Mary Margaret Olohan on November 11, 2020

• Many media pundits and Democrats have said they are making lists of President Donald Trump’s “sycophants” or supporters following the 2020 presidential election.
• “Any R now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite’ society,’” warned Washington Post writer Jennifer Rubin. “We have a list.”
• Journalist Glen Greenwald predicted before the election that rather than settle the nation’s divisiveness, a Biden presidency would spur the media to target Trump supporters, warning: “They’re going to continue to say, not maybe Trump, at least his movement, still pose this existential threat.”

Several media figures and Democrats have called for lists to be made of President Donald Trump’s “sycophants” or supporters following the presidential election, suggesting that these lists will be used in the future to hold the president’s supporters accountable.

“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future,” Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Cortez asked Friday, the day before media outlets called the presidential race for Biden. “I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.”

Ocasio-Cortez is not the only one asking for evidence of Trump supporter’s “complicity.” CNN’s Jake Tapper suggested that Trump and his followers should be careful of behaving in a way that might impact their future employment.

“I truly sympathize with those dealing with losing — it’s not easy — but at a certain point one has to think not only about what’s best for the nation (peaceful transfer of power) but how any future employers might see your character defined during adversity,” Tapper said.

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin also warned that Republicans “now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite’ society.”

Greenwald’s predictions may have been fulfilled in part. Days after Election Day, former Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan highlighted the start of a “Trump Accountability Project” intended to “make sure anyone who took a paycheck to help Trump undermine America is held responsible for what they did.”

Sevugan, who also served as national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee and as deputy campaign manager for former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, tweeted Friday that White House staff had begun looking for jobs, adding, “Employers considering them should know there are consequences for hiring anyone who helped Trump attack American values. Find out how at the Trump Accountability Project.”

“We must never forget those who furthered the Trump agenda,” the Trump Accountability Project website says. “We should welcome in our fellow Americans with whom we differ politically. But those who took a paycheck from the Trump Administration should not profit from their efforts to tear our democracy apart.”

The progressive Lincoln Project has repeatedly used it’s Twitter platform to target those affiliated with President Trump. On Tuesday, after multiple inquiries from the Daily Caller News Foundation, a Twitter spokesman told the DCNF that the Lincoln Project’s Twitter account would be locked until it deleted a tweet doxxing two Trump lawyers.

“Here are two attorneys attempting to help Trump overturn the will of the Pennsylvanian people,” the Lincoln Project tweeted with a picture of attorneys Carolyn McGee and Ronald Hicks. The tweet, which included the attorneys’ phone numbers and emails, added, “Make them famous,” with a skull and crossbones emoji.

Conservative figures on social media reacted strongly to the suggestion of making lists.

“While you’re a terrible person for doing this, Democrats putting Trump supporters and Republicans on lists is a great issue for us to campaign on in Georgia, so thanks,” NRSC Senior Advisor Matt Whitlock told Sevugan Friday in a tweet regarding the Trump Accountability Project. “Keep up the great work.”

“The list making at @CNN has begun,” warned radio host Chris Stigall in a Tuesday tweet above a screenshot of CNN. The photograph shows a long list of “GOP Senators Who Haven’t Congratulated Biden” above the caption, “Trump’s Defiance Fueled By Enablers Like Barr, McConnell, Fox.”

“To some insiders, the attacks have emboldened their campaign to find examples of ballot and voting fraud,” wrote the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard. “Still, it is true that for many inside the administration, finding a job will be difficult, no matter what. There are about 4,000 administration-related jobs, and those will go to Biden. While there are a few new Republican congressional members, it isn’t enough to absorb all those positions.”

The post ‘We Have A List’: Pundits And Democrats Plan To Hold Trump Supporters Accountable appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Jason Hopkins on May 11, 2020

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders all but shot down the possibility that he will run for president again, suggesting that another politician will take his place as the progressive choice.

Sanders spoke Monday about the 2020 presidential election and his support for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The self-described democratic socialist also appeared to put a cap on any future political ambitions.

“I think the likelihood is very, very slim at that. I think next time around, you’re going to see another candidate carrying the progressive banner,” Sanders said during a Washington Post Live event when directly asked if he wants to run for president again.

When the host pointed out that Sanders did not “fully close the door” on the idea, the lawmaker repeated that the chances are near zero.

