Novato sleeps while Sales Tax creeps

January 24, 2017 Novato Council votes to increase the sales tax cap while hiding the measure in language meant to obscure the discussion.  Josh Friday, Eric Lucan and Denise Athas each take turns in claiming that they are "alllowing a discussion" on raising sales taxes.  The public didn't buy it and neither did fellow council persons Pam Drew and Pat Eklund.  The meeting was delayed three times and the vote took place at 11:30 pm while Novato slept.  Fortunately, some determined citizens stayed with the meeting to announce their objection.  Council people also received and avalanche of mail.  Not a single citizen supported the measure.

Plan Bay Area Is Racist- Keeps Minorities In Poverty

Too much Winning.

What You Need to Know About Hate Speech and Free Speech

What You Need to Know About Hate Speech and Free Speech

What's protected by the First Amendment, and what isn't?

Lily HermanFEB 3, 2017 3:12PM EST




On Wednesday, students at the University of California, Berkeley, protested a planned campus appearance by Milo Yiannapoulos, an editor at Breitbart News, a favorite platform of the "alt-right" (AKA white nationalists); the event turned violent when an anarchist group began to destroy property and set fires. Protesters objected to Yiannapoulos's notorious online bullying and sexist remarks; UC Berkeley's administration said in an official statement, that he would be allowed to speak because "UC Berkeley is bound by the Constitution, the law and the university’s values and Principles of Community, which include the enabling of free expression across the full spectrum of opinion and perspective." Ultimately, though, the event was canceled just hours before it was supposed to take place due to "concern for public safety."

The incident, as well as clashes like it in the past, brought up questions about what free speech is and what's protected under the First Amendment. If someone like Yiannopoulos, whose vitriolic trolling campaigns include targeting Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones to the point where he got himself banned from Twitter, is there any way to curb that speech if it discriminates against people's identity, like race? And when does that speech become punishable under the law? Here's what you need to know about the freedom speech as well as how to deal with hate speech in the current political climate.

What's free speech?

Free speech is part of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In addition to allowing for freedom of religion, the First Amendment also allows for the freedom of expression. This includes freedom for the press to say what it would like, freedom for citizens to say what they'd like, and freedom for Americans to assemble, like petitioning the government or protesting peacefully.


More specifically, freedom of speech allows U.S. citizens to say or articulate their thoughts or feelings without having to worry about government censorship or other punishments on behalf of the state. In contrast to the U.S., countries that don't have fully "free" speech may censor certain materials (like specific web pages, websites, television programs, books, or films), especially those that go against the state's message. In extreme cases, those who don't follow government censorship sanctions in these nations can be charged with committing a crime and punished.

What's hate speech?

Hate speech is when a person or a group of people is attacked based on factors such as their gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, or disability. According to the Centers for Educational Justice & Community Engagement at the University of California Berkeley, hate speech includes written and verbal communication.

Of course, where the First Amendment becomes tricky is when it comes to people who have discriminatory ideologies against others, as they are also protected under the law. For example, one can vehemently disagree with the views of the Ku Klux Klan, which believes in white supremacy, but unless members of the Klan act on those words, their speech and right to assemble is protected under the Constitution.

When does hate speech become a crime?

Given that even hate speech is seen as a right, it's been largely protected in the courts. Some college campuses, for example, have tried to implement "speech codes," typically with good intentions of making campuses inclusive and ridding them of discriminatory language. In court, however, these acts have typically been found unconstitutional, as they violate the First Amendment and the right for people to speak freely.

While typically hate speech has to be acted on to turn into a crime, there is a special exception called the "fighting words" clause, which stipulates that if someone uses words to "incite an immediate breach of peace", then it's no longer protected. The example the ACLU gives is if a white student directed a racial slur at a black student, one could argue that the person did so as a means of racial harassment. This reasoning, however, hasn't been argued in the Supreme Court before, so it's hard to tell if it would be successful in the future.

Additionally, hate speech can violate certain freedom of speech laws like slander (trying to damage someone's reputation with false spoken words) or libel (trying to damage someone's reputation through writing). In some cases, hate speech could also violate rules as technical as copyright violations or non-disclosure agreements depending on how and where those opinions are articulated.

That said, law enforcement groups like the FBI as well as numerous independent organizations do keep track of reports of hate speech and similar hate incidents, especially if there's potential for them to turn into actions.

