Sheriff Bradshaw and the Palm Beach County Psihuska

"What's the worst that can happen?" asks Bradshaw about targeting "anti-government extremists"....

“What does it hurt,” asked Sheriff Ric Bradshaw of Florida’s Palm Beach County, “to have somebody knock on the door and ask, `Hey, is everything OK?’”

The answer to that question obviously depends on the identity of the “Somebody” who is making that inquiry. What Sheriff Bradshaw had in mind was a strike force composed of deputies, social workers, and “mental health” professionals from a “Behavioral Sciences Unit” (BSU) who would be on-call twenty-four hours a day, ready to be deployed to visit the homes of what the Soviets used to call “socially dangerous people.” In the Soviet Union, such people would often be involuntarily committed to a psihuska, or psychiatric prison.

“We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor and he’s gonna shoot him,” Bradhsaw told the Palm Beach Post in describing the BSU, which would be funded through a $1 million grant from the state government. That grant hasn’t been formalized, but if the state legislature balks, it’s quite likely the Feds will chip in: In a speech last February 6 to the Alliance of DelRay Residential Organizations, Bradshaw said that he would prefer to fund the unit “through a federal grant.”

This is precisely the kind of pilot program the Feds would find worthwhile – indeed, it represents a model of “preventive intervention” that the federal government has been promoting for at least two decades.

In 1993, another law enforcement personality with roots in Florida, then-Attorney General Janet Reno, proposed the creation of specialized units composed of police and social workers who would fan out in troubled urban regions, knocking on doors, conducting “safety” evaluations, and connecting residents to government “services.”

 

... well, this is one possible answer.

During her reign of terror as Dade County Prosecutor – in which she displayed unalloyed viciousness in tearing children from their homes and persecuting innocent parents – Reno created “Neighborhood Resource Teams” teams composed of “community-friendly, highly respected police officers, social workers, public health nurses, [and] community organizers, working full time within a narrow neighborhood,” she recalled in a May 1993 speech to the National Forum on Prevention of Crime and Violence.

Reno had the temerity to offer her program as a national model just weeks after presiding over the April 19 holocaust at Waco, where she and her underlings provided the indispensable service of annihilating dozens of innocent children after torturing them for fifty-one days.

Like Reno, Bradshaw describes the purpose of his proposed Behavioral Science Unit in therapeutic terms. The objective, he insists, is “violence prevention” and “referral to services,” rather than an arrest. To those on the receiving end of that intervention, this distinction is entirely theoretical: Being taken into custody by armed strangers is an arrest, irrespective of the semantic camouflage, and every encounter between the public and the State’s costumed enforcers is pregnant with life-threatening violence against the innocent.

It should also be understood that Bradshaw’s real objective is not “violence prevention,” but rather civilian disarmament. This was also explained by the sheriff in his February 6 address. The purpose of the BSU, the sheriff said, is to “identify people with a propensity and inclination to go do violent things and stop them from accessing firearms.” A system of preemptive disarmament of people considered to be psychologically unstable or otherwise “dangerous” has actually been in place in Connecticut since 1999. Although it has resulted in the confiscation of firearms from thousands of innocent people, it did nothing to prevent the horror that unfolded last December at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Employing the services of “mental health professionals” to certify that people are dangerous to themselves or others would negate the need for an actual criminal prosecution. And for Bradshaw, the most potent indicator that a given individual is a “socially dangerous person” is a hatred for the institutionalized affliction called “government.”

The man accused of shooting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords “was telling other people about how much he hated government and government officials,” Bradshaw told his audience. The assumption here is that such opinions are symptoms of incipient criminal behavior. This is why the sheriff intends to create a 24-hour tipline through which neighbors, family, friends, and others can inform on people who display such dangerous attitudes.

