Category: reason

I will be appearing tonight on the Fox News current events/humor program Red Eye w/ Tom Shillue at 3 a.m., along with former Reagan foreign policy hand K.T. McFarland, libertarian comedian Dave Smith, and Democratic political consultant Julie Roginsky. The main topic, unsurprisingly, will be the Orlando shooting, with Shillue promising to come out of the gate with some “new rules” for dealing with Muslim bad guys who say and do bad things without quite committing crimes. I will provide some disloyal opposition. 

The last time I appeared on Red Eye can be seen here:

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump says that in the wake of the Orlando shooting, America “cannot afford to talk around the issue” of radical Islamist terrorism, re-iterating his call for a “temporary ban” on Muslim immigration, which he first proposed in December, and saying political correctness over the issue was crippling the country.

“I called for a ban after San Bernardino, and was met with great scorn and anger but now, many are saying I was right to do so, and although the pause is temporary, we must find out what is going on,” Trump said in a speech in New Hampshire, according to his prepared remarks. “The ban will be lifted when we as a nation are in a position to properly and perfectly screen those people coming into our country.”

While his official campaign website does not list the ban under any of his policy pages yet, and Trump has previously insisted the ban was “just a suggestion,” today he appeared to lay out a proposal. He said that if elected he would “suspend immigration from areas of the world when there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies until we understand how to end these threats,” pointing to U.S. immigration law, which grants the president that power.

Trump said he wanted a “full, impartial” security assessment of the immigration process, after which, he said, his putative administration would “develop a responsible immigration policy that serves the interests and values of America.”

“With fifty people dead, and dozens more wounded, we cannot afford to talk around the issue anymore,” Trump said. “We have to address it head on.”

Trump noted that while the Orlando shooter was a U.S.-born citizen, his family emigrated from Afghanistan to the U.S. (in the 1980s). “The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here,” Trump said. “That is a fact, and it’s a fact we need to talk about.”

Trump said radical Islamist terrorism wasn’t “just a national security issue” but also a “quality of life issue.”

“If we want to protect the quality of life for all Americans—women and children, gay and straight, Jews and Christians and all people—then we need to tell the truth about Radical Islam,” Trump said, saying “Radical Islam” was also “coming to our shores.” The FBI has not uncovered direct contacts between the Orlando shooter and operatives of the Islamic State (ISIS) abroad.

Trump noted previous terrorist attacks, pointing out that the 9/11 hijackers came in on visas and, wrongly, claiming the Boston marathon bombers came in through political asylum. Instead the family came in on a tourist visa, which has less stringent requirements, and then applied for political asylum once here. He also mentioned the status of the San Bernardino shooter as the child of Pakistani immigrants, and that his wife, who also participated in the attack, came from Saudi Arabia on a visa.

He noted a Pew Research poll that found 99 percent of Afghans support sharia law, or law based on the Koran, as the official law of their country. “We admit many more from other countries in the region who share these same oppressive views,” he insisted. “If we want to remain a free and open society, then we have to control our borders.”

Trump then took credit for Hillary Clinton using the term “radical Islamism.” Clinton said in an interview she would use the term instead of “radical jihad,” which she said was the same. “Trump, as usual, is obsessed with name calling,” she said.

Trump characterized Clinton’s “solution” to terrorism as banning guns. “They tried that in France, which has among the toughest gun laws in the world, and 130 were brutally murdered by Islamic terrorists in cold blood,” he pointed out. “Her plan is to disarm law-abiding Americans, abolishing the 2nd amendment, and leaving only the bad guys and terrorists with guns. She wants to take away Americans’ guns, then admit the very people who want to slaughter us.”

Much like Trump’s manipulation of language, Clinton has not explicitly said she wants to overturn the Second Amendment but has signaled that she will pursue the kind of anti-gun measures that might not pass constitutional muster unless the amendment was repealed.

