The Libertarian Party (L.P.) started 2016 with around 411,000 registered voters. After a year of Trump and Clinton and the Libertarian’s Johnson/Weld campaign with its record over 4 million votes for the L.P., nearly 100,000 other voters have seen wisdom in registering Libertarian.
According to ballot access maven Richard Winger at Ballot Access News, the Libertarians are now the first nationally-organized Party in American history besides the Republicans and Democrats to break a half-million registered voters.
The L.P. had never broken 400,000 registered voters before this year.
The “nationally organized” part is key, as the California-only American Independent Party has around 507,000. It is well-understood, though, that a vast majority of people registering with it are doing so under the mistaken belief they are merely registering independent of any Party, not joining a specific party with that name. (That Party nominated Trump this year.)
Another sign of increased health for the L.P. is a yearly monetary take for the national Party of likely near $3 million, for what should be their highest-dollar year since 2000.
That’s fewer than half the number of federal House candidates the L.P. ran in 2000, the year in which their House vote total was close to, but not matching, this year’s, with a total of 1.61 million. Thus, the Party’s votes per candidate have gone up enormously.
Former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton is reportedly on the Trump administration’s short list for secretary of state. Even though no official announcement has been made, Bolton’s consideration is already drawing rebukes from libertarian-minded Republicans like U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, who on Tuesday called Bolton’s foreign policy views “unhinged.”
Paul’s spot on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gives him significant sway over the nomination of Bolton—or anyone else—as secretary of state, but you don’t have to share Paul’s skepticism about America’s interventionalist foreign policy to be terrified by the prospect of having Bolton in charge of the State Department.
Here’s a brief reminder of some of the terrible things Bolton has done (or wanted to do) in the realm of foreign policy. We only included five of the worst examples, but share your own not-so-fond memories of Bolton’s disastrous ideas in the comments below.
1. Bolton was a primary cheerleader of the War in Iraq and stands for everything Americans rejected about the Bush administration’s foreign policy.
Let’s just get the obvious thing out of the way up front.
“We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq,” Bolton said in 2002 while serving as President George W. Bush’s undersecretary of state for Arms Control and International Security. That wasn’t true, as we’d later discover after it was too late.
“Obviously the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake,” Trump concluded, before hammering Jeb for taking more than a week (earlier in the campaign) to answer a reporter’s question about whether his older brother made a mistake by launching the invasion.
Now Trump wants to hire someone who has taken 13 years (and counting) to do the same?
2. Bolton wanted the U.S. to go to war with Cuba over WMDs that also didn’t exist
A year before the United States would go to war with Iraq due (at least in part) to falsely believing that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, Bolton was advocating that the United States should go to war with Cuba because of later debunked reports that Fidel Castro was developing weapons of mass destruction.
In May 2002, during a speech at the Heritage Foundation, Bolton said he believed Cuba was developing biological weapons and was capable of distributing them to Libya and Syria.
The New York Times reported on the speech: “‘The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort,’ Mr. Bolton said, taking aim at the Communist government of Fidel Castro. Cuba, he added, has also ‘provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states.'”
The Times noted that it was the first time an American official openly accused Cuba of developing biological weapons. When the Times asked Bolton’s office to substantiate this historic and potentially bellicose claim, they offered no evidence.
Having apparently learned nothing from the decade-plus quagmire that resulted from the invade-now-come-up-with-an-exit-strategy-later Bush administration approach to the Iraq War, Bolton in March 2015 advocated for a similar bomb-now-and-figure-out-the-details-later approach to dealing with Iran.
In a New York Times op-ed titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” Bolton argued that “only military action” could “accomplish what is required.” The thing being required was preventing Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. A limited strike against known nuclear production facilities could set the country’s nuclear ambitions back by three to five years, Bolton argued, and should be combined with “vigorous American support for….regime change in Tehran,” because we all know about the successful track record of regime change in the Middle East.
As Reason’sMatt Welch noted at the time: “One of Bolton’s main stated concerns is that Iran’s pursuit of nukes will (and is already beginning to) set off a regional nuclear arms race, which would indeed be alarming. But isn’t there another possible game-theory scenario here, in which a pre-emptive attack on Iran (like the pre-emptive, WMD-justified attack on Iraq) could incentivize regional powers and various nefarious regimes to go nuclear faster? After all, the U.S. doesn’t spend a lot of time engaging in forcible regime change with countries (no matter how lousy) that already have the bomb. And Ukraine, for one, can tell you what happens to your defensive posture after emptying your nuclear arsenal.”
4. President Obama followed Bolton’s terrible advice about Libya and then Bolton blamed Obama for the resulting mess
In March 2011, while mulling a potential run for president, Bolton suggested to an Iowa crowd that the United States should try to assassinate Muammar Gadhafi, the then-dictator of Libya.
