On May 26, and into the early hours of May 27, in a foreshadowing of things to come, Libertarian National Convention delegates took seven rounds of voting to nominate Chase Oliver (who beat “None of the Above” after eliminating all other opponents) for president and two ballots to nominate Mike ter Maat for vice-president.

Three days later, Libertarian National Committee secretary Caryn Ann Harlos informed the committee of “a policy issue that is causing great upset.”

That issue: “Oliver has said he believes that giving puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to … minors is healthcare and simply up to parents and doctors. Others argue, and I agree, that it is child abuse …”

To her credit, Ms. Harlos makes clear that she doesn’t favor rescinding Mr. Chase’s nomination (which the committee can do with a 3/4 vote) over the matter.

That “policy issue” has, however, become a talking point for the Libertarian Party’s sore losers. At least one state party — Montana —  has already announced that it doesn’t intend to fulfill its obligation to place Mr. Oliver and Mr. ter Maat on its state ballot line.

I apologize for re-hashing inside third party baseball, and perhaps burying the lede. The matter is bigger than the Libertarian Party, but it’s just too good an example of the phenomenon I want to explore to pass up.

That phenomenon is not “puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors,” but rather the use of moral panic to move opinion.

You might be surprised to learn that of the 70 million minors living in the US, fewer than 20,000 received prescriptions for puberty blockers or hormone therapy in the five-year period covering 2017-2021.

That’s about three one-hundredths of one percent.

It’s not quite as rare as getting struck by lightning or death by drowning, but it’s in the same ballpark.

Absent demagoguery for the express purpose of creating moral panic, that’s not much of a “policy issue.”

But look where demagoguery for the express purpose of creating moral panic has brought us:

Even among self-described libertarians, Libertarian Party members, and LP officials, we find factions up in arms over the “issue” of parents/guardians (with the assistance of doctors), rather than politicians, making healthcare decisions for minor children.

It’s not just L/libertarians, of course. The entire modern political discourse seems pretty much driven by moral panic.

Drugs. Guns. Immigration. Gambling. Sex work.  Heck, even a non-existent “war on Christmas.” The list of handles politicians use to grab Americans and pull them from the common sense column to the  “SOMEONE might be doing SOMETHING I don’t LIKE — there should be a law!” column never ends.

When you’re handed a moral panic disguised as a “policy issue,” try thinking it through instead of hiding under your bed.

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

As you’ve no doubt heard, a New York jury closed out the merry month of May by convicting former US president Donald Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Media — mainstream, alternative, and social — are awash with analyses of how Trump’s criminal conviction will affect votes this November.

Hunter Biden, son of US incumbent president Joe Biden, went to trial on completely unconstitutional gun charges (there is no exception to the Second Amendment that allows the government to deprive drug users of their gun rights) at the beginning of June, so we’ll soon see a similar flood of “how does this affect the election?” punditry.

My prediction in both cases: Not noticeably.

Donald Trump and Hunter Biden are quite a bit alike in two ways.

Firstly, they’re crooked as San Francisco’s Lombard Street. They’re so crooked, they have to screw their pants on in the morning. They’re bent as pretzels.

Secondly, everyone — everyone who cares, anyway — has known that fact about both of them for a long, long time. No one with an IQ over 40 would leave a wallet, or a daughter, alone in a room with either of them (or with Hunter’s dad).

Both similarities bring me back to the well I always drink from: William James’s dictum that “a difference which makes no difference is not difference at all.”

Voters who’ve supported Donald Trump for president twice are almost certain to support him a third time. They knew he was a snake when they picked him up. One more bit of snakiness — especially one that’s old news, was really just a misdemeanor the statute of limitations had expired on, and  was tortured back into existence and into felony status by trying to tie it to unspecified “underlying crimes” — won’t change their minds.

Voters who’ve supported Joe Biden for president once are almost certain to support him again. They knew he was a snake when they picked him up. One more bit of snakiness — especially one that’s patently unconstitutional, indirect, and unrelated to corruption involving the father/son relationship — won’t change their minds.

Even those who MIGHT change their minds aren’t likely to switch “major party” sides. Former Biden voters won’t pick Trump. Former Trump voters won’t pick Biden. If they can’t bring themselves to support their previous pick, They’ll cast their votes for independent or third party candidates.

We can all predict with 99.9% certainty that, no matter how — or even if — we vote in November, either Joe Biden or Donald Trump will get (re-)inaugurated next January.

That’s a fine reason to not even bother voting.

It’s also a fine reason to make use of your vote to “send a message” that you’re unhappy with the “major party” choices.

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

“Mr. Block … licks the hand that smites him and kisses the boot that kicks him.” Industrial Worker editor Walker C. Smith wasn’t foreseeing, by 111 years, Walter Block, PhD’s “Libertarians Should Vote For Trump” (The Wall Street Journal, May 29); the character from Walker’s newspaper was fictional enough to be a blockhead in the most literal sense.

Dr. Block should get his head examined. “Hats off” to inviting Donald Trump to the Libertarian National Convention as being a more effective move than anything else the Libertarian Party “did in more than half a century of existence?” Such mental gymnastics dwarf the cartoon Block’s comically undersized bowler.

Block wants “the party of principle to be better publicized,” but if an afterthought to Trump’s ambition is the best notice they can get, libertarians could quote Progressive Conservative minister Darcy McKeough: “those are my principles, and if you don’t like them I have some others.” Maybe even take a page from the name of McKeough’s party and rename themselves “authoritarian libertarians.”

“Libertarian socialists” may seem just as oxymoronic; Block contrasts Republican “free enterprise” with “Biden the socialist.” Yet he extolled the voluntary socialism of “the convent, monastery, kibbutz, commune, syndicalist association, cooperative” in the 2019 Journal op-ed “Bad Capitalism and Good Socialism,” garnering a letter to the editor indignant at Block for not mentioning that “there are no countries in which socialism has worked on a large scale” (the same can be said of actually existing state capitalism).

Block trusts Trump’s promise of leniency for Ross Ulbricht during his second term (in living memory of Jimmy Carter enacting the Granting Pardon for Violations of the Selective Service Act immediately upon starting his first), and makes a qualified claim that through his re-election “we may get a slightly more libertarian president” than Biden.

On tariffs, perhaps: Biden has augmented Trump’s.  Regarding the underlying principle that voluntary exchange is mutually beneficial, Trump surpasses Pat Buchanan’s relatively literate dismissal of its intellectual origins in “scribblers like David Ricardo, James Mill and John Stuart Mill,” roaring that the notion that “both sides win” in negotiations is “a bunch of crap.”

Block might include that among the “obnoxious behavior” characteristic of gruff New Yorkers: Trump as Archie Bunker with his prejudices discreetly de-emphasized.  Not that the star of The Apprentice would follow the lead of Archie Bunker’s Place in getting berated as “one of them bleeding-heart liberals” for supporting gender neutrality in sports when a girl Bunker raises is turned away from an all-male baseball team.

Trump’s GOP would be even more unwelcome to another sitcom conservative, Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties, who teased his flower-adult parents but cited John Stuart Mill when joining them in opposing book bans.  Alex was the only Keaton to enthuse over Milton Friedman, but they all could have appreciated Friedman’s insistence that “I admire [modern liberals] for the softness of their heart,” only objecting when it “extends to their head as well.”  That’s a long way from excusing illiberalism that is simultaneously hard-hearted and blockheaded.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Don’t Chip Off the Old Mr. Block” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, June 3, 2024