement in the US is an analysis of how race and racism figured prominently in propelling this new political philosophy forward. African Americans demand for the expansion of civil rights fuelled the eventual creation of a conservative labyrinth of philanthropy foundations, think tanks and political lobbyist groups that would disseminate ideas to challenge liberalism and act as a bulwark against the browning of America.

Roosevelts small concessions to African Americans did usher in a very brief period of racial liberalism, which emboldened African Americans to press the federal government for expanded civil rights during the 1940s. Racial liberalism emerged as a political philosophy during World War II based on two central tenets in which (1) government should lend a hand in ending racial discrimination and (2) there should be an emphasis on equal opportunity legislation focused on dismantling racial segregation.

One of the most important developments to come out of this period of racial liberalism was the Double V campaign, which was a slogan used to rally African Americans to fight for victory at home and abroad during World War II. The campaign had only limited success highlighting the fact that the notion of racial liberalism never had widespread popular support.

The reason for this lack of support for racial liberalism can best be explained with the theory of interest convergence as espoused by Derrick Bell, the late legal scholar and co-founder of the Critical Race Theory movement. According to Bell, unless white Americans see a benefit for themselves, they will never promote and support civil rights legislation or economic policies which exclusively benefit African Americans.

Even when presented with opportunities to sign an anti-lynching bill or desegregate the military, for example, Roosevelt capitulated to political expediency and his political opponents like FBI director J Edgar Hoover.

Historians like Jill Watts question whether Roosevelt was a genuine friend to African Americans, based in part on his administrations lack of oversight of New Deal programmes, particularly in the American South where African Americans experienced extreme racism when trying to access New Deal benefits, and, for his failure to desegregate the armed forces.

However, when Roosevelt appointed William Hastie as the first African American federal judge or two million African Americans were hired for projects undertaken by New Deal-sponsored programmes such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, Roosevelt became the first American president since Abraham Lincoln to take up causes of particular importance to African Americans. The access that African Americans had to the president and his wife was viewed in apocalyptic terms by conservatives who feared the policies aimed at helping to lift African Americans out of poverty would usher in a period of pronounced interest divergence for their business and political interests.

The principle of interest divergence, which functions as the inverse of interest convergence, holds that Black peoples demands for racial equity will not be accommodated when those interests diverge from the interests of white people.

Conservatives firmly believed that any government intervention designed to increase employment opportunities or extend civil rights protections to African Americans would hurt them economically and would turn the US into a liberal welfare state.

To halt the expansion of the liberal welfare state, three disparate groups libertarians, who believed in less government control of the economy; traditionalists, who promoted strict religious adherence, patriotism and separation and segregation of the races; and anti-communists, who were particularly concerned with the spread of communism in the US and around the world came together following Roosevelts death in 1945 to begin the process of unifying and building an ideological infrastructure that could take on liberalism in the marketplace of ideas.

Libertarians, traditionalists and anti-communists ultimate goal in unifying under a singular political philosophy was to gain political power that would ensure that the interests of American big business would always be protected.

The events of 1945, including World War II and the power vacuum left by Roosevelts death in office, provided these groups with the opportunity to offer Americans an alternative political and social philosophy around which to rally. Conservatism was not necessarily new or unique to the US but what distinguished this modern formulation was that it would become better conceptualised and disseminated and it would use many of the same types of organising techniques that helped Roosevelt rise to political power, including establishing philanthropic organisations, as well as making use of the media and grooming charismatic, dynamic leaders.

From 1945 to 1955, conservatives reformulated the working definition of their belief system to overcome any ideological differences ensuring that they were creating an assertive rather than reactionary ideology. The anti-communism strand was emphasised as it bridged the gap between all factions, since anti-communism served to not only protect the US and the West from encroachment but also worked to promote conservative values at home. The primary method used to help unify the three factions of conservative thought was through the creation of a conservative scholarly journal that would help to disseminate conservative ideas to a broad cross-section of the academic community.

Conservative intellectuals such as William F Buckley Jr believed that in order to have legitimacy and staying power among the American public, modern American conservatism had to emerge from academia as Roosevelts New Deal policies were originally developed by the Brain Trust. Buckley realised that liberalism as an intellectual movement was still alive (even with the death of Roosevelt) and that conservatism still lacked sufficient focus to challenge liberalism.

It was the National Review, a multi-faceted conservative journal that was the brainchild of Buckley, that offered the burgeoning conservative movement its first real opportunity to have ideological cohesion. Likewise, National Reviews inclusion of two opinion columns From the Academy and The Ivory Tower critiqued the liberal intellectual class in Americas colleges and universities by exposing what conservatives believed to be the excesses of university faculty and administrators. Thus, with the publication of the National Review, conservatism would become a legitimate political and social philosophical alternative to liberalism which began losing some momentum at least within the academy during the turbulent 1960s, brought on by widespread student protests, public marches and demonstrations and violent clashes between African Americans and the police.

Shortly after the National Review burst onto the scene and the ideological debates generated by the journal became more widespread, conservatives began contemplating how they would extend their influence into the political realm of American society.

Realising that the only way for their political ideology to have relevance in Washington was to work through the two-party political system, conservatives were prepared to use the Republican Party as the vehicle to consolidate their power and bring conservatism to the American public. But how could such a young movement, seen by many in the political establishment as an aberration, use the Republican Party in such a way that by 1964, less than 20 years since its founding, it was poised to take control of the White House?

Interestingly enough, conservatives got a boost from former Brain Trust member, Raymond Moley, who left the team of advisers to the president in 1936 because of his strong opposition to Roosevelts concessions to African Americans and pro-union labour groups. In his 1952 publication, How to Keep Our Liberty, Moley explained his opposition to these concessions describing how demographic shifts in the US, as evidenced by 1920 census data, would favour an urban majority which would mean that Roosevelt would have to continue making concessions to African Americans and northern ethnic whites (mostly Irish and Italian) who made up a large part of the US labour movement. Instead, Moley walked away from the Brain Trust with the belief that the Democratic Party was driving the country into the ground and he feared that the free-market system would be replaced by socialism.

Nearly 20 years after leaving the Brain Trust, Moley refused to build alliances with the liberal or moderate factions within the Republican Party but he encouraged his fellow conservatives to support Dwight D Eisenhower publicly while working behind the scenes with academics, politicians and wealthy business owners to develop plans for the conservative takeover of the Republican Party.

Aiding Moley and other conservatives in their quest to not only take control of the Republican Party but also win over the American public in the battle of ideas against liberalism was the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union.