“I think he’s a legitimate target,” Bolton said, according to The Daily Beast. “He has murdered innocent American civilians. He has never faced responsibility for it. So I don’t have any hesitation in saying that.”
Later during the speech, Bolton admitted that he was willing to let Gadhafi live—”I personally would be happy to send him into exile somewhere,” is how he put it, according to the Daily Beast—but said it would probably be easier to just kill him and let someone else take control.
That someone else, of course, turned out to be ISIS. After the Obama Administration intervened in the Libya to drive Gadhafi from power (the dictator was eventually captured and killed by his own people), a power vacuum developed and Islamic extremists have since set up shop in Libya—just like they did in Iraq and Syria…it’s almost like there’s a pattern here.
5. Bolton suggested Israel should unleash nuclear weapons against Iran
Perhaps the most terrifying manifestation of Bolton’s desire to bomb Iran no matter the costs or consequences for America (to say nothing of the consequences for the people of Iran fixed in his crosshairs) occurred in 2009 while Bolton was speaking at the University of Chicago.
“Unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran’s program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future,” Bolton said. It’s been seven years and Iran hasn’t developed a nuclear weapon (and Israel thankfully didn’t follow Bolton’s advice), so either Bolton was exaggerating the threat or he doesn’t have a good understanding of the words “very near future.”
The logic here is almost too twisted to untangle.
Bolton argued that Israel’s preemptive use of nuclear weapon against an enemy (an act that would smash all international norms regarding the use of nuclear weapons) should not only be considered, but should be encouraged. Such an act would not destabilize the region (to say nothing of those smashed international norms), but Iranian efforts to develop a nuclear bomb—perhaps as a defense against exactly this sort of threat from Israel or the United States—is destabilizing?
“There is a day after you use a nuclear weapon,” he said. “If you want to maximize collateral damage and really make sure that the Iranian-Israeli conflict will be another unending Middle-Eastern conflict, then nuclear weapons is your path and John Bolton is your guy.”
Pondering the consequences of an unhinged, aggressive foreign policy isn’t Bolton’s strong suit. It’s stunning that someone who has been so wrong, so many times could end up running one of the most important parts of the U.S. government.
Before the election, many people were questioning the wisdom (or lack thereof) of giving a temperamental, vindictive, and irresponsible man like Donald Trump control over America’s nuclear arsenal. Those fears hopefully will never be realized, but letting John Bolton set the country’s foreign policy does nothing to calm the nerves.
Horrifying video footage of a violence aganst an anti-Trump protester at Ohio State University.
Lenny, the Lena Dunham newsletter, describes Hillary Clinton as “light itself”:
Hillary Clinton did everything right in this campaign, and she won more votes than her opponent did. She won. She cannot be faulted, criticized, or analyzed for even one more second. Instead, she will be decorated as an epochal heroine far too extraordinary to be contained by the mere White House. Let that revolting president-elect be Millard Fillmore or Herbert Hoover or whatever. Hillary is Athena.
“[Donald Trump] has no plans to reduce the drivers of our future debt,” says Mercatus Center Senor Fellow and Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy, “and these are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.” While it’s still too early to suss out the details of Trump’s plan, the fact that he “has no plan to reform entitlements shows that he’s not serious about the current situation.”
De Rugy talked with Nick Gillespie about what we can expect in terms of debt and spending in the Trump Administration.
It seems that when the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) decided that it would change the rules and fund sex-change surgeries for transgender troops, it failed to account for something just a little bit important: paying for it.
So now, apparently the VA is having to backtrack on a proposed rule change. Over the past year, the military began instituting a plan to allow transgender troops to serve openly and to even transition while in service. For veterans, though, there is a blip in the system. While the VA covers different types of treatment that help transgender veterans, VA policy specifically excludes sex-change surgeries. This doesn’t mean vets can’t get sex-change or gender-reassignment surgeries. It means the government is not going to pay for it. It’s treated as an elective surgery.
There’s been a push to change this designation, and while some may find the idea controversial (and the idea of being transgender suspect), there is support among medical professionals that sex reassignment surgery is potentially an effective, valid form of treatment. But obviously not everybody agrees, and so funding for treatment for transgender concerns is politicized. I wrote more about the complex issues involved here (Summary: If we as Americans are going to fund medical treatment for veterans, it’s hard to justify excluding this treatment just because people outside the medical profession don’t think it’s legitimate).
The VA announced this week that it’s going to have to delay implementing a plan to cover these surgeries until “when appropriated funding is available.” I had already seen a couple of “Oh, no, it’s starting!” tweets from transgender folks thinking this was some sort of backtracking that’s happening because of Donald Trump’s election. That doesn’t appear to be the case. The VA will still be covering all other forms of treatment related to transgender issues, but needs regulatory changes and appropriations to formally add surgery.
