I initially joined the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus Facebook group sometime around August 2017, within weeks of its creation. At the time, I was mainly interested in keeping an eye on things for Fakertarians, a watchdog Facebook page that attempts to keep the alt-right (and other authoritarian groups) from gaining a stronghold in the libertarian movement.
As I anticipated, there were a decent number of alt-righters there. However, some of the names in leadership were surprising to me; several of them were people I had ran into before who were openly anti-alt-right. This gave me some hope that the LPMC could be a force for good, and as the number of alt-righters in the group gradually went down to a minimal level once they realized that the LPMC wasn’t a Chase Rachels fan club, I decided to become more involved in the caucus. While there were still various disagreements I had with some of the members (I was generally more socially liberal in my personal outlook, although I was far from the only person like that), I thought that I had found a group that cared about once again making the Libertarian Party the party of principle.
I eventually became involved in leadership as a moderator for the Facebook group, often tasked with parsing through membership requests to boot out alt-right infiltrators, and I assisted with the LP chair campaigns of their endorsed candidate. I was also one of the caucus’s loudest defenders, frequently arguing with those who claimed the LPMC was a group designed to bring in the type of people with views like Christopher Cantwell, Augustus Invictus, and the aforementioned Chase Rachels.
But over time, I became concerned with the direction the caucus was heading, noticing two main issues. The first was a sort of hero worship, in which any questioning or criticism of podcasters, philosophers, or other activists associated with the caucus resulted in an uproar. It seemed to be that many (but not all) members of the caucus took this criticism as a personal attack, feeling the reflexive need to defend their “team” from those who suggested that they were less than perfect.
The second issue was that, although I still don’t believe it was the explicit intention of (at least most of) those in leadership, the alt-right problem was beginning to ramp back up. Membership in the caucus was rapidly increasing at a level not seen before, as the previously referenced podcasters began to encourage their listeners to join. To be clear, some joining were good, principled libertarians, but even many of them were inflicted with the aforementioned hero worship problem.
But alongside those members came those who were clearly at best influenced by, or at worst part of, the alt-right. Others like them, who had been in the caucus group for a long time but generally kept quiet, came out of their dormancy. This played heavily into my resignation from LPMC leadership in November 2019, during which I also cited the fact that I no longer wanted to feel a conflict of interest between my work with Fakertarians and with the caucus (given that I felt the need to post from Fakertarians about individuals who were LPMC-endorsed or adjacent). However, I still stuck around as a normal caucus member, maintaining some level of hope that things would improve.
That changed several weeks ago, when I finally felt that something drastic had to be done before things spiraled out of control. For several weeks, many of the Fakertarians admins (myself included) were highly critical of Dave Smith, a podcaster associated with the LPMC, for what we viewed as a willingness to cozy up with and pander to alt-righters like Stefan Molyneux and Nick Fuentes (as well as Christopher Cantwell, in an interview that occurred several days after the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017), an issue that could take up an entire article by itself. I shared a Fakertarians post about it to the caucus Facebook group hoping to start a conversation and received a lot of pushback, which to be clear, was expected.
However, what struck me by surprise was a contentious interaction I had with the caucus chairman, Michael Heise, after I had raised the possibility that the caucus had an issue with alt-righters joining. He asked me to name one, so I proceeded to do so, explaining my rationale for why I thought this person was a problem (an individual I’ll refer to from here on out as “JM”, as his name isn’t particularly relevant to the story). I specifically zeroed in on JM’s previous comments about how “Europe is for Europeans” (a common alt-right trope) and how he had previously said that libertarians need to do more about race (JM had said that more needed to be done as it relates to “IQ, criminality, [and] social cohesion”). Instead of the individual being booted from the caucus, or at least a private message asking me for my evidence, I had a conversation with Heise that revolved around the semantics of “alt-right” in which Heise contended that “Europe is for Europeans” only indicates that JM has a different “cultural preference” than me (as opposed to showing that he is alt-right and should be booted). During that conversation, JM also indicated that he wanted to ban all immigration to the United States.
