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Month: August 2013

Making Greenwald’s point for him, by @DavidOAtkins

Making Greenwald’s point for him

by David Atkins

I’m admittedly less concerned about civil liberties issues than I am about broader economics and climate change, and my view of civil liberties issues tend to be tinged with the idea that there should be a system in place whereby exposure of government overreach can happen without legally endangering whistleblowers. I also take an extremely dim view of libertarianism.

But I want to reinforce a point that Digby made yesterday: Greenwald’s partner was detained on a terrorism statue. Terrorism.

If there’s one overarching theme to the post-Patriot Act civil libertarian argument, it’s that in the pants-wetting national reaction to the 9/11 attacks, the insane amount of authority the government has been given to secretly surveil and interfere with the lives of citizens is being used for far less defensible or frankly indefensible purposes. The potential for abuse of unlimited surveillance power is radically high, and the danger of a totalitarian society is quite strong when just about any abuse of power the government conducts is justified by “terrorism.”

I’ve had my issues with Greenwald. But I don’t care if you believe that Greenwald and Snowden are the embodiments of the Anti-Christ. I don’t care what documents Greenwald’s spouse was carrying, how classified they were, or whether you believe that Greenwald is a journalist. I don’t care.

When a government detains someone who is very clearly not a terrorist for nine hours without access to an attorney under a terrorism statute, that government has proven every point Greenwald wanted to make. The argument is over right there.

And every “progressive” with a beef against Greenwald who attempts to defend the UK’s actions does nothing more than prove Greenwald’s point. Governments that detain civil libertarian bloggers and journalists as terrorists deserve every heaping of scorn they get, as do those who defend them.

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One small step for civil liberties

One small step for civil liberties

by digby

If you are concerned about civil liberties, one of the ways you can do something about it is to elect members of congress who also care about civil liberties. It’s not always at the top of the agenda, but it is something that speaks to people’s values and principles and it’s important to know who will fight on these issues and who won’t. It may not solve the problem in a country that seems to be permanently organized around being on a war footing, but it is one step in the right direction:

Howie has some news on this:

Last night, Alan Grayson (D-FL) endorsed Carl Sciortino for Congress, the progressive in a tight 5-way primary to replace Ed Markey. He joins People for the American Way, Blue America and all the Massachusetts LGBT and progressive organizations who have already endorsed. Grayson went right to the domestic spying situation Congress in looking at now– although he didn’t mention that one of Carl’s opponents, Katherine Clark (yes, EMILY’s List again) has a shocking record as a state legislator in advancing a domestic spying agenda that has been denounced by the ACLU. 

Grayson:

Recently, the U.S. House of Representatives came very close to ending the National Security Agency’s unconstitutional and illegal surveillance of every American. An amendment to do just that fell a few votes short.

The “intelligence community” pulled out all the stops to defeat this amendment. Members of Congress were told that if we did not allow the military to collect enormous quantities of data on every single American citizen, the next “9/11” would be on our conscience. NSA General Keith Alexander held four hours of secret briefings on the Hill, just before the vote. Republicans Michele Bachmann and Tom Cotton treated the amendment as though it were the End of Days. Bush-era counterterrorism officials who failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks swore that domestic spying is necessary to prevent new 9/11 attacks. (In the world of counterterrorism, apparently, failure makes you an expert.) Even the White House, sadly, weighed in in favor of continued pervasive domestic surveillance.

Despite this, 111 Democrats– a majority of all the Democrats in the House– joined 94 Republicans and voted to end domestic spying. That’s 205 votes against the secret surveillance state. Among the votes against surveillance was Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the original author of the Patriot Act, and highly respected among right-wing Republicans on national security issues. Even some of the Members who voted wrong on this amendment clearly were with us in spirit, but they were cowed by the fear of being blamed for some hypothetical future terrorist attack.

This large number of House Members voting against the NSA was a stunning rebuke to the “intelligence community.” This was the first vote on this issue, but not the last. To win, we need just 11 more House Members with the courage to stand up for our rights.

And I know how we can get two more: by electing them. One can come from a district in Massachusetts, which was vacated when former Congressman Ed Markey was elected to the U.S. Senate. Another can come from a district in Pennsylvania that is being vacated because the current officeholder is running for Governor.

I know candidates in both districts who have a realistic shot at winning these seats. Both candidates strongly oppose unconstitutional domestic surveillance, and both have said they would have voted with me in favor of ending it. I have mentioned one already– Daylin Leach, from Pennsylvania. The other candidate is Carl Sciortino in Massachusetts, a state legislator who has opposed the expansion of state wiretapping authority.

