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.

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“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.

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

While panhandling for votes at the Libertarian National Convention over Memorial Day weekend, two non-Libertarian presidential candidates — Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — promised to free political prisoner Ross Ulbricht if elected.

That promise is a big deal to Libertarians. Ulbricht, 40, is about a decade into his two life sentences, without the possibility of parole, for the “crime” of operating a web site.

Yes, you read that correctly.

You may hear other, darker allegations concerning what Ulbricht did, but those allegations were so weakly supported by evidence that even grandstanding, corrupt US Attorney Preet Bharara was afraid to charge Ulbricht over them.

Unfortunately, corrupt US District Judge Katherine B. Forrest, after openly rigging the trial to ensure a jury conviction, used those unproven allegations to justify the draconian sentence.

When it’s all said and done, the excuse for Ulbricht’s imprisonment comes down to this: He ran an e-commerce web site (Silk Road), and some people sold things on that site … things which the government disapproves of, like certain drugs.

That’s it. That’s all. There’s nothing else. He ran a web site, and now he’s sentenced to die behind bars for running that web site.

While I won’t be voting for Trump or RFK Jr. (I support another candidate who promises to “Free Ross,” Libertarian presidential nominee Chase Oliver), I do thank them for their offers.

But really, why should we — or, more importantly, Ross — have to wait until next January to get this matter taken care of?

Yes, Trump or RFK Jr., if elected, might keep the promise and do the right thing.

But President Joe Biden could do the right thing TODAY. Biden could commute Ross’s sentence or pardon him and put the  matter to rest.

That would be the right thing to do … and good politics as well.

Two of Biden’s leading opponents have pledged to get the job done.

With a stroke of his pardon/commutation pen, Biden could take the issue away from those opponents.

Politically, it would be an easy, all-benefit, no-cost proposition.

The constituency for freeing Ross may not be huge, but neither are the likely margins of victory this November.  Fewer than 50,000 votes in key states separated victory from defeat for Biden in 2020. He needs every vote he can get. SOME grateful Americans would reward a pardon or commutation at the polls.

The constituency for keeping Ross in prison is, for all practical purposes, non-existent. The tiny group supporting his continued incarceration wouldn’t change their votes over it.

What’s better than doing the right thing? Doing the right thing, rubbing your opponents’ noses in it, and adding votes to your column at their expense.

Mr. Biden, tear down this (prison) wall. Free Ross!

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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