ThinkSoros on Gary Johnson

Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson launched his 2012 presidential campaign Thursday. The commissars of approved opinion instantly condemned him for deviating from the Biden/Romney spectrum. Like Ron Paul, Johnson has had some favorable things to say about state nullification, which was used in the 1850s to fight against the fugitive-slave laws. Decentralized power, say the left-nationalists, is a “racist” idea that can be motivated only by a desire to oppress minorities. (Left unsaid, as usual, is that the government policy that most oppresses minorities today is the federal war on drugs, not anything any state is doing, but the left-narcs still won’t let us nullify it.)

Nationalism, which the establishment left joins neoconservatives (as usual) in endorsing, has been just super for minorities, the left says. Don’t believe them? Just ask the Japanese in the U.S. in the 1940s, or the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, or the Ukrainians in the Soviet Union, or the Jews in Germany!

Notice, by the way, that no attempt is made to refute Johnson’s positions. Commissars don’t exist to refute. They exist to smear and destroy. Their anti-nullification point man, the uncredentialed Ian Millhiser, has made precisely one legal argument against nullification in half a dozen articles on the subject, spending the rest of his time on demonization (“Citizen, how can you trust someone who holds a Jeffersonian opinion held by neither Barack Obama nor John McCain?”). I have of course smacked Millhiser and his friends all over the place; he has responded by pretending I don’t exist. But I do exist, unlike his arguments.

As soon as the geniuses over at ThinkProgress can answer my “Nullification: Answering the Objections,” I’m all ears. (I’m sure that’ll happen.) In the meantime, they are zombies.

Originally posted: www.tomwoods.com