The vast majority of Americans paid little attention to ideological debates over communism and anti-communism which presented conservatives with the opportunity to shape the publics ideas about communism to suit their needs.

At the end of World War II, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin initiated a Second Red Scare in 1950 when he claimed to have a list of alleged members of the Communist Party of the USA who worked inside the US State Department. McCarthys accusation created a media frenzy which in turn led to a heightened period of political repression and a campaign of fear of a communist overthrow of the US government. Despite McCarthy lacking evidence to prove such allegations, the primary targets of this repression were government employees, academics, labour-union activists and those in the entertainment industry.

While most white middle-class Americans moved to the suburbs and became preoccupied with the baby boom, consumption and a renewed embrace of domesticity, African Americans saw the end of racial liberalism and a return to the strict racial status quo during the McCarthy era which lasted until the mid-1950s.

The racial norms of segregation, disenfranchisement, and subordination that African Americans faced before and during the war only seemed to grow stronger when the US entered into the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Those who dared to speak out about the living and working conditions facing African Americans in the urban ghettos and racially segregated parts of the American South found themselves with little to no support from the federal government. Many prominent African American activists such as actor/singer Paul Robeson and civil rights activists W E B DuBois and William Patterson were accused of having ties to communism which placed them in the political crosshairs of the FBI.

The FBI had begun compiling surveillance files on these three men as early as 1942. In 1947, the Civil Rights Congress and the Council on African Affairs, organisations to which Robeson, DuBois and Patterson were all intimately involved, were placed on the Attorney Generals List of Subversive Organizations.

Being labelled communist during this period had severe negative economic and political consequences for these activists including having their passports revoked which affected Robesons ability to travel for his work as an actor. Robeson was also called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to sign an affidavit affirming he was a not communist. DuBois was charged with acting as a foreign agent because of his work calling for a ban on all nuclear weapons in 1951. The governments treatment of African American civil rights and social justice activists was nothing more than an attempt to silence African Americans and keep them in their place.

A few years later, during the Civil Rights Movement, white segregationists such as former Alabama Governor George Wallace and other conservatives began utilising specific rhetoric about the evils of communism which helped bring white Southern Democrats to the Republican Party. Conservatives reinforced the principle of interest divergence, insisting that any civil rights legislation proposed by liberal Democrats meant a loss of freedom for white Americans. In his 1963 inaugural speech as governor, Wallace argued that the Civil Rights Movement would be worse than what the Nazis did to Jews so the international racism of the liberals seek to persecute the international white minority to the whim of the international colored majority.

Despite the realities of racial violence and political disenfranchisement of African Americans, conservatives anti-communist rhetoric and the crackdown on civil rights activists by the FBI assured members of the economic and political elite that the American racial status quo would not be upended. To further prevent a resurgence of racial liberalism, individual American big business leaders began using their vast financial resources to support the candidacy of conservative politicians such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan to wrestle control of the Republican Party away from its more liberal and moderate factions. These liberal and moderate factions were accused of playing politics with the Democrats and acquiescing to the demands of racial minority groups.

Raymond Moley, for example, was especially harsh in his criticism of Republican President Eisenhower who supported the landmark 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision which helped to desegregate schools. The National Review ran articles claiming the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren and Associate Justice William Brennan, both Eisenhower appointees, had allowed liberalism to take root in the judiciary due to a number of rulings by the Warren Court which led to the end of McCarthyism. Additionally, both justices voted in favour of the African American plaintiffs in the Brown versus Board of Education decision.

The mounting tensions between the conservatives and the other factions of the Republican Party became very apparent as the 1960 presidential election neared. Conservatives believed that Nixon, the Republican frontrunner and Eisenhowers vice president, could not be trusted because of his moderate stance on school desegregation. Believing that Nixon would not deliver on Eisenhowers promise to undo various New Deal programmes, Barry Goldwater, a conservative Arizona senator challenged the Republican Party to grow up and work to put the party back together using a local, grassroots approach rather than engage in what Goldwater labelled as establishment treachery.

Goldwater was a political outsider to the Republican establishment because of his views on limited government, the free market system, discontent with the Civil Rights Movement, and his outspoken support for a strong national defence which he laid bare in his 1960 publication, Conscience of a Conservative. Goldwaters conservative beliefs and frankness were characteristics that endeared him to conservative peers like William Rusher, publisher of the National Review and John Ashbrook, a congressman from Ohio, who organised a series of secret meetings with Republican operatives and conservative business leaders to plan the Republican Party strategy for winning the White House in 1964 with Goldwater as their standard-bearer.

To break the liberal and moderate hold on the Republican Party, Goldwater needed more than a strong message; he needed money. Conservatives initially had to depend on rank and file money from ordinary Republican Party supporters, according to Mary Brennan, author of Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP. Instead, Goldwaters campaign received substantial financial support from members of the wealthy business elite at the time, including Fred Koch, founder of the oil refinery that would become Koch Industries, the second largest privately held company in the US; Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking, oil and aluminium fortune and founder of the Carthage Foundation, a conservative anti-communist political club focused on national security issues; and Harry Lynde Bradley, co-founder of the Allen-Bradley Company and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a conservative philanthropic foundation with over $800m in assets.

These wealthy donors were staunchly conservative in their political outlook with Koch and Bradley having been members of the ultraconservative group, the John Birch Society, best known for spreading conspiracy theories about communist plots to overthrow the United States.

Donations from these billionaires were used by the Goldwater draft team to help organise at the precinct, district and state level to build delegate strength for the 1964 Republican National Convention as opposed to trying to sway national party officials to the conservative cause. With the aid of conservative donors, Goldwater secured the party nomination and the conservative grassroots operation was solidly in place for years to come.

Despite losing the election, Goldwaters campaign breathed new life into the Republican Party. He helped the party gain support in the South which had been traditionally Democratic but was largely opposed to integrationist policies such as the Brown versus Board of Education decision. Goldwater also popularised the states rights position on racial integration arguing that the federal government had no business interfering in what was a states right to enforce integration orders or not.

Goldwater broke with liberal and moderate members of the Republican Party when he voted against the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, believing that African Americans should adopt a policy of gradualism and wait until southern whites were ready to embrace them as full citizens. Even when members of the John Birch Society, regarded in many Republican circles as a fringe group, threw their support behind Goldwater, he remained adamant that he would suffer the kooks and lose the election if it meant that conservatives could win the party.

It was the conservative capture of the Republican Party through the campaign of Goldwater that paved the way for his heir apparent, Ronald Reagan, to become governor of California and later become the first modern American conservative president of the US.