And here’s Leach on domestic spying:

“The NSA policy that the Amash Amendment attempted to rein in is an outrageous shifting of the historic balance between liberty and security. It abandons not only the requirement of individualized suspicion, but of any suspicion at all. It allows the government just to collect, en masse, the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans. It allows the government to know who we call, when, and for how long we speak, every time we use the phone.”

And here’s Sciortino:

“I have opposed pointless wiretapping in Massachusetts, and I will fight against it in Congress. Protecting individual liberties is something progressives must stand up and fight for. Unwarranted spying on law-abiding Americans is a violation of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. I would have been proud to have voted in favor of reining in the NSA. Putting aside the fact that it is not even clear that this NSA policy is, in fact, making us safer, that broad justification is insufficient. The noble end does not justify ANY means. We as a people must be wary, not only of those who would make us less safe, but also those who would make us less free. We must defend our borders, and our liberties. And we must do so in an open, transparent and thoughtful way.”

If we help elect Leach and Sciortino, that’s two more votes to stop the NSA from spying on us. But more than that, if we can demonstrate to current Members of Congress that there is real support by voters and donors against this illegal surveillance, then we can win those Members over to our side. Right now, all too many of them get their campaign money from the Spying Industrial Complex (“SIC”). Let’s prove that there are both money and votes on our side of this important issue.

Please contribute to the Leach and Sciortino campaigns today. Let’s put more people in the People’s House who will stand up for our freedoms.

Now, these are True Blue Democrats.



Courage,



Rep. Alan Grayson

Blue America is backing both candidates– as well as Grayson, of course– and you can contribute to all three of them here.

One last thing: it’s like pulling teeth to get progressive incumbents to endorse and help raise money for progressive candidates, especially in primaries. The Blue Dogs and New Dems have no such problems and conservative Democrats routinely contribute and help find contributors for “their” candidates. I’ve been trying for years to get progressives to do likewise and it’s just virtually impossible. Even when they agree it’s a good idea, they almost never do it. There’s always some staffer in the way or some lame reason it can’t be done. The exception, of course, is Alan Grayson, who has been incredibly generous with his time and advise as well as with helping progressives like Daylin and Carl reach a strong grassroots audience. So… if you decide to contribute to Daylin and Carl today… don’t forget Alan!

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The people really are nuts, by @DavidOAtkins

These people really are nuts

by David Atkins

Meet the new Chair of the Oregon Republican Party:

Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry, has marketed himself for the last three decades as an expert on everything from nuclear fallout to AIDS to climate science in the pages of a monthly newsletter, Access to Energy, which he published from his compound in the small town of Cave Junction. A quick glance at his writings, which were publicized during his ill-fated challenges to DeFazio, suggest that whatever the failings of the previous party leadership—Democrats now hold all statewide elected offices and control both houses of the state Legislature—Robinson brings with him a new set of challenges entirely.

On nuclear waste: “All we need do with nuclear waste is dilute it to a low radiation level and sprinkle it over the ocean—or even over America after hormesis is better understood and verified with respect to more diseases.” And: “If we could use it to enhance our own drinking water here in Oregon, where background radiation is low, it would hormetically enhance our resistance to degenerative diseases. Alas, this would be against the law.”

On public schools: “Public education (tax-financed socialism) has become the most widespread and devastating form of child abuse and racism in the United States. Moreover, people who have been cut off at the knees by public education are so mentally handicapped that they cannot be responsible custodians of the energy technology base or other advanced accomplishments of our civilization.” (Robinson, a home-schooling activist, sells a DIY curriculum for $195.)

On AIDS: “There is a possibility that the entire ‘war’ on HIV and AIDS is in error. U.S. government AIDS programs are now receiving $6 billion per year and are based entirely upon the hypothesis that HIV virus causes AIDS. Yet, the articles referenced above and numerous additional publications by scientists who have become involved in this controversy state that: attempts to cause AIDS experimentally with HIV have completely failed; thousands of AIDS victims are HIV-free; and HIV shows none of the classical characteristics of a disease-producing organism. Moreover, AIDS is not a unique disease—it is an increased susceptibility to many ordinary diseases presumably as a result of depressed immune response. This depressed immunity can result from many other factors including those especially prevalent in the AIDS afflicted population—drug abuse and unhygienic exposure to very large numbers of different disease vectors. Moreover, large numbers of HIV carriers who are symptom-free are being treated by powerful life-threatening drugs that kill people in ways very similar to AIDS.”

(His conclusion on the AIDS epidemic: Homosexuality might be a natural consequence of the gay lifestyle, and the federal government had cooked the books “as an excuse for all sorts of social engineering, especially in the public schools.”)

On climate change: “[T]here is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

On diversity: The white-male imbalance at his alma mater, Cal Tech, Robinson argued, was due to the fact that “its applicants are weighted toward those who seek severe, difficult, total-immersion training in science—an experience few women and blacks desire.”

It’s not an illusion. They really are getting crazier. It’s getting worse.

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No rest for the weary forced-birthers

No rest for the weary forced-birthers


by digby

You have to admire their persistence:

Ohio foes of abortion rights Thursday resurrected what could become one of the strictest abortion laws in the nation, arguing that other recent gains in their movement do not go far enough.

Federal judges in North Dakota and Arkansas either have struck down or placed on hold similar measures, but Reps. Christina Hagan (R., Alliance) and Lynn Wachtmann (R., Napoleon) are forging ahead by introducing a revised version of the so-called Heartbeat Bill to ban an abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected. That could occur as early as six weeks after conception.

A similar measure divided abortion-rights opponents last session. It passed the House but failed in the Senate. “It’s going to be different this time…,” said Mark Harrington, executive director of Created Equal. “There’s no certainty in politics, but we’re never going to give up.”

Ms. Hagan, however, said she’s received no assurances that the Senate, also controlled by Republicans, will consider the bill this time. “There’s a little bit of hesitation,” she said.

Supporters, surrounded by 17 of the 19 Duggar children featured in the cable reality show 19 Kids and Counting, made it clear that part of their plan is to get a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. They hope the makeup of the bench has changed enough over the years to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion.

They. do. not. quit. They adopted this incremental strategy some time ago and when they lose one they just keep their heads down and plow forward. They do the same when they win:

“Here we go again,” said Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL-Pro-Choice Ohio. “It strikes me that — a month after the governor signed one of the most restrictive anti-choice bills in the country, and we’re looking at the Department of Health closing abortion-care centers, reducing funding for family planning providers, and mandating medical procedures that may or may not be necessary — that’s not enough for the backers of what I consider to be the ‘heartless bill.’

It will never be enough until abortion is banned. Actually, until all reproductive freedom is banned, so they’ll just keep going. They’re chipping away at it one little right at a time.

I cannot help but wonder what would happen if women were to do what so many people urge them to do: “just ignore” the anti-abortion forces and stop being so “hysterical” about all this. Because at this point it’s taking massive amounts of energy, time and money for women’s rights groups to fight this back in over half the states and the federal government. How long would it take for abortion to be available in just a few states on the coast?  And how long would it be before the anti-choice forces brought everything they have to bear on those states?  Meanwhile, in Washington the Supreme Court would be watching and it would soon become obvious that the tide had turned.

No, you can’t ignore these people.  They are zealots and they will not stop. They must be battled back at every turn.  And it’s exhausting.  Of course, that’s part of the plan too.

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Bombing and hoping

Bombing and hoping

by digby

And the hits just keep on coming:

A surge of U.S. drone missile strikes that has killed about 40 suspected militants in Yemen over the last three weeks may appear inconsistent with President Obama’s pledge in May to use drone aircraft to target and kill only individual terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to Americans.

White House officials say the targeting rules haven’t changed for the 10 recent drone strikes. But analysts and former U.S. officials say the current campaign, after the pace of attacks had slowed, shows that the standards are elastic.

They say the wave of attacks highlights Obama’s willingness to accelerate lethal operations in response to terrorist threats, even though intelligence on the latest plot was imprecise about the timing or location of apparent targets.

“The tendency had been ‘less is more’ in terms of these strikes, and I think we’ll go back to that,” said a former U.S. diplomat who served in Yemen, but who asked for anonymity because the drone strikes are classified. “But at the moment, when you have guys on the move and a plot in the works, there is a bias toward taking as many whacks at them as you can and seeing if you can’t knock them on their heels.”
[…]
“This looks a lot like they are bombing and hoping,” said Gregory Johnsen, author of “The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia.” “It’s not clear they know who they are hitting.”

U.S. officials dispute that, but refuse to discuss their targeting decisions. The latest drone strikes bring the total in Yemen so far this year to 22. That compares with 42 last year.

Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said the attacks are consistent with the language and principles that the president outlined in his May speech.

Obama presented “the legal rationale that underpins our operations and the constraints that guide them. Those remain in place,” she said.

“The president did not say that our need for direct action would necessarily be lessened in the future,” she said. “He made clear, however, that under his new policy guidance the use of drones is heavily constrained.”