“It’s the same principle that’s used by the Secret Service that’s very successful,” he insisted. The S.S. has a hotline that can be used to report impious and supposedly threatening comments about the murderous bureaucrat who occupies the Oval Office, on the assumption that blasphemy against the divine person of the Dear Leader is itself a criminal act.

While Bradshaw and others of his ilk regard idle words to be dangerous, if not criminal, they can’t see how people could perceive a threat in the sudden, unsolicited presence of armed state functionaries on their doorstep. After all, asks the sheriff, what would it hurt to send his deputies to confront people who aren’t suspected of a crime?

If he possessed a particle of honesty, Sheriff Bradshaw would pose that question to Dennis Gaydos, and listen carefully to the answer. Because of the kind ministrations of Bradshaw’s deputies, Gaydos is now missing an ear and an eye.

What makes his case an even more compelling precautionary example is the fact that, according to a lawsuit he filed against Bradshaw, Gaydos – a homeless man -- had “contacted a local assistance agency by telephone for the purpose of a referral for residential resources, financial aid, and general counseling.” While he was on the phone, the helpful social workers with whom he was speaking made a “referral” of their own to Bradshaw’s agency, which responded by dispatching a SWAT team.

Gaydos had established a shelter on a parcel of land behind a church. The pastor in charge of the congregation had given Gaydos permission to be there. Shortly after Gaydos called for help, a combined tactical force composed of deputies from the sheriff’s office and officers from the Palm Springs Police Department -- kitted out in paramilitary drag, carrying the familiar assortment of weapons, and supplemented with a helicopter -- set up a staging area near Gaydos’s shelter.

Although they were dealing with a sickly, unarmed homeless man who was not a criminal suspect, the Berserkers treated the incident as a combat situation. As they approached the encampment, Gaydos – who was holding his cell phone – stood up. Without a word of warning, he was shot twice in the head with rubber bullets. The first round damaged an ear; the second one destroyed his left eye. The assailants later tried to justify the head shots by claiming that they had seen a knife in Gaydos’s hand – but since no knife was ever recovered, this can be dismissed as a self-serving lie of the kind routinely offered by police officers after they kill or mutilate an innocent person.

Apparently satisfied merely to leave their victim partially deaf and partially blinded, the officers never arrested Gaydos. At the time of this March 2007 incident, the PBSO SWAT team was under the command of Lt. Dan Burrows, an oxycontin addict who was accused of stealing pain medicine and a rifle from a terminally ill former deputy.

About a year before the PBSO participated in the assault that mutilated Gaydos, Captain David Carhart, the head of the department’s violent crimes division, was purged from the force following multiple incidents in which he broke into the home of former girlfriends. One of them, Tracey Seberg, filed a complaint with the sheriff’s office – and Carhart responded by threatening to kill her if she didn’t retract it. According to Seberg, Carhart told her that he “felt like God when in uniform” and thus didn’t believe that he was subject to the rules that apply to mere Mundanes.

Although Carhart faced up to 15 years in prison for burglary and stalking, he was demoted to lieutenant and then quietly dismissed from the department in a mass layoff, receiving a $120,000 severance package.

Neither Burrows nor Carhart is presently available for duty with the Behavioral Science Unit. However, Sheriff Bradshaw will be able to make use of the services of Sgt. Brent Raban, a sociopath who was discharged from the force after boasting about his habit of beating suspects – and then reinstated, with the expectation of $150,000 in back pay, through the intervention of the police union.

Like the members of a hyper-violent police gang in Milwaukee, Sgt. Raban has an adolescent fixation on a comic book character called the Punisher. This wouldn’t be a problem to anybody else if Raban hadn’t been given a state-issued costume and official permission to act out his violent fantasies on helpless people. He advertised his intentions by accessorizing his costume with a camouflage-colored skullcap displaying the word “Punishment.”