“I think it’s very, very unlikely that I’ll ever be running for president ever again,” the 78-year-old said, and added that progressives need to focus on defeating President Donald Trump.

The comments came after Sanders ended his second run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Both times the progressive candidate was able to muster up enough support to win a cluster of states, making him a formidable challenger and a nuisance to Democratic Party establishment figures who feared about his electability were he to win the nomination and compete in a general election.

A U.S. senator from Vermont since 2007, Sanders first ran for the Democratic nomination in 2016. Despite entering the contest with far less name recognition than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sanders dropped out after winning 22 state contests, giving him more than 1,800 in pledged delegates and the former first lady a run for her money.

In the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Sanders began as the frontrunner — coming to a near draw in the Iowa caucus, and then outright winning the New Hampshire and Nevada contests. However, his campaign quickly fell after the Democratic Party coalesced around Biden.

Sanders has since endorsed Biden, and said he will actively work to help the former vice president defeat Trump in the November 2020 elections.

The post Bernie Sanders Says Chances Are ‘Very, Very Slim’ That He Runs For President Again appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Audrey Conklin on October 30, 2019

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned Facebook for not policing political ads in a Wednesday tweet.

The failed presidential candidate’s tweet came as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg faces backlash for defending the tech giant’s policy of not fact-checking political ads the same way it fact-checks other ads in an Oct. 17 interview with the Washington Post.

“Facebook’s decision to allow false information in political advertisements is appalling. Voters are being confronted by millions of pieces of misinformation. A world where up is down and down is up is a world where democracy can’t thrive,” Clinton tweeted.

Facebook came under fire for not policing inauthentic advertisements, posts, groups and pages before and after the 2016 presidential election, which some commentators and pundits argue resulted in President Donald Trump’s success.

“We should all care about how social media platforms play a part in our democratic process. Because unless it’s addressed it will happen again. The midterms are in 8 months. We owe it to our democracy to get this right, and fast,” Clinton tweeted in 2018.

Zuckerberg also faced heat from House Financial Service Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters for the policy during an Oct. 23 congressional hearing.

“Are you telling me … you plan on doing no fact-checking on political ads?” Waters asked the Facebook CEO.

“Our policy is that we do not fact-check politicians’ speech,” Zuckerberg said. “We believe that in a democracy, it is important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying.”

The post Hillary Clinton Condemns Facebook For Not Policing Political Ads appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Shelby Talcott 

A federal judge reversed his ruling Monday and announced that the family of Kentucky teenager Nick Sandmann can sue The Washington Post for libel over its coverage of the teenager.

Sandmann’s family sued WaPo in February, writing that the publication allegedly “target and bullied” the teenager after an incident involving a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial in January. Judge William Bertelsman rejected the suit in July, citing the First Amendment, but changed his mind Monday and agreed to allow three of the 33 published statements to move forward, WaPo reported.

Sandmann attended a school trip to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 18 with classmates from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, and some of them, including the teenager, wore “Make America Great Again” hats. As they were chanting school cheers, Nathan Phillips, a Native American advocate, came towards the teenagers while beating a drum, according to WaPo.

Phillips accused Sandmann of blocking him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and the teenager denied he did so intentionally.

Bertelsman first said all 33 statements in WaPo’s article that Sandmann’s family sued over were not defamatory. He did not explain his reconsideration after deciding that three of the statements in the lawsuit could go forward.

“Suffice to say that the Court has given this matter careful review and concludes that ‘justice requires’ that discovery be had regarding these statements and their context,” Bertelsman wrote Monday. “The Court will adhere to its previous rulings as they pertain to these statements except Statements 10, 11, and 33, to the extent that these three statements state that plaintiff ‘blocked’ Nathan Phillips and ‘would not allow him to retreat.”

The three statements from WaPo’s coverage involve references to Sandmann allegedly blocking Phillips, the Washington Times reported. The outlet issued a lengthy editor’s note March 1 after the Sandmann family filed a lawsuit.

The family first filed a legal complaint alleging that WaPo “ignored basic journalist standards because it wanted to advance its well-known and easily documented, biased agenda against President Donald J. Trump by impugning individuals perceived to be supporters of the President,” the outlet reported. WaPo denied this claim and has stood by its reporting of the incident.