How can people act against hate speech?

This is a question that has long been up for debate throughout American history, and it's only becoming more and more prevalent during the Trump era. Any hate speech is in fact protected under the First Amendment, and those who try to interfere with it through actions or violence are legally violating someone's right to free speech, regardless if one believes interfering is "morally" right.

Organizations like the ACLU recommend that instead of trying to outright ban hate speech and risk a lawsuit, it's better to add more speech to the conversation. This is also the same principle behind reaching out to government representatives on the local, state, and federal levels to make sure your voice is heard. It's also why many people protest, exercising their First Amendment right to do so.

Additionally, each person has the valuable opportunity to educate others who use hate speech. If you're unsure of how to combat discrimination in everyday life, the Southern Poverty Law Center has a helpful guide for how to respond to bigotry in daily life through legal and protected means.

A Major HUD Social Engineering rule "AFFH" may be overturned. This is HUGE.

Fair Housing Faces an Uncertain Fate

Two bills have already proposed doing away with a new HUD rule, following a long tradition of opposing proactive desegregation.

TANVI MISRA
@Tanvim


Senator Marco Rubio with incoming HUD secretary Dr. Ben Carson at Carson's confirmation hearing. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)


The young year of 2017 has so far offered such a blizzard of political craziness that some less-spectacular developments have gone relatively unnoticed. One such story: The current machinations in Congress to undercut—yet again—a common-sense regulation to promote racial integration.

On January 11, GOP senator Mike Lee from Utah and former presidential candidate Marco Rubio introduced a bill called the “Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017.” The legislation seeks to nullify the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which gives concrete guidance to entities receiving federal funds on how to proactively dismantle historical patterns of housing segregation—a requirement of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. A similarly titled bill on the House side, spearheaded by Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, goes further: It asks to scrap the accompanying mapping tools that helps local communities identify patterns of racial segregation. Via Bill H.R. 482:


Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no Federal funds may be used to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing.

That this rule and the accompanying tool will be rescinded is a very likely possibility under this administration, especially given that Ben Carson, incoming secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, subscribes to the age-old maxim that regulating against housing discrimination amounts to “social engineering.”

But that would be a disservice—not just to poor communities of color that are cut off from accessing the many benefits of living in high-opportunity neighborhoods, but for city residents as a whole.

The fraught history of furthering fair housing

In 2012, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones traced the history of the Fair Housing Act all the way back to George Romney—Mitt’s father—who headed HUD during the Nixon administration. The law basically did two things: First, it prohibited discrimination in housing policy and practice, and second, it asked that federal agencies “affirmatively further” fair housing. In other words, it asked the government to take an intentional approach toward racial integration. Romney took that role seriously, Hannah-Jones writes:


Romney ordered HUD officials to reject applications for water, sewer and highway projects from cities and states where local policies fostered segregated housing.

He dubbed his initiative "Open Communities" and did not clear it with the White House. As word spread that HUD was turning down grants, Nixon's supporters in the South and in white Northern suburbs took their complaints directly to the president.

Romney’s initiative, which by no means addressed every local government that violated the FHA, was soon reeled in by Nixon. His administration essentially brushed the “affirmatively furthering” part of the FHA mandate under the carpet, with long-lasting repercussions. For decades, HUD—under both Democratic and Republican administrations—hardly enforced the provision.

What municipalities receiving federal funds had to do was analyze the barriers to fair housing in their jurisdictions, and suggest plans to overcome them. A 2010 Government Accountability Office report found that neither the grant recipients nor HUD did a very good job of this. “There wasn't a lot of understanding by communities about what it meant to affirmatively further fair housing, and there wasn't a lot of oversight by HUD to make sure that they were,” says Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an organization that promotes housing access.

Enter the AFFH rule, which Barack Obama’s HUD floated in 2013. In 2015, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled that housing policies that inadvertently hurt minorities were just as bad as those that explicitly discriminated, HUD went ahead and formalized the AFFH rule. Emily Badger explained how the rule worked at the time in The Washington Post :


The new rules, a top demand of civil-rights groups, will require cities and towns all over the country to scrutinize their housing patterns for racial bias and to publicly report, every three to five years, the results. Communities will also have to set goals, which will be tracked over time, for how they will further reduce segregation.