Liberals failed to anticipate how the volatile issue of race would affect white American voters, who, by and large, clung to a strong belief in tradition and order. Liberals readily assumed that their traditional base of support labour, African Americans and white ethnic communities would always remain firm. By the 1960s, however, liberals were no longer championing bread and butter issues such as wages and taxes which affect everyone.

Lower-middle class white ethnic voters tended to be deeply religious and favoured traditional family values so when Reagan made the charge that urban rioters, Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists were the greatest threats to freedom and civility, these white conservative Democrats, as they were labelled by Reagans campaign staff, threw their support behind the Republican gubernatorial candidate and never looked back.

Reagan took advantage of the perception real or imagined that liberal social programmes such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 encouraged African Americans to make even greater demands and would result in arson and murder as the first act of civil disobedience. Buoyed by a 1966 national Harris poll, which found that the number of white Americans who believed African Americans tried to move too fast in their demand for civil rights grew from 34 percent in 1964 to 85 percent just two years later; Reagan used this polling data to call for a crackdown on anti-war protesters and civil rights activists.

In one of his first acts as governor, Reagan signed the Mulford Act which repealed a law that allowed the carrying of loaded firearms in public. This bill was drafted for the primary purpose of disarming the Black Panther Party which had lawfully carried loaded guns to patrol neighbourhoods in Oakland to prevent police abuse of African Americans.

Reagan cultivated an image of stability and order with his nonsense crackdown on Black radicals. He was lauded by fellow conservatives for his decision to call in the US National Guard to put down the five-month student protest for the establishment of a Black Studies programme at San Francisco State College. He used the radical politics of the Black Panther Party, Students for a Democratic Society, and even calls for the desegregation of public schools in California from moderate civil rights organisations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to propel himself into national prominence.

By the end of his second term as governor, the conservative political machine which helped Goldwater run for the presidency in 1964 was once again set in motion to help Reagan go all the way to the White House with one important difference: Reagan would have access to an even greater largesse of conservative philanthropic support that could provide much-needed capital to not only win the Republican nomination but to make conservatism the dominant political force in the US for generations.

In 1971, two months prior to Richard Nixon nominating him to the US Supreme Court, Lewis F Powell Jr sent a private memo, entitled Attack on the Free Enterprise System, to various members of the US business community in which he outlined the assault on big business and what should be done about it. This memo, also known as The Powell Manifesto, specifically focused on how big business was attacked from within academe. Powell says, Although origins, sources and causes are complex and interrelated, and obviously difficult to identify without careful qualification, there is reason to believe that the campus is the single most dynamic source. The social sciences faculties usually include members who are unsympathetic to the enterprise system.

Powell suggested various ways in which members of the business community could halt the attack on the enterprise system by financing and sponsoring a counter-establishment starting with US higher education. Eventually, Powell suggested, once conservatives influence over US higher education was solidified, conservatives could press for control of the media, local and state court systems, and local, grassroots politics.

The aim of the conservative counter-establishment was to dissuade American politicians from enacting legislation that would increase regulation and taxation on American big business by turning American public opinion against liberalism.

Many of the same concerns that the American business community had with liberalism and the New Deal in the 1930s was echoed in the 1970s, except now, Powell laid out a detailed action plan for business leaders to combat liberalism. Likewise, while individual conservative donors supported the Goldwater campaign, what Powell called for was a much larger investment of money to cement the marriage between conservative academics and political leaders with US big business. This philanthropic support led to a new form of political activity known as movement conservatism.

Movement conservatives promote the commercial interests of the corporate elite rather than the general interests of the American public by funnelling millions of dollars into the creation of foundations and think-tanks that would develop policy analyses and research for politicians.

By the mid-1970s, movement conservatives began developing a vast network of foundations, think-tanks and academic policy organisations to remove all remaining vestiges of the liberal welfare state, particularly government-funded race and gender-based legislation such as affirmative action. This network included academic reform organisations such as the National Association of Scholars (NAS), think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, and conservative family foundations including the John Olin Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. In fact, the initial seed money to establish the Heritage Foundation came from Joseph Coors, grandson of the brewery magnate Adolf Coors, being stirred up to support the conservative cause after receiving Powells memo. Soon, other wealthy conservatives like Richard Mellon Scaife and John M Olin were setting up their own family foundations to support a variety of conservative causes and politicians.

With this new conservative philanthropic infrastructure in place by the mid-1980s, movement conservatives launched the academic culture wars in US higher education in response to Powells call to first target academe. Similar to Powells critique of the social science faculty, William Bennett who served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and later as Regans secretary of education, published a report in 1984, entitled To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education, where he claims that the study of Western civilisation has lost its central place in the humanities curriculum when he critiqued Stanford Universitys decision to add more works from women and people of colour in a Western civilisation course required of all freshmen students. This report launched the culture wars.

During the culture wars, affirmative action programmes and ethnic and gender studies departments were targeted because these programmes called into question who should have access to educational and economic opportunities while simultaneously providing a critique of capitalism and traditional racial politics in the US.

The primary goal of the culture wars was to silence critiques of capitalism and the existing social order by charging that ethnic studies programmes, affirmative action and other race-based initiatives relied on cultural relativism in their criticisms of capitalism and the racial status quo in the US. Members of the NAS used monies from conservative foundations to claim that liberalism eroded academic standards and denied conservative faculty and students their right to academic freedom in their quarterly journal, Academic Questions.

From 1988 through 2005, according to the Foundation Grants Index, the NAS received more than $10m in grants from different conservative philanthropies including the Olin, Bradley, Scaife, Coors and Smith Richardson foundations to support a wide range of programmes. In turn, these grants were used to fund conservative student newspapers such as the Dartmouth Review, fund internships to train conservative student activists, establish endowed fellowships for conservative scholars, and finance conservative educational policy institutes such as the Madison Center for Educational Affairs (MCEA).

The National Center for Public Policy Research, using donations and grants from the Carthage, Castlerock, Scaife and Earhart foundations and ExxonMobil, also created an African American conservative speakers bureau called the Project 21 Black leadership network in 1992.

Several members of Project 21, including economist Thomas Sowell, author Shelby Steele and conservative businessman and University of California regent Ward Connerly, were particularly outspoken against ethnic and gender studies and affirmative action during the culture wars. Connerly even called for an end to cultural graduation celebrations because they promoted the balkanization of the nation following his successful campaign to pass Proposition 209 in California, which ended affirmative action in state hiring, contracting and state university admissions in 1996.

