War: The Islamic State and Western Politicians Against the Rest of Us

Icon for censorship
Icon for censorship (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On July 28, London’s Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, aka “the Old Bailey,” announced the conviction of Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary on charges of “inviting support for a proscribed organization” (the Islamic State). He’ll be sentenced, likely to a long stint in prison, in September.

On August 18, social networking service Twitter announced that it has suspended 360,000 user accounts since mid-2015 — 235,000 of them just since February — for “promoting extremism.” While Twitter is theoretically a private sector entity, the New York Times reports that the company’s actions are motivated by “intensifying pressure on Twitter and other technology companies from the White House, presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton and government agencies.”

The United Kingdom is back in the business of holding political prisoners on a scale not seen since before the 1997 ceasefire in occupied … er, “Northern” … Ireland, and American social networks are handing the US government de facto power to censor Internet communications. What could possibly go wrong?

It’s easy to look the other way and whistle when the roundups target people like Choudary and the censorship is aimed at a particular variety of “extremism” enjoying little support in the UK or the US apart from small groups within insular communities.

First they came for the Islamists …

It’s easy not to notice that the terrorists who “hate us for our freedoms” chalk up a win each time those freedoms are diminished, openly or surreptitiously, in the name of fighting terrorism.

It became necessary to destroy the Constitution in order to save it …

We are told the west is at war. That much is true. But the central front in that war isn’t Iraq or Syria or Libya, nor is the enemy the Islamic State. “Daesh” is a gnat in a hurricane, empowered solely by western forces toppling secular regimes and creating power vacuums in which it can set up shop.

The real central front is the west itself and the real enemy is the western governments transforming themselves into totalitarian regimes before our eyes.

Every time an Anjem Choudary is imprisoned, or a Twitter account is shut down for “extremism,” or a beachfront town in France bans “burkinis,” the west looks less like the cradle of the Enlightenment and more like the Soviet Union circa 1937 or Germany circa 1939.

The best weapon against bad ideas is better ideas, not censorship and political imprisonment. Don’t let London or Washington wrest that weapon from us.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Scott Adams, Trump Card

English: This photo depicts Donald Trump's sta...
Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I agree with Scott Adams, who’s probably perpetually peeved that most people know him only as the creator of Dilbert — his accomplishments range far beyond that — on one thing: Donald Trump will win the 2016 presidential election in a landslide.

Adams predicted that outcome more than a year ago, at a time when I was still having a good laugh over the silly idea of Trump getting within a thousand miles of the Republican nomination. My friend Thane Eichenauer kept urging me to pay more attention to what Adams had to say, but I kept ignoring both of them until, oh, right about now.

Scott Adams’s General Theory of the Inevitability of Trump differs substantially from my own simplistic hypothesis, so much so that the former deserves a grandiose title and the latter doesn’t. Adams believes that  Trump has masterfully scripted himself into the lead role in a presidential campaign produced as a three-act movie. I just think that Americans despise Hillary Clinton even more than they loathe Donald Trump.

But hey, why can’t it be both?

Here’s what pulls me, kicking and screaming, toward Adams’s way of thinking about the race:

In 1997, according to Wikipedia (which references a San Jose, California Mercury News piece accessible only via Archive.org’s Wayback Machine and consisting of video files that either aren’t there or that my computer doesn’t like), Adams conducted an unusual and telling experiment at the invitation of Logitech CEO Pierluigi Zappacosta.

Disguised as rock star management consultant “Ray Mebert,” Adams expertly guided an eager group of Logitech managers through the process of revising their group’s mission statement into something “so impossibly complicated that it has no real content whatsoever.”

That sounds remarkably like what Donald Trump has done to the Republican Party over the course of the last year or so, doesn’t it? I mean, c’mon … building a wall and making Mexico pay for it? Someone’s obviously been tapping directly into the mind of Dilbert‘s megalomaniac companion, Dogbert.

I have to wonder if, somewhere deep down in the Trump campaign’s FEC reports, an inquiring mind might find multiple records of disbursements to one Ray Mebert for campaign consulting? OK, no, I don’t really wonder about that. I checked. Adams must have picked a different pseudonym for this particular escapade. I bet he still has the wig and fake mustache from his Logitech outing, though.

Well played, Mr. Adams, well played.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Clinton: Unhinged?

Hillary Clinton in Concord, New Hampshire
Hillary Clinton in Concord, New Hampshire (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Following multiple damning email leaks and disclosures, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign decided, in the weirdest attempt at damage control I’ve ever seen, to  invoke the late Allen Ginsberg’s “America”:

“America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.”

Forget the content of the leaks. Just focus on their alleged (not proven, alleged) source. IT’S THEM RUSSIANS!

Never mind that one of the leaks uncovered the Democratic National Committee’s secret program to deliver its party’s presidential nomination to Clinton at all costs. Did I mention that Donald Trump MIGHT BE WORKING WITH THEM RUSSIANS?

Never mind that another disclosure gave the public a glimpse of Clinton’s corrupt “pay to play” scheme,  in which high-dollar donors to the Clinton Foundation got special goodies from the Clinton State Department. Who cares? The Ukrainian government (installed in a 2014 coup funded by the US and orchestrated by Clinton’s protege,  Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland) just happened to conveniently “discover” “evidence” linking Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to THEM RUSSIANS!

Servergate? Never mind FBI director James Comey’s announcement and testimony revealing that she’s at least recklessly negligent  and almost certainly a felon who only avoided prosecution because her name is Hillary Clinton. LOOOOOOOK! THEM RUSSIANS!

It’s all so maladroit and ham-handed that it would be laughable if not for the stakes:

Clinton’s strategy for distracting attention from her corruption and incompetence, so that she can win the White House, is an all-out attempt to re-start the Cold War (at the risk of one or more very hot wars) and resurrect Joe McCarthy between now and November. And it just might work.

No, I can’t bring myself to support Donald Trump. But it’s getting harder and harder to peg him as the distinctively harebrained, irresponsible, unhinged one in the race. Clinton is still a game down to Trump in the World Series of Crazy, but it looks like the series will go all the way to seven.

It’s been noted over and over, by pretty much everyone, that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the two most roundly despised presidential candidates since polling became a thing. How either one of them got within spitting distance of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a mystery for the ages. And one of them almost certainly moving in come January sounds like an establishing shot for next summer’s top-grossing horror film.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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