Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Todd Staples sent a tweet to his followers Tuesday morning asking whether we're "worried about the direction of our country." Well, sure we're worried about partisan gridlock in Congress, the widening chasm of income inequality and drought conditions that cover most of Texas and more of the country than at any time since the '50s.
These things trouble me, for sure. But that isn't quite what he had in mind. Staples' tweet directed me to a piece written by noted libertarian and syndicated columnist at George Mason University, Walter E. Williams. Williams asks why the crimes of the Nazis are so well-known, while the atrocities of communists like Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin and socialists like Joseph Stalin get glossed over. Fair enough, but that's when Williams, the guy who famously offers certificates of amnesty and pardon to all persons of European descent for their slave-owning forefathers, brandishes the nuclear option. Amid progressive bastions like "the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children's Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism -- a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined."
"Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights."
To think that we're better than the Germans who allowed Nazi ascendance, Williams warns, would be a mistake. The quest for "social justice" is found on a spectrum inexorably leading to tyranny.
Seems to me, equating your political opponents to the perpetrators of genocide has to be found somewhere on a slippery slope leading to nowhere good. But there it is, promoted on our ag commish's official Twitter account. Staples aspires to be our next lieutenant governor, by the way.
