The Most Sinister Part of the Leland Yee Story...

Or: “Why Leland Yee Might Not be a Hypocrite on Guns”

So yesterday we had a lot of democrats being arrested by the Feds based on various charges.  One who stood out in particular was Leland Yee, a California State Senator.  Here’s a pretty good review of what he is being charged with:

SAN FRANCISCO -- In a stunning criminal complaint, State Sen. Leland Yee has been charged with conspiring to traffic in firearms and public corruption as part of a major FBI operation spanning the Bay Area, casting yet another cloud of corruption over the Democratic establishment in the Legislature and torpedoing Yee's aspirations for statewide office.

Yee and an intermediary allegedly met repeatedly with an undercover FBI agent, soliciting campaign contributions in exchange for setting up a deal with international arms dealers.

At their first face-to-face meeting in January, "Senator Yee explained he has known the arms dealer for a number of years and has developed a close relationship with him," an FBI affidavit says, noting Yee told the agent the arms dealer "has things that you guys want."

Read the whole thing.  And we saw different reactions.  Iowahawk (aka David Burge) mockingly referenced the media’s failure to identify the many people arrested as Democrats by referring to them as members of the “mystery party.”

Since Saturday, FBI has arrested RI's Speaker of the House, CA's #2 state senator, and Charlotte's mayor. Bad week for the #MysteryParty
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 26, 2014

Meanwhile at IGN, they are gleefully pointing out that this is the same California Senator who was a strong advocate against video game violence.  And yeah, it is fair to point out that apparently California unconstitutional effort to censor games was spearheaded by a man who was actually in the business of arming real life criminals.  They are entitled to some schadenfreude if Yee is indeed guilty.

And Twitchy also focused on the hypocrisy angle, but while I love them very much I think they walked right past what was actually very sinister, here.  Their post, called “Hypocrisy overload: Tweets from gun control advocate Leland Yee, charged with arms trafficking” is pretty self-explanatory as they and various tweeters dug around for comments from Mr. Yee that seem pretty hypocritical in retrospect, such as:

A year after Sandy Hook, let us recommit ourselves to working towards a safer society for all of us.
— Leland Yee (@LelandYee) December 14, 2013

Thank you @PiersMorgan for your commitment and passion to ending gun violence. We must never forget Sandy Hook.
— Leland Yee (@LelandYee) December 21, 2012

And there are other items on a similar theme.  There is also this observation from a tweeter:

The lesson here is that we need the 2nd Amendment to protect ourselves from the likes of Senator @LelandYee (D-CA) and his customers.
— Jimmy (@JimmyPrinceton) March 27, 2014

And that is all valid, but I think they are missing a far more sinister element to this situation.  The charge of hypocrite gets thrown around so much these days we forget what it means.  We act like the hypocrisy is the evil, when in fact it is simply a contradiction and a symptom of other issues.  I’m not even sure it is always a sign of person being wrong in some way.  For instance, there are many men who believe women are equal to men...  but continue to pick up the check, hold open doors, and so on.  Is that bad?  At the very least you are going to have to do some work to explain how it is.

Or you take one of the “worst” hypocrites in American history: Thomas Jefferson.  On one hand, he wrote that all men were created equal, and that they had an equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  On the other hand, he kept humans in bondage.  And in historical context there is little question that he thought these principles applied equally to black people as white people.

But does that make him the worst of his time?  Yes, Jefferson’s words did not match his actions.  And his actions were nothing less than horrible.  I do believe he endangered his mortal soul by being a slaveholder.  But the fact he also wrote the Declaration of Independence didn’t make things worse: it was his only saving grace.  Let me say this as bluntly as I can: if Thomas Jefferson is not suffering eternal torment as we speak for having kept other humans as slaves, it is only because he saved himself by writing the Declaration.  Yes, slavery is evil and his participation in that evil should not be diminished or swept aside.  When we go to Monticello we should pause in front of the slave quarters and give them our remembrance.  But at least Jefferson had the decency to denounce it in that founding document.  At least he had the foresight to declare in it that slavery was fundamentally at war with the principles of our Revolution.  He might not have had the moral strength to free his slaves and deal with the economic ruin that would have followed if he did, but at least he didn’t tell future generations that what he did was right.  At least he told them “don’t do what I did” in the most powerful and persuasive way he could.  And Lincoln himself told us that simply writing those words set slavery on the ultimate course of distinction.  Perhaps slavery would have ended no matter what but by writing what he did in the Declaration, Jefferson made that day come sooner.

