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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Horror Show Open Thread

Late Night Horror Show Open Thread

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Courtesy Mr. TBogg:

… Recently the Tea partying Metropolitan Detroit Freedom Coalition (MEDEFCO) — who love the Founding Fathers so much that their website looks like it was designed in 1776 — invited New Zealand libertarian gadfly Trevor Loudon to speak to them — for a modest fee – because they felt they needed some outside perspective on this whole “What’s wrong with America?” conundrum.

Loudon, or as I like to call him: Crocodile Dumbdee, is every bit as nutbar as Louie Gohmert, but people don’t seem to notice because he has an accent and Americans react to many foreign accents will childish glee and wonder … unless it is a Mexican one, in which case: ‘boo, go home.’…

Speaking at Veterans of Foreign Wars Bruce Post 1146 in St. Clair, Michigan (which seems to be some kind of idiot/circumcision truther magnet), Loudon explained to an appreciative crowd that a 2nd American Revolution is needed and they can only do that with a team equal to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and Samuel Adams [note: not the beer guy]. Fortunately for the Tea Partiers, such a group of brilliant brave patriots walk amongst us right now, and Loudon name checks them off with their appropriate cabinet positions and

It.

Is.

Delightful….

Details, and video, at the link.

Reader Interactions

27Comments

  1. 1.

    Lyrebird

    Oh thank you! That’s awesome. & I just caught up with the post-Alito thread, whose comments made things much easier to take…

    Trying to channel my frustration constructively.

    Anyhow, I haven’t yet finished TBogg’s article, but I gotta say that the Sam Adams who inspired the beer company IS the same revolutionary Sam Adams they’re talking about. Maybe he just meant to point up the others’ confusion, who knows.

  2. 2.

    KG

    Ok, they can have Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Austin and New Orleans become federal cities and remain ours. We take any nuclear weapons in those states before they are left to fend for themselves. I think that’s fair

  4. 4.

    PurpleGirl

    who love the Founding Fathers so much that their website looks like it was designed in 1776

    Well, shoot, of course it looks like it was designed in 1776. It was designed to be best viewed using M$ Explorer. Sheesh.

  5. 5.

    mike with a mic

    That entire Palin part is horrifically hilarious, the entire thing is but particularly that.

  7. 7.

    opiejeanne

    Note: Samuel Adams WAS the beer guy, in a sense. He was a poor businessman and his father finally installed him as a “maltster” in a malthouse the family owned.

  9. 9.

    J R in WV

    It is so nice to know that if I can resurect my internet connection at 3 am I can find friends here at Balloon Juice, with new and amazing information about current events.

    Thank you Anne L for your late night work here!

    And thanks to all the other BJ commentariat for your help when sleep is evasive!

    All that said, what can be done about political insanity? These people believe the most astounding things about their fellow citizens! I was doing phone bank volunteer work for a candidate who must remain nameless. This is mostly disconnected numbers, wrong numbers on the (old and poorly updated because there is no process specified for acquiring new data ) registration lists.

    So when someone answers their land line phone, it’s usually cause for very minor celebration. But not always. I got a winner the other evening who calmly imformed me that he couldn’t vote for anyone who enjoyed killing babies! As If! I should have instantly said “No One ehjoys killing babies. But N out of 100,000 pregnancies are flawed and need medical intervention. No child can survive with their organs all wrong!”

    But he wouldn’t have believed me. He also believes that the government is suddenly moving hundreds of thousands of foreign children into the heartland of America. I would have had a better conversation with someone who believes firmly in flying saucers, because I’m willing to accept that this isn’t totally impossible.

    But someone who would rather believe horrible things about their fellow Americans, neighbors, just because some stranger on TV tells them so, that’s crazy in a big bad way.

    And the fact that 5 out of 9 “Supreme Court Judges” see nothing wrong with imposing their unique and peculiar (and held by a small minority of their religious compatriots) roman catholic beliefs on the rest of America, now that is both truly scary in every way, and a horrible proof of the fear of the No-Nothings who feared the influence of the Papist Throne of Rome back when Catholics first started coming to America as immigrants.

    These guys do intend are currently proceeding to use their power to force all of America to accept their “obvious truths” about morality; they not only see nothing wrong with this, they seem to see it as a requirement of their service to America on the bench!