In other words, the rule laid out a way for local communities to execute what the FHA had required them to back in 1968. It also provided them with the demographic and housing data to clearly visualize the housing trends in their neighborhoods. For example, local stakeholders can use this map of Milwaukee, Wisconsin to see that most subsidized housing is located in segregated neighborhoods, and plan accordingly:(HUD)

The rule is to phased in over multiple years. In 2016, only 13 jurisdictions had to comply with it, according to the NLIHC experts. That is a very small proportion of the 5,000 or so total program participants that will eventually be folded in—if the rule manages to remain on the books.

‘Obama’s war on the suburbs’

The arguments against the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing today are the same as they were in Romney’s time and in the decades after: that it is a form of social engineering.

According to Rep. Gosar, who introduced one of the current legislations against it, the AFFH is a product of “Obama’s war on the suburbs,”—“a way of punishing neighborhoods that don’t fall in line with his liberal agenda of federally mandated demographics.” Sen. Rubio, who supported the Senate bill, declined to be interviewed. But his office provided CityLab with this statement:


Top-down, one-size-fits-all regulations by Washington bureaucrats won’t help make affordable housing more accessible to those who need it. The best way to reduce the cost of housing and increase access is to enable state and local authorities to make decisions that are best suited to the needs of their communities and residents.

Housing experts say that’s a fundamental misinterpretation. First of all, the rule is “agnostic,” says Solomon Greene, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, who previously worked at HUD. It empowers local governments to use data, involve the community, and improve access to housing and opportunity in all neighborhoods the way they see fit. That could mean preserving affordable housing in gentrifying area, or investing in infrastructure in distressed area, or providing more vouchers, depending on the context. “The HUD rule reflects the broader diversity beliefs in the housing field that there’s no clear answer as to what is the best use of a federal dollar,” Greene says. “It is the opposite of a one-size-fits-all model, which is how it's been rebranded.”

What detractors take issue with, it appears then, is not this particular AFFH rule, but the legislation it honors: the Fair Housing Act. Attempts to build affordable housing in predominantly white neighborhoods has always been met with coded racial backlash, by both liberals and conservatives. The straw man argument against the AFFH is just the meta-version of that.

Indeed, arguments against school busing programs and those against furthering fair housing both share an implicit assumption: that racial segregation is merely an expression of innate human preferences. That’s simply inaccurate. Intentional policies at every level of government are largely responsible for funneling black and brown people into certain neighborhoods—and still are. Any choice in the matter was usually not theirs.

The failure to purposefully reverse the effect of government-sponsored racial sorting is evident in Ferguson, Flint, and Milwaukee. And, now, if the AFFH rule is rescinded, that tradition will continue.


Editor's Note: Good Riddance AFFH. This obnoxious rule presumes communities are "racist" based on racial composition, not actual racial exclusion. It is social engineering on steroids and serves to marginalize EVERY community who does not conform to the social engineers "ideal" community. The biggest victims of this policy are the very minority communities it supposedly sets out to serve by uprooting neighborhoods and social institutions that have sustained them. While diversity enriches us, it should be voluntary and organic. In our increasingly urbane, international culture, such ham handed attempts to social engineer us are not necessary and counter productive

Berkeley Mayor after the Anti-Free Speech Riots

Published on Feb 3, 2017

Milo Yiannopoulos, a polarizing Breitbart News editor, was canceled Wednesday out of safety concerns after protesters hurled smoke bombs, broke windows and started a bonfire. In the wake of destruction City of Berkeley Mayor.

Editor's Note: This mayor has endangered the lives of hundreds with his inflammatory rhetoric and orders to have the police stand down to the assaults and property crimes.  While one can legitimately disagree 
with Milo, we should all agree that violence and physical intimidation should not be tolerated.  

San Francisco Police Department Suspends Participation With FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force

February 1, 2017 8:40 PM

Filed Under: FBI, Immigration, Joint Terrorism Task Force, Police, San Francisco, SFPD, Trump

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — San Francisco Police Department officials announced Wednesday evening that they have suspended participation with the FBI’s controversial Joint Terrorism Task Force.

According to San Francisco Police Commission protocol, all contracts require approval by the Board of Supervisors after 10 years.

The JTTF Memoranda of Understanding was signed in 2007, so that time has come, according to department officials.

The department will update its guideline for First Amendment activities and will “seek clarification” from the Police Commission as to this guideline’s application to JTTF investigations.