In recent months, White House officials have promised to bring greater transparency to the use of armed drones outside war zones. So far, that hasn’t happened.

Hey, just keep up the bombing. They’re bound to hit some Mohammed Badguys in a few of them, amirite?

Here’s a must-read article on drones and why we should be questioning their use, by Mark Bowdon. It’s very thought-provoking. At the very least, it’s obvious that we should (and undoubtedly won’t) think through the ramifications of using this new weapon in this way. It’s not as simple as it sounds: new arms technologies aren’t always just a refined, more lethal version of what went before. Sometimes they represent a paradigm shift in the way wars are conducted and the way people think about other people. This could be one of them.

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Defining terrorism down

Defining terrorism down

by digby

So, this happened:

The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London’s Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last under an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours.

Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.

The authority under which they held him is for terrorism. So, apparently, in the eyes of the UK government, anyone who lives with a journalist who is writing stories that reveal embarrassing information about the government are subject to interrogation and the seizure of their electronic equipment under terrorism statutes. Good to know.

This is especially poignant considering all the hand-wringing and pearl clutching about the authoritarian impulses of some of our rivals:

I realize that Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden rub many of you the wrong way. But if you care about civil liberties then you should really work on getting over that and start looking at the big picture here. Rousting journalists’ family members under terrorism laws is a bad thing, even if they were returning home after visiting … another journalist. Surely, anyone can see why there might be a problem with that, right?

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QOTD: Corey Robin (and Paul Krugman)

QOTD: Corey Robin (and Paul Krugman)

by digby

I missed this post by The Shrill One or I would have linked to it in my earlier post about Joe Scarborough’s William F. Buckley worship. Krugman discusses this nice piece by Mike Konzcal about the holes in the libertarian critique and makes the important point that conservatives aren’t really libertarians. (Not that I’m defending libertarians, mind you …) He points out the obvious fact that social conservatism is anything but libertarian, while the history of conservatism is well — the history of white supremacy. And anyone who thinks those foundational conservative  organizing concepts are dead really needs to think again, particularly when you see how necessary they are to the cause:

All of this makes no sense if you think of liberalism versus conservatism as a simple argument about the size and role of the state. But it makes perfect sense if you follow Corey Robin, who sees it as being all about the protection of traditional hierarchy:

For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.

That’s basically it. All the mumbo jumbo about states’ rights and individual freedom and the rest is a conservative tactic, not a principle. It’s about holding on to power. In America that manifests itself as a tool for the wealthy and a cause for certain members of the white majority who are unable to accept a world in which they are not inherently privileged. That’s a suckers game for the working class, but the racialists and patriarchs, along with the women who love them (talk about fools) think their relative status translates to power when it really doesn’t.

Real libertarians do truly believe all that stuff about the power of the state and freedom’nliberty but they are few in number. Conservatives care about hierarchy and power which, when you think about it, should really make them the libertarians’ greater enemy. It always astonishes me that it doesn’t.

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Iconic image of Cairo

Iconic images of Cairo

by digby

Courtesy The Times of London:

A woman tries to stop a bulldozer from sweeping up a wounded man

Yesterday’s violence:

Seventy-nine people died and 549 were wounded on Saturday in political violence around the country, state news agency MENA said on Sunday, quoting the government. That pushed the death toll since Wednesday to 830, including 70 police and soldiers.

In this piece in The New Yorker, David Remnick surveys the scene and what he sees isn’t pretty. He also analyses America’s position in all this, and that’s not pretty either:

When White House advisers formulate a position that they believe is correct but which manages to repel everyone, they say that they have “hit the sweet spot.” In Egypt, they have struck it with regularity. Obama has succeeded in angering Egypt’s Islamists, its military, and what few liberals remain on the scene—this is the price we pay, above all, for decades of fealty to Hosni Mubarak. But the Administration also insists on the need to stay engaged, even with a military leadership as heedless and as brutal as Sisi’s. After all, it says, if the U.S. withholds its relatively modest contribution, Russia, among others, will surely rush in to make up the shortfall and gain the kind of foothold it has not had in Egypt since it was kicked out by Anwar Sadat, in the early nineteen-seventies.

The Administration prides itself on taking the long view in foreign policy, forgoing the morally satisfying gesture in pursuit of a cooler calculation of outcomes. Yet gestures and words matter, too. There comes a point when a thing demands its proper name. A coup is a coup. A despot is a despot. And a massacre is a massacre.

