“California,” Milo Yiannopoulos wrote last year on X, “needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally.”

On August 27, ICE agents abducted Yiannopoulos at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, briefly detained him at one of the gang’s concentration camps in Alexandria, Louisiana, and deported him the next day to his native country, the United Kingdom. It seems he had overstayed his visa, and after failing to appear for a hearing, had become subject to a “final order of removal.”

Oops.

You can see, I hope, temptation to  schadenfreude from those of us who support truth, justice, and the American way  (i.e. “open borders” as called for in the Declaration of Independence and mandated by the US Constitution).

Do we really need a mouthy Brit jetting over here at will, spouting stupid, evil, and abhorrent opinions at high volume, then overstaying the “welcome” he insists everyone else must continually bow and scrape for both initially and on a recurring basis, on pain of abduction and deportation?

In my opinion, yes, that’s exactly what we need.

I don’t have to like Milo Yiannopoulos, or agree with his odious ideas, in order to understand that where he travels to or chooses to live is neither my business nor the US government’s.

In fact,  the case against deporting Yiannopoulos is strengthened, not weakened, by his 24/7 public stupidity.

It’s pretty easy for anti-immigration advocates to make the case for deporting, say, a (non-ICE) gang member who has committed violent crimes in the US or seems likely to based on having committed such crimes elsewhere.

It’s not quite as easy to make the case for deporting immigrant workers to “protect American jobs.” That requires preying on abject economic ignorance to convince Americans that immigration makes them less, rather than more, prosperous. But it’s obviously doable, at least for a little while, until a head of lettuce costs ten bucks.

Yiannopoulos, however, traffics mainly in speech.

Speech is not a violent crime. In fact, it’s not a crime at all.

Speech moves easily across borders. If Yiannopoulos wants to say something, we can listen whether he says it in London or in Los Angeles.

And the ability to speak isn’t a resource of fixed quantity. When Yiannopoulos speaks, he isn’t reducing the ability of anyone else to speak. He can speak all he wants … and the rest of us can too. As we should.

Even “bad” speech has value. As Louis Brandeis put it, “if there be time to expose through discussion the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

The rants of a Milo Yiannopoulos embody ideas — bad ideas — that, unfortunately, many other people also hold. The cure for bad ideas isn’t to deport a particular mouthpiece, it’s to entertain those ideas and expose them as bankrupt with better ideas.

Back in the UK, Yiannopoulos will continue doing the  same things he was doing in the US, just as successfully … and spending his money, probably mostly earned from US sources, there instead of here.

No schadenfreude from me. He’s owed an apology and his freedom to travel.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The US Army, Fox Business reports, plans to build nuclear “microreactors” at five of its bases — Fort Bragg, Fort Campbell, Fort Hood, Fort Benning, and Fort Drum — over the next two years, with at least 15 more to follow later.

Why? To, the report says, “strengthen the military’s energy security and reduce its reliance on potentially vulnerable power grids.”

The idea certainly makes sense for a military base, but it makes sense for everyone, everywhere else, too.

The biggest security  and reliability worry with electricity isn’t that an enemy missile or bomb will take out a power plant. It’s that an attack or accident somewhere along the 650,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 6.3 million miles of distribution lines criss-crossing the US will stop that power from getting delivered.

A drunk driver hits a pole. A defective or damaged transformer explodes. A computer suddenly stops juggling chainsaws to correctly operate some part the increasingly complex and interconnected “grid” system. And the lights go out, somewhere. Maybe just on your block, maybe in a million households.

Most of the proposed to solutions to these problems seem to be about making the “grid” more “robust,” more interconnected, more complex, and more centralized. That’s a move in the wrong direction.

The “grid” is a sprawling Rube Goldberg machine that evolved over the course of the 20th century based on the now false notion that large numbers of consumers must get their electricity from large, central power plants.

The problem with that is that when something breaks in one place, people in other places suffer. In 2003, a “cascading grid failure,” caused by sagging power lines short-circuiting on tree branches in Ohio, blacked out eight US states and the Canadian province of Ontario.

Technology advances, and it doesn’t have to be “grid” technology. These days, many consumers who lost power in 2003 could, reasonably affordably, get their electricity from their own rooftop solar panels or backyard wind turbines. And for those who don’t, smaller community-level systems make more sense than a central computer pushing watts down many miles of vulnerable line, through multiple switching  steps from far-flung plants.

The 20-megawatt nuclear reactors the army’s buying could each, in civilian context, power as many as 20,000 homes — about twice as many as found in the median US county. Combined with wind and solar — at both household and utility scale — there’s no reason why populations can’t become far more self-reliant and secure so a power problem in Akron doesn’t black out Ann Arbor.

If that sounds obvious, it is. So obvious that even the US Army has figured it out (as an old Marine, I naturally believe they’re not terribly bright). The rest of us should get with the decentralization/localization program.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On August 22, a new set of US tariffs went into effect. Those tariffs charge American buyers of Canadian goods — 569 categories of stuff including dairy, alcohol, electronics, furniture, building materials, and other items, amounting to a usual annual value of nearly $25 billion — an extra 50%.

Let me re-state and clarify that:

In order to supposedly punish Canada for supposedly discriminatory trade measures, US president Donald Trump wants to charge Americans a potential $12.5 billion in new taxes. I say “potential” because that 50% Trump tax hike will price many Americans out of the goods in question; the previous year’s $25 billion in imports will go down.

By way of “retaliation,” the Canadian government has announced it will tax Canadian buyers of US goods, according to finance minister François-Philippe Champagne , “dollar for dollar, rate for rate.”

To which Trump replied with a prospective doubling of auto and steel tariffs and the renaming of Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”

Trade wars are odd in that the dueling governments’ weapon of choice is confiscatory taxation imposed on their own citizens.

“I’m mad at you — I’m going to break my son’s arm.”

“Oh yeah? Well fine, I’ll break my wife’s leg — how ya like them apples?”

“You’ve done it now — I’m dousing my whole family in gasoline and lighting a match!”

When I point out how idiotic all that is, a few doofs come back at me with: “Buy American — problem solved.”

But no, buying American doesn’t solve your problem as a consumer. You’re going to pay more, whether you pay it directly  to Uncle Sam or not.

Suppose you  … well, no, let’s talk about me.

I had plans for a small construction project this fall. I was going to buy lumber for it next month and work on it at a leisurely pace through September and October. One of the ingredients: Plywood.

Lots of lumber comes from Canada, and these new tariffs will affect building materials, so I moved up my timetable and had the plywood delivered yesterday. It happens to be southern yellow pine plywood, grown and cut in the good ol’ USA. But you can bet the price will be going up anyway, due to the tariffs.

If Canadian lumber gets 50% more expensive, American producers can raise their own prices to any amount lower than that new, higher price and remain competitive. The increased demand for their  domestic supply versus Canadian goods will also tend to make it a seller’s market unless they’re built out to produce a lot more than normal, very quickly.

Which, I’ve often opined, usually seems to be the whole point. Politically connected industries make bank not by competing, but by getting their friends in government to make sure they don’t HAVE to compete.

These days, I’m less sure. Trump’s tariff antics don’t come off as following that corrupt logic. In fact, they don’t seem to be rooted in any logic at all. They look a lot more like a toddler’s unpredictable, unappeasable tantrums.

But either way, you pay and America loses.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY