The Daily Beast, like its neoconservative counterparts at the Free Beacon, is a thought-control site that aims to ferret out unapproved opinions. We are supposed to confine ourselves to the McCain/Obama box where the Daily Beast is comfortable. Anyone with opinions outside that box is by definition an “extremist,” and probably kind of crazy. Why else would someone hold an opinion that can’t be found anywhere in the whole three inches separating McCain from Obama?

So I actually laughed out loud when I read this classic thought-control headline: “Exclusive: GOP Senate Candidate Caught Saying States Can Nullify Laws.” (Thanks to Per Bylund for sending the link.)

So wait a minute! You mean someone asked a fundamental question? She must be destroyed, citizen!

This is like the reaction Ron Paul got to his foreign policy views: you mean someone thinks American policy toward country X should be something other than (A) bomb them or (B) starve them? Why, he must be crazy!

Now I know nothing about Joni Ernst, the Senate candidate with the forbidden thought. What I do know is that wrapped up in the question of nullification are all kinds of worthwhile issues that in a normal society we would freely debate: the proper scale of political order; whether a multiplicity of sovereignties might be better for preserving liberty, since this is how liberty came to Western civilization in the first place; whether the compact or nationalist theory of the Union is the correct one, etc.

Thought controllers like the Daily Beast do not think we should discuss issues like this. Bomb or starve is their spectrum of allowable thought. Tax at 40% or tax at 38%. That’s the kind of debate we peons are permitted.

Normally, dissenters are not entitled to a refutation of their views; a good scolding for being dissatisfied with the McCain-to-Obama smorgasbord of choices is about all we are thought to deserve. When we do get a refutation, it’s strictly at a second-grade level: why, the Civil War settled this! Or, don’t these people know about the Supremacy Clause? Dumb.

I suggest having a look at my Nullification FAQ. Here’s where the standard so-called arguments of the thought controllers are smashed to pieces.

Of course, I wrote a book on nullification in 2010. Knowing the response I would surely get from the thought controllers, I preemptively laughed at them with my Interview with a Zombie video:

For fun, you might also enjoy the blooper reel for that video:

(A certain author of the Declaration of Independence has also been “caught” saying the same thing, I note with my usual impudence.)