In early May, the Libertarian Party’s national committee announced a prominent speaker at the party’s convention over Memorial Day weekend in Washington, DC: Former US president Donald Trump.

A few days later, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a post on X (formerly Twitter), issued a challenge:

“We’re both going to be speaking at the upcoming Libertarian convention on May 24 and 25. It’s perfect neutral territory for you and me to have a debate where you can defend your record for your wavering supporters. ”

The party hasn’t publicly confirmed any invitation (offered or accepted) to Kennedy, but maybe that’s coming.

I’m not going to argue — here, anyway — over the wisdom of a political party inviting two of its most prominent opponents to use its national convention as a campaign rally location or debate venue.

I do, however, want all you voters out there to know three things about this … things that the media coverage seems to either leave unmentioned or gloss over:

1. Donald Trump isn’t a libertarian;
2. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t a libertarian; and
3. Neither Trump nor Kennedy will be the Libertarian Party’s 2024 presidential nominee.

We’ve got a pretty big field of announced candidates for that presidential nomination.

Neither Trump nor Kennedy have declared for that nomination (in fact, after flirting with doing so, Kennedy publicly rejected the idea).

Neither Trump nor Kennedy are eligible for that nomination … or at least they won’t be if they address the convention prior to the nominee being selected. According to the Libertarian National Committee’s policy manual:

“No person shall be scheduled as a convention speaker unless that person has signed this statement: ‘As a condition of my being scheduled to speak, I agree to neither seek nor accept nomination for any office to be selected by delegates at the upcoming Libertarian Party convention if the voting for that office occurs after my speech.'”

Since we haven’t selected our nominee yet, I’m not going to sing his or her praises to you or try to convince you to vote Libertarian . I just don’t want you to be surprised when you look at your ballot in November and don’t see the name “Trump” or “Kennedy” next to the name “Libertarian Party.”

Between now and November, I hope you’ll take time to familiarize yourself with libertarian ideas and with the Libertarian Party’s candidates for office across the US. They deserve your attention and consideration.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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

“V-U. DAY!” proclaimed the May 2 cover of the New York Post. Despite the jubilant headline and “mostly sunny, warm” weather forecast, the national mood in early May is more malaise than morning-in-America.

After all, even the classic Cold War political thriller Seven Days in May took its time revealing the scope of the challenge to the American way, rather than letting it into the open on day one.

New York mayor Eric Adams is quoted as considering it “despicable that schools will allow another country’s flag to fly in our country.” (Has Adams forgotten the Israeli flags unfurled by counterprotesters, or the multitudinous banners seen on class trips to the United Nations?)

The paranoid Post is more historically true to its founder Alexander Hamilton’s backing of the Alien and Sedition Acts than his fictionalization in The Hamilton Mixtape finding it “astonishing that in a country founded by immigrants, ‘immigrant’ has somehow become a bad word.”  Even so, they should calm down about the university populations they liken to the Axis.

Historian James Loewen emphasized that polls consistently found more approval for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq among those with college education.  Antiwar demonstrators have always been “the loud minority” of Mad magazine’s 139th cover from 1970.

Even many not viewing protesters as a fifth column on campus share the frustrations of Resentment Against Achievement author Robert Sheaffer, who sees “the largesse of the taxpaying class” leading to “far fewer concerns about productive activity” than among those who prefer to spend time on pursuits “that will yield far more gain” than “joining some probably futile protest.”

Heavy financial subsidization, extending to even nominally private American institutions, does atrophy their resource-allocation acumen in, and outside, the classroom. However, as Loewen notes, funding pays for itself as “a bulwark of allegiance” to the state.  While paralleling the “vastly extended schooling” of Castro’s Cuba and Maoist China, it results in a student body far more loyal to the USA than to the ghost of the USSR.

Ronald Radosh was haunted by that specter when he wrote of having been to New York’s “historic center of radical protest” in Union Square as a red-diaper baby from literal infancy.  In the summer of 2001, he perceived a “growing irony” that May Day parades were “the first step of my journey to America, a country where I was born but didn’t fully discover until middle age.”  Ironically, that celebration originates with labor agitators not from the twentieth century Kremlin but nineteenth century Chicago. Hippolyte Havel pointed out that organizers like Albert Parsons and Dyer Lum drew upon American experience for ideas dismissed as “foreign poison imported into the States from decadent Europe.”

For a century before Sheaffer suggested it, “pro-freedom” Americans inspired by the first May Day have been on the march “against government restrictions on our liberties.” As Liberty‘s Benjamin Tucker recommended in 1884, their supporters need “not even gather in the streets but stay at home and stand back on their rights” to win them.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “I protest: It is not a merry May” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, May 7, 2024
2. “I Protest: It Is Not a Merry May” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, May 9, 2024
3. “KNAPP [sic] COLUMN: I Protest: It Is Not a Merry May,” The LaGrange, Georgia Daily News, May 9, 2024
4. “Knapp [sic]: It is not Merry May” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], The Madill, Oklahoma Record, May 8, 2024
5. “Opinion: I protest: It is not a merry May” by Joel Schlosberg, Newton, Iowa Daily News, May 11, 2024

On April 29. the US Department of Justice “unsealed” a 2023 indictment of one Roger Ver, better known in cryptocurrency circles as “Bitcoin Jesus.” He was arrested in Spain and as of this writing awaits extradition proceedings.

The indictment claims that Ver failed to hand over a sufficiently large extortion payment to the US government  in 2017, after  leaving the country and renouncing his citizenship in 2014.

The DOJ press release doesn’t put it quite that way, of course. Instead it claims that  “[A]s a result of his expatriation, Ver allegedly was required under U.S. law to file tax returns that reported capital gains from the constructive sale of his world-wide assets …. He was also allegedly required to pay a tax — referred to as an ‘exit tax’ – on those capital gains. … [Ver] concealed the true number of bitcoins he and his companies owned.”

Yes, you have that right. Roger Ver left the US in 2014. Roger Ver renounced his citizenship in 2014. He’s charged with not paying a $48 million bribe to the US government after selling some of his Bitcoin in 2017, when he was neither a citizen of, nor resident in, the US.

In 1931, Germany’s Weimar Republic instituted something called the Reichsfluchtsteuer — “Reich Flight Tax” — to prevent wealthy Germans from going, and taking their money, elsewhere … or at least to grab much of that money.

After the Nazis rose to power in 1933, the tax was instead used to seize everything of value from Jews trying to flee the new government’s persecution.

But, so far as I can tell, even the Third Reich didn’t display anything like the sheer gall and temerity of the US regime, chasing down emigrants years later and extorting additional money from them. Hitler’s goons limited themselves to things like pawing through emigrants’ luggage and stealing their jewelry.

Roger Ver’s wealth was never any of the US government’s business (neither is yours), and he never “owed” them a cut of it even when he lived here (nor do you).

This “nice life you’ve built elsewhere,  shame if anything happened to it” routine  is a giant, audacious step beyond most governments’ protection rackets.

To add insult to injury, “Bitcoin Jesus” has probably done you more good — with his investments in, and evangelism for, cryptocurrencies —  than “your” government ever has.

Which may or may not be why they’re after him. But either way, telling Hitler “hey, hold my beer” just isn’t a very good look.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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