This interaction motivated me to leave the caucus, because if what seemed to be an obvious case of an alt-righter present resulted in this kind of pushback, I felt there wasn’t much hope for solving the alt-right problem in general. In the comments section of a Fakertarians post about it several days later that included screenshots of JM’s comments, Heise doubled down on his defense.
A couple days after that, JM was finally booted after screenshots surfaced of JM ranting about Jews and using the anti-Semitic “triple parentheses” that originated in alt-right circles. I gave credit to the LPMC from the Fakertarians page for getting rid of him, but I was perturbed by the fact that Heise was continuing to public defend the decision to not boot JM for the first set of comments.
Several others have been booted from the LPMC since this for alt-right ties (including one after we made another post about the specific person), but I still worry that these actions are either being done to save face (although I do know for a fact that some in leadership do oppose the alt-right and have taken at least a step or two behind the scenes to help fix things, even if I think the response hasn’t been adequate) and/or that it is only the symptoms of the problem that are being addressed (a few members here and then), as opposed to treating the “disease” itself (aka why the alt-righters are joining in the first place, which like the Dave Smith controversy, is complicated enough to write another entire article about).
I want to make it clear, as I alluded to earlier, that I do think there are still some good people in the caucus (and in the caucus’s leadership). I’ve had numerous caucus members reach out to me privately in agreement on a lot of aspects of this, and I know that some of them are working on trying to solve the issue, although I do think there are far too many who won’t even acknowledge that there’s a problem (and even those who think that the actual problem is that this issue is even being addressed at all, as some have complained that the caucus is taking the criticism too seriously).
After one individual in caucus leadership, who has generally been critical of the alt-right but has also objected to my public posts on the issue, told me several days ago that I should “either join the mod team again, or let [the caucus] handle it,” I made a good-faith public offer last night to rejoin as a moderator and help them combat the problem (although I do not particularly expect to be taken up on my proposal and have yet to hear any comment from LPMC leadership about it).
I generally have a propensity for trying to help groups or organizations that I see as salvageable get better instead of simply going scorched-Earth and only trying to tear them down, maybe even to a fault (like I did when I gave Liberty Hangout some credit several years ago for their firing of several alt-right writers, only to see them devolve once again several months later). But I do think there is something to be gained from a Libertarian Party caucus that focuses on Austrian economics and strict adherence to principles (which, although it is surely debatable how much that has happened in reality, is what the LPMC has often billed itself as). If I were in LPMC leadership right now, my first course of action would be to loudly state that the alt-right is not welcome (as opposed to simply kicking a person here or there without making a big deal about it publicly).
But whether the caucus really attempts to solve their alt-right problem and does so, whether they only pay it lip service, or whether they completely ignore the criticisms of myself and others and devolve into an alt-right cesspool, the other Fakertarians admins and I will continue to do what we can to help keep the alt-right from gaining a foothold in the Libertarian Party and movement.
fakertarians.wordpress.com 
I dropped out of the LP years ago; voted for Johnson in 2012 and 2016, but for Biden in 2020.
The Bob Barr/Wayne Root victory in the 2008 primary and effort by lots of “radical” libertarians to try and “build bridges” with the alt-right through fringe-right statists like Barr and Root — as well as adjacent white supremacist personality cult figureheads like Ron Paul — was a major warning sign of the direction of the “movement.” Too few Libertarians were willing to stand up to the alt-right, racists, homophobes, transphobes, anti-immigrant xenophobes, antisemites, etc.
The evolution was clear — the LP managed to resist the alt-right takeover, but numerous non-LP “libertarian” organizations fell victim to either supporting alt-lite/alt-right philosophy, or merely attempting to argue that we should agree to co-exist with it and not critique it as dangerous authoritarianism. “Libertarians” in the LP would rant with great fury about the imminent threat of communism at the hands of Hillary Clinton and the Paris Climate Accord, but when alt-right figures like Wayne Root would make racist rants about Obama, or Ron Paul would publish racist screens in his newsletters, we were encouraged “not to sow discord” and “keep an open mind” and “agree to disagree.”
The opening for the alt-right truly arrived with Donald Trump, and as a large chunk of “libertarians” went to support his authoritarian neo-fascist agenda, it became clear to me that there never was a real libertarian movement to begin with… just some earnest libertarians surrounded by opportunists seeking to use a thin veneer of libertarian rhetoric to advocate for anti-libertarian ideals.
Have a look at Wayne Root’s social media these days — Trumpian neo-fascism out clearly in the open, growing out of a long thread of questionable alt-right statements since his early days as a political candidate for the LP.
I respect your efforts to fight the alt-right, but I’m afraid it’s too late. It all started with the Bob Barr and Wayne Root thing. Once Barr was the 2008 nominee and Root was nominated to the Libertarian Party’s national board, the whole thing was over.
There’s nothing left to salvage. Most big-name libertarian periodicals and organizations have been either resolutely quiet in their condemnation of neo-fascism, or in the case of Reason, mildly supportive (see the firing of Shikha Dalmia for being too libertarian in her critique of Donald Trump, or this recent article stating that the threat of violence from Trumpian neo-fascists means we need to give them their own domain of absolute authoritarian power: https://reason.com/2021/01/19/to-avoid-more-political-violence-allow-americans-to-escape-each-others-control/ )
LikeLike
This take is almost totally correct except it slightly botches the…pathogenesis.
Look, the real turning point was the Ron Paul R3volution in 2008 and things were shaky even before that. Cato went insane over the Iraq War and America’s victory there, and Reason went from making fun of Antiwar.com to hiring people from it. Then in 2008 libertarians decide to chuck away decades of serious intellectualism onto the fire and embrace a guy whose ethos is based on bad economics and fairy-tale based foreign policy. That’s it, that’s the game. You’ve decided conspiracy theories and fabulism are to be valued and that expertise and context are for neoconz. The alt right takeover is merely an entirely logical evolution from the Ron Paul thing. Once you say okay to some nonsense, you say okay to all of it. No rules now.
Tucille is consistently awful…and so is Shikha. Reason hasn’t been readable for at least 13 years, Ron Bailey aside.
LikeLike
Voted for Biden?
Thanks for f–king our country over.
LikeLike
First, thanks for writing this blog post, and thanks to “Old-timer” for responding. If I know either of you by first name, or we’ve met, I’m sorry if I don’t know or recall who you are. I’ve met thousands of libertarians in my travels, most at various conventions.
MY VIEW OF THE LPMC
Michael Heise himself is a solid libertarian, from everything I’ve seen and everything I know. I wish him well in trying to retake the Libertarian Party for actual libertarians. However, I’d rescind my hopes for LPMC if it can’t or won’t change the LP into a functional entity, in-between election cycles, when the establishment wants it to “do nothing,” or “fly in a holding pattern.” We need a libertarian entity. (Agree with the blogger on that. There isn’t one now. Just the Mises embryo.)