By comparison, the consistent slaveholders who not only kept humans in bondage but insisted it was right to do so?  I don’t see how they would escape divine retribution.  There is nothing to mitigate that evil.

The problem here is too many people have accepted one of the most basic tenets of moral relativism: that the worst thing you can do is act in a way that is out of synch with your views.  The moral relativist believes that right and wrong is relative to a certain culture, a certain time period, and maybe even to a certain person, and therefore the moral relativist believes that nothing is wrong, or evil, unless it violates your own values.  So by the moral relativist’s formulation, the consistent slaveholder is not evil.  He simply lives in a time when most people think what he is doing is right and so on.  Thus Thomas Jefferson was worse, in their mind, because he admitted what he was doing was wrong.  Even when Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil, she defined evil in a relativistic way.

It shouldn’t surprise you that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rejected that kind of thinking: that he was a moral absolutist.  After all, if Dr. King accepted the prevailing morality of that day, he never would have led the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  The prevailing morality of that day was that segregation and racism was right.  So he had to reject moral relativism and in a sermon I shared with you the other day, he railed against the idea of moral relativism:

Most people can’t stand up for their, for their convictions, because the majority of people might not be doing it. See, everybody’s not doing it, so it must be wrong. And, and since everybody is doing it, it must be right. So a sort of numerical interpretation of what’s right. But I’m here to say to you this morning that some things are right and some things are wrong. Eternally so, absolutely so. It’s wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong! It’s wrong in America, it’s wrong in Germany, it’s wrong in Russia, it’s wrong in China! It was wrong in two thousand B.C., and it’s wrong in nineteen fifty-four A.D.! It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong! It’s wrong to throw our lives away in riotous living. No matter if everybody in Detroit is doing it. It’s wrong! It always will be wrong! And it always has been wrong. It’s wrong in every age, and it’s wrong in every nation. Some things are right and some things are wrong, no matter if everybody is doing the contrary. Some things in this universe are absolute. The God of the universe has made it so. And so long as we adopt this relative attitude toward right and wrong, we’re revolting against the very laws of God himself.

Slavery was, is and always will be wrong.  Yes, it took humans a long time to figure that out, and many still haven’t.  But that doesn’t make it any less wrong.  It just means that our failure to acknowledge this is that much more shameful.

I have given that spiel before, but usually it is in defense of the hypocrite.  That is not the case here, although I suspect the ardent pro-gun advocate might be tempted to borrow the “Jefferson” defense of “hey, sure he (allegedly) dealt in arms, but at least he had the decency to advocate against guns.”  But hypocrisy in my mind isn’t an evil in and of itself.  But it is at best a symptom of something else.

In Thomas Jefferson’s case it was a sign of his weakness.  As I suggested above, the reality was if Jefferson suddenly freed his slaves, it would have been a financial disaster for him.  He would have immediately been penniless at best, and... did they have debtor’s prisons in Virginia at that time?  He might have literally lost his freedom.  Now, mind you, that is precisely what he should have done.  He should have freed his slaves, let it ruin his fortune and deal with the consequences.  And he knew he should have done this.  But my point was apparently his hypocrisy exposed his weakness.

In other cases it is a sign of dishonesty.  Jim Geraghty’s tour de force of liberal hypocrisy yesterday includes many examples where the simplest explanation is that this person didn’t actually believe what they said and thus what they did didn’t match what they said.

But, dear reader, there is something much more sinister going on here than mere hypocrisy, if Mr. Yee is guilty as charged.  It’s hinted at in this tweet:

About to go on @kgoradio to discuss my bill to close loophole in assault weapon law. #SB249 #CAGov #CaLeg
— Leland Yee (@LelandYee) May 22, 2012

What is sinister here is that if he is guilty of being in a conspiracy to unlawfully import guns, then a far more sinister motivation for such legislation becomes obvious: cut down on legal sources of guns, in the hopes of increasing the demand for illegal guns.  In that case he isn’t really a hypocrite.  His conduct as a legislator and as an (alleged) gun runner have a sinister consistency: he was acting to increase his own profit.