Once that new guideline is adopted, the department may consider renegotiating the JTTF memoranda with the FBI with guidance from the police commission.

Last month, the Asian Law Caucus, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ San Francisco Bay Area office and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California sent a letter to San Francisco Police commissioners urging them to cease the department’s participation in the JTTF.

In the Jan. 5 letter, the groups speculate that, following President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the JTTF would likely increase surveillance of Muslim communities like the New York City police did after Sept. 11, 2001.

According to the FBI, 71 JTTF field offices have been established since 2001. The first was established in New York City in 1980.

“The SFPD is committed to public safety and will continue to work diligently to keep San Francisco safe for everyone,” San Francisco police Sgt. Michael Andraychak said in a statement.

The Threat to and Future of Ranching in West Marin"

Marin Coalition Presents: Wednesday February 1, 2017

“The Threat to and Future of Ranching in West Marin"

Speakers: Chance Cutrano, Resource Renewal Institute
John Hart, Environmental Historian and Author

Just a year after Drake’s Bay oyster farm was forced to shut down at Point Reyes National Seashore, a group of environmentalists have filed a lawsuit with a bigger and potentially more explosive target: the thousands of dairy and beef cattle in the park. Many of the cattle ranches have been operated by the same families since the 1860s. The suit against the National Park Service (NPS) has been filed by  the Resource Renewal Institute of Mill Valley along with the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project, based in Idaho. It claims the cattle are causing erosion, polluting waterways, harming endangered salmon and blocking public access.  Currently, the NPS is moving forward with a plan to renew for 20 years the ranchers’ leases.  The environmentalists claim the NPS is doing so without conducting adequate environmental studies. The ranchers say their operations are an integral part of our coastal history.  They note that when developers were threatening to build subdivisions on the Point Reyes Peninsula in the 1950s, local ranching families formed an alliance with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups to convince Congress and President John F. Kennedy to establish the park in 1962. Come to hear both sides of the issue from two well-versed speakers.

Chance Cutrano directs land policy initiatives, media projects, and emerging ideas at the Resource Renewal Institute (RRI), a nonprofit located in Mill Valley. His current work focuses on the management of the Point Reyes National Seashore and agro-ecology programs in the Central Valley. He studied philosophy and political science at Saint Xavier University where he analyzed bison and elk management policy in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Prior to RRI, Chance was researching food, water, and energy management policy in Vietnam, Morocco, and Bolivia. He lives in Marin, studies Sustainable Management at Presidio Graduate School, and is an ardent hiker and photographer.

John Hart is an environmental historian, who began writing on the Marin scene in 1970, at a time when the foundations for present policies—and controversies—were being laid. Four of the sixteen books he has written since relate to local landscapes. Relevant today are “An Island in Time: 50 Years of Point Reyes National Seashore” and “Farming on the Edge: Saving Family Farms in Marin County, California “. John has won the Commonwealth Club’s Medal in California, the Bay Institute’s Carla Bard Bay Education Award, the American Alpine Club’s David R. Brower Award for Outstanding Service in the Field of Conservation.  John has a BA in German and Comparative Literature from Princeton University.

The mob censorship of Milo is a betrayal of Berkeley’s radical history.

The mob censorship of Milo is a betrayal of Berkeley’s radical history.

2 FEBRUARY 2017

On 1 October 1964, Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley was the setting for one of the most historic moments in the fight for free speech on campus. Jack Weinberg, chairman of Campus CORE, a student civil-rights group, was arrested and put in the back of a police car for setting up a campaigning table, breaking the rules on political activity on campus. Seven thousand students surrounded the police car, giving speeches and performing songs on top of it, and refused to move until Weinberg had been released. It was the spark that lit the Free Speech Movement, a student and faculty campaign of sit-ins and civil disobedience that overthrew Berkeley’s censorious in loco parentis rules and inspired freedom-fighting students across America to do the same.

Last night, Sproul Plaza was in flames. Students amassed outside the Martin Luther King Jr Student Union to protest the appearance of Trump cheerleader and right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. Protesters held up placards saying ‘We REFUSE to accept fascist America’ and ‘BASH THE FASH’. Then a mob of black-clad ‘anti-fascists’ broke through police barricades, smashed windows, threw fireworks and set a light pole on fire. The event was cancelled and the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement became the site of its spiritual death. Where Berkeley radicals 50 years ago put themselves on the line for unfettered free speech, for the right of students to listen and speak and reason, their pimpled heirs are practising the must ugly, irrational form of censorship: censorship of the mob.

