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Election 2016: The X-Files/Napoleon Dynamite Factor

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As we come around what may be the final curve of the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton look positioned to be the two horses who break free of the pack and make a neck-and-neck run down the final straightaway toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That pairing and the likely outcome tell us some interesting things about America’s voters and their chosen candidates.

Specifically, it tells us that many voters are the political equivalents of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully from Fox’s long-time fan favorite show The X-Files: They want to believe.

Believe in what? Well, that varies.

Trump’s supporters want to believe that, working with him, they can “make America great again.” Nobody seems to really know how that might come about, except that it will involve getting Mexico to pay for a wall. But not to worry: It will be yuuuuge. It will be very nice. They’ll like it a lot, winning so much that they get bored with winning. They want so intensely to believe this that, as Trump himself says, he “could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” They don’t care whether or not he’s a “conservative” or about his actual policy positions. They don’t even demand that he make any sense from day to day.

Clinton’s supporters want to believe not only that she can win, but that she’s the only Democrat who can. They want so intensely to believe this that they’re willing to ignore her mediocre past electoral record, her dismal performances in elected and appointed office, her yuuuuge (like Trump’s) public disapproval numbers, the significant chance that she’ll be indicted over her mishandling of classified information, and the fact that she’s only been a “progressive” for about a minute, because it came to her attention that that’s what people like about Bernie Sanders.

If the voters resemble Mulder and Scully, the candidates remind me of the candidates in Napoleon Dynamite: Summer Wheatley, the “popular” student the regular kids actually love to hate but apathetically assume will win the student body presidency in a walk, and Pedro Sanchez, the upstart new guy who promises that if his fellow students vote for him “all of your wildest dreams will come true.”

I love The X-Files. I enjoyed Napoleon Dynamite.  But I’m not sure I can take eight more months of watching e-run marathons. Can you?

Maybe it’s time for a crisis of political faith. Maybe it’s time to crank up Netflix and find a new show to follow or a new movie to watch. So, two recommendations:

First, pull up Doug Stanhope’s comedy special Beer Hall Putsch on Netflix.

Second, if you must vote, vote Libertarian.

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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Obama Visits Havana: Cuba Libre For Real?

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"fight against which is impossible and wi...
“Fight against the impossible and win” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

US President Barack Obama’s late March visit to Cuba, continuing his initiative to re-establish friendly relations between the two countries, arouses opposition on both sides of the aisle in Washington.

The Republican complaints, of course, are to be expected. If Obama walked across the Florida Strait without wetting the hems of his trousers, Ted Cruz would ask why the president can’t swim.

But some Democrats also oppose breaking the ice with Havana. “It is totally unacceptable for the president of the United States to reward a dictatorial regime,” says US Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ). “The president is again prioritizing short-term economic interests over long-term American values.”

Let’s be honest here: Cruz, Menendez and their ilk have done as much to prop up Fidel Castro’s regime as Castro’s own secret police agents or neighborhood “Committees for the Defense of the Revolution” ever could, if not more. Half a century and change of sanctions and embargo have strengthened, not weakened, popular support for the island nation’s Communist rulers.

National isolation is the desire of every dictator: If his subjects never see what a freer society looks like or have the opportunity to avail themselves of its goods and services, they have no standard against which to measure his rule and find it wanting.

If a powerful, threatening external enemy actively aids him in achieving that isolation, so much the better: For now even if his subjects DO get a glimpse of higher living standards and relative freedom to travel, speak and worship, he can just blame that external enemy for denying them such things.

This is the dynamic which has kept the mullahs in charge in Tehran since 1979 and the Communist Party in charge in Havana since 1959. It is this dynamic which Obama hopes, by way of burnishing his presidential legacy, to interrupt with his Jeffersonian (“friendship and commerce with all nations”) overtures to Cuba.

The beneficiaries of the US embargo on Cuba have been the Castro regime, the US military industrial complex, the US sugar industry, and a few professional “opposition exiles” living on CIA funds and hoping to one day ride into Havana on American tanks. Its victims are legion and include the entire populations of Cuba and the United States.

Just as it was a myth that “only Nixon could go to China,” any president could have gone to Havana. One finally has. And we’re all better off for it.

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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The FBI Has an Enemies List: First They Came for Free Talk Live …

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Raid on Free Talk Live House

A typical Granite State Sunday morning on the cusp of spring, and a scene surprising no one who watches the news or any number of television shows dedicated to fictional or real-life law enforcement:

SUVs and police cruisers surrounding a house. Figures in bulletproof vests marked “FBI” hauling away computers pursuant to the warrant they’re serving. The next scene practically writes itself. We all know our lines. Time to cheer on the white knights who protect society from the scourge of child pornography.

But this time it’s different. This time we know the raiders represent the child pornographers and that their victims are journalists who exposed the FBI’s role in operating an illegal child porn web site.

The house, located in the college town of Keene, New Hampshire, serves as broadcast studio for Free Talk Live (freetalklive.com),  a libertarian talk show airing nightly on more than 170 radio stations worldwide. FTL ranks 38th on the “Heavy 100” list of Talkers magazine, talk radio’s premier trade publication. The home does double duty as living quarters for some of the show’s hosts.

Mere weeks ago, Free Talk Live dropped a bombshell into America’s political discussion, exposing a story that had previously only been noticed very much by tech insiders.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, it seems, has been moonlighting as a provider of child pornography. After locating and seizing the servers of a child porn site on the “dark web,” known as Play Pen and reachable only via the Tor browser, the FBI decided not to shut the site down. Instead, they kept it running for two weeks, using it to spread malware that could identify and locate a handful of the site’s visitors. The vast majority of the 200,000 people downloading child porn from the site went on their way unmolested (pun intended). A few whose computers were mis-configured so as to be vulnerable to the FBI’s trick were arrested.

Read that last paragraph again. It’s illegal — and most people agree it SHOULD be illegal — to distribute child pornography.

Yet the FBI did so with complete impunity.

Now they’re harassing the journalists who told us about it, raiding their home and seizing their equipment on the unlikely, even risible, claim that a computer in that building accessed the Play Pen site.

It’s spring in New Hampshire but there’s a chill in the air — the chill of politically motivated revenge by law enforcement gone rogue.

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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