To fund this anti-affirmative action consulting work, Connerly created the American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI), a non-profit organisation designed to educate the public about the problems with affirmative action. In its first year of operation, ACRI received more than $4m from donors like the Bradley, Olin, Scaife, Hickory and Randolph foundations.

This new type of philanthropy moved away from the traditional notion of philanthropy as charitable, altruistic and providing for the common good. Instead, this philanthropy openly discouraged discussions of race or gender in the classroom or the promotion of diversity in the workplace. Activists, political operators and scholars receiving monies from conservative groups often relied on racially tinged rhetoric to scare people into not supporting affirmative action, ethnic studies and cultural-based student programmes in universities. They emphasised race-neutral fairness, meritocracy and individualism rather than support policies that would diversify educational institutions or the workplace. Conservative think-tanks and institutes, such as the Heritage Foundation and Hoover Institute at Stanford University, helped to legitimise conservatism as an intellectual force that could compete with liberalism for domination in education, media and politics.

While academia was the initial battleground for the culture wars, movement conservatives got a boost from media coverage of the political correctness (PC) debates during this period. Newspaper and journal articles about these debates exploded in popularity from 101 articles in 1988 to 3,989 in 1991. PC debates provided an irresistible opportunity for print media to attract readers with sensationalised headlines, graphics and stories that played on the deepest fears of middle-class white Americans. The general public was largely unaware that most of these books and editorials were funded by conservative foundations such as Dinesh DSouzas Illiberal Education which was funded by the Olin Foundation..

While the academic culture wars was presented to the public as a battle over ideas within American colleges and universities, movement conservatives initiated the culture wars as an economic protectionist policy to protect their financial interests using a racial capitalism approach where the discourse on race is used to make the actual intent of this philanthropy opaque. By focusing on the language of meritocracy and using political correctness as a pejorative term to mean that racial minority groups and women could silence white men, movement conservatives could play on white American racial fears of the browning of America, convincing the unsuspecting public that policies benefitting African Americans and other racial minority groups were inherently unfair to the white majority.

Movement conservatives were able to channel popular anger about falling wages and living standards away from Wall Street and focus it instead on the Black poor and non-white immigrants. Writer Michael Lind has even suggested that conservatives launched the culture wars as a method of diverting the wrath of wage-earning populist voters from Wall Street and corporate America to other targets: the universities, the media, racial minorities, homosexuals, and immigrants. Movement conservatives used the culture wars to fabricate issues and frighten voters particularly low-income white voters into voting for Republicans whose policies are devastating the very families they claim to represent.

We can see clearly how heightened fears of losing power in the wake of African American demands for civil rights led to the use of philanthropy to build a conservative counter-establishment, as writer Sidney Blumenthal refers to it, where race was a central organising principle. This conservative counter-establishment had been working for decades, unbeknown to most of the American public, shaping and redefining the discourse around race in the US. By the time Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency, racial polarisation and the conservative backlash strategy was already firmly entrenched.

Originally posted here:
Racism and the roots of conservative philanthropy in the US - Al Jazeera English

The global controversy over genetically modified organisms is a classic bootleggers and Baptists story. Activists who mistakenly believe that GMOs are dangerous to consume have teamed up with pesticide and insecticide sellers to restrict the worlds poor from life-saving technologies.

This is a tragedy.

GMOs increase crop yields, improve the nutritional value of crops, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Those who want to improve standards of living and care for the environment should be appalled by GMO restrictions around the world.

Although the Baptists are skeptical about GMO safety, an overwhelming consensus of scientists agree that GMOs are safe to eat. They do not damage organ health, cause genetic mutations in humans or animals, affect pregnancies, or transfer genes to those who consume them.

The bootlegger alliesthe pesticide and insecticide industries are threatened by high-yielding and disease resistant crops that dont require their products.

Unlike conventional plant or animal breeding, which combines all the genes from two sources, GMOs are created by tweaking an organisms genetic code. This allows for more precise alterations, such as insertion of a disease-resistant gene or one that produces more vitamin C. Targeted alterations allow researchers to improve on conventional breeding practices and create organisms that are optimized for specific agriculture conditions.

This makes them well-suited to increase food security and lift farmers out of poverty. Farmers in poor countries lack access to the seed selection, farm equipment, fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation technologies that are widespread in wealthy countries. Without these products, their crops are more susceptible to weeds and pests and yield substantially less than crops in the developed world. When pesticides are available, farmers often apply them by hand, which contributes to pesticide poisoning.

The benefits of GMOs are well-known to farmers in these conditions. In Kenya, dairy farmers are petitioning their government to lift the ban on GMOs because the rising prices of non-GMO livestock feeds have put many out of business. Since plant improvements are more targeted, GMOs are higher yielding, require fewer synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, and are more disease resistant than conventional crops.

For example, genetically modified bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton increased Indian cotton yields between 50 and 70 percent between 1975 and 2009 and decreased insecticide poisoning by 2.4 million cases a year. Because farmers lost fewer crops to disease and pests, their profits rose by as much as 50 percent. For farmers who cannot afford tractors and fertilizer, these cost-reducing GMO seeds are an effective way to raise food production.

Yet only four African countries allow GMO crops, and much of southeast Asia restricts GMO access. The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation estimates that GMO restrictions could cost low and middle income nations up to $1.5 trillion in foregone income through 2050. In the Philippines, Bt eggplants were banned by the Supreme Court, even though several studies conducted in the country found numerous health and income benefits.

Beyond all these benefits, GMOs lower carbon emissions per unit produced. Adoption of genetically modified technology decreased greenhouse gas emissions by an equivalent of removing 15.27 million cars from the road in 2018 and saved the world approximately 16.1 million hectares in farmland. This is approximately 14 percent of the United States arable land.

Yet the European Union is moving away from GMOs and aims to have 25 percent of European farms producing organics by 2030.

The GMO debate continues to be controlled by non-scientific groups to the detriment of global hunger and efforts to lower emissions. Governments, particularly those of impoverished nations, should lift their bans and allow full access to GMOs.

See the article here:
Government Bans on GMOs Are Making Global Hunger Worseand Do Serious Harm to the Planet | Jeffrey Miron, Sarah Eckhardt - Foundation for Economic...

The new right-wing deputy Javier Milei, raffled this Thursday his second salary as a legislator. On this occasion, the raffle was won by Jonatan Lewczuk, an audiovisual producer who works for the City Government.

Like some Pro leaders, Lewczuk sympathizes with Mileis ideas. Im following you to death, he told her when the deputy called him to inform him that he had won the award.

This time I play on our side, Milei told the press. The winner will take the sum of 369,828.99 pesos.

It should be noted that, a month ago, Federico Nacardo had won the first draw that Milei orchestrated. Far from having sympathy for the far-right leader, Nacardo had signed up for the contest at the insistence of his partner and assured that he will use a large part of the money to pay off debts.. We will continue to feed the financial system, he closed on that occasion, before a stunned Milei.

After the existing doubts about the management and protection of personal data requested by the economist to be able to register for his salary draw, weeks ago an anonymous user assured to put the sale the database of more than a million participants in an internet forum, allegedly from hackers, in exchange for little more than 10 thousand dollars.

The protagonist of the new chapter in the novel by the legislator of Avanza Libertad is H4ck3rArgentino, a user who at 3 oclock in the morning on Wednesday offered for sale Argentinian Deputy Milei database (database of the Argentine deputy Milei): according to what he assured, the ID and number of the candidate, names and surnames, email and document number of all the people who signed up. That is to say, 1,040,622 people, according to the post made in the same forum that, days ago, published the sale of data from the National Registry of Persons (ReNaPer). The alleged data package is offered in exchange for $10,500.

Sources from the computer security sector assured Page 12 that the supposed leak generates a series of doubts. On the one hand, the required cost per user was too high and the user who made the offer had been created just a few hours before publication.

The draw generated the National Directorate for the Protection of Personal Data open a process to investigate if the organization had taken measures to guarantee the privacy of the data of the participants, as well as to determine if there was a violation of Law 25,326 on the Protection of Personal Data.

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This time the draw for Javier Milei was won by a libertarian: "He played on our side" - Then24

Review of Freedom: An Unruly History by Annelien de Dijn (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2020)

Freedom is life, declared a banner at a recent rally against public health measures taken to reduce the effect of the pandemic. Indeed, this has become a consistent theme during the pandemic, as the movement against vaccines and public health measures has claimed the mantle of freedom. In response, the Left has pointed out that our individual freedom relies on social solidarity, arguing that the public measures are needed to preserve our right to health.

At stake are two opposed definitions of freedom and this conflict is not new. In her recent book, Freedom: An Unruly History, Annelien de Dijn helps to shed light on these often contradictory meanings of the term. It is a sweeping history of the idea of freedom in the West, from Ancient Greece, to our time.

For centuries, writes de Dijn, western thinkers and political actors identified freedom not with being left alone by the state, but with exercising control over the way one is governed. As this suggests, de Dijn distinguishes between two types of freedom: freedom from versus freedom to, or, as they are sometimes styled, negative freedom versus positive freedom.

Freedom from is the kind of freedom most often deployed by the small-government, reactionary right. Supporters of capitalism regularly invoke this kind of negative freedom when justifying the deregulation of employment, rolling back health and safety laws or lowering minimum wages. Free market fundamentalists cite it to justify deregulating financial markets. And Christian conservatives claim negative freedom when arguing that religiously inspired bigotry should be exempt from antidiscrimination laws.

De Dijns thought-provoking book cuts through this rhetoric by explaining how this negative conception of freedom arose relatively recently, as a way to fight back against popular struggles for the freedom to participate democratically and actively in politics.

In Ancient Greece, and later, in Rome, freedom was defined in opposition to slavery. To be a slave was to be unfree; it meant having no say and no power over your future. When Ancient Greeks talked about themselves as free, de Dijn writes, they meant that, unlike the subjects of the Persian Great King, they were not ruled by another but governed themselves. This is what she describes as a democratic conception of freedom.

This is the basis of freedom to, or positive freedom, a conception of freedom that de Dijn traces like a golden thread through all subsequent debates over the term. After beginning in Ancient Greece, and continuing into the Roman Republic, this notion of democratic freedom begun to decline as Caesarism transformed Rome into an empire.

Much later, Renaissance thinkers like Niccol Machiavelli revived the democratic, positive meaning of freedom. As the great eighteenth-century revolutions in America and France established new, republican governments, masses fought for freedom to direct their governments once more. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the movements to win universal suffrage kept the idea of democratic freedom alive. De Dijns narrative ends with the postWorld War II period, and the transition into the twenty-first century, during which the concept of positive freedom declined slowly as neoliberalism became hegemonic.

This sweeping historical narrative is one of the strengths of de Dijns book. It allows her to show how an individual thinker like Machiavelli can be both situated in their time and also placed within a much broader historical context.

It also shows how the notion of democratic freedom has developed and deepened over time. For example, Machiavelli, took a more analytical approach to freedom in Discourse on the First Ten Books on Livy than the historians of Ancient Greece and Rome, such as Herodotus. As de Dijn demonstrates, this matters Machiavellis precepts had a considerable impact on subsequent treatments of freedom and political institutions.

According to de Dijn, the great seventeenth- and eighteeth-century revolutions also gave rise to a form of freedom staunchly opposed to the democratic conception favored by democratic and republican thinkers. Freedom from, or negative freedom, arose in opposition to the democratic, representative forms of government that were established in the United States, England, and France.

According to de Dijn, the period of Terror under Maximilien Robespierre, during the great French Revolution spurred the development of negative freedom, and was in large part motivated by fears among the elite of a democratic redistribution of wealth.

After this, the negative conception of freedom grew and developed during the 1800s, into the twentieth century, in which it was upheld by thinkers like Isaiah Berlin, who, according to de Dijn, introduced a new idea: that negative liberty was the very essence of Western civilization.

This development of freedom from, was not entirely valueless, however. It points toward a paradox at the heart of democratic freedom namely, that the majority can oppress the minority. De Dijn points out an example of this problem early in her book, by recounting how the ancient Athenian democracy decided democratically to execute the philosopher Socrates.

In the name of protecting minorities against the majority, however, freedom from has allowed minoritarian tyrannies to grow and prosper. This helps explain why negative freedom is particularly useful to property owners with access to extraordinary economic power that most people lack.

To illustrate the point, de Dijn cites an early antidemocratic tract from Athens, the Constitution of the Athenians. Although the author remained anonymous, historians refer to them as the Old Oligarch.

In this text, the author claims that Athenss poor majority ruled in their own interest and used the state to redistribute wealth, so that the poor become wealthy and the wealthy poor. Indeed, in Democracy: A Life, Professor Paul Cartledge argued that Athenian democracy is best understood as an example of Lenins idea of the the dictatorship of the proletariat, and represented a more democratic conception of freedom.