REGARDING DALMIA AND ROOT
Old Timer: 1- The prior point regarding Shikha Dalmia is really alarming. Dalmia is excellent, and so is Bryan Caplan. Catering to the GOP’s anti-immigrant nonsense is grotesque. Immigrants should be gratefully welcomed into the LP at every opportunity. In time, they will make more serious libertarians than anyone born here, for the same reasons Ayn Rand stated of her own immigration. 2- Everyone hates on Wayne Allyn Root, but he’s not a bad guy, and certainly not as bad as “lapel-grabbing libertarians” make him out to be. He’s “ex-GOP moving towards 100% libertarianism.” (Much like Ron Paul was, at one point.) FWIW: Root formally rejected his prior pro-war views to run as LP, and he personally adopted a favorable view of jury independence and even advocated it in his campaign. (He was a bit green in his understanding, but he was well-intended.) Root never went back on his word, either. (Very unlike Barr, Gray, Johnson, Redpath, Sarwark, etc.) In any case…I supported Root getting the nomination for president in 2008 (for an entire year before Ruwart entered the race), and was ethically-bound, by oral contract, to vote for him at the 2008 nominating convention. This then meant I had to hold my nose and vote for Barr, or defraud Root (Root paid my way to the convention when I didn’t have money). Bob Barr is, unfortunately, a repugnant totalitarian. (You can still find his support for drug warrior Alvaro Uribe’s death squads and U.S. military intervention on behalf of the drug war in Colombia, online at the internet archive.) This was all well-known before the convention, and Root was trying to campaign against him until the alternative was to be excluded from the LP’s VP slot. He claimed, even then, that he’d try to hold Barr accountable (it was a hollow claim…and he was in low spirits, having lost the POTUS slot). The Root supporters at the convention weren’t the same as the kind of idiots who were “Barrf irst” supporters. …One kid said “I’m not really a libertarian, I’m just here to support Barr, but it’s cool.” (Root was unable to really hold Barr accountable without openly breaking ties with him, which he was unwilling to do, because it’d have gotten him booted out of the LP.) Before the Ruwart disaster (I won’t mention the details here. A great woman and great author used an egregiously unfortunate choice of words, resulting in Root’s team going ballistic, and Root himself being placed in an awkward position.) Root was seeking to run with Ruwart.
Root lobbed many softballs in her direction, expecting her to recognize that she was vying to run a national campaign. She failed to profile Root et al. properly, and failed to hit any of those softballs. Instead she issued her famous remarks, doubling down on her prior position, without using the qualified language necessary in a political campaign. (Sincere question: Is it the LP’s policy to always volunteer information that will ensure political defeat? Should we allow ourselves to be conquered by the US-equivalent of the Nazi SS because we refuse to admit that there are such pieces of information? If she had even slightly walked back her prior statements, Root was then going to ask her to join forces to beat Barr, even if she wanted the top slot. …Because he’d have then, very likely successfully, sought Ron Paul’s endorsement when it really mattered.) …The LP then, once again, made the very worst of a situation that “could have gone either way.” Before I began backing Root, I’d reached out to Ruwart, as had several other people I knew, begging her to commit to run, early enough in the process to make a difference (which she would not do, until far too late in the game to make any difference…as we all saw…) …I’d have loved to have started working for her when a declaration from her would have been early enough to secure Ron Paul’s endorsement in the year of his peak popularity…which the LP went without. (This happened after Barr pissed him off by demanding Paul endorse him and his stinking Colombian drug war baggage.) The prior was, in hindsight, all by design. It only took one well-placed individual (Bill Redpath) to scuttle every secondary objective, then tertiary objective, and so on. In short, the “leadership” of the LP are feds. They’re not just “weak libertarians,” they’re people who do not wish libertarianism to succeed.
POLITICAL REALITY:
The point of much of the prior is that: You only possess what you possess, in terms of candidates. If you have nobody loyal, “hardcore” and aware, you have to back someone lesser, or effectively dissolve your party. Barr was the train-wreck to be avoided. Barr was the totalitarian who was unwilling to compromise his totalitarianism, knowing full well what he was doing. Root was arguably too dumb to count delegates. (And, you might argue, I was too dumb to pepper him with phone calls for control of the delegate count.) Root was too dumb to ally with Ruwart in spite of her comments. …But Root wasn’t disloyal, whereas Barr was. Root (or Ruwart) was our “Van Buren in the Free Soil Party” moment. Root was also more “politically aware” in terms of “what is” than Ruwart. (You never get to Ruwart’s “should be” if you completely refuse to recognize “what is.”) …And, yes, I do know what Mises said about political reality, or “realpolitik” …but he said that before Milgram, and before humans knew much about ‘fixed action patterns,’ a la Cialdini. He was an economist, not a psychologist, and he never won office.