What a horror story. The only bright spot for me is that we don’t have the administration strutting around bragging about how these are just “birth pangs” from the freedom they’vre bringing into the world as the Bush administration did. Yeah, words do matter. So do images.

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Joe Scarborough skips the dirty parts

Joe Scarborough skips the dirty parts

by digby

Morning Joe explainswhy he’s a conservative:

I was asked online earlier today for the historical text that best describes conservatism as I understand it. My answer to that question comes from a text that has been taped to the wall of my office for 20 years now. It was written (of course) by William F. Buckley and it describes the kind of conservatism that shaped my thinking in Congress and still influences my thinking today.

In his 1959 classic “Up From Liberalism” Buckley wrote:

“I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not? It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy, and Liberals at bay. And the nation free.”

Well, that sounds just terrific. Freedom. What could be wrong with that? Except Buckley also had some other ideas about what was a “political truth arrived at yesterday at the voting booth” didn’t he?

A 1957 editorial written by Buckley, “Why the South Must Prevail” (National Review, 8/24/57), cited the “cultural superiority of white over Negro” in explaining why whites were “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where [they do] not predominate numerically.” Appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air in 1989 (rebroadcast 2/28/08), he stood by the passage. “Well, I think that’s absolutely correct,” Buckley told host Terry Gross when she read it back to him.

A 1960 National Review editorial supported South Africa’s white minority rule (4/23/60): “The whites are entitled, we believe, to preeminence in South Africa.” In a 1961 National Review column about colonialism—which the magazine once called “that brilliantly conceived structure” (William F. Buckley, John Judis)–Buckley explained that “black Africans” left alone “tend to revert to savagery.” The same year, in a speech to the group Young Americans for Freedom, Buckley called citizens of the Congo “semi-savages” (National Review, 9/9/61).
National Review editors condemned the 1963 bombing of a black Birmingham Church that killed four children, but because it “set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically,” the editors wondered “whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur—of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro” (Chicago Reader, 8/26/05).

Just months before the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, Buckley warned in his syndicated column (2/18/65) that “chaos” and “mobocratic rule” might follow if “the entire Negro population in the South were suddenly given the vote.” In his 1969 column “On Negro Inferiority” (4/8/69), Buckley heralded as “massive” and “apparently authoritative” academic racist Arthur Jensen’s findings that blacks are less intelligent than whites and Asians.
The ugliness of Buckley’s public advocacy was not restricted to race. McCarthy and His Enemies, published in 1954 and coauthored by Buckley with Brent Bozell Sr., called Sen. Joseph McCarthy “a prophet,” and described McCarthyism as “a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.”

Buckley’s disdain for what he called “liberals’ fetishistic commitment to democracy” (William F. Buckley, John Judis) was evident in his admiration for dictators, including Spain’s Francisco Franco and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. “General Franco is an authentic national hero,” wrote Buckley (National Review, 10/ 26/57), lauding the fascist for wresting Spain from its democracy and “the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists” in charge. Pinochet was defended (National Review, 11/23/98) for deposing the democratically elected Salvador Allende, “a president who was defiling the Chilean constitution and waving proudly the banner of his friend and idol, Fidel Castro.”

During the Cold War, Buckley advocated massive violence against disfavored nations. In 1965, four years after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he continued to call for an invasion of Cuba (National Review, 4/20/65). The same year, he called for a nuclear attack on China’s nuclear production facilities (Life, 9/17/65). In a 1968 syndicated column (2/22/68), he urged a nuclear attack on North Vietnam.

Through the years, the self-styled libertarian conservative backed policies calling for deep state intrusion into the private lives of citizens. In his 1965 campaign for mayor of New York City, he called for the relocation of ‘chronic welfare cases” to “rehabilitation centers” outside the city and for drug addicts to be quarantined (William F. Buckley, John Judis).

In a 1986 New York Times op-ed (3/18/86), Buckley urged that ‘everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.” In 2005 Buckley obliquely tried to rekindle interest in the policy in a column (National Review, 2/19/05):

Someone, 20 years ago, suggested a discreet tattoo the site of which would alert the prospective partner to the danger of proceeding as had been planned. But the author of the idea was treated as though he had been schooled in Buchenwald, and the idea was not widely considered, but maybe it is up now for reconsideration.

He famously “purged” the conservative movement of the Birchers, (and allegedly recanted some of his racist views — and I do mean allegedly) but it sure as hell took him awhile. There were a whole lot of people who didn’t need to “evolve” from the idea of authoritarian white supremacy in the 1960s, especially intellectuals. When men like that talk about “liberty”, it’s wise to watch your back if you don’t happen to be a member of their club.

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