Just think about what has taken place. These protesters used violence to try to silence a view they simply dislike, which they disagree with. It speaks not only to the deep intolerance of campus radicals and left-wing groups today, but also to their fundamental unreason, their brutish belligerence. Their hysterical fear of unfashionable opinion, their refusal to engage with out-there ideas, has reached its ugly conclusion. Though the antifa crew may not have been representative of the nearly 2,000 students who turned out peacefully to protest against Milo, they are the sharpest expression of a Safe Space movement built on the assumption that mere ideas are unsafe, akin to a threat. And they’ve responded in kind: challenging Milo’s ‘fascism’ by means of force and fury and flame. A grim irony indeed.


This is a symbolic moment. The sight of students and radicals rioting out of fear of letting people listen and decide for themselves represents the unravelling of Enlightenment values in the academy. While Trump voters are often smeared as a prejudiced blob, this is what real, unthinking intolerance looks like. And it’s a betrayal not only of the high-minded, liberal ideals on which the academy is founded, but also of the once radical left. The students of ’64 knew that freedom was paramount. That’s why, as FSMer Bettina Aptheker told me in 2014, they fought for free speech alongside right-wing students, some of them supporters of Barry Goldwater, the Trump of his day: ‘The only requirement was that they believed in freedom of speech.’

That when faced with a president so authoritarian young radicals can only respond in kind is a grim reminder of where self-willed censorship leads: to stupidity and blind rage. The casual presentation of right-wing wind-up merchants like Milo as the first act of a new fascism, and these students’ inability to do anything other than wail when confronted with ideas they dislike, speaks to a new endarkenment. To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, if you refuse to let your views be challenged they become like prejudices that you are incapable of defending or articulating. When you reject free speech you lose the opportunity to defeat ideas you dislike and propound your own. You trade changing the world for throwing things at it. That’s what we saw playing out at Berkeley last night.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus, edited by Tom, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Protests in Berkeley over Free Speech.

Lifting sales tax cap is unfair to struggling households

Marin Voice: Lifting sales tax cap is unfair to struggling households

By Randy Warren

POSTED: 01/30/17, 12:01 PM PST | UPDATED: 2 HRS AGO

14 COMMENTS

Perhaps they will call it the McGuire Tax. Unelected officials are pressuring state Sen. Mike McGuire to kill the protective sales tax cap for Marin.

That cap is a covenant between government and the people: Our total sales tax will never exceed 10 percent.

This conversation so far is only within government, as though we the people have no say in whether to give up this covenant.

Many of us manage sales tax via our good incomes or Visa cards.

But sales tax is a racist tax. It puts the tax pain disproportionately onto the most economically vulnerable in our community.

It is harsh also on single parents and seniors trying somehow to remain in Marin.

Property tax is targeted. Income tax is scaled. But no family escapes sales tax. The dollar payments apply equally but the impact is disparate.

Marin approves nearly all taxes on which it votes. And most proposals are worthy.

That is the problem: There will always be more worthy projects, but tens of thousands in Marin already cannot afford them. They are struggling.

Even so, affluent Marinites keep raising the tax bill without thinking about those less fortunate than themselves. Tax promoters feed that thinking: “Oh, but THIS tax is so small it won’t make any difference.”

Yet at a certain point, one more straw breaks a camel’s back.

The aggregate of these supposedly harmless sales taxes now take away about $1 for every $10 that we spend. Do you realize how oppressive that is to the poor?

This is money they do not have available to spare. They must not be asked to pay more.

Fortunately, we have protection: the covenant of the protective sales tax cap.

The proposed McGuire legislation would unlock that cap in Marin (but not Sonoma where the senator lives). The cap can be moved or eliminated without public consent. In communicating only with government officials, Sen. McGuire proceeds in an absence of community engagement, bypassing the people who must pay those taxes.

The Novato City Council, in a 3-2 squeaker, supported the McGuire Tax, topped with this impressive arrogance: They called it a vote “to remove a state procedural obstacle to allow a community conversation.”

That is like President Donald Trump saying he will build a wall with Mexico so the people can choose its color.