Lawsuits were also filed against CNN and NBC over their coverage of the story. Both outlets have filed motions to dismiss the lawsuits.

“We look forward to engaging in full discovery to develop the factual record in this case, which we believe will ultimately lead to The Post being held accountable for its accusatory coverage of Nicholas Sandmann,” L. Lin Wood, the Sandmann’s attorney, said according to WaPo.

The Washington Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The post Judge Allows Nick Sandmann’s $250 Million Lawsuit Against WaPo To Move Forward appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Peter Hasson

The Washington Post passed on a thinly sourced, unproven allegation about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh before the New York Times published it in a misleading article in Sunday’s paper that has since been corrected.

Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly left out exculpatory evidence in an article that claimed Kavanaugh had his pants down at a “drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.” The sole source for the claim was Max Stier, an attorney in Washington, D.C.

Pogrebin and Kelly failed to inform readers in the original article that friends of the alleged victim said she has no recollection of the incident in question. That crucial fact was included in Pogrebin and Kelly’s new book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” which was the source of the material in their article.

The Times published a correction to the misleading article late Sunday night.

The Post previously declined to publish the thinly sourced accusation, the D.C. paper revealed in an article Sunday night.

The Post “last year confirmed that two intermediaries” had passed along Stier’s claim “to lawmakers and the FBI” but “did not publish a story in part because the intermediaries declined to identify the alleged witness [Stier] and because the woman who was said to be involved declined to comment,” the Post’s article said.

Neither the Times nor Pogrebin and Kelly have explained why the article omitted the fact that the alleged victim reportedly has no recollection of the incident. Pogrebin and Kelly didn’t return emails inquiring about the omission.

Conservatives were critical of the Times’ decision to publish the misleading article.

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway noted that Stier and Kavanaugh have a “long and contentious history,” stemming from Stier’s defense of former President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, while Kavanaugh served on Ken Starr’s team in the Whitewater investigation.

National Review’s John McCormack described the Times’ omission as one of the “worst cases of journalistic malpractice that I can recall.” The Times’ article was more of a “dud” than a “bombshell,” McCormack added in a column, noting that “the authors provide no indication there is any first-hand witness to corroborate the allegation.”

Follow Hasson on Twitter @PeterJHasson

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

[RELATED: The Self-Gaslighting of Partisan America]

The post Washington Post Passed On Thinly Sourced Kavanaugh Story Before NYT Published It appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

That’s the thesis of a recent article in the Washington Post, which claims that the 16th president and the socialist philosopher “were friendly and influenced each other.” According to an essay by Gillian Brockell, “Lincoln was regularly reading Karl Marx” and appears to have adapted a Marxist conceptualization of the labor-capital relationship to the discussion of slavery in his first annual message to Congress.

While Brockell stops short of ascribing socialist beliefs to Lincoln himself, she uses this purported historical kinship with Marx to secure a place for socialism within the mainstream of American politics. Modern “democratic socialists” such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, it follows, are merely successors to Lincoln’s own accommodating assessment of Marxist thought.

The Post’s article instantly found an audience on the academic left, with Princeton historian and Twitter warrior Kevin M. Kruse broadcasting his stamp of approval for its message to his followers. The result is a textbook example of modern-day pundits and activists attempting to enlist the past as an electioneering tool for their favored political causes in the present.

Brockell badly misreads her sources and reaches faulty conclusions about the relationship between the two historical contemporaries. Contrary to her assertion, there is no evidence that Lincoln ever read or absorbed Marx’s economic theories. In fact, it’s unlikely that Lincoln even knew who Karl Marx was, as distinct from the thousands of well-wishers who sent him congratulatory notes after his reelection.

To be clear, Lincoln did maintain a lifelong interest in economic theory — just not the Marxist variety. As Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon explained in an 1886 letter, Lincoln “more or less peeped into” several economic thinkers from his own library. These included the British classical economists John Stuart Mill and John Ramsay McCulloch as well as Americans Francis Wayland and Henry C. Carey. “Lincoln ate up,” Herndon explained, “digested and assimilated Wayland’s little work. Lincoln liked the book, except the free trade doctrines. Lincoln I think liked political economy — the study of it.”

These and similar authors may be found in the reconstructed contents of the “Great Emancipator’s” reading list, and offer an important counter to one of Brockell’s major claims about a posited Lincolnian connection to Marx.