“It’s not crime-fighting – I’m dealing out PUNISHMENT!” observed Raban in a 2009 Facebook post written while he was patrolling Belle Glade, a city whose residents are besieged by both private crime and officially-sanctioned police violence. Raban wasn’t concerned about facing charges, he gloated, because “Like a good batterer, I know the areas that hide the marks well.”  In another post he complained that it had been at least two weeks since he had beaten somebody, and that this prolonged dry spell had left him “itchy.”

When on-shift opportunities to beat handcuffed suspects became scarce, Raban found other ways to indulge what his boss calls a “propensity and inclination to go do violent things.” On one occasion he parked his squad car behind a school bus that was decanting young children, turned on his blue lights, and used his PA system to insult and upbraid parents who were picking up their kids – most likely in the hope that one of them would be provoked into offering him an excuse to inflict “punishment.”

From Sgt. Raban's Facebook page.

He was eventually fired after a woman in his neighborhood complained that he had parked his patrol car on the sidewalk in front of her home and used his position as a deputy to harass her family. 

By that time, Sheriff Bradshaw – who had reluctantly been forced to have Raban sign a “last-chance contract” – was compelled to fire Raban. But in Florida, as is the case in most other states, it is practically impossible to fire a law enforcement officer.

In April of this year, an arbitrator ordered Bradshaw to reinstate Raban and pay him back wages. According to the people responsible for imposing “accountability” on law enforcement officers, Raban’s sociopathic behavior does not disqualify him for service as a Palm Beach County Deputy – which may well include working with the BSU to visit and take into custody people anonymously accused of “hating the government.” After all, what other personality type would be interested in a job of that kind? 

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

My friends, I am indebted beyond measure for your unfathomably generous response to the appeal I posted a couple of weeks ago. During that interval I have  spent most of my time flat on my back while undergoing daily (for a while, twice-daily) antibiotic treatments.

I'm still facing weeks of treatment, but things are looking immeasurably better now than they did two weeks ago, and our prospects have been made much brighter through the immense and Providential generosity you have displayed to me and my family. Thank you so much for your help; your kindness has literally reduced me to tears on several occasions.

Without intending to slight anybody who has helped us, I want to make special public mention of Lew Rockwell, Ernie Hancock, Scott Horton, and Dr. Stan Monteith, each of whom used his influence to let many other people know about my plight. I intend to express personal thanks to everybody who has donated to help us out in this crisis, as well. God bless all of you -- and thank you, once again, on behalf of my entire family. 

Dum spiro, pugno!

When Homeland Security Theater goes Off-Script

While police in Watertown, Massachusetts closed in on the boat in which 19-year-old terrorist suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had concealed himself, FBI investigators in Chicago were snapping handcuffs on 18-year-old Abdella Ahmed Tounisi as he attempted to board an airplane bound for Istanbul. He intended to travel to Syria to fight on behalf an Islamic rebel group that seeks to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

There is reason to believe that the FBI had advance knowledge of the Boston Marathon bombing plot. On the other hand, we know that Tounisi was a pure product of the FBI's terrorist factory: He was the latest in a long procession of socially alienated teenage Muslim males who have been lured into an FBI-orchestrated plot by the Bureau's roving troupe of “terrorism facilitators.” 

What makes the terrorism charges against Tounisi more remarkable is the fact that he is accused of seeking to enlist in the service of a terrorist group that is presently receiving material aid from Washington.

Tounisi had been targeted by the FBI last fall after a friend named Abdel Daoud was snared in one of the Bureau's prefabricated terror plots.

The indictment against Daoud claims that he had “attempted, without lawful authority, to use a weapon of mass destruction” – in this case, a car bomb – in a terrorist attack against a Chicago-area nightclub. In familiar fashion, the Bureau's informant/provocateurs sketched out the plot and provided the targeted patsy with all of the material necessities – including the dummy bomb. 

Daoud playedhis scripted role to perfection – that is, he expressed entirely justifiable outrage over the U.S. Government's relentless campaign to kill Muslims overseas, while allowing himself to be seduced by agents of that same malevolent government into committing a proseuctable act.