The first community conversation, Novato, should be about whether the people are willing to change the protective sales tax cap. It is not a “procedural obstacle.”

Doing it otherwise may, ironically, cause Marin’s generous voters to start voting down new taxes. Note that most recent taxes passed on razor-thin margins. The McGuire Tax may shift enough voters.

San Rafael exhibited greater wisdom, declining to presently support it. The entire county should follow this leadership, and then reject the McGuire Tax.

Yachts may produce only a small wake, but to the person barely keeping their nose above the water line, small wakes make big differences.

Can Marin be so tone deaf as to complain how the high cost of living makes it impossible for people to afford housing but at the same time sling yet another arrow into tens of thousands of our poorest neighbors?

Think not in terms of your First World problem of how well you could manage losing the sales tax cap. Think about what it means to those struggling just to put bread on the table.

Or will Sen. McGuire tell them to eat cake?

Randy Warren is a San Rafael lawyer. He was a candidate for San Rafael City Council in 2013.

See the article HERE

Editor's Note:  Here is the voting score so far for the TAM TAX scam

The Board of Supervisors (Dennis Rodoni was not seated yet) and the TAM Commissioners unanimously approved lifting the sales tax cap.

In San Rafael it was defeated 4-1 with Mayor Phillips for approving.

Fairfax was 4-1 for eliminating the sale tax cap :Renee Goddard, John Reed, David Weinsoff, Peter Lacques approved and Barbara Coler opposed.

Novato vote 3-2 for in favor. Josh Fryday, Denise Athas, and Eric Lucan voted for increasing the sales tax cap and Pam Drew and Pat Eklund opposed the measure.

TAM commissioners approved unanimously

From the TAM website: http://www.tam.ca.gov/index.as...

MEMBERS (TERMS) AFFILIATE PHONE #
Alice Fredericks (exp. 2020) Town of Tiburon 415.435.7377
Judy Arnold - Vice Chair (exp. 2020) County of Marin District 5 415.499.7331
Dan Hillmer (exp. 2018) City of Larkspur 415.927.5110
Diane Furst (exp. 2018) Town of Corte Madera 415.927.5086
Eric Lucan (exp. 2020) City of Novato 415.226.0815
Tom McInerney (exp. 2020) Town of San Anselmo 415.226.0815
Gary Phillips (exp. 2020) City of San Rafael 415.485.3074
John Reed (exp. 2020) Town of Fairfax 415.226.0815
Kathrin Sears (exp. 2020) County of Marin District 3 415.499.7331
Katie Rice (exp. 2018) County of Marin District 2 415.499.7331
Thomas Theodores (exp. 2018) City of Sausalito 415.997.8650
P. Beach Kuhl (exp. 2018) Town of Ross 415.453.1453
James Campbell (exp. 2018) City of Belvedere 415.435.3838
Stephanie Moulton-Peters - Chair (exp. 2018) City of Mill Valley 415.388.4033
Steve Kinsey (exp. 2020) County of Marin District 4 415.499.7331
Damon Connolly (exp. 2018) County of Marin District 1 415.499.7331

Must We Pick a Side?

Must We Pick a Side?

The wildly contentious election of 2016 seems to have inculcated certain habits of mind. We are tempted to believe that our role as citizens is like that of a sports fan. We need to choose a team and stick with it, no matter what. Our team needs us.


If we lend our voices in support of the other guy, we are betraying our team. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. My friend is imperfect, but to admit this publicly is to weaken our side. It’s a test of loyalty. Therefore bring out the face paint, the jerseys, and the Vuvuzelas, and let’s fight, fight, fight!

Every day, the media exploits this model, giving us combat spectacles of left vs. right, party vs. party, this person vs. that person. This drives ratings, which is evidence that people find it intriguing. It allows spectators to participate by shouting at the TV, yelling at the radio, posting angrily on social media, having sub-tweet wars, and so on. We mimic what we see in these venues and even begin to talk like the vituperative and viral voices that fill up our feeds.

Go Team!

That turned on a light for me. I realized that there is something insidious about any approach that requires you to shut off the critical capacity of your intellect. The truth is not embodied in any political faction. If I expected to think with integrity, I had to go my own way. Realizing this was a hinge in my life, I never looked back.

The Friend/Enemy Model

Putting your brain on the shelf for political advantage has a long philosophical tradition behind it.