Lincoln on Capital and Labor

The claim that Lincoln regularly read Marx, or picked up economic doctrines from Marxist writings, is entirely anachronistic. Marx did not publish the first volume of his treatise Capital until 1867, some two years after Lincoln was assassinated. His earlier writings on the relationship between capital and labor primarily appeared in obscure European outlets with little circulation in North America, and even the Communist Manifesto of 1848 went almost completely unnoticed in the English-speaking world until sometime after 1870.

It is theoretically possible that Lincoln encountered a slim amount of text written by Marx during his time as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune in the 1850s, and Brockell speculates as much without providing any direct attestation. But Marx’s articles for the newspaper consisted of brief news summaries about the Crimean War, continental European politics, and piles of dry filler material about annual crop yields and industry reports. Only a small minority of these works ventured into something resembling a cohesive Marxian economic theory, and the chances that Lincoln would have encountered them let alone recognized them as such is low. In the 1850s and 60s, Marx’s name remained sufficiently unknown in America that only a tiny number of contemporary newspapers even noticed or reprinted his contributions to the Tribune. Several of those that did openly mused about the possibility that the “Karl Marx” byline served as a pseudonym, presumably intended to expand the output of other writers under Horace Greeley’s employment.

In any case, Lincoln did not consult the Tribune for its dispatches on corn prices in Germany, or its second-hand accounts of the decimation of the Light Brigade. He studied the paper for its domestic political coverage, and its editorial line affirming the Whig and Republican economic doctrines of free soil, industrial encouragement, and trade protectionism.

Unable to produce any direct evidence that Lincoln ever read Marx, Brockell turns next to identifying hints of Marxist doctrine in Lincoln’s words. To this end she quotes a passage from Lincoln’s 1861 annual address to Congress in which he declares, “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.” In her rendering, this argument “sounds like something Karl Marx would write.” She therefore speculates that it demonstrates Lincoln’s familiarity with, and possible sympathy for, a central tenet of Marxist thought.

This reading entirely misconstrues the origin and purpose of Lincoln’s quoted passage. Lincoln’s digression on labor and capital in 1861 was actually a truncated excerpt from an earlier speech he gave in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, some two years prior. Lincoln’s major purpose in the Milwaukee address, in turn, was to rebut a pro-slavery speech by South Carolina Sen. James Henry Hammond from 1858. Hammond attempted to justify the plantation system with what he called the “mud-sill theory” — the notion that social ranks could be naturally divided between a bottom “mud-sill” class of laborers who performed menial but necessary tasks, namely slaves, and an upper class of cultured elites who drive the advance of “progress, civilization, and refinement.”

Lincoln countered this argument by presenting an economic case for a “free-labor” foil to Hammond’s class-based theorizing. According to this alternative formulation, the economic mobility of the free laborer undermines the southerners’ attempts to assign their slaves to a fixed and menial class. As Lincoln explained the free-labor doctrine, “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.”

The description Lincoln offers is a standard-fare articulation of the labor-capital relationship from classical economics. Consider for example Wayland’s similar observation from 1837 in which he explains how private property creates “a motive … for regular and voluntary labor, inasmuch as the individual knows that he, and not his indolent neighbor, will reap the fruit of his toil.” Through this process the free laborer “begins to create a regular supply of annual product. With increased skill, this annual product increases, and he begins to convert it into fixed capital.”

One may find an even more direct parallel in the opening chapter of Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), which begins by noting “the requisites of production are two: labour, and appropriate natural objects.” Capital, as Mill then defined it, consists of “a stock, previously accumulated, of the products of former labour.”

To return to Lincoln’s own formulation — namely the assertion that labor is prior to capital, and capital derives from labor — we find that he is simply paraphrasing what he likely read from Wayland and Mill. By borrowing upon the Milwaukee address in 1861, Lincoln intended only to present his earlier rebuttal of Hammond’s slave-based economic hierarchy before Congress, using the contrasting positions to frame the competing economic philosophies of the two belligerents in the now-raging Civil War. Marx is neither necessary for understanding Lincoln’s arguments, nor is a proprietary Marxian spin on Lincoln’s terminology  supported by the available evidence.