LP IS ‘CONTROLLED OPPOSITION’
In any case, the prior is moot. The Libertarian Party is a controlled opposition front. For two decades, one man, Bill Redpath (and his “yes men” on the LNC), controlled 100% of the LP’s “potentially useful spending.” (All of the spending that interfaced with the general public. …The intelligence community (or parts of it) are actually slightly afraid of the LP or independents doing smart things on the ground, at the local level, for extended periods of time. Redpath made sure that didn’t happen for 20 years. When I approached every single person on the LNC from 2011 to 2014, I was met with…sadly….stupidity or infiltration from the entire LNC. Because some of these people might simply have been stupid, I won’t name them here. …But I got back suggestions like “Well then we just shouldn’t run any candidates, let’s just stop funding ballot access” (i.e. “If I kill myself, this hangnail won’t bother me anymore!”) and “I’ll talk to so and so, and we’ll see what we can do to vote him out, but I just don’t see what discussing past ballot access drives can do…”(failing to comprehend the signaling difference between ‘registration’ and ‘petition’ ballot access drives) etc. ….In short, you just had a bunch of nice, well-intended people who aren’t smart enough to challenge politically-entrenched government power.
…THE DELUSIONAL LNC
I’m sure they’re great grandparents, productive businesspeople, and have many redeeming qualities, as human beings. …But they’re not cut out to challenge power in any way. (BTW: Here’s an excellent heuristic …if not ‘a litmus test’ for figuring out who’s a totalitarian pretending to be a libertarian: Find out if they support jury nullification of law in victimless non-crime cases, AKA “jury independence.” …Many in the Redpath crowd openly state their opposition to it. These are the people who wish to roll us back to total enslavement, and also protect the DEA and BATFE. …In short, they’re totalitarians.) The math of truly random jury trials only favors setting the innocent free. See the link in my profile here.
‘ALT-RIGHT’
As for the stink-right? Yes, they stink. Is Molyneux one of them? I don’t think so. I think he’s very different from someone like Chris Cantwell or some of the other lesser-known informants and racists who are purposefully trying to rebrand libertarianism and its classical liberal history as racist. (There’s an old joke, post-2015: “Who’s the best at refuting Molyneux’s claims? Molyneux himself from pre-2013.”) …Molyneux’s video “What is the Matrix, Part 3” brought a lot of people into the LP. It had millions of views on YouTube in the early days. Good for him. He still has not abandoned principle, but he’s interpreted some ideas very incorrectly and malevolently, in my opinion. Again: There’s a big difference between “disloyalty” and “stupidity.” I don’t think Molyneux is disloyal, or untruthful. I think some of his positions are downright stupid. (But he’s still brave. He’s willing to debate Bryan Caplan, but Caplan isn’t willing to debate him. …Bravery matters. Willingness to test your ideas in contest with “a smart opponent whom you cannot cast as the devil due to a great overlap in agreement” is a very valuable trait. I’m not saying Caplan doesn’t ever display this trait, but that Molyneux always displays it. Different people have different strengths. I personally think Caplan would win the debate, but I value Stefan’s willingness to defend the merits of his position, including on economic grounds.)
ON PARTY PURGES
The libertarian movement isn’t big enough to run purges against people. So how to handle the agents provocateurs and stink-right? More speech counters toxic speech. Leadership of LP Mises occasionally quotes Mises, and denounces their statements. If such people claim to speak on behalf of LP MC, (as opposed to “I think LPMC should do X”) only then can their memberships be rescinded. The purge mentality is idiotic. It’s like the famous scene from “The Life of Brian” where the People’s Front of Judea goes to war with The Judean People’s Front, and there’s a total of 6 people fighting, IIRC.
ON ANTI-IMMIGRANT NONSENSE
The very best way to hand anti-immigrant or anti-immigration trolls is to ask them what they dislike about immigrants. And simply refute their logic. I totally understand that this gets tiring very quickly. (Especially for people who aren’t good at it.) …But that’s the right thing to do, to separate those who are simply confused about libertarian ideas from those who wish to make such ideas toxic.
ON SERIOUSNESS
I always find it odd when libertarians view political participation as “something vastly more important than a hobby,” but then behave as though it’s “vastly less important than a hobby.” I want to ask them: Don’t you realize how great the likelihood is that we’re all going to die because of that incoherence? For example: When I talk with most libertarians, they immediately reveal to me that they don’t know anything at all about [“practical”+”moral”] political action. (This was actually something of a problem with Mises himself, and Ayn Rand, herself. However, remember: The goal here is to avoid another holocaust. If there’s even a chance I’m right, please hear me out.) Blackwell’s famous quote, “If your philosophy is good and true, you owe it to your philosophy to learn how to win,” is valid. That’s all we should need to know. But none of us act as though our lives depend on it. We don’t act as though we’ll be treated like Emmet Till, the Branch Davidians, or Kalief Browder if we fail. …But we will. We are “on a curve.” (0) If we do nothing, the most likely option, we are hated as cowards, and our children experience a holocaust, hating our generation as cowards. (1) If we attract too much attention by behaving in politically-antagonistic ways, we get attacked and neutralized (MOVE HQ, The Branch Davidians, Duncan Lemp, Aaron Patterson), and our children experience the holocaust in our absence (a legacy in which we are hated as “victims who could have been heroes”). (2) If we then go further in attracting attention, by acting in politically-effective ways, the parasites shrink backward, afraid to attack us, lest they anger “the sleeping giant,” of America’s right-thinking gun owners and the portions of the media that aren’t controlled. (Dick Randolph; Thomas Massie; Rand Paul; perhaps Cody Wilson?) (3) If we then go still further on the same spectrum in attracting attention by acting in politically-effective ways, the sociopaths see no option for themselves but to attack us, lest we begin a feedback loop that ends in their loss of power (as in the case of Snowden, Ulbricht, Assange, Aaron Patterson, Schaeffer Cox). Thus, it seems the safest and best course of action is “the unpredictable middle value.” But how can the sociopaths be predicted? It’s almost impossible. I strongly suggest that libertarians learn about jury independence activism, what its boundaries are, and how it can be integrated with politics. (It may be that nobody really knows these things. If so, that’s a sad commentary, since anyone can read Clay Conrad’s book, “Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine” and Tom Woods’ book, “Nullification” and Richard Mack’s book, “The County Sheriff,” and Vin Suprynowicz’s book “Send In The Waco Killers” and learn everything they need to know. …Though not in one place. Perhaps the best “one place” to go for the prior is Ken Royce’s fiction book, “Molon Labe” which is also worth reading. It’s a fictionalized account of a violent rebellion, the violent portions of which portray where an appropriate “line in the sand” is to be drawn.) The prior books would set people up to prevent another holocaust. It’s also worth mentioning that there are certain people in law enforcement who, while they were employed, voiced their sympathies with major libertarian ideas
ON ‘LAW ENFORCEMENT’
John Douglass of the FBI said that ‘going after victimless crimes kills women and kids, because it takes resources away from the FBI’s ISU, and there’s a direct man-hour correlation between number of man-hours allocated to serial murderer evidence, and the capture of that serial murderer and the cessation of his ongoing activities’ in the same writing, he also pointed out that serial killers don’t tend to get caught without help from public witnesses, and that the drug war makes witnesses clam up, in a very reasonable manner. The prior is a sentiment echoed by former CIA operative Nic McKinley on the Patrick Bet-David podcast on sex slavery. …I may not like the prior entities (FBI, CIA, etc.) any more than any other libertarian, but it’s worth mentioning this because the prior arguments are the only ones that are 100% effective on well-intended-but-misguided ‘law and order’ types. It’s always sad to see ‘conservative’ almost-libertarians favor pseudo-law and pseudo-order when a flashy and unphilosophical election-winning-persona like Trump’s comes along. At least reaching out to the pro-law-enforcement types before such recurring catastrophes is smart. We need more Justin Hanners’, Raeford Davis’, and Matt Foggs (the former U.S. Marshal who turned against the drug war). With every whistleblower cop that speaks out against the police, innocent people are helped, and harm is minimized. Ideally, the drug war can be ‘stopped in its tracks.’ Immediately. By refusal to enforce, jury nullification of law, nolle prosecui (failure to prosecute) from prosecutors, and ‘sua sponte’ nullification from judges. (If Democrats were actually “anti-racist” they could adopt all the prior measures, and go to war with Biden, Harris, and the DNC-types who keep the drug-war alive. Similarly, if the GOP wanted to destroy the Democrats, they could take the dramatic lead on these issues…not ‘tinkering around the edges with drug and gun slavery’ but actually abolishing prohibition, entirely.)