Now, of course, whether this will happen in a Trump administration is anybody’s guess. The general thought is that Trump’s conservative administration may end up being more hostile to these issues than Trump himself might be, given Mike Pence as vice president and whoever else from the Republican Party ends up in the administration.
I’m deliberately avoiding trying to speculate too much what might happen here because of the lack of clarity from Trump on LGBT issues. Trump is clearly not anti-gay and not anti-transgender, but his catering to populism makes it difficult to ascertain whose attitudes toward transgender accommodation are going to win out in his administration.
You may have heard of whataboutism—the practice of rejecting criticisms of a regime on the grounds that other regimes do bad things too. Well, whataboutism has a cousin. Call it wherewereyouism: the impatient disdain that libertarians start to feel right after an election, when many members of the newly disempowered party suddenly rediscover the virtues of limiting government power.
It’s an understandable feeling, and I’m prone to it myself. (Back in 2009, when the Tea Party protests started taking off, my initial response was: “Why weren’t you marching when Bush was pushing through TARP?”) To an extent, it’s not just understandable but valuable. As liberals watch Donald Trump take control of a presidency whose powers grew greater while Obama was in office, making the executive branch an even vaster and less accountable maze of surveillance and secrecy and unilateral punitive action, it’s a fine time to seize the teachable moment: “You see? YOU SEE? Now will you listen when we warn you what could happen?”
But eventually you’ve got to reach out and work with those chastened fair-weather friends of freedom. I don’t mean the hacks who gave us Hillary Clinton. (They don’t seem all that chastened, and they’re not even fair-weather friends.) I mean rank-and-file activists, legislative backbenchers, or anyone else who has suddenly learned how it feels to look at the government and feel dread. We don’t know yet whether the worst names being floated for a Trump cabinet will actually land there, but even if we’re spared the horrors of David Clarke at Homeland Security or John Bolton at State, it’s clear that Trump’s presidency will be terrible on a host of issues, particularly where police powers are concerned. And since the number of Americans who are consistent defenders of civil liberties is pretty small, obstructing or rolling back bad policies will require coalitions.
Some of this month’s born-again dissidents will learn their lesson and be more skeptical of the state even after Trump makes his exit; some will be back to cheerleading executive authority as soon as President Michael Bloomberg wants the right to call in drone strikes against black-market Big Gulp dealers. But as long as any of them are willing to stand against Trump when he tries to take new powers—or to abuse the powers his predecessors bequeathed him—I say welcome to the fight.
Sen. Rand Paul implored Donald Trump not to pick Rudy Giuliani or John Bolton to run the State Department and suggested he would be inclined to vote against their confirmation.
In an interview with Reason, Paul described Bolton and Giuliani as representatives of “the most bellicose interventionist wing of any party” and the antithesis of the restrained foreign policy platform Trump ran on. The selection of either man would be a serious betrayal of Trump’s supporters, who wanted a clean break from the rabid interventionism of the past GOP administration.
“I can’t support anybody to be our Secretary of State who didn’t learn the lesson of the Iraq War,” said Paul.
After dropping out of the GOP presidential race, Paul focused on his own re-election to the Senate, and didn’t offer Trump much in the way of vociferous support. But like many other libertarians, Paul found something to admire in Trump’s stated opposition to neoconservatism.
“I don’t think anybody believed that he was going to be libertarian on foreign policy, but there was at least a glimmer of hope that he would be less of an interventionist than Clinton,” said Paul. “The things he says unscripted on the campaign trail were much less hawkish than Hillary Clinton.”
That was a fair assumption, given Hillary Clinton’s extreme hawkishness. Sen. Clinton was a key supporter of the Iraq War. And though she later regretted that vote, Secretary of Clinton repeated the error—and then some—when she pushed the Obama administration to intervene in Libya. The U.S.-backed ousters of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi have destabilized the entire Middle East and contributed to the rise of ISIS.
But Trump’s leading secretary of state candidates—Bolton, especially—have embraced all of Clinton’s worst foreign policy blunders and would push the federal government to do even more. Indeed, Bolton has made public his support for taking the country to war with Iran.
Paul described Bolton as “unhinged.”
“It concerns me that Trump would put someone in charge who is unhinged as far as believing in absolute and total intervention,” he said.
Bolton would have almost no chance of getting Paul’s support, unless the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations repudiated virtually everything he stands for. Giuliani would face a similarly uphill battle to persuade Paul, he said.
As Reason’s Brian Doherty noted, Paul could make trouble for an unacceptable secretary of state pick. Paul sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is currently split 10-9. If he voted with the Democrats, he could certainly send a message—though this would not prevent the full Senate from voting to confirm, according to The Washington Post.