The rest of Lincoln’s passage, omitted from Brockell’s rendering, actually repudiates the state of conflict that Marx posited between the owners of capital and the proletarian class. “Capital,” Lincoln explained, “has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.” Indeed, the American president saw little value in such firm lines of division. They did not reflect the “mixed” state of economic reality, where “a considerable number of persons mingle their own labor with capital; that is, they labor with their own hands and also buy or hire others to labor for them.”

Lincoln’s economic vision appears to have offered little room for the hierarchies of class-conflict theory, whether that entailed a slave-owning aristocracy and a “mud-sill” of slave laborers, or the proletarian struggle of the Marxist system. This does not mean the 16th president adhered to laissez-faire doctrines of economic non-intervention. Rather, Lincoln identified himself firmly in the tradition of Henry Clay’s “American System” — an economic philosophy that attempted to merge industrialization with tariff protectionism and an active policy of national economic development through public infrastructure expenditures. Lincoln retrospectively explained how he came to adopt these positions when asked about them on the eve of his presidential campaign. “I was an old Henry Clay tariff whig,” he wrote in a letter to a distant relative from his wife’s side of the family in 1859. “I have not since changed my views.”

Here, Lincoln’s economic beliefs likely reflected the influence of Henry C. Carey, the aforementioned American economist who became the leading theorist of the protectionist school in his day. Lincoln had several direct and substantive interactions with Carey during his 1860 campaign and presidency.

Carey helped to draft the main economic plank of the Republican Party’s platform, played an important role in delivering the swing state of Pennsylvania to Lincoln’s column, and continued to advise the Lincoln White House on tariffs, public finance, and other economic matters throughout the Civil War. Marxian doctrine, by contrast, remained conspicuously absent from those discussions for the simple reason that Marx was a complete non-entity in Lincoln’s understanding of economics.

What Marx Thought of Lincoln

In a further attempt to bolster her case, Brockell follows a long literature of scholars on the left who enlist what appears to be a single tangential exchange of letters between Lincoln and Marx to demonstrate their alleged “friendship.” The evidence here is almost comically flimsy though. A closer inspection reveals that Lincoln was probably unaware of the Marx letter’s existence, and certainly knew nothing of its author because it arrived under a different person’s name.

In late 1864 Marx drafted a congratulatory resolution to Lincoln on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association to commemorate the president’s successful recent reelection campaign. Marx famously supported the Union side in the war, although there’s no evidence to show that his commentary on the subject meaningfully swayed even British opinion on the contest, let alone assisted the American war effort. Marx’s resolution, dripping in flowery and obsequious prose that employed an abundance of words to say very little, amounted to a bid for political attention by latching his organization to Lincoln’s fame. He arranged to have the note delivered by delegation to Charles Francis Adams, U.S. minister to Britain, and drafted detailed instructions that were intended to draw conspicuous attention to its ceremonial presentation before the American diplomat.

The letter was one of several thousand congratulatory notes that Lincoln received from abroad. Adams replied in January 1865 with a courtesy note thanking the organization for the congratulatory overture. The official reply was not even addressed to Marx, but to W. Randal Cremer – an antislavery campaigner and trade union organizer who later parted company with Marx over objections to the communist movement’s embrace of violent revolutionary means. There are no references to Marx’s resolution in any of Lincoln’s known papers, and it is not even certain that he ever saw the document. Even if he did, its transmission papers carried Cremer’s name rather than Marx, whose only connection to the document appeared within an affixed list of four dozen affiliated names beneath Cremer’s signature.

Adams’s response to Cremer was the 19th century’s equivalent of sending a form letter response to constituent mail. Marx nonetheless enlisted its receipt as propaganda for his organization to imply that the American president had looked with favor upon his cause, and republished the document widely in socialist and labor-aligned newsletters.

Despite Marx’s bids to obtain public recognition from Lincoln, substantial evidence found in his private papers reveals that he actually looked down upon the 16th president and even the Union war cause, save when each serviced his ideological objectives of fomenting a proletarian revolution. He explained this position in a brash and racial-slur-laden letter to his collaborator Friedrich Engels dated September 10, 1862:

The way in which the North is waging the war is none other than might be expected of a bourgeois republic, where humbug has reigned supreme for so long. The South, an oligarchy, is better suited to the purpose, especially an oligarchy where all productive labour devolves on the n—s and where the 4 million ‘white trash’ are flibustiers by calling. For all that, I’m prepared to bet my life on it that these fellows will come off worst, ‘Stonewall. Jackson’ notwithstanding. It is, of course, possible that some sort of revolution will occur beforehand in the North itself.