The affidavit filed by the FBI claimed that in a conversation with an informant Doud said he wanted the bombing to “send the message that the United States should `stop abusing people overseas.'” Like millions of Americans who see Muslims as an undifferentiated mass of hostility, Daoud reportedly saw Americans as anti-Muslim automatons, rather than as “regular people.”

“They're like – more like robots, even the decent, nice people, most people in this country,” Daoud reportedly told the FBI provocateur. From Daoud's perspective, this applied even to those who “hate the president” (who, let it not be forgotten, is killing Muslim civilians through drone strikes practically every day) and who opposed “the two wars.” This is because most Americans are still “for the war on terrorism,” insisted Daoud.

As the FBI carefully reeled in Daoud, it made a play for Tounisi as well, but he was savvy enough to suspect that the operation was a law enforcement sting. Rather than using what influence it had to encourage this wayward young man onto the path of probity, the Bureau redoubled its effort to entice him into a prosecutable act: It set up a website intended to recruit fighters for the Syrian rebel group Jabhat al-Nusrah (JAN), which used to be called al Qaeda in Iraq.

After finding the website, Tounisi made contact with a purported recruiter for the group, who was yet another of the FBI’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of terrorism facilitators. It was the FBI’s asset who made arrangements for Tounisi to travel to Syria, by way of Turkey, to join the U.S.-supported terrorist group. 

The FBI, whose chief occupation since 2002 has been the manufacture of ersatz terrorism plots, induced Tounisi into an act described as providing “material aid” to a foreign terrorist group. If he is convicted, he will be found guilty of carrying out the Obama administration's official policy without official permission. He is not the only American presently facing the prospect of imprisonment on this charge. The administration has filed felony charges against a US Army Veteran from Arizona named Eric Harroun, who traveled to Syria to join the fight against Assad. 

Harroun, who used his Facebook page to describe his role in the conflict, is charged with using a weapon of mass destruction – namely, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher – while fighting on behalf of JAN. 

JAN is the dominant element of the rebel “coalition” being supported by the US and NATO in its insurgency against the admittedly loathsome regime of Bashar al-Assad. JAN has demonstrated its worthiness as a recipient of taxpayer-extracted material support by carrying out undisguised acts of terrorism against civilians. Of particular interest in light of the Boston bombing is the growing role played by Chechen jihadists in the U.S.-backed JAN. Chechen Jidhadists were accused of carrying out the recent abduction of two Syrian Orthodox Bishops earlier this week.

As with Tousnisi, Harroun is accused of giving “material support” to a foreign terrorist group; as in the case of Daoud, he is charged with using a “weapon of mass destruction” – a rocket-propelled grenade launcher – “without legal authority.” 

The relevant section of Title 18 of the US Code specifies that the term "weapon of mass destruction" applies to the following "destructive devices": "[A]ny incendiary, explosive, or poison gas -- bomb, grenade, rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces, missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce, mine, or ... any type of weapon (other than a shotgun or a shotgun shell which the Attorney General finds is generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes) by whatever name known which will, or which may be readily converted to, expel a projectile by the action of an explosive or other propellant, and which has any barrel with a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter...."

NOT a WMD, according to the Regime....

 John Mueller, who holds the Woody Hayes Chair on National Security Studies at Ohio State University, points out that under federal statutes dealing with WMDs "not only is a hand grenade a weapon of mass destruction ... so is a maliciously designed child's rocket even if it doesn't have a warhead. On the other hand, although a missile-propelled firecracker would be considered a weapon of mass destruction if its designers had wanted to think of it as a weapon, it would not be so considered if it had previously been designed for use as a weapon and then redesigned for pyrotechnic use or if it was surplus and had been sold, loaned, or given to you (under certain circumstances) by the Secretary of the Army." 

The WMD designation would likewise apply to "all artillery, and virtually every muzzle-loading military long arm for that matter," continues Schneider. 