Trump insisted as president he would give the intelligence community, law enforcement, and the military “the tools they need to prevent terrorist attacks,” including an intelligence-gathering system second to none” in which there would be increased cooperation among officials from different branches of government.

After retreading his rhetoric on immigration, he returned to the domestic war on terror. “I want us all to work together, including in partnership with our Muslim communities,” Trump said, bringing up Muslims as Americans for the first time in the speech. “But Muslim communities must cooperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad—and they do know where they are.”

This “idea,” such as it is, has been tried before. In New York City, Trump’s hometown, police ran a massive surveillance operation targeting the Muslim communities in that city and in neighboring regions. That initially secret program did not yield a single lead before it was closed in 2014.

Trump also linked the Orlando shooting and radical Islamist terrorism to U.S. foreign policy. “America must do more, much more, to protect its citizens, especially people who are potential victims of crimes based on their backgrounds or sexual orientations,” Trump said. “It also means we must change our foreign policy.”

Trump rightly pointed out that the intervention in Libya, which Clinton proudly supported, and the decision to help overthrow the regime (U.S. air support helped Libyan rebels capture Col. Qaddafi, Libya’s leader, who they then killed and over whose death Clinton gloated), as well as the U.S. push to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, “created space for ISIS to expand and grow.” While Trump criticized the Iraq war partially during the primary, he did not note its role in helping create ISIS in the first place. Trump also offered that the Iran nuclear deal, which he called “disastrous,” was making it harder for the U.S. to work “in partnership with our Muslim allies in the region.”

“That is why our new goal must be to defeat Islamic terrorism, not nation-building,” Trump said. He also took credit for NATO announcing a new counter-terrorism initiative in recent weeks. Trump launched a critique of NATO in March centered on its ineffectiveness and its cost to the U.S. “The last major NATO mission was Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya,” Trump said. “That mission helped unleash ISIS on a new continent.”

Claiming that the Iran deal jeopardized partnerships with regional Muslim allies, however, did not stop Trump from mocking Clinton for suggesting the U.S. call on Saudi Arabia, the largest Muslim “ally” in the region, to stop funding hate. Trump said he was calling on Clinton to return $25 million in donations the Clinton Foundation received from the Saudi government, which is on course to break its record for number of beheadings this year. Prosecutors in Saudi Arabia are also reportedly pushing for the use of the death penalty for homosexuality, which is illegal in the kingdom, because social media was turning people gay.

Given his (unsurprisingly) contradictory statements on Saudi Arabia (which is the Muslim ally most worried about the Iran deal), it’s unclear what, if anything, Trump envisions his war on terror in the Middle East to look like.

The Boston Globe, from Massachusetts where William Weld governed as a Republican in the 1990s, reports on a bunch of Weld pals and former GOP operatives planning to support his Libertarian campaign for the vice presidency (along with Gary Johnson as president).

The folks running this new “Socially Liberal and Fiscally Conservative” PAC (named after the favorite way that Johnson/Weld like to explain libertarianism) are from Weld’s own Boston lobbying firm. They plan to raise money for TV ads for the Libertarian Party campaign. Their founder is R.J. Lyman, the senior v-p from Weld’s old firm ML Strategies. Lyman used to work in Weld’s gubernatorial administration. They have not yet announced any specific money sources or goals.

Major advisers to the PAC include former John McCain general counsel Trevor Potter and Matt Sanderson, who has worked in the past for McCain, a Romney PAC in 2012, and as counsel to Rand Paul’s Republican presidential bid this season. (They also both helped Steven Colbert with his comedic SuperPAC in 2011.)

Weld, the Globe reports:

began working through his contact list last week, reaching out to potential donors and eyeing the hiring of fund-raising consultants. He said he enjoys the work, describing himself as “back in my briar patch.”

The Globe also highlighted a policy gap on taxes between top and bottom of the L.P. ticket:

Johnson believes in the “fair tax,” a national consumption tax that would replace federal income and payroll taxes. Weld, for his part, believes in the “flat tax” and called Johnson’s preference “an awfully regressive way to run a railroad.”

