The Transformation of the American Republic

“Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.” — Article II, Section 9 of the Communist Manifesto

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were sent by the French government to study the American prison system. In his later letters Tocqueville indicates that he and Beaumont used their official business as a pretext to study American society instead. They arrived in New York City in May of that year and spent nine months traveling the United States, studying the prisons, and collecting information on American society, including its religious, political, and economic character. These studies became the basis of his 1840 book “Democracy in America.” In that book he wrote about the growing power of a central government :

“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.

How prophetic Mr. de Tocqueville was.

Tocqueville believed that the Puritans established the principle of sovereignty of the people in the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. The American Revolution then popularized this principle, followed by the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which developed institutions to manage popular will. While Tocqueville speaks highly of the America's Constitution, he believes that the mores or "habits of mind" of the American people play a more prominent role in the protection of freedom. Those mores being:

• Township democracy
• Mores, Laws, and Circumstances
• Tyranny of the Majority (Federalist No. 10)
• Religion and beliefs
• The Family
• Individualism
• Associations
• Self-Interest Rightly Understood
• Materialism

This is a far cry from the writings of Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto, published a mere 8 years after Democracy in America.

Mark Levine writes if his latest book The Liberty Amendments:

“What was to be a relatively innocuous federal government, operating from a defined enumeration of specific grants of power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force. It is the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Moreover, with aggrandized police powers, what it does not control directly it bans or mandates by regulation. For example, the federal government regulates most things in your bathroom, laundry room, and kitchen, as well as the mortgage you hold on your house. It designs your automobile and dictates the kind of fuel it uses. It regulates your baby’s toys, crib, and stroller; plans your children’s school curriculum and lunch menu; and administers their student loans in college. At your place of employment, the federal government oversees everything from the racial, gender, and age diversity of the workforce to the hours, wages, and benefits paid. Indeed, the question is not what the federal government, the question is not what the federal government regulates, but what it does not. And it makes you wonder—how can a people incapable of selecting their own light bulbs and toilets possess enough competence to vote for their own rulers and fill out complicated tax returns?”

The illimitable regulatory activity, with which the federal government torments, harasses, and coerces the individual’s private and economic behavior, is the progeny of a colossal federal edifice with inexhaustible energy for societal manipulation and change. In order to satisfy its gluttonous appetite for programmatic schemes, the federal government not only hurriedly digests the Treasury’s annual revenue, funded with confiscatory taxes on a diminishing number of productive citizens, but desserts on the wealth not yet created by generations not yet born with unconstrained indebtedness. And what havoc has this wrought.

The federal government consumes nearly 25 percent of all goods and services produced each year by the American people. Yearly deficits routinely exceed $1 trillion dollars. The federal government has incurred a fiscal operating debt of more than $17 trillion, far exceeding the total value of the annual economic wealth created by the American people, which is expected to reach about $26 trillion in a decade. It has accumulated unfunded liabilities for entitlement programs exceeding $90 trillion, which is growing at $4.6–6.9 trillion a year. There is not enough money on the planet to make good on the federal government’s financial obligations. Hence, the Federal Reserve Board has swung into action with multiple versions of “quantitative easing,” which is nothing more than the federal government monetizing its own debt — or buying its own debt—with a combination of borrowing, issuing itself credit, and printing money amounting to trillions of dollars. Of course, this has the eventual effect of devaluing the currency, fueling significant inflation or deflation, and destabilizing the economy at some future point.

But like the laws of physics, there is no escaping the laws of economics. As these fiscal and monetary malpractices escalate, for there is no end in sight, the federal government will turn increasingly reckless and demanding, taking an even harder line against the individual’s accumulation of wealth and retention of private property. For example, when the federal income tax was instituted one hundred years ago, the top individual income tax rate was 7 percent. Today the top rate is about 40 percent with proposals to push it to nearly 50 percent. There is also serious talk from the governing elite about instituting a national value-added tax (VAT) on top of existing federal taxes, which is a form of sales tax, and divesting citizens of their 401(k) private pension plans. Even the rapaciousness of these policies will not be enough to fend off the severe and widespread misery unleashed from years of profligacy. Smaller nations such as Cyprus, Spain, and Greece provide a window into the future, as their borrowing has reached its limit. Moreover, unable to print money, their day of reckoning is either looming or arrived. Therefore, bank accounts, other investments, and wealth generally are subject to governmental impoundment, sequester, and theft. The individual’s liberty, inextricably linked to his private property, is submerged in the quicksand of a government that is aggregating authority and imploding simultaneously.

What, then, is the answer? Again, Tocqueville offers guidance. Looking back at the Constitutional Convention some fifty years afterward, he observed that

“It is new in history of society to see a great people turn a calm and scrutinizing eye upon itself when apprised by the legislature that the wheels of its government are stopped, to see it carefully examine the extent of the evil, and patiently wait two whole years until a remedy is discovered, to which it voluntarily submitted without its costing a tear or a drop of blood from mankind.”

It is asking too much of today’s governing masterminds and their fanatical adherents to reform the product of their own fatuity — that is, the continuing disassembly of the American Republic.

“During the ratification period, the Federalists repeatedly assured the Anti-Federalists and other skeptics of the proposed federal government’s limits. For example, Madison argued in Federalist 14,

“In the first place it is to be remembered, that the general government is not to be charged with the whole power of making and administering laws: its jurisdiction is limited to certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members of the republic, but which are not to be attained by the separate provisions of any.”

In Federalist 45 he insisted:

“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

In Federalist 46, Madison asserted that:

“The powers proposed to be lodged in the federal government are as little formidable to those reserved to the individual States, as they are indispensably necessary to accomplish the purposes of the Union; and that all those alarms which have been sounded, of a meditated and consequential annihilation of the State governments, must, on the most favorable interpretation, be ascribed to the chimerical fears of the authors of them.”

Madison’s declarations were not unique among the Constitution’s proponents but rather were commonplace. And without these assurances — and the additional pledge that the First Congress would offer amendments to the Constitution further ensuring that individual and state sovereignty would be safeguarded against the new federal government (what became the Bill of Rights, including the Ninth and Tenth Amendments) — the Constitution would not have been ratified. Thus, the Constitution, drafted by delegates who were sent by the states to Philadelphia in 1787 and ratified subsequently by delegates in the state conventions, preserved the decisive role of the states in the American Republic.”

It requires emphasis that the states established the American Republic and, through the Constitution, retained for themselves significant authority to ensure the republic’s durability. This is not to say that the states are perfect governing institutions. Many are no more respectful of unalienable rights than is the federal government. But the issue is how best to preserve the civil society in a world of imperfect people and institutions. The answer, the Framers concluded, is to diversify authority with a combination of governing checks, balances, and divisions, intended to prevent the concentration of unbridled power in the hands of a relative few imperfect people.”