Engels for his own part mockingly answered that “the only apparent effect of Lincoln’s emancipation so far is that the North-West has voted Democrat for fear of being overrun by Negroes.”

The two men continued to view Lincoln with contempt for the remainder of the war even as they simultaneously hoped for a northern victory. While their public statement showered the American president with flatteries and declared him a friend of the working class, Marx and Engels’s private correspondence ridiculed him as a buffoonish bourgeois politician who stumbled his way into victory in spite of himself. In September 1864, anticipating the very same election that his organization would publicly herald to Adams, Marx spit forth only derision of Lincoln’s competence, coupled with a persistent hope that a worker’s revolution would somehow emerge out of the whole mess of the war:

Lincoln has at his disposal considerable means for achieving election. (Needless to say, the peace proposals made by him are mere humbug.) The election of an opposition candidate would probably lead to a genuine revolution. Nevertheless, there is no mistaking the fact that during the next 8 weeks, in the course of which the matter will be decided pro tem, much will depend on military eventualities. This is undoubtedly the most critical moment since the beginning of the war. Once this has been shifted, Old Lincoln can blunder on to his heart’s content.”

Not even death redeemed Lincoln in Marx’s private assessments. When news of Lincoln’s assassination reached London in May of 1865, Marx actually rejoiced at the elevation of Vice President Andrew Johnson into office, believing that the new president would be more sympathetic to proletarian interets and less likely to abide by democratic constraints on his exercise of executive power. Writing Engels, Marx announced that “Johnson is stern, inflexible, revengeful and as a former poor White has a deadly hatred of the oligarchy.” Unlike Lincoln, Johnson represented a true son of the working class. “He will make less fuss about these fellows, and, because of the treachery, he will find the temper of the North commensurate with his intentions.”

Engels concurred, replying that “Johnson will insist on confiscation of the great estates, which will make the pacification and reorganisation of the South rather more acute. Lincoln would scarcely have insisted on it.” Yet again, even the most basic political judgments of both men succumbed to their ideological quest for a worker’s revolution.

To Marx and Engels, Lincoln was little more than a hapless tool in their grand cause — an object of praise when doing so garnered them favorable press, but one that could be discarded when they sensed a better opportunity for a worker’s revolution by other means.

So Marx turned once again to using public flattery as a tactic for garnering favor and recognition from Lincoln’s successor. I won’t hold my breath though in waiting for the Washington Post article on how Andrew Johnson’s “friendship” with Karl Marx legitimizes democratic socialism in the modern political mainstream.

Phillip W. Magness

The post Was Lincoln Really Into Marx? appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Early reporting on the incident by the Post made it appear as if the MAGA hat wearing teens instigated and harassed Philips, mocking the man as he beat a drum and chanted a traditional Native American song. The mainstream media was quick to pile on the false narrative of the teens harassing a poor old man which lead to the defamation of Nick Sandmann and his classmates, as previously reported by the Libertarian Republic.

However, as more developments came out about the case, it became clear that Sandmann and his classmates were the victims of harassment and threats by the hate group the Black Israelites,and Philips was not as innocent as the media initially portrayed him.

The editor’s note from The Washington Post, which was posted on Friday, explained their decision to correct their previously published erroneous reporting.

“A Washington Post article first posted online on Jan. 19, reported on a Jan. 18 incident at the Lincoln Memorial. Subsequent reporting, a student’s statement and additional video allow for a more complete assessment of what occurred, either contradicting or failing to confirm accounts provided in that story — including that Native American activist Nathan Phillips was prevented by one student from moving on, that his group had been taunted by the students in the lead-up to the encounter, and that the students were trying to instigate a conflict. The high school student facing Phillips issued a statementcontradicting his account; the bishop in Covington, Ky., apologized for the statementcondemning the students; and an investigationconducted for the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School found the students’ accounts consistent with videos.Subsequent Post coverage, including video, reported these developments: “Viral standoff between a tribal elder and a high schooler is more complicated than it first seemed”; “Kentucky bishop apologizes to Covington Catholic students, says he expects their exoneration”; “Investigation finds no evidence of ‘racist or offensive statements’ in Mall incident.”