 

...but Roman Candles can be considered WMDs.

For the Regime and its acolytes, “terrorism” is committed when private individuals, singly or in groups, emulate the criminal violence of the State without receiving official permission. That principle was explained – with admirable candor – by Bill Clinton during an interview published in the December 2009 issue of Foreign Policy magazine. Clinton defined terrorism as "killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority and go beyond national borders." (Emphasis added.)

By reverse-engineering this definition we learn that "killing and robbery and coercion" carried out with "state authority" isn't terrorism; it's public policy. We can also infer that the "war on terror" is not meant to bring an end to such violence, but rather intended to eliminate challenges to the State’s monopoly on criminal violence.

Accordingly, an act of politically motivated armed violence carried out by “non-state actors” can be described as an act of WMD-involved terrorism if it is carried out without what the Regime calls “legal authority.” On the other hand, exactly the same acts can be consecrated as “official policy” when they are committed by “non-state actors” who operated on behalf of the Regime. 

Three days before the Boston Marathon Bombing, the foreign policy establishment celebrated the opening of the Washington office of the National Council of Resistance in Iran. This is the political front group for the so-called People’s Mujahadeen (or MeK), a Washington-backed Islamo-terrorist group that has carried out bombings and assassinations in Iran during the past decade. During the 1970s, the group staged several terrorist attacks that left U.S. citizens wounded or dead. It was part of the revolutionary coalition that brought Khomeni to power in 1979, but was forced to flee to Iraq following a purge. During the ten-year Iran-Iraq war, the MeK carried out attacks against Iran on behalf of Saddam Hussein’s regime. 

Created in 1965 as part of a Soviet-sponsored international terrorist network that waged wars of "national liberation" throughout the developing world, the MeK was listed as a terrorist organization from 1997 until last September, when it was removed from the State Department’s terrorism roster following a high-pressure campaign that included scores of prominent elected officials and veterans of the National Security “community.”

Several members of Congress, including House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Michigan), received significant cash donations from MeK’s supporters as part of the de-listing campaign. Other paid supporters of the MeK included Newt Gingrich, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey (who supervised prosecution of federal “material support” cases on much flimsier evidence), retired General Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and retired General James Jones, former National Security Adviser to Barack Obama. 

Every U.S. official who lobbied on behalf of the MeK committed the federal offense of providing “material support” to a listed terrorist group. Under the Anwar al-Awlaki precedent, each of them was liable to summary execution by drone strike. Indeed, under the Abdel al-Awlaki codicil to that precedent, each of their children was likewise a fair target for a drone strike because of what White House mouthpiece Robert Gibbs would describe as the lethal irresponsibility of their parents.

 

Former Nat. Sec. Adviser Gen. James Jones addresses MeK.

As with the JAN in Syria, the Iranian MeK is considered a valuable asset in Washington’s program to foment warfare throughout the Middle East – by providing luridly unreliable but politically useful “intelligence” about the Iranian nuclear program, and carrying out assassinations and other acts of officially sanctioned terrorism within the country. One measure of the MeK’s value to the Regime is found in the fact that the office for the group’s political front group is located less than one hundred yards from the White House.

According to press accounts, Dzhokar Tsarnaev (communicating through a dense haze of painkillers and other pharmaceuticals) admitted to planting the Boston Marathon bombs and told investigators that he and his brother -- like Tounisi, Daoud, and dozens of other young men their age who had been shepherded into FBI-orchestrated false flag operations – were aggrieved over the U.S. government’s unremitting state terrorism against Muslim populations abroad.

The fact that the FBI had previous contact with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as well as “multiple” warnings about his potential involvement in terrorism, would suggest culpable incompetence on the part of the Bureau – if it weren’t for the fact that the bombing so perfectly fits the template from which scores of FBI-directed plots have been struck. This, when coupled with the fact that authorities were conducting a bombing “drill” on the day of the marathon, suggests that something other than official incompetence is involved.

If the Boston Marathon bombing plot was a case of “lone wolf” terrorism rather than an episode of Homeland Security Theater that went off-script, it would be an anomaly – albeit a fortunate one for those who presume to rule us, given that they profit from the bloody misfortune of the population they supposedly protect.

An explanation – and an appeal

Thanks for not forgetting about Pro Libertate during my extended but unavoidable absence. 

Since April 15 I’ve been bed-ridden – and usually in the hospital – fighting a severe infection. I’m nearing the end of a ten-day course of IV antibiotics that requires twice-daily visits to the hospital that last nearly two hours. Assuming we can beat back the infection, I’m looking at extended therapy with the local wound center.

As a freelance writer whose income is dependent entirely on my output, I was barely able to eke out living expenses for my family of eight. Since I was fired by The New American (without cause or explanation, I must reiterate) more than six years ago, our family has been without medical coverage. We’re doing what we can to pay off the expenses incurred by my wife’s repeated hospitalizations, and will be for the rest of my life.

I don’t exaggerate in the slightest in saying that my current health crisis has left us entirely destitute – or it would have, were it not for some timely and generous help from friends over on Facebook. We’re still holding onto a sheer cliff wall by our fingernails, and we desperately need whatever help you can provide. If everyone who follows this blog could donate ten dollars, this would see my family through the end of the summer.

In any case, thank you to everyone who has given so generously to me and my family in the past. Likewise, I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to read and share what I have published in this space. I intend to continue publishing my thoughts as long as there are people interested in reading them. Thanks again, and God bless.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Nationalizing Children

Commissar for Children: Anton S. Makarenko, depicted in a Soviet Postcard

We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. –

Instructions given at a congress of Soviet educators in 1918 (cited in Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, by Sheldon Richman, pg. xv).

[The Soviet family] is an organic part of Soviet society. Parents are not without authority … but this authority is only a reflection of social authority…. In our country he alone is a man of worth whose needs and desires are the needs and desires of a collectivist…. Our family offers rich soil for the cultivation of such collectivism. –

Soviet family theorist Anton S. Makarenko, The Collective Family, A Handbook for Russian Parents, pgs xi-xii, 42.

If we want to talk about equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there’s no equality…. In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them. –

Dr. Mary Jo Bane, Assistant Secretary of Administration for Children and Families at the US Department of Health and Human Services, 1993-1996; currently Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Police and Management, Harvard Kennedy School; quoted in “The Family: It’s Surviving and Healthy” by Dolores Barclay, Tulsa World, August 21, 1977. 

 Whenever a progressive refers to “investments,” he or she is referring to confiscation of private wealth.

Whenever a progressive invokes the “community,” that term refers to a state-engineered collective in which the individual has no rights.

Whenever a collectivist refers to “public education,” that phrase is shorthand for the process of destroying a child’s developing sense of self-ownership and indoctrinating them in the notion that they are the property of the “community.” This process is also known as “socialization,” which is the indefinable value-added element that supposedly makes “public education” superior to homeschooling.

Whenever an advocate of “public education” refers to “our children,” conscientious parents should take a quick inventory of their arsenals.
Melissa Harris-Perry, a slogan-spewing news reader for the Stalinist media outlet called MSNBC, ran the table of these collectivist nostrums in a recent installment in the network’s “Lean Forward” ad campaign. The “Lean Forward” spots feature various MSNBC luminaries holding forth like Communist Party functionary exhorting the cadres at a “struggle session” in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Harris-Perry is a collectivist of such passionate conviction that she regards opposition to Obama's radical centralization of power to be a species of sedition. She considers private firearms to be a pestilence, but embraces a vision of social engineering that would require a great amount of gun-related violence by state functionaries. 

Although – or perhaps because -- Harris-Perry is a credentialed academic, she has the odd and annoying habit, so common among adolescents, of ending every statement with a vocal inflection that suggests a question. In her "Lean Forward" ad, she uncorked this specimen of unfiltered collectivist cant:

“We have never invested as much in public education, because we’ve always had a sort of private notion of children – your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of, `These are our children.’ So part of it is that we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”



Harris-Perry’s disdain for parental authority is wedded to a denial of the idea that the individual child has a right to self-ownership. During an MSNBC discussion about a North Dakota law that would ban abortion after six weeks, she used the expression “this thing” to refer to the developing fetus and warned that “if this turns into a person, there are economic consequences.” 

It’s important to understand that Harris-Perry’s commitment to legalized abortion doesn’t grow out of a misapplied commitment to individual liberty, but rather her devotion to the collective management of the human population. It’s akin to the view expressed in the early 1970s by then-Rutgers professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg that the Roe v. Wade ruling was a product of “concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations we don’t want too many of.” 

Belief that the unborn human child has a right to be protected against lethal aggression, according to Harris-Perry, is a “faith claim … not associated with science.” However one views that moral proposition, the humanity of the developing individual is an incontestable scientific fact.  The existence of the invisible, intangible abstraction called the “state” is based entirely on faith claims that Harris-Perry is willing to impose through coercion. 
 

Nationalize children: Dr. Bane.

In an essay she wrote for The Nation magazine three years ago – then, as now, she wore her surname fashionably parted in the middle, but in a slightly different style – Harris-Perry described how she catechizes her unfortunate students in the gospel of the Almighty State: 

"I often begin my political science courses with a brief introduction to the idea of `the state.' The state is the entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, force, and coercion. If an individual travels to another country and kills its citizens, we call it terrorism. If the state does it, we call it war. If a man kills his neighbor it is murder; if the state does it it is the death penalty. If an individual takes his neighbor's money, it is theft; if the state does it, it is taxation."

In addition to instructing other people’s children in the fear and admonition of the Divine State, Harris-Perry is eager to see its heretical enemies put to the torch.

"The Tea Party is a challenge to the legitimacy of the U.S. state," Harris-Perry insisted. "When Tea Party participants charge the current administration with various forms of totalitarianism, they are arguing that the government has no right to levy taxes or make policy. Many GOP elected officials offered nearly secessionist rhetoric from the floor of the Congress [during the debate over nationalizing health care]. They joined as co-conspirators with the Tea Party protesters by arguing that this government has no monopoly on legitimacy."

The overt act that made that impious “conspiracy” a prosecutable crime, according to Harris-Perry, was an anti-Obamacare protest in which Tea Party activists heckled Georgia Rep. John Lewis. As an elected official, Lewis is not merely a human being, according to Harris-Perry, but an “embodiment of the state” – or, to use appropriate creedal language, al living  image of the invisible deity.

"When protesters spit on and scream at duly elected representatives of the United States government it is more than an act of racism," snarled Harris-Perry, making a de rigueur – and entirely gratuitous -- reference to Lewis's ethnic background. "It is an act of sedition."

String up the barbed wire, sharpen the guillotine, ready the basement cells of the Lubyanka: There are "seditionists" to be dealt with! 

Like many others of her ideological persuasion, Harris-Perry is a stranger to concision. In describing the totalitarian state’s proprietary claim on children, someone who represented a slightly different strain of collectivism – albeit not as different as Harris-Perry would insist – stated the matter much more tidily almost exactly eighty years ago:

“When an opponent declares, `I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say: `Your child belongs to us already…. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in this new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”

Those words were spoken on November 6, 1933 by the community-organizing, civilian-disarming, socialized medicine-promoting, government stimulus-peddling, unitary executive who presided over Germany’s National Socialist government. When Harris-Perry and her comrades demand that we "Lean Forward," that's the direction they have in mind.

If you can, please help keep Pro Libertate on-line. We really appreciate your generosity. Thanks, and God bless!

Dum spiro, pugno!