by Bob Barr | May 26, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall In a recent piece at The Bulwark, Sonny Bunch puts into words a sentiment sensed by many for years, namely, that what once made social media so great has now made it unbearable. According to Bunch, social media’s original design as platforms for “debate culture” has descended into a toxic landscape of information silos where arguments are “dismissed in favor of agreement.” Rather than a boundless world of information and opinions, social media now serves to blind users from reality. This sorry situation, however, is precisely what Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein predicted in his 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation, How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. How tragically right he was. Today, social media is used far less for reasoned debate than as the vehicle for outraged mobs to launch vicious fusillades against their perceived enemies. Some targets of this vehemence are large organizations and companies able to withstand such attacks. Often, however, victims of social media lynch mobs are individuals who knowingly or by chance have traversed the social media crosshairs of the Left and expressed views at odds with the prevailing social media orthodoxy. In spite of the potentially life-changing consequences of becoming the latest “Central Park Karen,” or merely someone wrongly accused of being a “Nazi,” such nuances are lost on these online mobs, as their aim is not to change minds or debunk misinformation, but to destroy their targets personally, emotionally, and financially – all while taking glee in the ruin they cause. This internet misbehavior is fueled by hashtags that facilitate coordination and aided by secret algorithms designed to keep users hooked by feeding...
by Bob Barr | May 19, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall Support for President Trump has become something of a litmus test in today’s GOP. While this actually is not a bad measure of political backbone for a Party often in need of it, the removal of Liz Cheney as Conference chair and her replacement with up-and-comer Elise Stefanik, is a reminder that in order to project and protect conservative values, the Party needs more. Much more. Beyond Stefanik’s support for Trump is a troubling voting history in Congress. According to FreedomWorks’ 2020 congressional scorecard, Stefanik received a paltry 37 percent on scored votes. By comparison, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scored a 26 – just 11 points less than the GOP’s now third-ranking member in the House. Stefanik hardly seems the right choice to carry the GOP mantle at a time when conservative values are under attack from a progressive mob determined to wipe out all that we hold dear. There are other troubling signs for the GOP. Take Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz. Gaetz’s support for Trump and willingness to stand up to critics played a major role in the Florida Millennial blossoming into a rising GOP star, even though rumors of his questionable behavior were known for years. And, with a FreedomWorks’ congressional score of 65 (largely attributed to many missed votes on key bills), Gaetz’s unreliability as a crucial conservative vote fails to offset the liability he has become. Stefanik and Gaetz are but the latest examples of the personality-over-principles problem within the GOP. The prevalence of social media in today’s political campaigns appears to have forever altered how candidates communicate with voters. In some ways, this has given way to...
by Bob Barr | May 12, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall To point out the elephant sitting next to the 500-pound gorilla in the room, the federal government spends too much money. In spite of the regular verbal abuses levelled at so-called “earmarks,” they are not to blame for this massive problem. In a sense, earmarks, can be considered part of the solution. Why? Because they are transparent. One of the primary catalysts for profligate spending is the near-complete lack of transparency in the annual congressional appropriations process. Rather than budgets with neatly organized line-items detailing where and how taxpayer dollars are spent, most federal spending results from huge pots of money allocated by very general categories for the thousands of federal offices, agencies, and departments authorized to spend those dollars. Attempting to track specifically where monies eventually are spent is nearly impossible, even for those familiar with the arcane process. This purposeful lack of transparency is made worse due to decades of funding government through short-term (usually “emergency”) bills, where bloat and the sheer speed at which the bills are passed helps to ensure opacity. One of the most popular Beltway novelties is Sen. Rand Paul’s annual “Festivus Report” that confirms what we have long known, which is that government is wasteful. The truly bothersome take-away from Rand’s study is the degree to which it makes clear the absurd ways in which taxpayer dollars actually are being wasted. While Rand’s yearly opus sheds a broad light on wasteful spending, it is by definition, after-the-fact. Earmarks, on the other hand, provide a more current way for taxpayers to see how some of those federal dollars are to be spent, as they...
