The Case Against Socialism

by Rand Paul

  GQ quickly published an article condemning the Smollett “crime” that argued that “the racist, homophobic attack on Smollett is Far Right America’s endgame.” For comparison, consider that after I was attacked and suffered six broken ribs and a pleural effusion of my lung that led to two serious cases of pneumonia, GQ gleefully headlined its story on my assault with this: “Rand Paul Sounds Like the Worst Person to Have as a Neighbor.” Their bias is breathtaking.

  In an article for National Review titled “Hate-Crime Hoaxes Reflect America’s Sickness,” Andy Ngo wrote:

  Jussie Smollett’s hoax is symptomatic of America’s illness. Because of the mainstreaming of academia’s victimhood culture we are now in a place where we place more value on being a victim than on being heroic, charitable, or even kind. Victims or victim groups high on intersectionality points are supposed to be coveted, treated with child gloves, and believed unreservedly. Their “lived experience” gives them infinite wisdom. Those who urge caution are treated as bigots.11

  It wasn’t just the Jussie Smollett hoax. There was the vandalization of an Indiana church painted with homophobic slurs and pro-Trump language—which turned out to be the work of the church’s gay organist, who hoped to “mobilize a movement.” Or what about extensive coverage of the Muslim woman who falsely claimed that a group of Trump supporters attempted to tear off her hijab in an attack at a New York subway station? Or the Michigan woman who falsely claimed a white man “threatened to set her on fire if she did not remove her hijab”? All of these stories were breathlessly reported in the media as evidence of Trump supporters’ violence and viciousness. All were false. We are in an age of new propaganda, where the media’s power rivals that of the state.12

  Chapter 38

  Fake News and Propaganda on the Rise in America

  There is probably no more egregious example of the Internet’s mob vigilantism and the media’s stoking of those flames than the grossly inaccurate, in many cases deliberately false, reporting of the scene at the Lincoln Memorial between the teenagers from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, the Black Israelite hate group, and the Native American activist Nathan Phillips. By seizing on only a small clip of nearly one hundred minutes of video and ignoring all context, the media, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, reported that the boys were “mobbing and taunting” the Native Americans. The New York Times headline blared “Boys in MAGA Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March.” Twitter lit up with celebrities and pundits rushing to condemn the boys, trying to outdo one another with their righteousness, their indignation, and their outrage.

  It grew uglier and uglier. Mere words would not suffice; calls for violence ensued. Prominent actors, writers, and pundits of all stripes were screaming for the boys and their parents to be doxed, to be physically attacked, to be sexually molested. CNN legal analyst Bakari Sellers fantasized about the sixteen-year-old’s “punchable face,” as did the former CNN personality Reza Aslan. CNN pundit Ana Navarro called them “asswipes” and Saturday Night Live writer Sarah Beattie offered oral sex to anyone who “manages to punch the MAGA kid in the face.” These calls for violence were coming from highly privileged, highly paid, ostensibly well-educated adults in America’s media today. None were fired or even criticized by CNN or SNL for their embarrassingly lowbrow calls for violent attacks on teenagers.

  In the cesspool of social media our famous and respected journalists and actors called for violence against a sixteen-year-old kid for his “privilege,” and his “white smirking face.” I wonder who has more “privilege” in America today—these wealthy and influential actors and media personalities or a high school kid from a small town in Kentucky where the average family income is $42,000 a year?

  Soon more details came to light as people started posting the full video. My friend Congressman Thomas Massie refused to be cowed by the torch-and-pitchfork mob and immediately stood up for his constituents in a series of tweets and retweets of Robby Soave’s excellent article in Reason magazine. Anyone who watched the full video could see and hear the racist, homophobic, and filthy bile that had been spewed at both the boys and the Native Americans by the Black Israelites, a recognized hate group.

  The Black Israelites can be seen antagonizing the Native Americans during their ceremony, using a bullhorn to amplify their racist insults, calling them “drunkards in the casinos,” “savages,” and “Uncle Tomahawks.” They ridiculed their religious and cultural beliefs as “idol worship of buffalos and eagles.” When a Native American woman attempted to stop their abuse, the Black Israelites yelled back, “Where’s your husband? Let me speak to him.”

  The boys, who were waiting for their bus, were seen standing and watching the men from a distance, saying nothing. And then the Black Israelites, a group of grown men, started spewing their hatred at the boys, calling them “faggots, incest survivors, and dirty ass crackers.” They called a black Covington student the n-word and shouted that his classmates were going to eat his organs.

  The boys never responded in kind. When the Black Israelites yelled, “President Trump is a homosexual . . . It says on the back of the dollar bill that ‘In God We Trust,’ and you give faggots rights,” the boys started booing and a couple of them yelled back, “That’s racist, bro”; “That’s rude”; “We don’t judge you.” Indeed, the kids were remarkably composed in what was undoubtedly a confusing and embarrassing situation, especially for teenagers, as passersby heard them being attacked on a loudspeaker by this group of aggressive men. It’s not as if the kids had an option to leave the area, since the Lincoln Memorial was the meeting point for their bus.1

  The boys asked for permission to sing their school spirit cheers to drown out the hateful language being hurled at them while they waited for the bus. Anyone who has ever attended a sports game against a Catholic boys school knows that these kids have a series of loud, boisterous, funny cheers, usually led by one or two shirtless boys. These pep rally cheers are part of the spirit and culture of these schools, something my family and I enjoyed watching from our apartment balcony overlooking the Gonzaga College High School football field in Washington.