When asked to name a suitable alternative, Paul pointed to Sen. Bob Corker—who is also on Trump’s short list—as a better choice.
“I would say, while not being libertarian, [Corker] is more of a reasonable, realist kind of person,” said Paul. “I think he would be less likely to say tomorrow we need to drop bombs on Iran.”
In any case, it’s unsettling that Trump was so immediately tempted to choose unrepentant hawks to run his State Department—especially considering that he owes the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party very little. Most neoconservatives abandoned Trump and supported Clinton, Paul noted.
“[Bolton and Giuliani] don’t represent even the mainstream of foreign policy,” said Paul.
It’s too soon to say whether Trump will betray his non-interventionist supporters. But the possibility of a Bolton or Giuliani running the State Department is truly frightening, and libertarians should be grateful that Paul was willing to speak up in defense of principle. We can only hope it makes a difference.
So now it’s Facebook’s fault that Donald Trump was elected president.
If you have any number of friends who like sharing either memes or headlines, you’ve undoubtedly seen all sorts of fake news stories and fabricated facts.
We’re not talking deliberate parodies, like The Onion, though even they fool people now and then. We’re talking pieces that are just completely made up by little-known “media outlets” with vague names, and the stories are intended to be perceived as real. Because these stories don’t show up anywhere else (because they’re not true), people might be more inclined to click the link to read when they see them on Facebook, particularly when the headlines are outrageous.
There’s now apparently both a push to act as though these fake stories had a major impact on the election and also that Facebook should do something about it. There has been coverage in the New York Times, Gizmodo, and elsewhere. Google and Facebook have responded in the past by trying to find ways to de-emphasize links from these sites and just recently announced they’ll refuse to run ads on fake news sites.
There are a lot of concepts to parse on what seems like a minor election side story (and the latest reason for some people to ignore why Hillary Clinton actually lost), but it’s worth exploring more deeply.
First of all, perhaps consider that thinking people voted because of fake information they were exposed to on Facebook says more about you than them. To the extent that people fall for fake news, the fact that such news affirms existing biases certainly plays a major factor. Does anybody have evidence to suggest that fake news actually caused anybody to change their vote?
There is a component to this particular argument that has a stench of “What a bunch of rubes the people are,” connected directly to the results of a controversial election. Not that people don’t believe in conspiracies or fall for fake news, but as Jesse Walker would point out, Americans across the spectrum believe in them, not just those who would vote for Trump. And I would point out that believing fabricated conspiracy stories perpetuated by fake news sites significantly influenced the election is itself kind of a conspiracy theory.
Second, do you know who was big about pointing out fake news stories? Donald Trump. All those accusations of sexual assault and harassment? He said they’re all lies. A smear job. He said he was the victim.
We all understand what people demanding Facebook do something about “fake news” are actually getting at. They’re generally not asking for Facebook to serve as an arbiter of the factual components of controversies (though I wouldn’t put it past some people). Facebook is not very good at managing controvery. Rather what these folks have in mind that is that there are clearly news outlets that are producing fake news stories on purpose to get page views and earn some cash, and they’re absolutely right.
But that’s exactly how Trump would describe the media outlets who run with the assault stories. So what these frustrated people need to realize is that if they convince Facebook to censor sharing of these obviously fake stories, then there’s going to be a fight over what a “fake story” actually is. There’s a bias here—in media circles most obviously—that it’s simply going to be a matter of cutting out the outlets making stuff up from whole cloth. These little no-name places that aren’t known journalistic outfits.
Why would it end there? Given that Facebook is now so influential in putting information in front of people, the result will most certainly be a push to define “fake” down in order to keep stories that harm certain interests from spreading. And so, yes, forget letting algorithms do all the work. Eventually Facebook staff will be put in a position of determining what is and isn’t “real” news. How many people think the Trump sexual assault scandal is fake? How many people think the Hillary Clinton email scandal is fake?
And then there’s the American ethnocentricness of it all. A newly released report from Freedom House indicates that internet freedom has been declining for the past six years due to government crackdowns on social media. Before asking Facebook to censor away fake news stories, ask yourself, “Will folks like me be the ones actually deciding what counts as fake news, or it will be powerful and connected government leaders?” I am very certain that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would be very happy to tell Facebook which news stories are fake.
I’m not fond of the fake news headlines, and it’s frustrating to have to deal with them when they pop up in my news feed, though frequently I find that my Facebook friends have realized they’re not true on their own not long after posting them. I am even more concerned, though, at the potential negative long-term consequences of asking Facebook to referee the “realness” of information people are posting.
(Traditional libertarian caveat: Facebook is a private company that can set up whatever posting guidelines it chooses. I would recommend against trying to play referee here.)