ON AGENCY
At any time the libertarian movement decides it wishes to exist, it can. There’s currently no Gerrit Smith in the US liberty movement. Sarwark and his henchmen, and the ultra-weak LNC, are symptoms of a fed-scuttled LP. Any billionaire (what Gerrit Smith was to the abolitionist movement) who wishes to clean up the LP could easily do so. Of course, they don’t. Because they’re afraid. That’s understandable, but, as Norbert Wiener wrote, “The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door.”
ON ‘THE BARE MINIMUM’
If you replace Redpath, and don’t hire one of the other ‘Almost Old-timers’ like me to replace what little of his functionality is legitimate, you’re just putting a bullet in the head of the Libertarian Party. This is because the LNC actually doesn’t know what to do. They’re lost. They don’t even know they’re pwned. There’s nobody on the LNC who is at the level of a well-intended undergrad who’s taken a Poli-Sci 101 course. Redpath keeps the LP in a coma on life support, because he’s aware of the difference between life and death. If you want to beat the devil, you need to give him his due.
ON 2016
I worked for McAfee in 2016, because I was hoping he’d be able to institute some anti-malware programs in the LP. I got 15 minutes to talk with him, thanks to Kevin Takanaga. John was brilliant, and absorbed all the logical points of jury independence arguments in those 15 minutes. (Something that even other computer scientists have been unable to do.) He was the best candidate, by far. (Of course, Redpath et al. screwed that up, too.) RIP, John.
MORE ABOUT HEISE & PURGES
I’m pretty sure Heise is aware of most of the prior, so I think supporting LPMC is a good idea, if you can afford it, and if they haven’t been decisively been taken over by right-wing stink. (This was written Jan 1, 2022.) The presence of people who are alt-right inside the PAC as low-level supporters is actually OK with me. If you question many such people, they’re incoherent. If you exclude alt-right people simply because they’re incoherent idiots, you probably won’t be able to have any sort of a political movement. There simply aren’t that many coherent people in the USA. Using Mises’ work as a litmus test is not a bad idea.) …It might or might not be worth getting personally involved. It depends what their organizational structure is, and if it pays to accomplish useful things. (Heresy! Did I just suggest people actually be paid to accomplish useful work? In a capitalist political party?!
ON FAKERTARIANS BLOG
I don’t know who any of the other fakertarians bloggers or activists are, I am only responding to this one post. It made me happy to read it, and see that some people are thinking things through at a fairly high level. While we disagree on a few minor details, I could see myself working with someone who agrees with this blog, but I can’t see myself working with anyone who’d fire Shikha Dalmia because she righteously dragged Trump’s idiotic anti-immigration and anti-immigrant policies and statements.
ON DAVE SMITH
I like what I’ve seen of Dave Smith. He seems well-intended. Same with Tim Dillon, Joe Rogan, Doug Stanhope, Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle, or Louis CK. If any of those guys ever sat down with me for a planning session, I could have them running the LP effectively like a well-oiled machine in under 3 hours. I don’t think having comedians involved in the LP diminishes it or makes it “less serious.” I think it makes it more serious. “The emperor is naked!”
WHY SHOULD ANYONE GIVE A FUCK ABOUT WHAT I’VE WRITTEN HERE? WHO AM I?
I’m nobody. You shouldn’t care. The logic doesn’t speak for itself. Ever. Run along, credential inspectors.
LikeLike
This post is why the Libertarian Party will never, ever be a serious contender in American political life.
LikeLike