The comparison is apt. At the height of Athenian democracy, the state redistributed wealth to further democratic participation. The Athenian republic ensured that the working poor were able to participate in democratic decision by paying them to attend citizens assemblies. The Athenians also experimented with other forms of democracy, including election by sortition (that is, by lottery). Citizens elected to government roles received recompense, allowing them to leave their everyday jobs for the duration of office.

Importantly, de Dijn traces how the Old Oligarchy which was overthrown by Athenian democracy feared the redistributive power of political democracy. From the time of Ancient Athens until today, this fear has been a constant in reactionary thought.

Theres one obvious lacuna in de Djins book, linked to both types of freedom she traces: namely, the role played by human rights, since the end of World War II.

The Declaration of Human Rights includes both positive, democratic freedom and negative freedom from. For example, Article 21 states that everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country which, as we have seen, entails a democratic conception of freedom. By contrast, Article 17(2) states that no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property, which imposes restraints on popular government in line with freedom from.

On a broader level, the idea of human rights deeply informs contemporary discussions of freedom. Typically, those fighting undemocratic, repressive governments have drawn on the rhetoric of human rights for example, in Putins Russia. Increasingly, however, the reactionary right and Christian conservatives claim to defend freedom against democratic, representative governments. For example, they claim that taxes or laws prohibiting discrimination against LGBT people are a violation of their freedom to property and conscience, respectively. These developments have further influenced the way the Left thinks about freedom, and de Dijns historical narrative would have benefited by including them.

To de Dijns credit, however, she is at pains to highlight the limitations of historic forms of freedom. She makes it clear that historic political systems built around democratic freedom still excluded many people. For example, the Athenian Republic denied freedom to slaves, women and non-Athenian men.

Freedom: An Unruly History is an excellent book that captures the sweep of more than twenty-five hundred years of Western debate about the nature of political freedom. Of course, this scope precludes a detailed focus on any one historical period. At the same time, however, de Deijns long view helps ground differing and deficient conceptions of freedom in the political realities upon which they arose.

This historic breadth helps show that although an antidemocratic, elitist form of freedom may now be ascendent, this is a relatively new development that arose in opposition to the unprecedented expansion of democratic freedom and representative government from the 1600s onward.

This makes it clear that we will only win economic freedom if we win greater political freedom. And although this means overcoming freedom from, de Dijn reminds us that we can only build stronger political freedom if we extend it to minorities excluding, of course, the ultra-wealthy.

Read the rest here:
Since Ancient Greece, People Have Fought for Genuine Freedom Against the Wealthy - Jacobin magazine

(cupephoto/Getty Images)

Remember when some people wanted to protect college students from the terrible influence of leftist speakers? In North Carolina, e.g., the state had a ban on communist speakers on campuses in the UNC system. (That law was eventually struck down.)

These days, there are still people who want to protect students, but now, apparently, the threat comes not from Communists but from conservatives and libertarians.

In this Law & Liberty piece, Oglethorpe University professor Joseph Knippenberg reviews a recent book by Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola, Free Speech and Koch Money.

Knippenberg writes, In a nutshell, Wilson and Kamola contend that in large measure the campus free speech crisis is a product of the efforts of the Koch network, which funds the small handful of . . . campus activists, the provocative speakers they host, the media network that amplifies the ensuing controversy, the legal organizations that are involved in any subsequent litigation or threats of litigation, the think tanks that develop legislative responses, and the faculty and academic institutes that provide a veneer of academic respectability to the entire enterprise. It is a tempest in a teapot, stirred up by the plutocratic libertarians for their own ends, which largely involve recruiting people to their network to bolster their policy efforts at the state and federal level and to put their political adversaries on the defensive.

How despicable!

Knippenberg doesnt find the book persuasive. He concludes, As someone who was attracted to the academic life understood as the pursuit of wisdom for its own sake, I find Wilson and Kamolas vision at least as threatening as other efforts to instrumentalize learning. It is just as much a threat to the independence and integrity of the university as that posed by the Koch network that they deprecate. Nay, it is more of a threat: its end is, in a sense, totalizing and those who embrace it seem currently to hold a good bit of the academic high ground.

Several years ago, the Martin Center published a pro and con with Wilson arguing that outside conservative money was a threat to the mission of universities and Hillsdale economics professor Gary Wolfram arguing that there was no true threat. Read both and see which advocate has the better argument.

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The Imaginary Threat of Koch Money to College Integrity - National Review

SciCheck Digest

As of early December, unvaccinated adults were about 97 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people who had received boosters, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. But a Twitter user falsely implied that the death rate for the unvaccinated included people who had only one or two doses of a vaccine. The CDC said unvaccinated means someone has not been verified to have received COVID-19 vaccine.

How effective are the vaccines?

All of the authorized and approved vaccines are effective at preventing symptomatic disease.

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which is the first COVID-19 vaccineto receive full approval from the Food and Drug Administration, showed a final efficacyof 91% against symptomatic illness in its phase 3 trial, meaningthat under the conditions of the trial the vaccine reduced the risk of getting sick by 91%. The Moderna vaccine showed similar results in its clinical trial, with an efficacy of 94%against disease at the time of emergency use authorization.

Johnson & Johnson, which partly tested its vaccine in South Africa when the beta variant emerged, reported an efficacy of 66% in preventing moderate to severe COVID-19 and an efficacy of 85% in preventing severe or critical COVID-19.

Subsequent studies have demonstratedthat the vaccines are effective under real-world conditions, includingagainst the highly contagious delta variant, although they are lesseffectivein preventing infection and mild disease compared with earlier versions of the virus. Most studies show the vaccines remainhighly effectivein preventing serious disease, hospitalization and death from delta.

Data also suggest that vaccinated people arelesslikelyto transmit the coronavirus if they do become infected.

Link to this

A Feb. 5 tweet from President Joe Bidens official government Twitter account @POTUS said that unvaccinated individuals are 97 times more likely to die from COVID-19 compared to those who are boosted.

Thats accurate, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions most recent analysis of data from 24 U.S. jurisdictions.

The CDC says that, as of Dec. 4, the weekly COVID-19 death rate among unvaccinated adults was 9.74 per 100,000 population, and the rate was 0.1 per 100,000 population for people 18 and older who were fully vaccinated with a booster dose.

The White House confirmed in an email to FactCheck.org that the tweet was based on the CDCs data from early December.