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the U.S., was, until Dear Leader Barack Hussein Obama came along, considered as the worst president in U.S. history. But Jimmy Carter, to his credit, in 1976, did say, "I am not going to use the federal government's authority deliberately to circumvent the natural inclination of people to live in ethnic homogeneous neighborhoods. I think it is good to maintain the homogeneity of neighborhoods if they've been established that way." So chalk one up for Carter.

Too bad (for us) that Obama can't (or won't) say the same. Obama, through Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is pushing "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing," (AFFH) a program to "allow the feds to track diversity in America's neighborhoods and then push policies to change those it deems discriminatory."

Guess who gets to decide if discrimination is present. Why, HUD, naturally. This is the definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The AFFH  (FR-5173) states:

“Through this rule, HUD proposes to provide HUD program participants with more effective means to affirmatively further the purposes and policies of the Fair Housing Act, which is Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The Fair Housing Act not only prohibits discrimination but, in conjunction with other statutes, directs HUD's program participants to take steps proactively to overcome historic patterns of segregation, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities for all. As acknowledged by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and many stakeholders, advocates, and program participants, the current practice of affirmatively furthering fair housing carried out by HUD grantees, which involves an analysis of impediments to fair housing choice and a certification that the grantee will affirmatively further fair housing, has not been as effective as had been envisioned.

This rule accordingly proposes to refine existing requirements with a fair housing assessment and planning process that will better aid HUD program participants fulfill this statutory obligation and address specific comments the GAO raised. To facilitate this new approach, HUD will provide states, local governments, insular areas, and public housing agencies (PHAs), as well as the communities they serve, with data on patterns of integration and segregation; racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty; access to education, employment, low-poverty, transportation, and environmental health, among other critical assets; disproportionate housing needs based on the classes protected under the Fair Housing Act; data on individuals with disabilities and families with children; and discrimination. From these data, program participants will evaluate their present environment to assess fair housing issues, identify the primary determinants that account for those issues, and set forth fair housing priorities and goals.

The benefit of this approach is that these priorities and goals will then better inform program participant's strategies and actions by improving the integration of the assessment of fair housing through enhanced coordination with current planning exercises. This proposed rule further commits HUD to greater engagement and better guidance for program participants in fulfilling their obligation to affirmatively further fair housing. With this new clarity through guidance, a template for the assessment, and a HUD-review process, program participants should achieve more meaningful outcomes that affirmatively further fair housing.”

This is will be the final act of Obama’s desire to transform the American Republic into the Communist dream of his father. As stated in Article II, Section 9 of the Communist Manifesto:

“The combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.”

This would blend all neighborhoods into the communal society Barack Obama and his henchmen on the left desire. Of course certain neighborhoods would get a pass. They would be the neighborhoods where the elite reside. After all socialism is for the people not for the socialist — the elite are made of finer clay.

The AFFH program will require HUD to try to remedy what it considers segregation and discrimination in neighborhoods through data collection and the use of a massive database.  Data from this so-called "discrimination database" will be used with transportation and infrastructure planning, housing financing policies, and zoning laws to alleviate what HUD deems as discrimination and segregation.  Just what America needs: another government database.  Can anyone say "NSA"?

According to HUD, AFFH will "provide HUD program participants with more effective means to affirmatively further the purposes and policies of the Fair Housing Act, which is Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968," which "directs HUD's program participants to take steps proactively to overcome historic patterns of segregation, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities for all." Just like Marx proposed.

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan introduced this plan in July at the NAACP convention. Donovan said:

“Unfortunately, in too many of our hardest hit communities, no matter how hard a child or her parents work, the life chances of that child, even her lifespan, are determined by the zip code she grows up in. This is simply wrong.” (See my blog entitled Another Infringement From The Administrative State.)

HUD and Donovan are reverting to the old and well-worn Progressive/Democrat/Liberal playbook of comparing apples with oranges in an effort to get their way, to try to gather data that will support their position so HUD (and Obama) can act as it desires, to impose his will upon us.

HUD blames poverty on zip codes, something that studies have not supported, rather than other socio-economic factors that studies have shown to contribute to poverty. For example, Dr. David Hilfiker, in his book Poverty in Urban America: Its Causes and Cures, says: "Causes of poverty are always multiple, interrelated, and mutually reinforcing. It is the combined, intertwined effect of these various factors that is so intractable." Hilfiker lists several causes:

• Racial Discrimination: "the history of discrimination helped to create the ghetto environment."
• Segregation: "Continuing, imposed, severe segregation of African Americans from the rest of society is the single most important cause of urban black poverty"
• Education: "Because elementary and secondary schools are primarily funded through local taxes, cities with large numbers of poor people have fewer resources per child and are therefore less able to fund decent education" (emphasis in the original).
• Health Care: "Poor people, therefore, cannot afford to purchase insurance on their own, so they remain uncovered, spending significant percentages of their income on doctor or emergency room visits, especially if they have young children."
• Criminal Justice System: "Since ex-cons find it much harder to get jobs, the impact of the criminal justice system on poverty is doubly harsh."

Whether you agree with Hilfiker or not is not at issue here. The fact is, Hilfiker's list does not include zip codes. For HUD, it's all about the acquisition of power and for Obama it’s the transformation of the Republic and the elimination of private property.

Hilfiker concludes by stating, "As long as ghettos exist, most of the people who live there will be poor." Gosh, I didn't realize that ghetto-creating segregation was imposed on anyone. Did I miss something here? I thought that imposing segregation was unlawful. I guess that AFFH, by imposing HUD's will, will be able to eliminate ghettos one zip code at a time. Imposing segregation: bad; imposing AFFH: good. Or so HUD thinks. Consistency is not one of HUD's strengths.

Of the AFFH program, Edward Pinto, of the American Enterprise Institute, said:

“This is just the latest of a series of attempts by HUD to social engineer the American people. It started with public housing and urban renewal, which failed spectacularly back in the 50's and 60's. They tried it again in the 90's when they wanted to transform house finance, do away with down payments, and the result was millions of foreclosures and financial collapse.”

For HUD, history and past performance doesn't count. As Thomas Sowell stated:

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

And from Rob Astorino, of the Westchester County Executive (the head of the executive branch of the Westchester County NY government), we get this perspective:

“What they [Donovan and HUD] are trying to do is to say discrimination and zoning is the same thing. They are not. Discrimination won't be tolerated. I won't tolerate it. Zoning though, protects what can and can't be built in a neighborhood.”