I reported on two previously announced SuperPACs intending to help Johnson/Weld, Matt Kibbe’s AlternativePAC and Ed Crane’s PurplePAC.

Tonight’s Kennedy (Fox Business Network at 8 p.m. ET, with a repeat at midnight) is a soberer-than-usual affair, with an appropriately serious look at policy responses to the Orlando Pulse massacre. I’m on there for three segments, along with Democratic political consultant Julie Roginsky and libertarian comedian Dave Smith, sorting through the competing statist responses by presidential front-runners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

I appeared on Kennedy’s show a week ago as well. A clip from that:

Tonight’s Kennedy (Fox Business Network at 8 p.m. ET, with a repeat at midnight) is a soberer-than-usual affair, with an appropriately serious look at policy responses to the Orlando Pulse massacre. I’m on there for three segments, along with Democratic political consultant Julie Roginsky and libertarian comedian Dave Smith, sorting through the competing statist responses by presidential front-runners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

I appeared on Kennedy’s show a week ago as well. A clip from that:

The Orlando Pulse nightclub mass murder understandably has inspired calls for legal solutions to prevent such things in the futre. It touches on the core reason people think we need government: to protect our lives from violence.

Omar Mateen’s evil assault, evidently motivated by some combination of dedication to radical Islam as represented by ISIS and an animus toward homosexuals, for which he used guns including a Sig Sauer MCX rifle condemned by many as an “assault rifle” unsuited for any legitimate civilian use, touches on three different areas where many Americans desire more legal pressure or attention: the presence of Islamic radicals in our nation, the “hate speech” thought to possibly motivate such violence, and the ability to obtain the weapon used. (It’s a grim trifecta that likely pushed some “the government must do something” button in nearly all non-libertarians.)

So how can people be so obtuse and/or heartless as to believe that people’s freedom of movement (for those who conflate the citizen Mateen with non-citizen Muslims who might like to come here) or freedom from surveillance or arbitrary detainment, or freedom to think and express hateful things, or freedom to peacefully own objects that exist in the world, should trump government’s ability to stop tragedies like Mateen’s shooting?

There are a few reasons. If you don’t have even a hint of a core belief that, for the most part and in most circumstances, people should be free to be, act, think, speak, and own what they want, as long as they are not or have not actually harmed someone’s life or justly owned property, you may find these reasons unconvincing. You might even consider such people not enthusiastic supporters of “doing something” with force of law in the face of nightmares like Orlando to be villains.

If you believe no benefits exist on the other side of questions of surveillance, censorship, or weapon ownership, then the fact that in most actual circumstances, certainly including this one, no amount of conceivably acceptable government action would have stopped this from happening is meaningless; all costs spent toward the goal of stopping murders, no matter how unlikely to accomplish anything, are then acceptable.

Should government keep a closer eye on people in America who seem to evince some sympathy for or connections to radical Islam? People who knew Mateen did feel they saw something, and they did say something. And the FBI investigated.

We have no reason to believe their investigation was incompetent in terms of not uncovering things that were uncoverable, unless we believe they should either be seers or be so suspicious of all Muslims that they should have initiated some sort of 24 hour tail on Mateen. They looked into him, discovered he had committed no crimes, and eventually took his name off a terror watch list. (And had they kept him on it, that too would have had no bearing on their ability to prevent him from committing this crime.) 

Are advocates of increased surveillance of suspected terrorist sympathizers imagining preventive detention of the suspicious as necessary and proper? Do they believe if cops listened in on every phone call and read every email in real time, that the plans to murder would be discussed out loud in plenty of time to swoop in and stop them?

The use of government manpower to investigate people who said the wrong things or had the wrong associates in the field of terror in the vastly overwhelming majority of cases are merely harassing people who have committed no crime and don’t realistically plan to do so. And even when such surveillance or investigations are not harassing the innocent, or not ginning up attempted crimes that would not have even happened without the FBI’s encouragement, the Mateen case shows that using such techniques to prevent future crime rather than investigate and punish past crime is not apt to accomplish much either.