  The boys were already dancing, whooping, and hollering when Native American activist Nathan Phillips did not take the most convenient route to the top of the memorial, which he claimed was his objective, but suddenly veered left and walked right into the center of the boys’ group, beating his drum. Some of the boys were bewildered by his sudden appearance, and can be heard saying, “What is happening?” in the video. Other boys understandably assumed that Phillips was showing his support to them in their attempt to drown out the invective from the Black Israelites—after all, they had both been verbally attacked by the same vile group of men for the last hour.

  The point is, the kids were clearly dancing and whooping well before Phillips walked into their midst. They continued dancing and cheering to the beat of his drum as he entered their space and stopped to beat his drum within a few inches of the face of sixteen-year-old Nick Sandmann. It is worth noting that, in the video, Sandmann is standing on a higher step while Phillips beats the drum in his face, which is the only reason that they appear to be eye to eye. This boy, or “beast” as Phillips described him to the media, is a head shorter than Phillips.

  The fact is, the Covington boys did not approach Nathan Phillips and his fellow Native Americans at all, much less “mob, taunt, and surround” them as they were conducting a sacred ceremony. This lie was repeated over and over, even after many of Nathan Phillips’s statements were found to be utterly untrue or misleading, including his claims to be a “recon ranger” and a “Vietnam times veteran.” He falsely claimed to be a Vietnam veteran in a video posted to the Native Youth Alliance Facebook page in January of 2018.

  Once the larger story and video proof became undeniable, one would have expected more of a mea culpa from the media, but the “clarifications” were tepid at best. After falsely smearing minors with “Boys in MAGA Hats Mob Nat
ive American Elder at Indigenous Peoples March,” the New York Times put forth the lame and cowardly “Fuller Picture Emerges of Viral Video of Native American Man and Catholic Students.”

  As Caitlin Flanagan wrote in the Atlantic, “CNN, apparently by now aware that the event had taken place within a complicating larger picture, tried to use the new information to support its own biased interpretation, sorrowfully reporting that early in the afternoon the boys had clashed with ‘four African American young men preaching about the Bible and oppression.’” CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and their countless parrots were all loath to correct a reported story, however false, that so neatly tied their hatred for President Trump, “toxic masculinity,” and “white privilege” into a convenient box.2

  Shockingly, even days after the nearly one hundred minutes of YouTube footage exonerated the students, CNN’s Chris Cuomo was still sanctimoniously shaming and lecturing the boys and their parents on national television, while refusing to fully report on the racist, sexist, and homophobic taunts by the Black Israelites, the true instigators. He briefly described the Black Israelites’ words as “unduly provocative.” Cuomo’s tepid description of their hateful, repugnant language was combined with his continued reverence for Nathan Phillips, despite the proven falsehoods in his statements, such as his description of the boys as “beasts” and the Black Israelite agitators as “their prey.”3

  It is not surprising, then, that data from a Pew Research Center poll of over 5,000 people shows that over two-thirds of Americans consider the media to be biased and 58 percent believe that the news media “do not understand people like them.” Sixty-eight percent of Americans believe that journalists and reporters have bias toward one side in political and social issues. These numbers are even starker for Republicans, where the polls show 86 percent believing in reporter bias versus 52 percent of Democrats.4

  To their credit, some of the actors and journalists apologized for their rush to judgment and tweeted honest regret for their digital vitriol against the boys. Rich Lowry, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Kara Swisher come to mind. But others took the coward’s way out and deleted their nasty tweets with no apology. Bill Kristol was predictably one of the latter. Tucker Carlson pointed out that we shouldn’t have been at all surprised by Kristol’s wormlike deletion sans apology. “After all, he still hasn’t apologized for the Iraq War,” Tucker reminded us. Newly elected Minnesota representative Ilhan Abdullahi Omar falsely wrote that the boys “were taunting five black men before they surrounded Phillips and led racist chants.” She, too, quietly deleted the tweet without apology or correction to her lies, an ignoble beginning to her tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives.

  As their story fell apart, the media pundits scrambled for anything else they could use to continue casting the kids as the villains. In the end, it came down to the smirk.

  “Well, why was this kid smirking? How dare he smirk?” they demanded. His outraged accusers left no room for the possibility that his expression might be that of a sixteen-year-old kid who was nervous, embarrassed, or confused about how to react to a strange man who had suddenly walked up to him and started beating a drum in his face. Could the boy have been waiting for the man to say something, as he claimed? Could he have been wondering if it would be rude to walk away? Absolutely not, scolded our thought monitors in the media. His smile was the smirking face of white privilege, they lectured, and for that alone he is condemned.

