Category: Politics

Wasted Time

by Darien Sumner

As libertarians, we’re used to a sort of goofy sectional squabbling between self-styled "purists" and "realists," which often manifests itself as an argument about whether to pursue attainable changes now, or to deride that as "selling out" and remain focused on the long-run goal. Murray Rothbard pretty much had this one dead to rights years ago: the libertarian can, in good conscience, support anything that advances the libertarian cause without deviating even one iota from libertarian principle. So it’s fine for libertarians to go to bat for tax cuts or regulatory relief, so long as they aren’t packaged with something evil also.

So there’s lovely. That’s not really what we’re here to talk about today. I’m here to consider whether or not libertarian involvement in politics has been a fool’s game from the get-go; whether or not it’s all been a massive redirection of energy into a solidly negative direction. To put it as provocatively as possible: was Ron Paul a net negative for the liberty movement?

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The Triumph of Unreason

by Darien Sumner

I’ll be honest with you: I haven’t read Reason since Radley Balko left. Does anybody still bother with that dilapidated old libertarish rag? Why? Is it for sterling insights like this one?

[T]he courage of [Judge Roy] Moore’s convictions frequently clash with both the plain language and contemporary interpretation of the Constitution. Such as that time, oh, LAST WEEK when Moore suggested that kneeling during the National Anthem is "against the law" (it’s not, and if such a law were passed, it would surely be declared unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds).

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Nothing New Under the Sun

by Darien Sumner

A "disabled Holocaust survivor" wrote that, as such, he is trained to detect Nazis, and he knows, from this [hold-your-nose-and-vote-Republican] column, that I would have been a top Nazi commandant at a gas chamber. My office at Las Vegas was defaced several times…

In many ways, from simple reading or listening to scholarly studies we know that the media, especially the Respectable Media, the respectable press, and national TV, are overwhelmingly left-liberal in ideology. And we know, too, that the media have been, for a long time, biased against conservatives and libertarians and in favor of left-liberalism. (I’m not talking so much of the owners, who range from mildly liberal to mildly conservative but the editors, writers, newsmen, actors, entertainers, comics, etc. – the "cultural elite.") But, until very recently… the media – except when they are clearly labeled as columnists, commentators, or Op-Ed writers – sometimes tried to cleave to an ideal of objectivity and fair-mindedness, to provide some kind of balance, so that the public has the tools to make their own judgments and decisions.

That is no longer true. Within the last year… the media have cast aside any pretensions of objectivity. Bias, love of liberals and hatred of their enemies, oozes out of the media at every pore. Take the way the TV and press treated the two conventions. Everything about the Democratic Convention was prettified and glorified to make it seem a love-feast of unity and reasonable "moderation." Any sour notes were played down or buried by the media.

And then, at the Republican Convention: everything any Republican said was immediately countered, even in headlines, either by some Democrat "refutation," or by the journalist’s own phony "correction" of the record. No stone was left unturned in this quest. The media made the Republican convention out to be disunited, riven, captured by "right-wing extremists"; when the truth is that conservatives were no more dominant at this convention and on this year’s platform than they have been for a generation…

Often the public, which has a healthy distrust of the liberal media, can see through the distortions… [b]ut how can the public see the truth when the media are not only systematically biased but are now engaged in faking reality?

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This Post Is a Coded Signal to All My Nazi Friends

by Darien Sumner

There are plenty of regime leftists who like to play at libertarian. The Cato Institute is a hotbed of them; while Cato certainly has some decent people, it also has a ton of run-of-the-mill social climbers angling for a bigger slice of that sweet, sweet Koch Industries pie. The giggling nitwits who run the Libertarian Party are another fine example, pretending to have principles while simultaneously continuing to endorse — even now! — the outrageously crooked Gary Johnson and his shockingly unlibertarian running mate.

I’m not interested in engaging these people today. Mainly I’m interested in annoying them. So following the jump, you’ll find the full text of Jeff Deist’s magnificent speech "For a New Libertarian," which the left-libertarians of the world have somehow managed to label a "Nazi speech." No, I mean nitwits are actually literally saying that the Mises Institute is a Nazi front group. So here’s the entirety of Deist’s speech. Decide for yourself if this is what it means to be a Nazi.

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That happened to me back in Calculus class, too.