Treating a huge sector of American society for reasons of ethnicity or religion or ideology or associates as inherently worthy of deep, extended investigatory attention from government has, understandably, a bad reputation in American history, even when the ideology under investigation is genuinely ugly. And as this week shows, such surveillance or investigations don’t hold much promise to actually accomplish much in the way of public safety for the costs to the dignity and privacy and right-to-be-left alone of those targeted.

For those who think that hateful attitudes or expression toward others (even when they fall short of violence) need to be extirpated or punished, well, that is certainly a more and more popular attitude in the West. I imagine it makes perfect sense to those who reacted to the last sentence of 1984 with anything other than a chill of horror, or those who have a hard time seeing any principle or value behind freedom of conscience or freedom of expression, those cores of Western liberty, other than “it is only good to say and think good things.” There are costs to giving power over conscience and expression to government, and they won’t only be used where you think they ought to be used.

As for guns, you may believe in the Second Amendment, sort of, or not believe in disarming all American in all circumstances but just think when it comes to certain kinds of guns you want to call “assault rifles” or certain size magazines that there’s no good reason to allow them to stay in circulation.

Almost universally, those kinds of guns or magazines of a certain size are not used to harm anyone. But they clearly can be, and those who want them gone can’t think of any good reason some one would want one, certainly not a reason good enough to justify even the slightest chance it can be used to harm someone. (It might be worth considering the specific types of weapons or magazines usually targeted by these “reasonable” gun control recommendations aren’t necessarily any more deadly than other kinds.)

One can even grant two suppositions—that the innocent should be robbed of the use of some existing tool because the evil may misuse it if you aren’t satisfied with their reasons for wanting it, or even that it would be a better world if no one had those kind of weapons and those sized magazines—and still doubt trying to pass and enforce such laws is worth it. 

America already has had a couple of wide-scale experiments, with alcohol and drugs, in banning or forbidding something that already exists here in America in vast profusion, and/or is relatively easy to smuggle in. Booze, drugs, guns, magazines, all things that in some cases can facilitate or further or help cause harm to others; and that in the vast majority of cases are used for private pleasure and fulfillment of a sort an outsider might scoff at but whose pursuit can be seen as core to liberty writ large: the ability to choose how to shape your life and leisure, as long as you are not actually harming someone else’s life or property.

So we already know here in America that there are enormous costs associated with such attempts to police the nation and find and confiscate and punish people over existing items that people want and that they almost never harm others with. Such costs especially in the harassment and punishment of the actually innocent (that is, those who might be violating the prohibition on owning or using the contraband, but would not ever have harmed someone else), costs which almost certainly will fall the hardest on our culture’s poorest and least respected, are huge and should not be taken on lightly.

You might think that murder is not a “light” reason and indeed it is not. But given the combination of other ways to kill (guns were not part of either the 9/11 or Boston marathon terror attacks), the existence of so many of those weapons and magazines already, and the vanishingly small number of cases in which their absence would have made murder impossible, the costs of a new war on a new form of contraband—one which police could make the case present such a danger to them that already overly violent policy practice would get even more violent thus conceivably leading to more deaths than that would-be contraband cause now—seem, to some Americans, worth more than any imagined benefit. (Unless the only benefit is the ritual of “doing something.”)

So, those are some reasons some people don’t instantly leap to the conclusion that something new must be done by government in the face of this horrible mass murder Orlando just suffered through.

To be fair, if you believe any amount of harassment or restrictions on the innocent’s ability to peacefully move through American life unmolested is meaningless in the face of a vanishingly small possibility that you might prevent a murder or murders from occurring, then those reasons will not be convincing to you.

But there might be cultural and historical reasons that those more libertarian-leaning attitudes can be found in your fellow Americans, as your “any price in terms of liberty is worth paying in pursuit of any possibility of safety” attitude is strongly at odds with the structure and philosophy of American government and life as it was constituted, at its best.

Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has not been shy in pointing out that his poll numbers surge after a terrorist attack either at home or abroad occurs. Trump declares that he will be tough on terrorism, but other than banning Muslims from immigrating to the U.S., he remains resolutely vague on what that might mean. 

In March, the stats wizards over at the New York Times‘ FiveThirtyEight blog noted that terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Brussels had apparently bolstered Trump’s polling numbers. And in May, Vanity Fair’s political correspondent Nick Bilton declared, “You can bet that if any significant national-security threat is posed between now and November, Trump’s poll numbers will soar in the same way that Bush’s did in 2001. And if that happens, God forbid, I’m willing to bet that he may be the next president of the United States.” Well, maybe.

Scholars, however, do generally agree that one of the chief purposes of terrorism is to attract the attention of a bigger audience to their grievances. A 2013 Journal of Peace Research study, “Voters versus Terrorists: Analyzing the Effect of Terrorst Event on Voter Turnout,” finds that terrorism does work, at least, with regard to boosting voter turnout. Broadly speaking, the researchers analyze 350 legislative elections in 51 democracies in years when there were terrorist attacks versus years in which there were no attacks. They use two different terrorism datasets; one that focuses on domestic events in Europe and another global one that collects information on both domestic and international attacks. Their analysis spans 1975 through 2004.

The researchers find that the occurrence of an attack or attacks is associated with a 2 percent increase in voter turnout when compared to an election in which there is no terrorist event in the preceding year. If the attacks were non-lethal, voter turnout rose by 1.4 percent, but if lethal, turnout increased by 2.9 percent. They conclude:

Terrorist attacks are threatening and novel political events that lead to anxiety in the electorate, which, in turn, induces individuals to examine the political environment more closely and to attribute greater salience to proximate political event. As a result of this increase in concern and the increased salience of upcoming elections, individuals are more likely to turn out to vote.

So if these social scientists are right, due to terrorist attacks more Americans will vote this year than would otherwise have done so. Still, at least according to FiveThirtyEight today, it remains to be seen how the Orlando atrocity will affect the election this fall.

It may be mystifying to conservatives and libertarians that a good chunk of angry response from the left over the Orlando shooting is directed toward conservatives, not just about gun control but over the way they’ve historically treated gays and lesbians.

It is most obviously true that even to the extent that Christian social conservatism has been hostile to acceptance of gays and lesbians, it has certainly not risen to the horrifying levels of Sunday’s attack by Omar Matteen, which he dedicated to the Islamic State. Certainly there have been radical Christians within the United States calling for violence against homosexuals. But their calls to arms have been ignored and are not institutionalized by authorities (with prison terms and even executions) as they frequently are in Muslim-dominated countries.

There has nevertheless been plenty of generalizations about the attitudes of Muslims toward homosexuality that has led some on the right to wonder why people are yelling at them over what happened on Saturday. I agree with conservatives that trying to deflect away from what actually happened to hobby-horse issues like gun control is an awful thing to do.

But a couple of Pew polls might help explain what’s going on here. It is true that there is a tremendous amount of hostility to gays and lesbians in countries where Islam is a dominant religion. A Pew poll from 2013 had the vast majority of Muslims in 36 countries overseas declaring that homosexuality is immoral. When I say “vast majority,” I mean numbers like 90 percent.

But a recent poll in 2015, also by Pew, shows that American Muslims are much less likely to share this attitude. By comparison, 45 percent of American Muslims approve of homosexuality, and 42 percent of Muslims support same-sex marriage recognition. In both cases, a greater number disapprove of acceptance than approve. But then, so do Evangelical Christians in numbers greater than American Muslims. Only 36 percent of Evangelical Christians approve of homosexuality and only 28 percent of Evangelical Christians support same-sex marriage recognition.

The good news is that support for acceptance of gays and lesbians in America has increased in all faiths between 2007 and 2014. And the point of this post is not necessarily to hold up social conservatives to criticism over an incident they had nothing to do with.