As Marilyn Assenheim writing in the Patriot Update states:

“The Imperial President has seized another chunk of our freedom…again. Loss of freedom begins with baby steps. Perhaps when one’s high-water usage toilet is confiscated in favor of “water saving” models that must be flushed three times to do the same job as one flush from the original. Then, suddenly, we find that government mandated healthcare is now the law of the land. Involvement is mandatory and is being governed through the yet-to-be-fettered IRS. Failure to participate results in escalating fines which become usurious, rapidly. Now, here comes the regime’s Department of Housing and Urban Development. If you think where and how you live is exclusively up to you, think again.

…

The Lyin’ King (Barack Obama) will not be satisfied until every man, woman and child in the nation has had their freedom squashed under his rapacious thumb. HUD has taken community organizing nationwide and no one is immune. Call AFFH what it is; it is: The Lyin’ King’s recreation of America. The steps aren’t tiny anymore.”

We are losing our freedoms one step at a time. AFFH is just the latest manifestation of that loss.

On a tangential note, where do Carter and Obama rank as presidents? Interestingly, in a poll conducted by Siena College (2010), and published by US News and World Report, two hundred thirty eight presidential scholars ranked Barack Obama as 15th. But the poll's validity can be questioned, as the scholars ranked Obama as 6th in imagination, 7th in communication ability, 8th in intelligence, and 10th in ability to compromise. I guess that the "presidential scholars" were hand-picked by Siena College for their ability to ignore what Obama is currently doing and provide the rankings it sought. I certainly would recommend passing on Siena College for a college education. By the way, the poll ranked Carter 32nd.

Inalienable vs. Unalienable

“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.” — Thomas Jefferson

I am sick and tired of hearing people misuse these two words when referring to the Declaration of Independence. First let me quote what Jefferson wrote (with Franklin’s edit) in the final document that was approved by the delegates of July 2, 1776.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Below is a replica of the mark-up version that was edited by the committee of five including; Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania and Robert R. Livingston of New York:

According to the Merriam-Webster On Line Dictionary “Inalienable” is defined as: “incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred.”

On the other hand the Free Dictionary defines “Unalienable” as: “Not to be separated, given away, or taken away.”

While this is a subtle difference it must be noted than when quoting the Declaration you must use “Unalienable” if you wish to quote it accurately.

To find the origins of the word unalienable, we can look at the root, alien, which comes from the Latin alienus, meaning "of or belonging to another." This provides the basis for our word, with the prefix un- providing the turnaround "not," and the suffix -able providing the idea of capability. Therefore, we get “not able to be denied.” Oh, and if you are wondering about the common argument as to whether it is "unalienable" or "inalienable," either is correct in there meaning of the Declaration, but Jefferson used “unalienable” in his writing.

According to U.S. History.Org:

The question is often asked, "Is the word in the Declaration of Independence unalienable or is it inalienable?"

The final version of the Declaration uses the word "unalienable." Some earlier drafts used the word "inalienable," which is the term our modern dictionaries prefer. The two words mean precisely the same thing.

According to The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style from Houghton Mifflin Company:

“The unalienable rights that are mentioned in the Declaration of Independence could just as well have been inalienable, which means the same thing. Inalienable or unalienable refers to that which cannot be given away or taken away.”

In a footnote in "The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas" by Carl Lotus Becker, published 1922, we learn:

The Rough Draft reads "[inherent &] inalienable." There is no indication that Congress changed "inalienable" to "unalienable"; but the latter form appears in the text in the rough Journal, in the corrected Journal, and in the parchment copy. John Adams, in making his copy of the Rough Draft, wrote "unalienable." Adams was one of the committee which supervised the printing of the text adopted by Congress, and it may have been at his suggestion that the change was made in printing. "Unalienable" may have been the more customary form in the eighteenth century.

While all of this sounds much like a tempest in a teapot and the words mean virtually the same you should use “Unalienable” when quoting the Declaration.

I recently saw a TV ad for Sam Adams beer with a spokesman quoting the Declaration as he poured a glass of the golden brew — a beer I happen to like. He did quote the Declaration using “unalienable”, but left out the important phrase “that they are endowed by their Creator.” Here is what the as states:

“Why name a beer after Samuel Adams? Because Samuel Adams signed the Declaration of Independence,” the bartender says. “He believed there was a better way to live: all men are created equal. They are endowed with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Smooth, flavorful, we bow to no kings. Samuel Adams Boston lager: declare your independence.”

Perhaps you may remember that President Obama had a habit in late 2010 and early 2011 of doing the same thing:

By the way, you may be wondering why “endowed by their Creator” is such an important phrase. Well, as scholars will tell you, rights granted by God shouldn’t be taken away — rights given by man can change with the wind.

This was not an oversight by Sam Adams Brewery — According to a spokesperson’s explanation to Fox News the brewery decided to cut the “Creator” phrase because it violated the Beer Institute’s guidelines on not using religion in commercials, from the purported explanation:

“The Beer Institute Advertising Code says, beer advertising and marketing materials should not include religion or religious themes. We agree with that and try to adhere to these guidelines. While we understand your objection to the omission of the phrase “by our creator” in other circumstances (after all, they occur in the Declaration of independence which Samuel Adams signed and helped author) we believe it would be outside our industry guidelines to invoke those religious words in a beer commercial.”

Sure enough, according to a section on the Beer Institute’s website, the group does discourage such a practice. You can see it below listed as number seven:

7.) Beer advertising and marketing materials should not employ religion or religious themes.

While for many that may not excuse the decision, it may at least explain it. After all, the counterargument could simply be that if a company is not going to adhere to a quote — especially such an important one — then why use it at all?

I don’t think the Declaration of Independence is a religious theme just because there is mention of “Creator.” We have become so political correct in our speech that we have lost all concept of what our revolution was about. The imposition of this political correct language s how the progressive left has been able to get its agenda adopted by more and more Americans. When does the Beer Institute’s advertising guidelines trump the Declaration of Independence?

It’s acceptable to run commercials touting Planned Parenthood, an organization that kills babies in the name of “pro-choice.” It is okay to run commercials for Viagra and Cialis in prime time and for Trojan vibrators on TV, but you cannot quote the Declaration of Independence in a beer commercial. Didn’t Jesus turn water into wine at the wedding of Cana?

The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), an atheist activist non-profit, is behind a new full-page newspaper ad that decries the notion that America was founded on Christianity and the Bible. A portion of the contentious text reads, “Celebrate Our Godless Constitution,” and it features the faces and quotes from some of the nation’s most prominent Founding Fathers.

The effort, according to the FFRF’s website, praises the U.S.’s “godless constitution.” Created in response to craft store chain Hobby Lobby’s advertisements about faith in America (the company has posted these in newspapers across the U.S. since 2008).

“The ads quote U.S. Founders and Framers on their strong views against religion in government, and often critical views on religion in general,” reads a press release announcing the atheist effort. “The ad features two revolutionaries and Deists, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, and the first four presidents: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.”