However, a Twitter user falsely implied that the death rate for the unvaccinated was inflated by including people who had received only one or two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Heres the deal: classifying people who have 1 or 2 jabs as unvaccinated is ridiculous, Libertarians: Diligently Plotting tweeted in response to the POTUS account. An image of that tweet was posted to the Facebook page of Libertarians: Diligently Plotting to Take Over the World & Leave You Alone, which has over 71,000 followers.

But the CDC said it only counted people who had not received any COVID-19 vaccine doses as unvaccinated.

A footnote on the CDCs Rates of COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by Vaccination Status webpage says unvaccinated means people who have not been verified to have received COVID-19 vaccine. In addition, that CDC page says partially vaccinated people who received at least one FDA-authorized vaccine dose but did not complete a primary series were excluded.

For most people, the primary vaccination series is: two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, given three weeks apart; two doses of the Moderna vaccine, given four weeks apart; or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Someone is not considered fully vaccinated until at least 14 days after the second dose of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine or at least 14 days after one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Whats more, the CDC separately tracks fully vaccinated people who have only received the primary vaccination series. As of Dec. 4, the weekly COVID-19 death rate among adults fully vaccinated without booster dose was 0.71 per 100,000 which was about seven times higher than the rate for those fully vaccinated who also had received a booster shot.

Weve reproduced the graph from the CDCs page below:

Heres how CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky explained the data in a Feb. 2 press briefing by the White House COVID-19 Response Team and public health officials:

Walensky, Feb. 2: Similar to what I showed you last week, vaccination and booster doses substantially decrease the risk of death from COVID-19. Looking at the data from the week ending Dec. 4, the number of average weekly deaths for those who are unvaccinated was 9.7 per 100,000 people, but only 0.7 per 100,000 people for those who were vaccinated.

This means the risk of dying from COVID-19 was 14 times higher for people who were unvaccinated compared to those who received only a primary series.

For those who were boosted, the average of weekly deaths was 0.1 per 100,000 people, meaning that unvaccinated individuals were 97 times more likely to die compared to those who were boosted.

She clearly provided different COVID-19 risk assessments for the unvaccinated, the fully vaccinated without a booster and the fully vaccinated who had been boosted.

Editors note:SciChecks COVID-19/Vaccination Projectis made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation hasno controlover our editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation. The goal of the project is to increase exposure to accurate information about COVID-19 and vaccines, while decreasing the impact of misinformation.

President Joe Biden (@POTUS). Heres the deal: Unvaccinated individuals are 97 times more likely to die compared to those who are boosted. Protect yourself and those around you by getting vaccinated and boosted today. Twitter. 5 Feb 2022.

Libertarians: Diligently Plotting (@LibertariansDP). Heres the deal: classifying people who have 1 or 2 jabs as unvaccinated is ridiculous. Twitter. 5 Feb 2022.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rates of COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by Vaccination Status. Cdc.gov. Accessed 8 Feb 2022.

White House. Press Briefing by White House COVID-19 Response Team and Public Health Officials. Transcript. Whitehouse.gov. 2 Feb 2022.

Read more:
Latest CDC Data: Unvaccinated Adults 97 Times More Likely to Die from COVID-19 Than Boosted Adults - FactCheck.org

House Bill 1134 is Exhibit A of why the Colorado General Assembly should adjourn earlier, much earlier. The bill isnt just one of those solutions-seeking-real-problems proposals that proliferate the docket; it is illustrative of a flawed governing philosophy that is as pernicious as it is seductive.

The legislation forbids restaurants to give customers plastic tableware or condiment packets without first obtaining their express permission. It contains six pages of detail differentiating the types of restaurants that must get permission to give away a napkin and which may give a fork sans permission. It determines who can proffer a lid to avoid spillage and who must first inquire of desire for said lid. It defines exactly which utensils and condiment packets are covered, omitting only pickle relish perhaps from oversight. The bill even provides a definition for spill plug, the plastic thingy in the coffee lid. Its also called a splash stick. Who knew?

The only ambiguity is the enforcement mechanism which presumably will be added in a committee hearing on the bill. Will there be fines for transgression? Which agencies will ferret out malefactors secretly slipping unsolicited straws at the drive-through? As if theres not enough real crime happening to keep law enforcement occupied right now, they wouldnt mind organizing a statewide sting: Operation Unsought Spork coming to an unsuspecting takeout counter near you.

The lawmakers spearheading this silly little bill must think restaurants are foisting unwanted sugar packets, plastic spoons, and splash sticks onto customers too weak-willed to refuse them. These products are filling up kitchen drawers, glove compartments, and landfills everywhere. The government therefore must intervene and rescue us from ourselves.

Over the past century, this government-must-help-us philosophy has become ascendant. If something is deemed desirable, the government must promote it, subsidize it, and even provide it free at taxpayer expense to all comers. If something is deemed undesirable, the government must regulate it, tax it, curtail it, or ban it. Its not just a philosophy of the left. Corporate and farm subsidies enjoy strong bipartisan support.

Congressmen and congresswomen of both parties seek to regulate social media tech companies for the sake of individuals who voluntarily use the services. Examples of paternalistic government displacing personal responsibility are too numerous to recount within this space. The fact that lawmakers here in Colorado are targeting soy sauce packets demonstrates there is no limiting principle to this government-to-the-rescue impulse.

Since outright bans tend to provoke a backlash among voters, as these same lawmakers will no doubt experience when their plastic bag ban goes into effect in 2024, politicians are discovering ways to manipulate their subjects, I mean constituents, in less noticeable ways. Its called altering the choice architecture to advantage certain choices over others.

In this case, customers can still get packets of strawberry jam, they just have to ask for them. Customers will be better off without a drawer full of plastic, restaurants will save money, and landfills will be a tiny, tiny bit less full of waste. Best of all, politicians show they care about the environment and are solution-oriented.

In this way, the enlightened can nudge the hoi polloi to do better without actually resorting to more draconian means that elicit resentment like when customers discover they cant get a plastic bag for that greasy rotisserie chicken. Some call this manipulation paternalistic libertarianism, but if they were honest, theyd leave off the noun. Theres nothing libertarian about using the full force of law to compel restaurants to ask customers if they want a straw with that.

Ostensibly free citizens can figure that tricky transaction out by themselves.