by Bob Barr | May 5, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall The Central Intelligence Agency under President Joe Biden and his appointed director, Bill Burns, appears to have morphed into yet another tool of the “woke” Left; unrecognizable to many of the men and women who, like me, were proud to serve what was in years past the world’s preeminent intelligence agency. It has become an embarrassment. In a recent recruitment video published on social media, the point is made clear that the mission for employees of today’s CIA is not about serving as members of a team committed to providing the very best objective intelligence to policymakers in the administration. The mission now is more about using the CIA as a vehicle to boost one’s self-image. This ad, perhaps dreamed up by some overly woke ad agency, has the self-declared 36-year-old female CIA employee refusing “to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas about what a woman can or should be.” She then informs us that she is “tired of feeling like I have to apologize for the space I occupy rather than intoxicate people with my effort, my brilliance.” Labeling this gobbledygook idiotic is being overly kind. In fact, when I first saw this video, I thought it was a joke. Sadly, it is not. It is an official CIA recruitment video, obviously directed to self-centered individuals with pre-existing psychological issues (including something the star of the video calls “generalized anxiety disorder”). At National Review, Charles Cooke humorously pans the video as a “well-targeted” recruitment tool, given the sorts of people who respond positively to it are “already experts in manipulating, infiltrating, surveilling, and extracting dubious confessions from the rest of us.” However, the video...
by Bob Barr | Apr 28, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall President Biden is returning to the Barack Obama playbook of “reforming” municipal police departments by forcing multi-year federal court “consent decrees” down their throats — a strategy that makes it extremely difficult for those departments to hire and retain good officers, or to administer their agencies in accord with the needs of the communities they serve. Of course, as with everything being undertaken by this Administration, it is all about race and politics, not good policing. Police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville are but the latest recipients of this federal intervention. It is noteworthy, though not often noted, that both of these cities have been under Democrat Party control for more than three-quarters of a century. One reason why left-wing propagandists, such as Black Lives Matter and the mainstream media fail to note this anomaly, is that it invites the uncomfortable question of how, with Democrats at the helm of these cities for so long, police departments under their purview descended into the alleged hotbed of systemic racism that now warrants federal oversight by the notoriously heavy-handed Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. A key question that should be asked, but of course is not, is what precisely is to be accomplished by Democrat bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. that has not been possible for Democrats locally across nearly eight decades of control. Investigating and prosecuting real cases of alleged civil rights violations by police officers is a legitimate focus for the Department of Justice, especially in cases for which there is no adequate prosecution by state authorities. Were this the sole focus by the Civil Rights Division, it...
by Bob Barr | Apr 21, 2021 | Townhall Article |
Townhall For the eight years I represented Georgia’s 7th Congressional District in the U.S. House, I was a member of the Financial Services Committee; a committee on which California Rep. Maxine Waters also served. It did not take long for me to learn that she is as mean-spirited as they come, a characteristic she wears proudly to this day. Over the course of the past year, however, as violence, looting, and attacks on law enforcement officers spread across our country, Waters’ mean streak has become far more than a reason to avoid crossing her path in person. Her calls for demonstrators in Minneapolis and elsewhere to become ever “more confrontational” reveal Maxine Waters to be more than a deeply unpleasant individual, but rather a public menace, inciting mobs to violence as a new mini warlord for the Left. While Waters might prefer for people to think that her bluster is the result of heat-of-the-moment passion, the reality is that it is all carefully planned political grandstanding, something she has perfected over decades of haranguing. Three decades ago, for example, as a freshman member of the House, Waters cheered on as mobs rampaged through south Los Angeles in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King verdict. More than five dozen people died in those riots. True to form, in 2020 as mobs ransacked businesses, police headquarters, and other government buildings in cities from Portland, Oregon to New York and Washington, DC, Waters has been in the forefront of urging continued confrontation against law enforcement and all manner of other targets of demonstrators’ ire. Last year’s rioting added up to $2...