Zucked!

by Darien Sumner

The Liberty Conservative earlier today posted an article about a bizarre Twitter rant Cato Institute vice president Brink Lindsey engaged in on Wednesday. Lindsey was outraged about that there Ron Paul; apparently it’s somehow cosmically socially unjust that Ron Paul is more widely known and respected than Brink Lindsey, and Lindsey wants us all to understand that real libertarianism consists of world wars, government-managed trade "agreements," and presumably also forcing people to bake cakes, though Lindsey himself was rather silent on that important point.

So that’s as may be. I was planning to write up a few hundred sarcastic words and throw it in Last Week in Weird. But then a funny thing happened on the way to the bookmarks: I shared the story on Facebook, which promptly earned me a 24-hour ban. And that’s not just me: apparently anybody who shares this particular story on Facebook is banned from "creating open graph actions" for twenty-four hours. What is an "open graph action?" It is a mystery!

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The Rule of Men

by Darien Sumner

Don’t worry; the Trump administration is hard at work protecting America from the truth. By which I mean: they’ve apparently concocted an ambitious network of excuses to kidnap and torture dispense summary justice upon deliver a charming Uncle-Sam-o-gram to Wikileaks editor Julian Assange, who has, as of the time of this writing, been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for seven years. Of course, the Official Media Gatekeepers — by which I obviously mean: fake news — are only too happy to help sell this atrocity to the American people.

The US view of WikiLeaks and Assange began to change after investigators found what they believe was proof that WikiLeaks played an active role in helping Edward Snowden, a former NSA analyst, disclose a massive cache of classified documents.

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The First of Trump’s Wars

by Darien Sumner

Making political predictions is easy. Here’s the rule of thumb: whatever is the worst possible outcome, that’s what they’ll do. The entire body of optimism I was able to muster for the Trump administration was, as I said many a time, predicated on the slim hope that maybe — maybe — he’d be less of a warmonger than his predecessor. There was some campaign rhetoric to that effect, and, while believing campaign rhetoric is a singularly silly idea, it was just enough to prop up a distant hope that the United States could indeed decide that not every event in every country is our business.

So much for that.

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The Last — and Worst — of Obama’s Wars

by Darien Sumner

That can only be the war in Yemen. This is a truly disgusting and cynical war; Yemen is almost impossibly poor, and is no threat to the United States in any conceivable reality, and your United States government is aiding and abetting the butchers that are the house of Saud in what amounts to the most lopsided partisan religious persecution of all time. This is a "war" fought for no purpose, with no defined endpoint, and with no objective other than the wholesale slaughter of helpless children, all to curry political favor with oil-rich barbarian war-chiefs.

Now, just because I labeled this an Obama war, don’t think I’m leaving the new guy off the hook. I was wholeheartedly in favor of giving him a chance, but at this point he’s had it, and he’s officially blown it. If the Trump administration can’t even see through this most insincere of all wars, it clearly has never seen and will never see a war it doesn’t like. All we can hope for at this point is that maybe they won’t start quite as many new ones as the last administration did.

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There is a huge contradiction in the witness' testimony!

With Friends Like These

by Darien Sumner

Contra Reason’s Nick Gillespie, the best thing that happened for the liberty movement in 2016 — indeed, arguably the only good thing in what was otherwise a catastrophic year — was the sudden explosion in popularity of the wonderful libertarian mantra "taxation is theft." In addition to being absolutely true and correct, this is also a powerful slogan that portrays libertarianism at its best, as a philosophy that does not waver and does not compromise with evil for political expediency.

So, naturally, there are libertarishes who hate it.

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Tolerance!

The Sound of Silence

by Darien Sumner

"This is what tolerance looks like at UC Berkeley," Mike Wright of Berkeley College Republicans, the group that invited Yiannopoulos to the campus, said outside the student union building as smoke bombs went off around him.

As he spoke, someone threw a glass bottle of red paint at him. The bottle shattered and splattered paint on his clothing. "It’s sad," he said.

Milo Yiannopoulos was supposed to speak to a sold-out crowd at Berkeley a few days ago. His speech never occurred. Let’s be blunt: the reason for this is that Berkeley is infested with barbarians. Which may come as a surprise to the sort of person who believes the mainstream press, the barbarians don’t come clad in "Make America Great Again" hats swilling from cans of Bud Light as they drive their pickup trucks to Super Bowl parties. Quite the opposite. The barbarians wrap themselves in rainbows, carry signs about love and peace and unity, and then smash windows, spraypaint their slogans on other people’s buildings, assault innocent people, and set fire to the campus. Welcome to the modern left, where tolerance has become what it beheld.

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