    Amazing AND Scary!!! This is the kind of non-judicious behavior I might expect of a catholic judge at the lowest level in an area dominated by a catholic population, who could not be elected to the bench without pandering to his electorate. Not what you expect from the Supreme Court at all!

    Perhaps if we gain the majority in the House and a 66 vote majority in the Senate we can proceed to impeach all 5 of these guys for obvious non-judicial findings that violate their oath of office. I see no other moral course for those of us they plan to impose their skewed beliefs upon.

    Truly scary. I think we should use the word impeachment in every discussion about this issue, so as to help bring it into the light. I have not seen a clearer case of offricial mis-conduct since Richard Milhouse Nixon was deploying his “plumbers” across the nation!

    Well, maybe since Iran-Contra… whatever.

  10. 10.

    opiejeanne

    @J R in WV: they were the Know-nothings. The movement was sinister and racist.

    Don’t forget what JFK had to say to allay fears that he would be ruled by Rome.

  11. 11.

    BruinKid

    Adam Weinstein’s post on Gawker about the latest vapid bullshit from Charles Murray’s mouth about libertarianism vs. progressivism is well worth a read.

    What Murray, in fact, takes issue with as “progressivism” is a notion of politics and philosophy that privileges the good over the right—that takes rights not as absolutes, but as values that are good insofar as they’re good for something. This is actually the way most of us reason: We believe in free speech, but not to shout “fire” in a crowded theater or distribute pornographic pictures of underage children. Those forms of speech aren’t good for anything, we generally agree—in fact, we’ve agreed as a culture that they represent a harm.

    And so on with other rights. We generally believe in a right to self-defense, but can actually argue over whether that includes the right to carry guns openly or concealed—and if so, what training or types of weapons are acceptable. We generally believe in a woman’s right to choose her womb’s destiny—but can agree that keeping abortion rare is a public good, and worth debating as a policy aim. We generally believe that wealth inequity is a problem to be addressed, and that everyone should have a baseline ability to not starve or go homeless or illiterate, but we can negotiate just how far our society goes, and what it sacrifices, to improve the lot of the worst-off.

    Progressivism, in other words, in concerned with moral consequences and outcomes of the things people do, and has an interest in legislating to that end. It admits of shades of gray. It negotiates. But it’s sanguine and unwavering about the problems it addresses.

    Libertarianism shuts that down. It views rights as absolute, a priori, and can tolerate no dilution or exception to those rights. Hence, it can deny that there’s even a problem with outcomes.

    In this worldview, free speech is absolute… and as a result, a family of five or six can impose its religious opinions on the thousands of workers that make the family business profitable—even if the family’s religious convictions are completely and willfully ignorant of scientific facts, much less workers’ needs. Property rights are absolute… and as a result, even a Republican-devised compromise measure to keep the air relatively clean, like cap-and-trade, is a socialist constraint of trade and capital. Gun rights are absolute… and so you see, we can’t do mental-health checks, or close private-sales loopholes, or mandate licenses, because those measures would erode individual liberty, which is a far greater harm than any number of deaths, so now shut up about it, or else you’ll get shot in the face by an armed freedom-loving paranoiac who felt threatened by your incursion on freedom.

    The absolutist rhetoric of rights is not a cornerstone of discourse. It’s a wrecking ball. It admits of no shades, no difficult cases that can’t be solved by recourse to the “me”—and a particular “me” at that, one that old white male Harvardians like Murray can wrap their heads around. He has plenty of empathy—for people who make sense to him. You know, people just like him.

    The absolutist rhetoric of rights that Murray advocates represents a capricious rightward shift from Adam Smith liberalism, which was grounded in the good—a rising tide floats everyone’s boats! The invisible hand helps everyone! Capitalism helps fix poverty!—to something darker: Ayn Rand libertarianism, which is grounded in rights—it’s mine! I don’t care if it’s better or worse for you, it’s right that I should keep it! Fuck you!—and sees questions of the good as dangerous to the “me.”

  12. 12.

    ⚽️ Martin

    @BruinKid: Libertarians are fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is attractive because it is lazy. No need to waste time weighing moral issues, just run the algorithm and accept the answer, good or bad.