A Jan. 22 correction to the original story reads: “Earlier versions of this story incorrectly said that Native American activist Nathan Phillips fought in the Vietnam War. Phillips said he served in the U.S. Marines but was never deployed to Vietnam.
It is important to note, as previously reported, The Washington Post is being sued by one of the Covington students, Nicholas Sandmann, who was most prominently featured in the videos of the incident and whose reputation was significantly attacked in the aftermath.”

The post Washington Post Corrects Erroneous Reporting After Sandmann Sues appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

In what they claim is the “first of many lawsuits”, the lawyers of Covington High School Junior Nick Sandmann filed a hefty $250 million dollar lawsuit against The Washington Post on Tuesday.

“The Post rushed to lead the mainstream media to assassinate Nicholas’ character and bully him,” high-profile attorneys Lin Wood and Todd McMurty wrote in a summary of their lawsuit. The newspaper “[fanned] the flames of the social media mob into a mainstream media frenzy of false attacks and threats against Nicholas.”

Sandmann and his classmates became victims of false accusations of racism were leveled against them after a heavily edited video of the events that took place as the students were waiting for their bus after the 2019 March for Life went viral on social media. The video makes it appear as if Sandmann and his classmates were harassing Nathan Phillips, an elderly Native American who claims veteran status.

However, after further review of the entire video, it is clear that Phillips approached the Covington students, wading into the crowd chanting a Native American song and beating a drum inches from Sandmann’s face as members of the hate group, the Black Israelites, shouted derogatory racial slurs at the boys. The kids had been performing school cheers in an attempt to drown out the harassment and did not respond to adults’ insults and abuse in kind.

No video footage of the kids shouting “build the wall” exists despite reports from the media.

Below are both the full and edited video footage:

Adding to the video evidence that vindicated Sandmann and his peers, it then came to light that Phillips did not actually serve in Vietnam as he and multiple media outlets reported he did. He also has a violent criminal record, and attempted to lead protestors in disrupting Mass at the Basilica of National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception – where many pro-life events take place around the March for Life – just one day after he confronted Sandmann.

The lawsuit against the Washington Post says the newspaper engaged in “unlawful and bullying conduct at Nicholas.” The 115-pound 16-year-old, who was on his first-ever out-of-state field trip without his family, “suffered substantial reputational and emotional harm” as a result of the Post’s false reporting, his lawyers say. “The Post’s campaign to target Nicholas in furtherance of its political agenda was carried out by using its vast financial resources to enter the bully pulpit by publishing a series of false and defamatory print and online articles which effectively provided a worldwide megaphone to Phillips and other anti-Trump individuals and entities to smear a young boy who was in its view an acceptable casualty in their war against the President.”

“Unlike the Post’s abuse of the profession of journalism, Plaintiffs do not bring this lawsuit to use the judicial system to further a political agenda,” the lawyers maintain. “This lawsuit is brought against the Post to seek legal redress for its negligent, reckless, and malicious attacks on Nicholas which caused permanent damage to his life and reputation…The Post bullied an innocent child with an absolute disregard for the pain and destruction its attacks would cause to his life.”

The incident resulted in the students receiving death threats, in addition to their school being shut down for a day and then guarded by a heavy police presence when it reopened.

Sandmann’s lawyers, Wood and McMurty, laid out their evidence that the Post, in a series of seven articles, published defamatory and false information about Sandmann, concluding, “As the natural and foreseeable consequence of its actions, the Post knew and intended that its False and Defamatory Accusations would be republished by others, including media outlets and others on social media.”
The attorneys say the newspaper published its pieces smearing Sandmann “negligently and with actual malice.”
“Here is the Complaint filed today against The Washington Post on behalf of Nick Sandmann. All members of the mainstream & social media mob of bullies who recklessly & viciously attacked Nick would be well-served to read it carefully,” Wood tweeted on Tuesday.

The post Still Smirking: Nick Sandmann Sues WaPo for $250 Million appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Dionne suggests that the objective of Socialists is to “save capitalism”, and  that without the all-powerful hand of big government, the market would inevitably die. While there are indeed many problems in America’s economy, the fault does not lie with capitalism. One cannot blame capitalism because America does not have a true free-market system, and really hasn’t for at least as long as the lifetime of anyone currently reading this article. The truth is that America’s economy today is, in reality, more crony-capitalist than sincere capitalism.

Crony-capitalism at its core is really fascism. Fascism is a form of socialism in which the government and their corporate buddies get in bed together to rig the economy in their favor. While socialists might accurately diagnose a problem in  the American economy, their remedy is more control of the economy. That would be the economic equivalent of going to the doctor if an individual had cancer, and the doctor saying the problem isn’t the cancer inside you, but the way it grows. What we need to “cure” you is to control the spread of cancer not stop it.

As Ron Paul points out, the solution to cronyism is not more government, but less.

Free markets don’t need to be regulated by government because, in a truly free-market, competition between companies for a customer’s business serves as a natural regulatory force. Government picking winners and losers is neither free nor fair as socialists claim.

Dionne praised Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal as “sweeping and adventurous”, but the price of this adventure has quite a hefty price tag as it seeks to ban 99% of the cars on the road, ban, all air travel, and the use of oil, natural gas and nuclear power entirely as Glenn Beck recently pointed out.

Dionne also asserts that when 18 to 29 year olds think of socialism, they don’t think of places like the Soviet Union, but instead of places like Denmark and Sweden. The only problem is that the socialist paradise of Denmark isn’t socialist. Which begs the question – what exactly makes a nation a socialist nation? 

According to Merriam- Webster’s Dictionary, socialism is “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” In short, that means in order to be a socialist nation, the government must own and control the means of production. 

The economic disaster created by the New Deal is an example of the failure of government meddling in the economy, and should serve as an example of why America should favor a hands-off approach to economics, and celebrate every time a regulation is repealed.

Mr. Dionne is quite wrong about who will fail in the end. When it comes to socialism, history has proven over and over again that wherever it is tried, socialism will always fail – from the Soviet Union to Venezuela. Rudyard Kipling points this out in my favorite poem, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”, which he wrote after seeing the terror and destruction of the Fabian Socialists at the end of World War I. Kipling concludes:

“As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. 
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, 
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, 
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, 
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”

The post WAPO Says Trump’s “War on Socialism Will Fail,” While Asking For Money appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Evie Fordham on January 9, 2019

Vice President Mike Pence denied Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s characterization of Wednesday’s shutdown talks as a “temper tantrum” and said the president even passed out candy.

“For those interested — the candy that [Donald Trump] offered at the start of the congressional leadership meeting included Butterfingers, M&Ms, Baby Ruth,” Washington Post reporter Seung Min Kim wrote on Twitter Wednesday.

But Trump’s attempt to sweeten the deal was to no avail to Schumer and the Democrats.

“Unfortunately, the president just got up and walked out,” Schumer said according to CNN. “He asked Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi, ‘Will you agree to my wall?’ She said, ‘No.’ And he just got up and said, ‘Then we have nothing to discuss,’ and he just walked out. Again, we saw a temper tantrum because he couldn’t get his way, and he just walked out of the meeting.”

Pence disagreed with Schumer’s statement while talking to reporters.

“Well, the president walked into the room and passed out candy. It was true,” Pence said according to Fox News Insider. “I don’t recall him ever raising his voice or slamming his hand.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said the same thing.

“The way to come out to this floor and talk about a meeting in a manner that did not take place in there is disturbing to me,” he said according to Fox News Insider. “People are hurting. So I tell the Democrats, get back into the room. Let’s not leave, let’s solve this problem. Just as the president said, it doesn’t even take 45 minutes.”

Trump said that he left the meeting because it was a “total waste of time” in a tweet Wednesday.

“Just left a meeting with Chuck and Nancy, a total waste of time,” he wrote. “I asked what is going to happen in 30 days if I quickly open things up, are you going to approve Border Security which includes a Wall or Steel Barrier? Nancy said, NO. I said bye-bye, nothing else works!”

The aborted talks came a day after Trump’s Tuesday evening national address in the lead-up to his planned visit to the southern U.S. border Thursday.

The partial government shutdown is now the second-longest in U.S. history. Trump has indicated it could last for months or even a year as he asks for $5.7 billion in funding for a southern border wall.

Follow Evie on Twitter @eviefordham.

Send tips to evie@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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