Category Archives: Op-Eds

Op-Eds

Who’s on Third? Not John Kasich

Leave a comment
Libertarian Party Logo
Libertarian Party Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I don’t think either party is answering people’s deepest concerns and needs,” Ohio governor John Kasich said in a February 25 interview on ABC News’s This Week. “I don’t think it’s going to happen tomorrow but I think over time do not be surprised if these millennials and these Gen Xers begin to say, ‘Neither party works, we want something new.'”

The idea smacks of special pleading by Kasich, who ran a lackluster campaign for the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential nomination and got sent home by his party’s primary voters in favor of Donald Trump. His supporters (with no discernible discouragement from him) are talking him up as a possible 2020 candidate on a third party ticket.

Maybe not tomorrow, governor Kasich — and certainly not yesterday.

In 2014, Kasich and Ohio’s Secretary of State, Jon Husted, actively conspired to deny Ohioans third choices — Libertarian Party nominee Charlie Earl for governor and Steve Linnaberry for Attorney General — accepting an illegal $250,00 in-kind donation from a GOP activist  in the form of attorney bills for legal action to remove Earl  and Linnaberry from the ballot.

The only reason John Kasich suddenly thinks fondly of third parties is because he fell short of his own party’s top slot. Back when he thought the sky was the limit for himself, he couldn’t stand the idea. Sore loser much?

 

He may be right that a third party is coming, but not for the reasons he wants one. He’s enamored of the notion that what Americans REALLY want in a political candidate is a “centrist” like John Kasich, Mitt Romney, or John McCain, or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton. In other words, a candidate like those who keep losing presidential elections.

The winners of recent elections have been candidates who moved away from the center — ever so slightly in a “progressive” direction like Barack Obama in 2008, or falsely but loudly in a “populist” direction like the Tea Party’s 2010 congressional class or Donald Trump in 2016.

The problem with the major parties is not that they’re not “centrist” enough, it’s that their candidates run as something different and then move to the center after they win.

Americans clearly want change, not the same old stuff in louder packaging. We don’t agree on what kind of change, but it’s obvious to most of us that something just isn’t working.

There’s already a third American political party, based on ideas that work every time they’re tried. It’s the party Kasich did his damnedest to hide from the voters of Ohio: The Libertarian Party.

There are other  third parties, too, if freedom isn’t your touchstone. The Green Party. The Constitution Party. The oldest third party in existence, the Prohibition Party.

But they’re not the kind of third parties John Kasich has in mind. They’re parties whose supporters want to actually take America in new directions. John Kasich wants to paint a racing stripe on his broke-down ideas and sell us a jalopy with four flat tires and no engine as something “new.”

Sorry, John. No sale.

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

Op-Eds

A Letter to Students Demand Action from a Gun Owner

Leave a comment

Gun photo from RGBStock

Dear Students Demand Action,

I understand. You’ve witnessed — far too often at first hand and in the most terrifying circumstances — the violent deaths of your fellow students. You refuse to accept that that’s just how it has to be. You’re organizing for change.  You deserve to be heard. Don’t let anyone talk down to you or minimize your concerns.

You want action. I don’t blame you. But it’s important to consider what kind of action you want, how to go about getting it, and what it will accomplish.

With respect to gun control laws, it’s worth considering how well those have worked in the past at preventing school shootings.

Article 18, Section 922 of the United States Code deems it “unlawful for any person to sell or otherwise dispose of any firearm or ammunition to any person knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that such person … has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution.”

Nikolas Cruz was, according to Florida’s Department of Children & Family Services (which had investigated prior violent incidents in which he was involved) “classified as a vulnerable adult due to mental illness.”

But he got a gun anyway.

Another part of that US Code section, usually referred to as the “Gun-Free School Zones Act,” deems it “unlawful for any individual knowingly to possess a firearm that has moved in or that otherwise affects interstate or foreign commerce at a place that the individual knows, or has reasonable cause to believe, is a school zone.”