People reading the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune and other daily newspapers across America will likely be surprised when they are greeted with today’s atheist-laden history lesson.

“The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion,” reads one of the quotes (a portion of a treaty that was once signed by John Adams).

 

The Founding Fathers were highly educated men. It has been said that in those days they knew almost all of man’s knowledge available. It has been estimated that their education level would be equal to a grade 17 (Seventeen years of education) as opposed to the average education of our representatives today, an estimated 9th to 10th grade level. The founding fathers based all rights upon the concept of “Nature’s God” because those rights would be immutable. They used that term because it does several things. No one could argue that if it is God, he created nature and his laws are reflected in nature and will also be in science. All people had a way to come to the same conclusion. But the argument as to whether the above is true or not can be read in their words. These were indeed brilliant men who meant what they said and said what they meant. We, as a Nation, need to remember what it was they knew and begin to reverse the ruinous course we on one towards the tyranny of the state and the minority.

It matters not that our Founders called it “Nature’s God”, the “Creator” The “Supreme Judge”, or “divine Providence” they were referring to God.

The Tyranny of our Ever Expanding Government

“Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known and less fixed?” — James Madison, Federalist No. 62 — 1788

When writing about the tyranny of a mutable government and the legislature passing long and complicated laws of which no one could comprehend and obey James Madison raises the very forceful point. He stated that citizens will find it very difficult to obey the law if it is constantly changing (“mutable government”), either by growing enormously in size to be beyond the grasp ordinary people, or by being incoherent, or being repealed or revised before they are promulgated.

Today we have the situation where massive and complicated laws, like ObamaCare (over 3,000 pages) are passed without having been read or debated by the legislators themselves, let alone discussed in the press and by the people. When this sad state has been reached, the law itself, as Madison eloquently says, “poisons the blessings of liberty.” James Madison stated in Federalist No. 62:

“To trace the mischievous effects of a mutable government would fill a volume. I will hint a few only, each of which will be perceived to be a source of innumerable others.

In the first place, it forfeits the respect and confidence of other nations, and all the advantages connected with national character. An individual who is observed to be inconstant to his plans, or perhaps to carry on his affairs without any plan at all, is marked at once by all prudent people, as a speedy victim to his own unsteadiness and folly. His more friendly neighbors may pity him, but all will decline to connect their fortunes with his: and not a few will seize the opportunity of making their fortunes out of his. One nation is to another, what one individual is to another; with this melancholy distinction perhaps, that the former, with fewer of the benevolent emotions than the latter, are under fewer restraints also from taking undue advantage of the indiscretions of each other. Every nation, consequently, whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability, may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors. But the best instruction on this subject is unhappily conveyed to America by the example of her own situation. She finds that she is held in no respect by her friends; that she is the derision of her enemies; and that she is a prey to every nation which has an interest in speculating on her fluctuating councils and embarrassed affairs.

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uniformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any way affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the FEW, not for the MANY.

In another point of view, great injury results from an unstable government. The want of confidence in the public councils damps every useful undertaking, the success and profit of which may depend on a continuance of existing arrangements. What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not but that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed? What farmer or manufacturer will lay himself out for the encouragement given to any particular cultivation or establishment, when he can have no assurance that his preparatory labors and advances will not render him a victim to an inconstant government? In a word, no great improvement or laudable enterprise can go forward which requires the auspices of a steady system of national policy.

But the most deplorable effect of all is that diminution of attachment and reverence which steals into the hearts of the people, towards a political system which betrays so many marks of infirmity, and disappoints so many of their flattering hopes. No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.”

In Federalist Paper 10, probably the most important of the Federalist Papers, James Madison, writing as Publius, addresses the Tyranny of the Majority trough Factions.

“Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true.”

As I have stated in previous blogs in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.” In this context, it is irrelevant who resides in the White House or holds the House speaker’s gavel. America is not a nation of laws, but of rules. Only a renewed cultural will to true reform, coupled with political leadership, can correct that.

Today we are experiences the worst of our Founder’s fears. An unfettered executive branch coupled with a legislative branch that is so encumbered with factions that it no longer serves the will of the people. This combination of ills has formed a fourth branch of government — the administrative state.

I have written numerous times about the history and tyrannical effects of the administrative state and how it is slowly destroying the republic our Founders envisioned. The latest egregious example is the Senate passed 1,200 page immigration bill that contains so much pork a pig farmer would have problems weighing it. It contains cars for immigrants to placate Senator Barry Sanders of New Hampshire and subsidies for the Alaskan fishing industry. It states that the counterfeiting of no more than three U.S. passports is not a crime. While allowing for the hiring of 20,000 additional border patrol agents and building a fence along the entire border it gives the Department of Homeland Security the power to cancel the fence construction at any time at their discretion.

Today a landmark Supreme Court ruling that struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act has set up a stand-off between Republican-led states and the Obama administration over controversial voting laws that until now had been stalled.

The 5-4 ruling on Tuesday addressed a 1960s-era provision that largely singled out states and districts in the South — those with a history of discrimination — and required them to seek federal permission to change their voting laws.

The court ruled that the formula determining which states are affected was unconstitutional.

In doing so, the court potentially opened the door for certain states to proceed with voter ID laws and other efforts that to date had been held up because of the Voting Rights Act. Prominent among those are voter identification laws in Alabama and Mississippi.

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder has claimed that he does not agree with the ruling and will continue to do all he can to force states to abide by his edicts

Attorney General Eric Holder warned states against going too far. He said the Justice Department would not hesitate to take "swift" action against states looking to "take advantage" of the ruling.

He, like President Obama, said he was "deeply disappointed" in the decision, saying discriminatory practices live on and need to be addressed.

"These problems have not been consigned to history," Holder said.

Holder and Obama urged Congress to create a new formula.

"Today's decision invalidating one of its core provisions upsets decades of well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair, especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically prevalent," Obama said.

To read more on this decision click here.

In another example of the power of the administrative state today Obama declared his war on coal even though throughout the 2012 election campaigned he denied such a war on coal or guns.

So much for the denials. An administration that throughout its 2012 election campaign denied it was waging a War on Coal has now come out and publicly declared its intention to shut down coal-fired power plants – putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work and sending electricity prices skyrocketing.

This is not what the American people voted for.

Responding to a White House petition to end the War on Coal, the administration said: “The President has made clear that he understands that coal has played a critical role in our country’s energy portfolio for decades and will continue to be an important source of energy in the future.”

Sycophantic liberal media outlets (like The Nation and the Associated Press) went further, repeatedly claiming that the War on Coal was a myth. The Obama campaign even ran a TV ad in Ohio claiming that Mitt Romney would be bad for coal – and trotted out former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland to deny there was a war on coal and echo the attacks on Romney.

Yet today Obama political consultant David Plouffe took to Twitter to bang his chest: “Today's climate announcement underscores that elections matter greatly” – as if Obama had campaigned on shutting down coal plants instead of on denying his intention to do so.

Such denials are no longer necessary. Today a top Obama global warming adviser told The New York Times the denials were just election-year politics. Daniel Schrag said: “Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.

And Obama delivered. It’s right there on page 19 of his Climate Action Plan: “Going forward, we will promote fuel-switching from coal to gas for electricity production.”

Indeed, Obama made clear in his speech that he intends to impose regulations on existing coal plants that can only be met through carbon capture and storage (technology that doesn’t exist on a commercial scale), switching to natural gas, or shutting down completely.

Coal still produces 37 percent of U.S. electricity. A Heritage Foundation analysis found that implementing Obama’s proposed regulation on existing coal plants would destroy more than 500,000 jobs, slash the income of a typical family of four more than $1,400 a year, and increase electricity prices at least 20 percent. Price spikes could be much higher in states that depend heavily on coal-fired power plants, especially in the Midwest. President Obama once famously explained that he intended to make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.”

Obama intends to fight his War on Coal by issuing a Presidential Memorandum to the EPA to issue regulations under the 1970 Clean Air Act. This is despite the fact that the law’s principal author, Democrat John Dingell of Michigan, famously said: “This is not what was intended by the Congress and by those of us who wrote the Clean Air Act. We are beginning to look at a wonderfully complex world, which has the potential for shutting down or slowing down virtually all industry and all economic activity and growth.”

And there is zero global warming benefit to go with all the economic costs, because even if all United States greenhouse gas emissions were shut down to zero tomorrow, the rest of the world would keep on puffing. Paul Knappenberger recently calculated, based on standard assumptions, that getting to zero emissions in the U.S. immediately would only reduce global average temperatures an imperceptible 0.08 degrees Celsius by 2050. Moreover, the rest of the world would replace all U.S. emissions within seven years.

So it’s all pain and no gain — by legally dubious means — to accomplish the opposite of what Obama promised on the campaign trail. Congress should take exception to being circumvented and step in to stop Obama’s (now-declared) War on Coal.

Once again it is plain to see that complex laws passed by a willing legislature leave the door open for the executive branch to do just about anything it wants under the color of law. This is truly a feature of the administrative state where the masterminds call the shots and self-government is a thing of the past. So much for the Republic Mr. Franklin.

On the other hand 62 Tea Party representatives dealt a blow to the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives when they gather enough support to defeat an overblown Farm Bill on June 20^th.

The GOP leadership suffered a stunning defeat as 62 Republicans voted against the 5-year farm bill (H.R. 1947), which locks in the record baseline of food stamp spending and creates multiple new agriculture subsidy programs. A handful of them voted against it because it cut too much spending, and others like Bill Shuster voted no because they are facing potential primary challenges (Shuster voted for the 2008 bill). But this is a strong showing, as it is a dynamic none of us would have ever predicted several years ago.

Some Republicans are complaining that because of the conservative revolt we will now continue on the status quo with direct farm subsidies. But they fail to understand that the new price support programs and shallow loss coverage that were created by this bill would have been more expensive and represent worse market distortions than direct subsidies. It’s better to reauthorize the status quo than to pass a long-term bill that creates even more problems and precludes real reforms for another 5 years.

Other Republicans complain that now we will face the so-called milk cliff. Pursuant to a silly 1949 act of Congress, every time we fail to renew expiring farm programs, the government must begin imposing Soviet-style price controls on milk by decreasing supplies through massive purchases of milk, butter, cheese, and other dairy products. Under permanent law, the USDA would begin purchasing dairy products at a rate of $38.54 per hundredweight; more than double the current price ($18 per hundredweight). This market manipulation could double the price of milk, dairy products, and everything else up the food chain.

But instead of avoiding the deleterious effects of the Agriculture Act of 1949 by growing government, why don’t we just repeal the damn law?

In a sane world, both houses of Congress would convene and repeal this inane and outdated law within a few minutes by unanimous consent. That way we could debate a long-term farm bill without having the sword of the 1949 law brandished over our necks and forcing Congress to rush through bad legislation.

However, Congress is not sane, and they have no plans to repeal the law. In fact, Paul Broun introduced an amendment to do just that, but all the Democrats and more than half of Republicans voted it down.

The latest ephemeral trend in Washington is to create a contrived crisis for the purpose of growing government, increasing spending, or raising taxes. The new “milk cliff” is just the latest in the bag of tricks held by the permanent statist class.

Moving forward, we must split up the farm bill into two components; food stamps and agriculture programs. Food stamps must be devolved to the states and most agricultural subsidies need to be means-tested and charted on a gradual course towards elimination. And most of all, the dairy supply control system must be repealed once and for all in a standalone piece of legislation.

That would represent responsible conservative reform that is becoming of a GOP-controlled House. Working harder to buy off Democrats with more spending increases is not the way forward. If Kevin McCarthy and Eric Cantor desire to grow government with Democrat support, maybe they should run for the Pelosi whip team.

The American people elected a Republican House to provide a bold contrast to the Obama-Pelosi agenda, not to work behind the scenes to help grow government with their support.

You can read more about the defeat of the trillion dollar food stamp and farm bill by clicking here.

One of the things all tyrannical regimes such as the administrative state does is to compile a list of enemies. These enemies are defined as those who do not agree with their policies and could pose a threat to their agenda.

The vast majority of the annual shooting homicides are committed by inner-city and minority youths below the age of 30. Handguns are involved in 80% of all murders. Rifles and shotguns account for less than 10% of homicides.

No matter; the National Rifle Association is now blamed for generic gun violence, especially the mass shootings at schools, even though usually no one knows of any proposed gun law — barring outright confiscation of previously purchased firearms, bullets, and clips — that would have prevented the shooters at Sandy Hook and Columbine. Gun merchants are blamed by the president while in Mexico for selling lethal semi-automatic weapons to drug cartels. But so far, the only identifiable purveyor of illegal weaponry is the president’s own attorney general, whose subordinates in the Fast and Furious operation sold hundreds of guns illegally to Mexican drug lords.

Suggestions to encourage greater incarceration of the mentally unstable, to jawbone Hollywood about its profitable (and gratuitous) gun violence, to regulate extremely violent — and extremely well-selling — video games usually fall on deaf liberal ears. In short, the stereotyped camouflaged, weekend gun enthusiast is not the problem that leads to Columbine, or the nearly 532 murders last year in Chicago. But because we can’t or won’t address the causes of the latter, we go after the former. He is not the unhinged sort that shoots a Gabby Giffords or innocents in an Aurora, Colorado, theater; but somehow is the supposed red-neck yokel that a journalist like ABC’s Brian Ross assumes does.

If the Department of Homeland Security, as is rumored, really did wish to stockpile hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition, then why did it begin such repository buying right in the middle of a hysterical national debate about limiting access to various rifles and semi-automatic weapons? Was it not to create a climate of fear and panic buying that has emptied America’s shelves of the most popular types of ammunition? If the homicide rate in Philadelphia and Chicago is any indication, murderers still have plenty of access to bullets. Those who want to target practice or shoot a varmint on their property do not.

The CIA and FBI knew of the suspicious activity of the Boston bombers, of Major Hasan, and of Anwar al-Awlaki. And they did nothing to preempt their violence. The FBI is said to be carefully avoiding monitoring mosques, although all of the above terrorists were known by many fellow Muslim worshipers to be either disturbed or extremist or both. In contrast, the NSA monitors, we are told, nearly everyone’s communications rather than focusing on Middle Eastern male Muslims, even though Middle Eastern male Muslims have been involved in the vast majority of post-9/11 terrorist plots. The NSA is the electronic version of the TSA, which feels it is noble and liberal to stop an octogenarian in a wheel chair for special frisking as proper compensation for every focused look at a West Bank resident or Pakistani visitor on his way into the United States.

The words “Tea Party” and “patriot” in a non-profit’s name would more likely earn a negative appraisal from the IRS than would “Islam” or “Muslim.” One wonders how Lois Lerner’s IRS division would treat a hypothetical “Sarah Palin Foundation” versus “The Dr. Zawahiri Charity.”

The IRS is not worried at all about 47% of the nation who pay no federal income taxes. The vast majority of those whom it focuses on are instead the 10% who pay over 70% of all taxes. These are the would-be proverbial “fat cats” who did not build their own businesses. They are reluctant to spread their wealth. They certainly did not know either when to stop making money or when the age of profit altogether had passed. Sometime around 2009 success was deemed failure, and failure success — at least if we collate the president fat-cat rhetoric with the vast expansion in the disability, food-stamp, and unemployment-insurance rolls.

Note that the IRS is not interested in leaking to Democrat senators or former administration official rumors about George Soros’s income or the details of the tax returns of Warren Buffett, Steven Spielberg, or Bill Gates. Instead, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate bragged that he knew (falsely as it turned out) that Mitt Romney paid no income taxes. And former high administration official Austan Goolsbee claimed (also falsely as it turned out) that he too knew that the Koch brothers were shorting the IRS.

Note that only liberal groups like ProPublica leak information about the confidential donor lists of conservative activists, apparently given their familiar arrangement with the IRS. So far IRS chiefs are not looking at prominent Democrat politicians for tax violations, although for a time — cf. Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle, Hilda Solis — that might have been a fruitful profile for inquiry. (One encouraging side note: if you are a suspect white, mature, well-off, conservative, heterosexual, Christian male, you can still obtain exemption from federal suspicion by loudly announcing that you also are enthralled by Barack Obama.)

We know who was not an administration suspect in the killing of four Americans in Benghazi — hard-core, al Qaeda-related Islamic terrorists. Instead a supposedly right-wing unhinged video-maker was the object of vitriol from the secretary of state, the UN ambassador, and the president of the United States. He currently sits in jail. The known perpetrators of the murders walk free. In contrast, Lisa Jackson, the former EPA director, just got a fat inside job from Apple, despite creating not just a fictitious name (e.g., “Richard Windsor”) to avoid scrutiny when she communicated official business, but also an entirely made-up alter ego: “Richard Windsor” became an ideal employee lauded by the unethical EPA for his supposedly “ethical behavior.”

We also know who in the media is not a target. Not the CBS or ABC News presidents who have siblings working in the White House. Not ABC’s Good Morning America, given that one of its stalwarts is married to Press Secretary Jay Carney. Instead, there are two sorts of suspicious reporters that are considered hostile to the administration and worthy of having their communications monitored. One group are those journalists who leak information that the administration wished to preempt and leak first or who refuse to only leak favorable classified information — the bin Laden trove, the cyber war against Iran, the drone targeting protocol — that makes the president look as if he were a competent commander in chief.

The other target, of course, is Fox News, whose staff, in a variety of ways and on a number of occasions, the Obama administration has previously attacked as in some way illegitimate.

Again, who fits these profiles that our current, vastly expanding big government does not like? If you are an operator of a coal plant that creates needed energy at a profit, then beware that the EPA is after you. If you are a shady insider who wants tens of millions of government dollars to subsidize a money-losing wind and solar plant, you hit the jackpot. Ditto the suspect people who build guitars, loan money to Chrysler, or wish to locate a jet airliner plant in South Carolina. Profits create suspicion; failures earn subsidies.

Then there are the clingers, whom the president long ago blasted as religious zealots and gun-toting xenophobes. These are the sorts whom the attorney general calls “cowards” (not “my people”) — the “enemies” whom the president advises Latino activists to “punish” at the polls, the sorts that the president apologizes for abroad as guilty of sundry sorts of past class, race, and gender oppression.

In contrast, who is not so worried about government surveillance or audit? The New Black Panthers who turned up at a polling station in Philadelphia to intimidate voters; the “farmers” who, according to the New York Times, filed bogus claims to cash in on the government’s ill-advised and poorly administered Pigford settlement; the Secret Service agents who routinely visited prostitutes while on duty protecting high government officials abroad; and the assistant to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who used her office to enhance her private consulting business.

Americans wonder whom would the immigration services more likely wish to deport: the German Romeike family that was “guilty” of homeschooling their children; Obama’s aunt Zeituni, who lied about her immigration status to illegally obtain state and federal subsidies; or Onyango Obama, who likewise is here illegally (for 21 years) and was recently charged with ramming a police car while driving intoxicated? Is the U.S. so short of DUI offenders and frauds that we must deport homeschoolers to make room for them?

There is currently a climate of fear growing throughout the United States. Millions of Americans are terrified of the IRS, the Department of Justice, the EPA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and even perhaps the FBI, CIA, and State Department.

Why?

These government agencies have never been bigger, more powerful, and more ideologically driven. Citizens fear them for understandable reasons: those who do nothing wrong, whether in filing tax forms or trying to buy a rifle, are considered suspect and deserving to be the target of either federal scrutiny or presidential slurs. But those who do a great deal of wrong, either by illegally entering the country, disrupting polling, trafficking in weapons in Mexico, eavesdropping on American citizens, pulling tax information for partisan purposes, subverting a government agency, or lying to the public about government activity, seem exempt from punishment — and, more chillingly, sense that they are so exempt.

Ask who now is sitting in prison — a shyster video-maker who had nothing to do with the deaths of four Americans, or their five known terrorist killers lounging about in North Africa? Apparently, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, like EPA director Lisa Jackson, was guilty of creating a fake persona. Like Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, he had a lien on her business. Like former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, he had some unpaid taxes. Like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he had been visited by government investigators. Like Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, he lied to federal authorities — although they were not quite as high as those in the U.S. Congress. And unlike all of the above, he was therefore jailed.

Of all the legacies of Barack Obama, the most pernicious will be the creation of a rogue government that has cut off and terrified half the population — and for no other reason than that they seem to represent things that Mr. Obama simply does not seem to understand.

The truth is that governments are always like pitchers trying to pitch out of a jam with all the bases loaded. We the people want a little free stuff. The ruling class wants to seize and hold political power. Promising free stuff is how you get elected. This what James Madison knew when he authored Federalist No. 10.

Usually, those vote-buying promises result in policies that damage the economy. President Obama has been worse than most. The result is that politicians and their officials are always involved in trying to Band-Aid over the distortions and the wounds they have inflicted on the economy and our freedoms in their crude bid for power.

Can You Speak the Truth without Punishment?

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” — John Adams, 'Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,' December 1770.

In today’s climate of political correctness people are being punished for speaking the truth — even when they have the facts on their side.

Before I continue let me once again explain the theory of cognitive dissonance that often explains apparent irrational behavior. In a nutshell, this theory holds that people are uncomfortable when holding two opposing ideas or beliefs (this is called dissonance). To reduce discomfort, people will achieve consistence by such tactics as denying one view or avoiding situations that expose contradictions. The classic study is Leon Festinger's When Prophecy Fails, where the day of an end-of-the world UFO cult's exact prediction of the world's demise came and passed, but they nevertheless reinvigorated their prediction rather than admit foolishness.

By all accounts, today's college campuses grow more intolerant by the day. We move closer to the old Soviet Empire, where political dissidents risked the gulag for even joking about Marxism. In the U.S., however, the hate crimes concern anything that touches on race, ethnicity, gender differences, diversity, and sexuality (see here). Even an old-fashioned ethnic joke almost guarantees mandatory counseling.

According to Greg Lukianoff writing in the Wall Street Journal — The Justice and Education departments issue a dangerous new speech code for colleges:

“The scandals roiling Washington over the past two weeks involve troubling government behavior that had been hidden—the IRS targeting of conservative groups and the Justice Department's surveillance of the Associated Press, among others. Largely overlooked amid the histrionics has been a shocker hiding in plain sight. Last week, the Obama administration moved to dramatically undermine students' and faculty rights at colleges across the country.

The new policy was announced in a joint letter from the Education Department and Justice Department to the University of Montana. The May 9 letter addressed the results of a year-long joint investigation by the departments into the school's mishandling of several serious sexual-assault cases. The investigation determined that the university's policies addressing sexual assault failed to comply with Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

But the joint letter, which announced a "resolution agreement" with the university, didn't stop there. It then proceeded to rewrite the federal government's rules about sexual harassment and free speech on campus.

If that sounds hyperbolic, consider the letter itself. The first paragraph declares that the Montana findings should serve as a "blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country." After outlining the specifics of the case, the letter states that only a stunningly broad definition of sexual harassment—"unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature"—will now satisfy federal statutory requirements. This explicitly includes "verbal conduct," otherwise known as speech.”

Skeptics need only look at the pervasiveness of campus speech codes, coerced sensitivity training, the mandatory injection of multicultural propaganda into courses, and other top-down censorship. Even an exposed hate crime hoax has become a "teachable moment." None of this existed in the 1950s and 1960s

Nevertheless, just when you thought that imposing the PC orthodoxy could not get any worse, it does. The latest example concerns the firing of Jason Richwine from the Heritage Foundation. Richwine's heresies can be found in his 2009 Harvard dissertation, not anything he said or did while employed at Heritage. He asserted that racial/ethnic groups differed in genetic-based IQ and then suggested that U.S. immigration policy might recognize these differences when dealing with immigration from Mexico.

Here is part of what Patrick Buchanan wrote in Townhall.com regarding Richwine’s firing from Heritage:

“Jason Richwine, the young conservative scholar who co-authored the Heritage Foundation report on the long-term costs of the amnesty bill backed by the "Gang of Eight," is gone from Heritage.

He was purged after The Washington Post unearthed his doctoral dissertation at the JFK School of Government.

Richwine's thesis:

IQ tests fairly measure mental ability. The average IQ of immigrants is well below that of white Americans. This difference in IQ is likely to persist through several generations.

And the potential consequences of this?

"A lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market."

Richwine defended his 166-page thesis before Harvard's George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser and Christopher Jencks, who once edited The New Republic. But while his thesis was acceptable at Harvard -- it earned Richwine a Ph.D. -- it has scandalized the Potomac priesthood.

Our elites appear unanimous: Richwine's view that intelligence is not equally distributed among ethnic and racial groups, and is partly inherited, is rankest heresy. Yet no one seems to want to prove him wrong.

Consider Richwine's contention that differences in mental ability exist and seem to persist among racial and ethnic groups.

In The Wall Street Journal last month, Warren Kozak noted that 28,000 students in America's citadel of diversity, New York City, took the eighth-grade exam to enter Stuyvesant, the Bronx School of Science and Brooklyn Tech, the city's most elite high schools. Students are admitted solely on their entrance test scores.

Of the 830 students who will be entering Stuyvesant as freshmen this fall, 1 percent are black, 3 percent are Hispanic, 21 percent are white -- and 75 percent are Asian.

Now, blacks and Hispanics far outnumber Asians in New York. But at Stuyvesant, Asians will outnumber blacks and Hispanics together 19-to-1.

Is this the result of racially biased tests at Stuyvesant?

At Berkeley, crown jewel of the California university system, Hispanics, 40 percent of California's population and an even larger share of California's young, are 12 percent of the freshman class. Asians, outnumbered almost 3-to-1 by Hispanics in California, have almost four times as many slots as Hispanics in the freshman class. Another example of racial bias?

The 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, which measures the academic ability of 15-year-olds worldwide, found the U.S.A. falling to 17th in reading, 23rd in science, 31st in math.

Yet, Spain aside, not one Hispanic nation, from which a plurality of our immigrants come, was among the top 40 in reading, science or math.

But these folks are going to come here and make us No. 1 again?

Is there greater "underclass behavior" among Hispanics?

The crime rate among Hispanics is about three times that of white Americans, while the Asian crime rate is about a third that of whites.

Among white folks, the recent illegitimacy rate was 28 percent; among Hispanics, 53 percent. According to one study a few years back, Hispanics were 19 times as likely as whites to join gangs.

What about Richwine's point regarding "social trust"?

Six years ago, in "E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century," Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone," wrote that after 30,000 interviews he found that ethnic and racial diversity can be devastating to communities and destructive of community values.

In racially mixed communities, Putnam wrote, not only do people not trust strangers, they do not even trust their own kind.

"People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down,' that is, to pull in like a turtle ... (to) withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television."

With the immigration bill granting amnesty to 12 million illegals, an open door to their dependents and a million new immigrants each year, almost all from the Third World, America in 2040 is going to look like Los Angeles today. Yet, it was in L.A. that Putnam found social capital at its most depleted and exhausted.

If Richwine is right, America in 2040 will be a country with whites and Asians dominating the professions, and 100 million Hispanics concentrated in semiskilled work and manual labor.

The issues Richwine raises go to the question of whether we shall survive as one nation and one people.

If our huge bloc of Hispanics, already America's largest minority at 53 million, is fed by constant new immigration, but fails for a couple of generations to reach the middle-class status that Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians and Poles attained after two generations, what becomes of our "indivisible" nation?

Rather than face this question, better to purge and silence the Harvard extremist who dared to raise it.”

It's pointless to debate this issue here, but let's just say the scientific evidence for this assertion satisfied his dissertation committee (which included the well-known liberal Christopher Jencks). Clearly, Richwine is not a crackpot, and the IQ/immigration nexus might warrant academic study.

Richwine's heresy has been widely (though often unfairly) condemned, but one such attack demands extra-special scrutiny, for it shines light into just how far campuses now go to burn witches. Here is part of a statement issued by 23 Harvard student organizations regarding Richwine's dissertation:

“Central to his claim is the idea that certain groups are genetically predisposed to be more intelligent than others. We condemn in unequivocal terms these racist claims as unfit for Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard University as a whole. Granting permission for such a dissertation to be published debases all of our degrees and hurts the University's reputation. Even if such claims had merit, the Kennedy School cannot ethically stand by this dissertation whose end result can only be furthering discrimination under the guise of academic discourse.”

In other words, though Richwine might be factually correct, his research should be condemned, since it tarnishes the Harvard degree and reputation and will only promote discrimination by giving it an academic veneer. Being offended now trumps intellectual freedom. Note well, the dissertation is already online, and there is zero chance of it being removed from the Harvard archives, so all of this denunciation is just speech-making, taking "a stand" against "hate." This is tantamount to Pope Urban VIII refusing to believe Galileo Galilei’s theories of heliocentrism because they believed that the planets revolved about the earth (geocentrism) because this what the Pope and Church always had believed and preached and the thought of people losing confidence in their dictum drove them to discredit Galileo. This is why he was punished. This is a perfect example of cognitive dissonance!

Ironically, absent this publicity, the dissertation would have remained obscure. Moreover, what harm will occur as a result of Richwine's assertions, regardless of veracity? Will the finally uncovered facts instigate violence? Will Hispanic workers be denied employment (or even fired) since employers now finally recognize their below-average. In short, other than getting a Harvard Ph.D. fired, this outrage accomplishes nothing.

How did this happen? Surely the 23 organizations are aware of academic freedom and the First Amendment. And surely they could read Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and the rejoinders before condemning Richwine. Obviously, something is very wrong when Harvard students are so easily roused to stamp out Orwell’s 1984 thought crimes.

Here's how cognitive dissonance applies to these book-burning Harvard students. From kindergarten onward, every one of them undoubtedly encountered firsthand some minority students who performed less well academically (including in classes at Harvard). Most also read about the academic problems of these minorities, including the billions spent on failed programs like Head Start. They likely also encountered the disproportionate achievements of Asian and Jewish classmates, an inescapable firsthand reality that closely matches Richwine's data.

Simultaneously, their teachers often told them the very opposite: all groups — blacks, Asians, Hispanics, men, and women — possess equal intellectual abilities, and "diversity makes us strong." In effect, youngsters are told to disregard a plain-to-see reality — trust only what your teachers and textbooks tell you. Yes, test scores and professional attainment are unequal, but these just reflect environmental advantages. Better yet, race really doesn't exist; it is just a social construct.

How is this conflict between an unavoidable reality and school learning to be reconciled? The solution, as we suggest, is to fervently denounce any evidence contradicting the political orthodoxy. Recall the Soviet Union circa the 1980s — don't fall for the capitalist propaganda about life being better in the West.

There is even an older example of this cognitive dissidence in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s allegory he presented with a group of men chained to a wall in a cave facing a large, blank wall. Behind them a fire burns. People and animals pass in front of the fire casting distorted shadows on the wall. When one of the men is released and goes out of the cave and witnesses the real world he is astonished. When he returns to tell the men in the cave what he has seen they refuse to believe him. They are more comfortable with their environment and the whole of their society depends on the shadows on the wall.

This allegory, another example of cognitive dissidence, is what our public education and university system is fostering on the students of today.

Such cognitive gymnastics are not easy, so every contradictory fact has to be hounded down and destroyed. Constant vigilance is necessary, and as tension grows, the greater the necessary exertion. It is insufficient to just opine, "Well, I disagree." Obliterating infuriating evidence demands public approbation and hyperbole lest anyone doubt one's commitment to the PC orthodoxy. Condemnation is not about Richwine per se; it is about sustaining a belief that plainly differs from reality. Recall the infamous Two Minutes Hate of Orwell's 1984. Anything less fervent might permit a bit of doubt to survive, and who knows? Like a cancerous cell, it might metastasize and lead to Klan membership.

Thus understood, the condemnation of Richwine by Harvard undergraduates and his dismissal from the Heritage Foundation cannot be softened, let alone reversed, by lecturing them on academic freedom or the value of intellectual honesty. It is equally pointless to explain that vulnerable Hispanics are safe from a heretofore obscure Harvard dissertation (or that the federal government is better-suited to protecting them). Rather, outrage reflects a crisis of faith, an ever-widening chasm between the PC orthodoxy and an indisputable reality. The parallel might be a Harvard undergraduate who believes in Socialism taking a course on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. This would be tantamount to the prisoner in the cave.

This indignation suggests that such assaults will only worsen, and, correspondingly, fewer and fewer researchers will venture into career-ending territory. After all, there seems no end to futile budget-busting efforts to bring about an egalitarian fantasy while educators continue the propaganda. Millions of youngsters will continue to hear about the joys of racial/ethnic differences while personally witnessing a world of ethnic strife. Stamping out heresies to solidify the faith will also intensify as universities hire yet more "anti-hate" specialists who discover yet more heresies.

I recall one seeing university president in a TV interview who, when asked if he had read The Bell Curve, said that not only had he not read the book, but he would not even think about reading it. Such is today's life of the mind. What's next? Requiring all college freshmen to sign a loyalty oath promising to expunge all bad thoughts? In this sense they will all be prisoners in Plato’s cave.