  Consider CNN’s Bakari Sellers’s defense of his repugnant tweet suggesting that Nick Sandmann should be punched in the face: “My tweet was metaphorically responding to the smugness of those students. It’s metaphoric to talk about one’s smugness, or smirking.” Perhaps Bakari should learn to use metaphors that reflect thoughtfulness and insight, not brutishness and hate. Apparently that level of writing ability is not a requirement to work for CNN, given Ana Navarro’s embarrassing potty-mouth insults.5

  But back to the smirking. Tina Jordan of the New York Times retweeted this Facebook post from Marlon James, calling it “the single best commentary I’ve read on the Covington Catholic boys”:

  Here’s the thing about Covington Catholic School Boy. He didn’t shout, he didn’t rage, he didn’t threaten and he did not even lift a finger. Because he’s not even twenty years old, and already knows he never has to. He just stood there with his smirk, the line sealing his white privilege. A smirk saying that nothing you speak matters, your existence doesn’t matter, your protest doesn’t matter, your dignity doesn’t matter, not even the fact that you were here first matters. You’re a joke because I find you funny, you’re a target because I got my bullseye on you, and you are nothing because I won’t even remember you by the time I get home. This is racism boiled down to the core, bigotry in excelsis.6

  So, as the pundits could no longer credibly accuse the boys of mobbing, taunting, or using racist language, they increasingly justified their outrage by concentrating solely on the boy’s young face, its whiteness and its expression. Suddenly all that was necessary to deserve hateful national condemnation was to wear a hat supporting the president of the United States while smiling. As the obsession with Nick Sandmann’s facial expression grew, many writers and Twitter users began posting photos of him with this quote from George Orwell’s ever-prescient 1984:

  It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. . . . In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (incredulity when a victory was announced, for instance) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.7

  Chapter 39

  Welcome to the Panopticon: FaceCrime, PreCrime, and the Surveillance State

  In China, “FaceCrime” is not conjecture but today’s reality. Billion-dollar facial recognition companies such as SenseTime and Megvii are transforming China’s ability to have omnipresent surveillance of its citizens as they go about their daily lives. Chinese citizens are given social credit scores and rewards for participation in community activities such as volunteer work or blood donations. Those with low scores can be similarly punished and denied access to jobs, loans, the ability to book flights or train travel—virtually any freedom the Chinese government seeks to deny them.

  What could give you a low score? Buying too many video games, posting what the government deems to be “fake news” online, smoking in a nonsmoking area . . . basically whatever the government decides. Perpetrators of “crimes” as minor as jaywalking are publicly shamed on massive digital billboards. Citizens are even judged for their facial expressions as they ride trains. Better not smirk when passing a billboard with a photo of Dear Leader!

  The repercussions are not benign. As Harry Cockburn describes in the Independent: “Millions of Chinese nationals have been blocked from booking flights or trains as Beijing seeks to implement its controversial ‘social credit’ system, which allows the government to closely monitor and judge each of its 1.3 billion citizens based on their behavior and activity.”

  Cockburn writes, “Punishments are not clearly detailed in the government plan, but beyond making travel difficult, they are also believed to include slowing internet speeds, reducing access to good schools for individuals or their children, banning people from certain jobs, preventing booking at certain hotels and losing the right to own pets.”1

  James O’Malley reports that one’s social credit score is quite elaborate and arbitrary: “the province of Qingzhen uses more than 1,000 different metrics that can impact a citizen’s score. If you hire a child worker for your business, you lose five points, and if you sell coal that doesn’t meet regulatory guidelines, you lose 10 points.” The system would seem highly dependent on who exactly judges each infraction.

  In one Chinese province, a recording that announces to callers that you are “untrustworthy” punishes people with bad debt. Likewise, you can be blacklisted if you don’t sort your recycling according to the rules. God for
bid that your dog barks at night. A bad social credit score can lead to the government confiscating your pet.2

  As Anders Corr wrote in an article for La Croix International,

  Xinjiang is a test bed for how far a state can control a population in the age of high technology. It is a panopticon, in which no Chinese citizen is quite sure whether a particular communication, transit, or purchase has been tracked, or whether it would really matter to an official who did track it. But individuals do know that data is tracked at least sometimes by a human behind the screen, and sometimes that tracking results in detention, torture or worse. So the risk-averse individual molds his behavior in anticipation to what he thinks the CCP might like were it watching.

  Corr went on to warn us that there are those in the west who would seek to emulate China in an effort to better police its citizenry, noting that the Brookings Institution “collaborated with Huawei on a 2017 paper that promoted ‘safe cities,’ a marketing term for smart cities controlled by a police brain fed by a nervous system of networked intelligence feeds.”3

  You might be surprised to find that Big Brother’s facial recognition has even found its way into the restroom. In 2017, the Temple of Heaven in Beijing began to require facial recognition to acquire toilet paper. If you haven’t attempted to get any toilet paper in the past nine minutes, you are eligible for 80 centimeters of toilet paper. Lo Bei, a representative of the facial recognition device, appears not to be overly concerned with the freedom to wipe: “For most people, 80cm of paper should be enough.” God forbid anybody gets some bad Kung Pao chicken before visiting the Temple of Heaven.