But Nikolas Kruz came to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida with his rifle and killed 14 students and three staff members anyway.

Nikolas Cruz was, in theory, bound up in a web of laws intended to prevent him from getting a gun or using it to commit murder. Those laws didn’t stop him.

Starting with the National Firearms Act of 1934, the US government has, with increasing stringency, regulated the ownership, carriage and use of guns for nearly a century.

What have we learned?

Among other things, we’ve learned that these regulations don’t work, at least if the goal is to reduce violence. Any list of the most dangerous cities in the United States will heavily overlap a list of the cities with the most draconian gun control laws.

The numbers are hard to pin down, but at a minimum there are more than 100 million gun owners, and more than 300 million guns, in America. The Gun Violence Archive claims 15,593 gun deaths in 2017. That’s 15,593 too many. But it’s also one death for every 6,400 gun owners and one for every 18,000 guns, and that includes police shootings, self-defense, and suicide.

I’m writing to you as one of  more than 100 million American gun owners who has never entered a school with the intent to kill. We and our guns are clearly not the problem as such.

What is the problem? How to solve it? I wish you luck in doing a better job than your elders of figuring that out.

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

Op-Eds

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Russiagate

Leave a comment

Witch Burning
 

“An epidemic terror seized upon the nations,” wrote Charles Mackay in his 1841 masterpiece, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. “It was a crime imputed with so much ease, and repelled with so much difficulty, that the powerful, whenever they wanted to ruin the weak, and could fix no other imputation upon them, had only to accuse them of witchcraft to ensure their destruction.”

Sound familiar? It’s a recurring theme. There’s always some specific group to blame for all our problems. Witches. Catholics. Jews. Freemasons. Reds.

And, lately, Them Russians.

The problem with popular delusions extends beyond their cultivation by the powerful to distract us from real problems. Such delusions can and often do escalate into panics far more dangerous than originally intended.

The purpose of the “Russiagate probe” is to convince us that the Russian state “meddled” in the 2016 US presidential election.

So far the evidence for that proposition boils down to some cheesy Facebook ads (“Help Jesus Beat Hillary!”) and street theater (e.g. an actor playing Hillary Clinton in inmate clothing, haranguing passersby from her “cell”), supposedly funded by Russian intelligence operatives and carried out by their American dupes (including several now under indictment pursuant to Robert Mueller’s investigation).

For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate to the claim that Vladimir Putin unleashed an army of trolls to freak us all out, and that he thought he could thereby change the outcome of the election. Based on current evidence  the attempt looks pretty pathetic, but OK, let’s just say that’s what happened.

In this universe, it’s a safe bet that it didn’t work (Clinton lost by about 80,000 votes from Rust Belt Democrats who decided Trump was Ronald Reagan redux).

Nor, in this universe, is it at all unusual for foreign countries to try to influence US elections and vice versa. Especially vice versa. The US government went all-in to ensure that Russian president Boris Yeltsin won re-election in 1996, and sponsored a coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014 to overturn that country’s election outcome, to name two recent instances. Business as usual.

But now the same public figures who drummed up “Russiagate” in the first place to explain why their candidate lost in 2016 are attempting to escalate the matter to the level of Mackay’s “epidemic terror.” They’re  comparing “Russiagate” to Pearl Harbor and 9/11,  calling it an “act of war,” and publicly baiting US president Donald Trump to respond accordingly.

In case anyone’s forgotten, Russia is a nuclear power. Throwing around the phrase “act of war” is over-the-top insanity.  It’s a call for the transformation of some Facebook ads into burning cities and piles of body bags, all because an election didn’t come out the way some people wanted and expected it to.

Even if the most grandiose claims for “Russiagate” are true, they don’t constitute anything close to a legitimate casus belli.

Time to calm down, America. Whatever “Russiagate” ultimately turns out to be, it won’t be anything that’s worth a single drop of American or Russian blood.

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