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 THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 768, April 27, 2014 Get a rope.
Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise There once was a time—one of the darker moments in the history of Western Civilization—when a person caught with the wrong edition of the Book of Common Prayer, the one with a misplaced comma, or the disapproved semicolon, could be imprisoned, jailed, tortured, and executed. The thing to understand is that it didn't have anything to do with religious doctrine or anything else even remotely theological. It was simply one of many excuses that you could rely on to suppress your enemies. More recently, useful taboos have pivoted on different centers. The British science fiction series Blake's 7 was about a man—well, imagine that Captain Mal Reynolds of the Serenity had been falsely convicted of collecting child pornography. I often wonder how many politically inconvenient individuals have been discredited that way. But today, we have an even better way to railroad people who might be a threat to the establishment. The fun part is that you don't even need evidence to do it, just the ability to twist your opponent's words so they seem to mean the exact opposite of the way they were intended. It's called "race-baiting". After systematically slandering the "decadent" South and the "barbarous" West in this country for decades, anyone who lives in either of those regions can be accused of racism on the least excuse, by "cultured and civilized" Northeastern liberals in the mass media, and a disappointingly high percentage of the public will believe it, mountainous volumes of evidence to the contrary or not. Now, go ahead and call me a racist. I welcome it, I relish it. The last time I was accused of racism was by a third-rate Canadian magazine that took offense over what I wrote about the Oklahoma City bombing. For some reason, appearing in print only few hours after that atrocity was unseemly. But I had written in the white heat of fury, not only at the bombing itself, but at the way Bill Clinton and his slimy orcs were trying to exploit it against their political enemies, especially on the radio. I knew somebody had to set the tone in a way that would make such exploitation impossible, and if no one else was prepared to do it, I was. I bitch-slapped the magazine into silence simply by listing the viewpoint characters—the heroes and heroines—of all my novels at the time, something I'd never thought about before. Many, as you probably know, are female, and almost none of them are white. Detective Win Bear, for example, is a full-blooded Ute Indian. But I digress. Thus the kindly, generous, decent, and humane Dr. Ron Paul has been accused, despite the several hundred Hispanic and black babies he's brought into the world, many of them without charge, because of a handful of articles someone else wrote in a newsletter he published, articles that were not, in fact, racist at all (I know who wrote them, and I've read some of them myself), but simply told certain unpleasant truths. Which brings us to the point of this exercise. Unless you've been in suspended animation for the past week or so, you know the story of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher singled out by the federal Bureau of Land Management because their evil master, Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid wanted the land Bundy's family had been grazing cattle on for a century, for a crooked deal his son was doing with a Chinese corporation. While distant onlookers argued with one another over who had the right to do what and with which and to whom, the BLM, an illegal and extraconstitutional agency with no right to exist, arrived with armed thugs, including snipers in ghillie suits, on Mr. Bundy's doorstep, instead of following due process and simply requesting that the local sheriff present him with a subpoena so the matter could be settled properly. Mr. Bundy's cowboys, armed, as near as I could tell, with 19th century weapons (lever action rifles and single action revolvers), confronted government goons with M-16s and other goodies that are (illegally) forbidden to American citizens. But as time passed, the goons found themselves staring down the barrels of the unorganized (but well-regulated) militia, consisting, at least in part, of Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, America's last, best hope for freedom. At this point, the county sheriff, whose authority in the matter properly trumps everybody else's, finaly found his gonads in a drawer somewhere, and ordered the BLM out of his county. No one who was alive and conscious in 1993 during the Waco mess believes the situation is over. But they could be wrong, because, having failed to threaten Mr. Bundy off the land, and having lost an armed confronatation with the real people of this country, the badguys and bullies have done what badguys and bullies always do these days when they know that they have lost. They have ordered their obedient news floozies and gentlemen of the evening in the national media to accuse Mr. Bundy of having prayed from the wrong book of prayer—er, pardon me, of being a racist. This on the strength of certain observations he made at an ambush press conference, which were then edited by the networks and major newspapers to convey the exact opposite of what Mr. Bundy actually said. [ See Neale Osborn 's Weekly Gun Rant in this issue for the text of what he said—Editor ] I have heard the unedited version myself, and he had nothing to say about anybody of any color that was not gentle, kindly, and concerned for the unspeakable damage that the government has inflicted on its "clients". What chiefly roused the socialist rabble was his wondering publicly whether black people (he used the expression "Negro", which I, too, was brought up believing is a respectful alternative to the uglier epithet black people were called by) might have been better off under slavery than under the welfare state, which has obliterated their ambition and any reasonble hope they may have cherished for the future. I've driven past public housing and had the same thoughts myself. And so have you. Given what white liberal social engineering has done to blacks and their families over the past half century, the question of whether the welfare state is better or worse than slavery is perfectly legitimate. What's more, the first people I ever heard ask such a question were George Mason University economist, commentator, syndicated columnist, author, and academic, Walter E. Williams and Stanford Hoover Institute economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author, Thomas Sowell. Both of these distinguished thinkers are black. It's really no surprise to see who stands against Mr. Bundy, aside from thieving grifters like Harry Reid and his unspeakable offspring. Easterners and socialists (but I repeat myself) despise the West as "flyover country". They hate guns and cowboys and horses with working saddles, They hate any manifestation of individuality, let alone individualism. But it is disgusting to watch political cockroaches like Rand Paul cravenly distance themselves from what's right in this matter. When it appeared that Mr. Bundy had been exposed as a racist, what they most clearly experienced was relief that they would no longer be required to stand shoulder to shoulder with the old cowboy. The younger Paul has now sold the last infinitessimal wisp of his soul, as far as I'm concerned, and I will do everything I can to keep him from advancing politically. I feel sorry for his father. Even worse than these Republicanoids are those who call themselves libertarians, who didn't bother to find out and listen to what the man really said. One individual I know, and usually respect, referred to Mr. Bundy as a "welfare rancher". But as a Westerner myself, for more generations than I can count, let me assure my friend, who is a "dude" in the original meaning of the term, that to Mr. Bundy, the grass his cattle eat is like the air that he and they breathe. That is the way he was brought up, that is what he was promised by the government. He and his animals (and their ancestors) were there before the Bureau of Land Management, and with good fortune, they (and their descendents) will be there long after the thugs and goons and ghillie suits are gone. Let it therefore be resolved that (A), genuine racism is over and done with—it has been utterly defeated, and is now gone, (B) that whenever individuals are willfully misunderstood and nitpickingly accused of the imaginary thought-crime of racism, and forced to stitch a great big red R on the front of their clothing, then (C), once it has been demonstrated that the accused are in fact guilty, as Mr. Bundy clearly is, of no more than freely thinking his own thoughts and speaking his own mind, his accusers in the media will be forced to work and make all public appearances with a burlap bag over their heads. And we'll think of something else for the politicians involved. Get a rope.
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