Rather, these numbers help demonstrate why exactly we cannot treat American Muslims as though they’re inherently suspicious and prone to jump into extremism and jihads. American Muslims are not necessarily more conservative than many of our country’s Christians. There are a whole host of different reasons for this (including the likelihood that Muslims immigrate to the United States in the first place to get away from extreme social conservatism within their own religion). Americans (including gay Americans) who interact regularly with Muslim citizens are probably less likely to see them as being profoundly different. Because they’re not—in the United States.

Add to this mix information that Mateen apparently declared allegiance to different Islamist groups who are opposed to ISIS, like Hezbollah. In the end, Mateen may be a vicious garden-variety psychopath that we’re treating exotically because he declared a connection to a terrorist group that hates the United States and has called for attacks against it. But in reality he may well be more reminiscent of serial killer Ted Bundy blaming his behavior on porn addiction.

The Islamic State is a violent, terrorist group (I realize that’s the mother of all “to be sure” caveats), but it’s important not to treat it like it’s a virus that people of Muslim faith can just catch. American Muslims don’t share the attitudes of the Islamic State, and so treating them with skepticism, generalizing about them, and also expecting some sort of collective responsibility that all Muslims must be held accountable for the policing those who share the faith, doesn’t seem any more helpful than more gun control regulations. It’s fear-based collectivist attitudes from the right and it reads like so many other historical fears about how various minorities will drag America down. Such generalizations feed a culture war (just like the gun control arguments) rather than examining the roots and potential solutions for the problem.

(Hat tip to former Reason editor Matt Feeney.)

• The latest info on the Orlando shooting: The police have detailed how the attack went down and their responses; more names of victims of the shooting have been released; a former co-worker of shooter Omar Mateen says the guy was a crazy nutjob; and President Barack Obama and the FBI say that, despite Mateen declaring allegiance to the Islamic State during the attack, there’s no clear evidence that ISIS actually directed his actions.
• Democrats are again going to try to use terrorist watch lists (which are bureaucratically controlled) to try to restrict individual gun rights on the basis of just suspicion rather than actual conviction of crimes, or even charges. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) seems to think due process is some sort of “loophole,” a nice reminder of how awful she is.
• Police are trying to figure out the deal with the guy who brought a bunch of weapons and ammo in his vehicle to Los Angeles’ weekend gay pride events, but it seems increasingly likely that he was not planning an attack as had been previously reported by police.
• The Supreme Court declined to hear a case from a group of American Samoans who want to be granted birthright citizenship for being born in a U.S. territory.
• The Supreme Court also ruled, 5-2, that Puerto Rico cannot restructure its debts to public utilities to help ease its financial crisis.
• Microsoft bought LinkedIn, the job-related social media site that you joined and still quite aren’t sure why, for $26 billion.

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The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a new report about worker performance that can be briefly summarized as: Everything is awesome (or was in 2013 at least, the most recent year for which there is complete data). 

The federal government’s in-house auditing body found that the rank-and-file of the federal workforce is almost uniformly good at their jobs according to employee evaluations, with 99 percent ranked as “fully successful” or better.

A similarly impressive 78 percent of higher-level workers were ranked as outstanding or fully successful.

The performance evaluation system used for most federal employees has five levels: unacceptable, minimally successful, fully successful, exceeds fully successful and outstanding. Less than 1 percent received the bottom to evaluations. Fully 74 percent received ratings in the top two levels, with 38.6 percent of employees rated “outstanding,” 35.1 percent got “exceeds fully successful,” and 25.5 percent were “fully successful.” 

“Apparently the federal bureaucrats grading one another think virtually everyone who works for the government is doing a fantastic job,” Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) said in a statement quoted in The Washington Post. “But given the dysfunction we’ve seen throughout the federal government over the last several years, that can’t possibly be true.”

With its trademark dryness, the GAO notes that when it comes to performance reviews, “a cultural shift might be needed among agencies and employees.”