Krista L. Kafer is a weekly Denver Post columnist. Follow her on Twitter: @kristakafer.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

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Kafer: When Do you want ketchup with those fries? becomes the law - The Denver Post

Early in the game, as Booker Dewitt is exploring Columbia and learning about the cloud city, he comes upon a raffle in front of a stage and takes a number, written on a baseball. It is revealed that the winner of the raffle gets to throw the baseball at an interracial couple, who is surrounded by racist imagery. While the scene can certainly be uncomfortable, up to this point it serves its purpose well. It shows the ugly side of Columbia in a single scene and it demonstrates that some people who live there don't necessarily agree with these ideals, in the form of the couple. What happens next is where things get problematic.

Players are presented with three options. To either throw the ball at the raffle announcer, throw it at the couple, or do nothing. Ultimately, all three options lead to the police noticing the "mark of the beast" on Booker's hand, preventing him from throwing the ball at anyone. The game, however, never reflects or discusses the player's choice. Instead, there is a situation where the "hero" of the story could have chosen to participate in a racist, hateful act, without any real consequences or conversation about it. There might be an argument that foreshadows a reveal at the end of "Bioshock Infinite,"but it seems more likely that this resulted from a need to have a choice in the narrative-driven game.

Excerpt from:
The Bioshock Infinite Scene That Aged Poorly - Looper

Once upon a time when Knoxville was still a two-newspaper town, the Knoxville Journal sent me to Nashville to cover state government. I was expected to produce a couple of stories a day but wasnt given much guidance as to how to proceed. I arrived at the Legislative Plaza lost in the high weeds.

Then I ran into Carl Koella, whom Id met during the previous summer campaign season. I didnt love his politics, but found him smart, engaging and an endless source of interesting yarns. We had a cup of coffee and the next day I reported that he was fixing to introduce a bill to buy a desert island and turn it into a maximum-security prison for career offenders. This was, of course, preposterous, but I was pretty excited to get the scoop until I learned that every rookie reporter whod come to Nashville for the last decade had written about this bill of Koellas, which was more Fantasy Island than Devils Island.

Oh, well. I still liked Carl, who was considered the most right-wing member of the legislature. He was a Republican, but preferred to call himself a Libertarian, a label Id previously connected primarily to certain disciples of Ayn Rand Id known in college mostly born-on-third-base frat boys who considered her books about objectivism and enlightened self-interest affirmations of their own innate superiority. They bored me half to death, something I never said about the senator from Blount County.

My most enduring memory of Carl was an event I witnessed in his office late one Thursday after legislative business had ended. He hosted a weekly poker game in his inner sanctum at that time, and Id stopped by to ask him a question before I hit the road for Knoxville. The air was thick with cigar smoke and whiskey fumes. He came out to the reception room to talk to me, but our conversation was interrupted by a delegation of Blount County preachers bent on haranguing him about abortion. Their timing was as bad as their manners, and Carl wasted no time informing them that abortion was a matter between a woman and her maker not women and their lawmakers before he showed them the door.

That was a story I didnt write, much as I wanted to, and I remember walking down the long hall and thinking that maybe Libertarians werent just concerned with laissez-faire economics maybe they wanted the government to butt out of everybodys personal lives, too.

That was 30 years before I got to know my next Libertarian, a TV wrestling star who was running for county mayor. I was one of the few whod never heard of his alter ego, Kane, but Glenn Jacobs made a favorable impression on me. He was soft-spoken and much smarter than I expected a guy who wore a rubber mask and smashed people over the heads with folding chairs would be. I was further impressed that he visited local schools and talked to kids about being kind.

Whats not to like?

Well, I did have some misgivings when he bragged that hed been personally endorsed by U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, the highest-placed Libertarian in public office, then, as now.

Rand Paul and Glenn Jacobs

This was years before we anticipated a pandemic, which was when I came to know Paul as a sawed-off bully whod gone swimming in the Senate pool after hed tested positive for Covid. His lack of concern for the health of his colleagues was a whole new take on the virtue of selfishness. The PR photo of big old Jacobs and little bitty Paul is kind of a hoot, although I doubt it was intentionally funny.

The appropriation of the word liberty is another unfunny thing. Libertarians like Paul and Jacobs approve of it when it works to their benefit. They love the Second and 10thAmendments, but dont have any First Amendment willies when it comes to censorship or theocracy. Mask mandates during a pandemic are affronts to their pursuit of happiness; vaccinations a massive assault on their personal liberty. Teachers and front-line healthcare workers dont have any rights at all.

I am clearly in the minority here: Jacobs appears set to walk into a second term as county mayor on his way to a run at the governors office. More immediately, hes going to be donning mask, wig and tights and heading for Mississippi to throw down some choke slams, untroubled by the notion that we are all entitled to enjoy the blessings of liberty, regardless of gender or political bent.

In the interest of accuracy, perhaps theyd consider changing their movements name to something that evokes their leaders philosophy. Jacobites? Nah. Too Catholic. Jacobeans? Too anarchist and, well, French. Its hard to think of a label theyd consent to wear. Maybe we should just call them Authoritarians.

Betty Beanwrites a Thursday opinion column for KnoxTNToday.com.

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Give me liberty, but keep the Libertarians - Knox TN Today

Bill Maher says he's finding himself in a weird position these days ... a hero on the right and a villain on the left.

Maher, a libertarian who has been a reliable Democrat, skewered the Dems Friday night on "Real Time" for what he called "goofy s***," but he says it's not about embracing Republicans ... he says it's about teaching Democrats how to effectively fight them.

He seems amused members of George W. Bush's Administration -- which helped get him fired back in the day -- are now suggesting he run for President.

The message was laced with hilarity ... "I am still the same unmarried, childless, pot-smoking libertine I always was. Let's get this straight. It's not me who's changed, it's the left who is now made up of a small contingent who've gone mental and a large contingent who refuse to call them out for it, but I will."

And, then he did ... "People sometimes say to me, 'You know, you didn't use to make fun of the left as much.' Yeah, because they didn't give me so much to work with. The oath of office I took was to comedy. And if you do goofy s***, wherever you are in the spectrum, I'm going to make fun of you because that's where the gold is. And the fact that they are laughing at it should tell you something. It rings true."

Maher made his case by calling San Francisco "a shoplifter's paradise." He called out members of Congress who have advocated canceling rent and mortgages ... members who believe "capitalism is slavery."

Bill didn't mince words ..."It's not my fault that the party of FDR and JFK is turning into the party of LOL and WTF."

On the surface, it sounds like a Republican ad, but Bill's made it clear he thinks the Republican Party -- with its current configuration -- is a danger to the very existence of democracy. Buy it or not, he seems to be saying Dems need a course correction, or else.

See more here:
Bill Maher Amused the Right is Urging Him to Run for President - TMZ