To be sure, putting your brain on the shelf for political advantage has a long philosophical tradition behind it. There are of course the Marxists, who tag people as exploiters or the oppressed based on class identity – and their modern successors who apply these designations, to the point of absurdity, to a huge range of characteristics of race, sex, religion, physical ability, and gender identity. To them, life can be nothing but conflict.

But it’s not just a left-wing problem. Have a look at the work of Carl Schmitt – a right-wing Hegelian/Nietzschean – and his 1932 essay “The Concept of the Political.” (If you already know something about the situation in German academia in 1932, you can guess the rest.)

To Schmitt, to be political is the highest calling of the human person, and this always means separating people according to friends or enemies. He despises classical liberalism and economics precisely for the reason that they attempt to obliterate the friend/enemy distinction, replacing it with trade, cooperation, and forms of competition in which every competitor wins.

On what basis does politics make the friend/enemy distinction? Schmitt says it has nothing to do with norms or even high theory. “In its entirety,” he writes, “the state as an organized political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction.”

But what does it mean to be an enemy? It refers to “the real possibility of physical killing.” Without bloodshed, it means nothing, which is why “war is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity.”

So let’s review. To be political is the essence of life, according to Schmitt. The core of the political means to be willing to kill enemies. Therefore, we might conclude from his writings, death itself is the essence of life. Thus did Carl Schmitt become the leading philosopher of National Socialism and the intellectual font of what became the Holocaust.

Elections and Warfare Sociology

It’s a kind of addiction, a mental habit that gives us considerable pleasure.

It’s true that the friend/enemy model makes sense to many people during the election season. We are all empowered with the vote. We feel a great sense of responsibility for how we use it, despite overwhelming evidence that your one vote will not swing an election. It’s mostly symbolic, but it matters, because people like participating in the democratic process, gaining power for friends and obliterating the enemy.

But the election is over. Why does this attitude persist even though no one in politics and government will be asking for our presidential vote for another four years? It’s a kind of addiction, a mental habit that gives us considerable pleasure. Maybe it’s primal, an instinctual form of low-grade violence that Freud suggests we need to overcome to have civilization.

In practice, what does blindly cheering for one team over another in politics achieve? Nothing good, in my view. It becomes psychologically debilitating to expend so much time and energy on it. Indeed, politics pursued in this fashion is poison to the human spirit. It relies on sustaining a level of hate that is toxic for anyone who wants to live a full life.

The Problem of Trumpism

We haven’t seen this level of nationalist rhetoric in my lifetime.

The problem is compounded by the lack of intellectual coherence at the top of the ruling party. It’s not exactly a new problem, but it is unusually poignant in the case of Donald Trump. We haven’t seen this level of nationalist rhetoric in my lifetime, and it pertains to the core functioning of American economic life. The lack of appreciation for the intellectual and political achievements of free trade is palpable. Adding to that, he seems to be pushing for expensive infrastructure spending, more military pork, and an immigration policy that would certainly require extensive surveillance of American businesses.

At the same time, he has said some wonderful things about deregulation, tax cuts, bureaucracy downsizing, education, and health care, proposals dear to any liberty lover’s heart.

At best, then, the agenda is confused. So people are weighing the relative benefits and costs. Will the benefits of tax cuts be so great as to make up for the downside of new tariffs? How bad will the immigration controls be compared with the supposed benefits to national security? And so on.

This is not just an intellectual exercise. The end game here is to answer the critical question: should we favor this team or oppose it?

Think for Yourself

By maintaining your objectivity and principles in these times, you will be in the minority.

I suggest that this is the wrong way to think about the matter. We should not obsess over the question of whether we should cheer Trump or condemn him, become his fans or swing into opposition, defend him against enemies or become his enemies.

There is another approach. It is not easy in a hugely partisan political environment, but it is the right one. Stay independent, think clearly, watch carefully, adhere to principle, speak fearlessly, praise when good things happen and oppose when bad things happen, tell the truth as you see it, and otherwise be ever vigilant in defense of rights and liberties, yours and everyone's. To be steadfast and honest in these times is the height of political virtue.

“At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare,” says Lord Acton, “and its triumphs have been due to minorities.”

So, yes, by maintaining your objectivity and principles in these times, you will be in the minority. But you will be a friend of freedom, and you could make all the difference.


https://fee.org/articles/must-we-pick-a-side/