“White supremacists embraced cryptocurrency early in its development, ” Michael Edison Hayden and Megan Squire report at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog, “and in some cases produced million-dollar profits through the technology, reshaping the racist right in radical ways.”

I have no doubt the claim is true.  What’s also true is a note several paragraphs into the piece: “Nothing is inherently criminal or extreme about it, and most of its users have no connections to the extreme far right. ”

You’re not going to hear much about that angle on the story in mainstream media reports on the topic, though.  Political coverage of cryptocurrency tends more toward cultivating moral panic — arousing the public to fright whether the facts justify that concern or not — than about care with such inconvenient facts.

Having mined out the moral panics over cryptocurrency being used by drug dealers and human traffickers, it was certain beyond doubt that the next step would be tarring Bitcoin and its siblings and children with the  brush of racism and antisemitism (and trying to dip libertarianism in that tar as well). NBC News gets right to work on the matter, quoting report co-author Squire:

“Crypto looked to [the far right] like an interesting toy and a way of being in charge of their money and not having to use central banking. Then when you layer the antisemitism, on top of that, as in ‘the banks are controlled by the Jews,’ it makes a lot of sense why these early adopters, these libertarian-styled guys, would get involved in Bitcoin so early.”

Just to be clear, libertarianism is neither inherently “right-wing” (I’m a left-libertarian myself) nor has anything whatsoever to do with anti-semitism. Many of libertarianism’s foremost framers and thought leaders, from Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand to Milton Friedman to Murray Rothbard, have been Jews, and the Libertarian Party’s platform “condemn[s] bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” Libertarians dislike government currencies and central banking because we like freedom, not because we hate Jews.

One attractive feature of cryptocurrency is that it reduces interference from intermediaries who might not want to do business with marginalized groups, and from governments persecuting those groups. It doesn’t care whether those groups are good or bad, loved or hated, socially accepted or socially ostracized.

That doesn’t just include drug dealers, or human traffickers, or child pornographers, or racists. It includes immigrants who need an easy way to send money home. It includes adult, consensual sex workers whose incomes and assets remain under constant threat from the police. It includes anyone who’d like a little privacy, please.

Nor is cryptocurrency unique in that respect. You know what else all of the groups I just named use? Cash. Yes, all those people use the same little green pieces of paper you probably keep in your own wallet for times when the fast food joint’s debit card terminal is down.

Cryptocurrency is money that doesn’t care who you are. It just does its job. And that’s a good thing.

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.

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Writing at Antiwar.com, Natylie Baldwin reports on letters sent in October by the US Treasury Department to American writers Daniel Lazare and Michael Averko, threatening fines of up to “$311,562 or twice the value of the underlying transaction.”

The “underlying transaction” in question? Getting paid to write for a publication the US government disapproves of: The Strategic Culture Foundation, a Russian think tank sanctioned by the Treasury Department because it’s regarded as an arm of the Russian state.

Yes, you read that right: Putting in one’s two cents on current affairs (the SCF’s focus) can yield a profit of more than 1.5 million percent!

Unfortunately, that investment return runs in the wrong direction — out of the writer’s portfolio and into the US Treasury.

Although I’ve run across the Strategic Culture Foundation’s articles here and there, and recognize the names of some of the authors whose work appears on its site, I can’t claim any great familiarity with its editorial line or funding sources.  For all I know, it really IS a Russian state medium associated with that regime’s intelligence service and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In other words, SCF may be the equivalent of the US government’s Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Television Marti, Center for Strategic and International Studies, et al.

If so, well … so what?

The First Amendment’s freedom of speech and press clauses make no exceptions for speech or writing published in foreign media, or speech or writing for which the writers or speakers are paid. Nor, the US not being at war with Russia, is there any question of, say, treason (“adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort”) involved.

Last time I checked, the US Constitution, as “Supreme Law of the Land,” outweighed Executive Order 13848, under which the Treasury Department issued its threats against Lazare and Averko.

Writing for a foreign publication, even a state-funded or -operated publication, even for money, is not a crime.

Threatening writers for doing so is a crime in both the legal and moral sense.

Since 2002, the United States has fallen from 17th place to 44th place on the Reporters Without Borders global press freedom index. Need we wonder why?

US president Joe Biden says that “a free press is essential to the health of democracy.” If he means it, he’ll forbid future use of  his predecessor’s Executive Order 13848 to impose censorship under threat of financial punishment.

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.

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“Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup,” Barton Gellman writes at The Atlantic. “It will rely on subversion more than violence …. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024.”

There’s nothing new about claims that an election was stolen, or is about to be. The phenomenon stretches back into the 19th century —  most famously the 1876 presidential election, which was arguably stolen from Democrat Samuel J. Tilden on behalf of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.

Of the six presidential elections since 2000, at least four have generated loud claims of fraud. Democrats complained of judicial  skulduggery in Florida in 2000 and voting machine rigging in 2004. In 2016, Democrats asserted “Russian meddling” to explain Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump, while Trump (and Republican supporters) insisted in both 2016 and 2020 that he could only lose (and lost) if the election was “rigged.”

And, to be fair, the two major parties use ballot access laws and debate participation schemes to rig EVERY presidential election, and most other elections, to preclude the possibility of a competitive independent or third party candidacy.

Democrats are already sowing the seeds for claims of a rigged 2024 election with credible complaints about Republican efforts to, well, rig the 2024 election.

In a 2016 column, I pointed out the danger that casting doubt on election credibility represents to the United States as we know it. History is full of  coups (real ones, not annoying riots), revolutions, and civil wars sparked by arguments over who gets to be in charge. America is not immune to that possibility.

But for libertarians and anarchists like me, there’s a potential up side to this growing distrust of election outcomes.

The next step after losing trust in the integrity of the election system and the honesty of the outcomes that system announces is losing trust in the idea of elections as a way to settle our differences.  That could be a very good thing, as long as we don’t replace elections with monarchs or other rulers for life.

The problem with politics is not who we put in charge, or how we put them in charge. It’s THAT we put them in charge.

As military strategist Carl von Clausewitz pointed out, “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” Conversely, politics is the waging of war by other means.

Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature as “the war of all against all” and prescribed government as the cure. He got it exactly backward.

Putting something — anything, no matter how trivial — under the control of politicians amounts to declaring eternal, unceasing war over that thing.

The best solution to the perceived problems of election “rigging,” election “meddling,” etc., isn’t to resign ourselves to dictatorship, or even to seek more trustworthy elections. It’s to cut the power of government down so much that elections become too unimportant to bother “rigging” or “meddling in.”

We can have politics, or we can have peace. We can’t have both.

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.

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