  13. 13.

    Betty Cracker

    …but people don’t seem to notice because he has an accent and Americans react to many foreign accents will childish glee and wonder …

    I’ve always considered that one of our most charming national qualities.

    @J R in WV: The Opus Dei wing of the SCOTUS is worrisome, alright, but the war on women is primarily driven by evangelical Protestants.

  15. 15.

    James E. Powell

    Tea Party loud mouths know less about the American Revolution and the people who made it then they do about Jesus and the early Christians. They pick up little pieces – they hated taxes & loved their guns! – but they don’t know or care about reality.

  16. 16.

    sm*t cl*de

    Loudon? He’s an off-shoot of “Zenith Applied Philosophy” — a NZ version of the Birch Society (though with extra conspiracy theorising and antisemitism) started by a lapsed scientologist. Take him, you’re welcome to him.

  17. 17.

    Chris

    @opiejeanne:

    Don’t forget what JFK had to say to allay fears that he would be ruled by Rome.

    This is what drives me insane about the whole thing. Nativists spent over a hundred years claiming that all Catholics were all part of a sinister plot to take over America and impose Catholicism, even when the fairly obvious fact was that most of them had little to no power and certainly not the kind of presence in the system that would have allowed them to institute a theocracy even if they’d wanted to.

    Fast forward to now, when Catholicism has been mainstream and accepted for fifty years or so, and now we actually have some crazy politicians beginning to legislate Catholic (though not exclusively Catholic) morality into law (with a big “fuck you” to all religious groups that don’t agree). And the old WASP/bigot demographic not only isn’t worried anymore, they’re cheering it on (in even greater numbers than actual Catholics, who break even where evangelicals remain very much right wing). What do they want to talk about instead? “Creeping Sharia.”

    Right wing privilege: it really is a thing.

  18. 18.

    Chris

    @BruinKid:

    The absolutist rhetoric of rights that Murray advocates represents a capricious rightward shift from Adam Smith liberalism, which was grounded in the good—a rising tide floats everyone’s boats! The invisible hand helps everyone! Capitalism helps fix poverty!—to something darker: Ayn Rand libertarianism, which is grounded in rights—it’s mine! I don’t care if it’s better or worse for you, it’s right that I should keep it! Fuck you!—and sees questions of the good as dangerous to the “me.”

    More than that, there’s a word for “rights” that allow you to trample the rights of as many other people as you like because IGMFY. It’s spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-G-E.

  19. 19.

    TR

    @James E. Powell:

    Except they fuck up those little pieces too.

    President Washington sent troops to suppress the anti tax Whiskey Rebellion and their idea of guns was muzzle loaded muskets only justified for a national guard.

  20. 20.

    André

    Oh yes, Trevor Loudon’s a veritable nut. Overt libertarianism doesn’t gain much traction here in NZ (the “welfare state” is literally part of our national identity, at least in the abstract) and Trev’s brand is fairly extreme even for the locals who, no lie, congregate on a libertarian website called Solo Passion. You can’t make this stuff up.

  22. 22.

    Citizen_X

    New Zealand libertarian gadfly

    Anyone else read that as “Kiwi fugitive from felony indictments back home”?

  23. 23.

    CONGRATULATIONS!

    This Kiwi is a pro snake-oil peddler. He knows exactly what this crowd wants and is throwing out the perfect amounts of red meat to keep them hooked.

  26. 26.

    Jay C

    @sm*t cl*de:

    Loudon? He’s an off-shoot of “Zenith Applied Philosophy” — a NZ version of the Birch Society

    Well, anyone who would – unironically – create or join an organization with the acronym of ZAP is kinda giving the game away right there….

  27. 27.

    sm*t cl*de

    Well, anyone who would – unironically – create or join an organization with the acronym of ZAP is kinda giving the game away right there….

    The ZAP organisation has the rare distinction that the NZ fascist party severed links with it for being weird and extreme. Loudon managed to batten onto an existing minor political party and was its vice-president for 2006-2008 before they threw him out for weirdness; ever since then he has been presenting himself as a major-league player, actively engaged in government, with access to all manner of secret sources.

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