I have been mystified for years that liberals would often make such fallacious arguments for gun control.  First, it simply never made any sense for anyone to try to ban guns in a single city: how  on Earth would that stop them from coming in?  Just talking on the intellectual subject of how to ban things, that just didn’t make sense.  And even if we had a nationwide ban on a certain kind of gun, given that we presently cannot stop entire human beings from coming into the country why do they think we can stop guns?  And indeed which side of the illegal immigration debate insists that it is impossible to stop the flow?  Oh, right the liberals.  And they often say the same thing about drugs: you can’t stop it.  But on the other hand, guns can be stopped, according to often the very same people.  It’s nonsensical.

That is, unless we consider the possibility that Mr. Yee is not really an anomaly but instead the tip of the iceberg.  The fact is there is a hidden industry of gun smugglers.  And often these smugglers are into other crime and generally speaking they don’t want normal people to be able to defend themselves against that business.  It exists and even if it can be eradicated it will be difficult to do so.  And they have money.  Who are they going to give it to if they want to shape policy?  The NRA that would destroy a large chunk of their smuggling business if not eliminate it entirely?  Or something like the Brady Campaign which will give their business life and give their employees protection from law-abiding citizens.  Do you think Al Capone wanted regular people to have guns?  Or did he want them kept all to themselves?

Now I don’t want to overstate this thesis.  I am not saying that all or most gun control advocates are involved in illegal weapon smuggling or even think of it in terms of protecting that industry.  But I could see the very real possibility that they are the pawns of the gun smuggling industry.  Do you think the illegal gun smugglers also respect the donation limits on campaigns?  You don’t think they might use some of the really obvious loopholes to get around it?  So maybe they flood money into perhaps a well-meaning liberal organization that supports gun control and thus promotes policies that benefit their business.  Oh, and which party makes it the most difficult to close our borders?  Which party wants to restore the voting rights of felons?  Are you starting to see a pattern, here?

Again, if Yee is guilty he might be an anomaly: a person who promoted gun control to increase demand for the business of gun smuggling.  I would hope most of the rest would simply be unknowing pawns.  But if you ask who wants to see gun control, one of the obvious constituencies has to be those who deal in illegal arms.

In any case, this is a serious moral blow to the gun control movement if we don’t let it fade away.

There is one more example, still, of a hypocritical statement from Yee that might become very telling over time.  After the massacre at Sandy Hook, Yee decided to blame not only guns but video games as well and when gamers protested that video games were not responsible for a single nutball, he had this response:

Gamers have got to just quiet down. Gamers have no credibility in this argument. This is all about their lust for violence and the industry’s lust for money. This is a billion-dollar industry. This is about their self-interest.

“This is about their self-interest,” said the alleged gun smuggler who pushed legislation that made his alleged business more lucrative...  Gee, it’s almost like projection, like he is accusing the accusers of what he is guilty of.  And where have I seen that before?

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My wife and I have lost our jobs due to the harassment of convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin, including an attempt to get us killed and to frame me for a crime carrying a sentence of up to ten years.  I know that claim sounds fantastic, but if you read starting here, you will see absolute proof of these claims using documentary and video evidence.  If you would like to help in the fight to hold Mr. Kimberlin accountable, please hit the donation link on the right.  And thank you.

Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

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Disclaimer:

I have accused some people, particularly Brett Kimberlin, of reprehensible conduct.  In some cases, the conduct is even criminal.  In all cases, the only justice I want is through the appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice system.  I do not want to see vigilante violence against any person or any threat of such violence.  This kind of conduct is not only morally wrong, but it is counter-productive.

In the particular case of Brett Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him.  Do not call him.  Do not write him a letter.  Do not write him an email.  Do not text-message him.  Do not engage in any kind of directed communication.  I say this in part because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want that to happen to him.

And for that matter, don’t go on his property.  Don’t sneak around and try to photograph him.  Frankly try not to even be within his field of vision.  Your behavior could quickly cross the line into harassment in that way too (not to mention trespass and other concerns).

And do not contact his organizations, either.  And most of all, leave his family alone.

The only exception to all that is that if you are reporting on this, there is of course nothing wrong with contacting him for things like his official response to any stories you might report.  And even then if he tells you to stop contacting him, obey that request.  That this is a key element in making out a harassment claim under Maryland law—that a person asks you to stop and you refuse.

And let me say something else.  In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above.  But if any of you have, stop it, and if you haven’t don’t start.