Fringe parties gonna fringe
America's Libertarian Party and Britain's Green Party might not have much in common, except for authoritarian takeovers.
Me: in an age where illiberalism is on the march, now more than ever we need a Libertarian Party holding the line in support of classical liberal ideals like freedom of expression, free trade and the rule of law.
The Libertarian Party:
Take it away, Jeff Jacoby:
Here is a puzzle: Why would the Libertarian Party, which will be nominating a presidential candidate at its national convention in Washington this month, invite former president Donald Trump — the Republican Party’s presumptive 2024 nominee — to be its keynote speaker?
Here are four possible answers:
1. Libertarians are uninhibited by ordinary political rules and inviting a rival to address their convention is just the sort of eccentric move that appeals to them.
2. Party leaders, knowing Trump is more likely to be elected in November than their own nominee, want to encourage him to embrace libertarian ideals of shrinking government, expanding liberty, and curbing the welfare state.
3. Libertarian Party leaders never expected Trump to accept their invitation but will gladly exploit the publicity he brings them in order to promote their own issues and candidates.
4. The Libertarian Party has been taken over by hard-core MAGA supporters who want to help Trump win.
My money is on No. 4.
(Let’s not rule out option 5, which involves the LP leaders being so thoroughly baked, they don’t even know what they’re doing or even where they are at any given moment.)
I don’t have the patience to go through my archive to find it, but I remember writing something a few years ago about disgruntled Republicans, preferably with some well-heeled backers, migrating en masse to the Libertarian Party and taking it over. At least they have ballot access and stuff in most states.
Alas, it looks like the MAGAfied Republicans - actually extreme right-wingers wearing Libertarian skin suits - beat me to it:
Unlike Johnson and Weld, who could at least portray their views as libertarian-lite, Trump is affirmatively opposed to most libertarian principles. There is his long-standing animus against immigration, both legal and illegal. His decades-long hostility toward free trade and support for higher tariffs. His call to confiscate guns without waiting for due process. His declaration that a US president has untrammeled authority to order businesses to close. His vow to never “cut a single penny” from the crushingly unaffordable Social Security and Medicare programs. His repeated fawning over the world’s dictators, including Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin. The nearly $8 trillion he added to the national debt during his presidency.
As the Libertarian Party itself declared in 2018, “Trump is the opposite of a Libertarian.”
But that was the Libertarian Party then. The Libertarian Party now is a very different creature.
Beginning in 2017, a bigoted faction calling itself the Mises Caucus moved systematically and ruthlessly to take over the Libertarian Party. For years, the party had had a reputation for free-market fundamentalism, open immigration, drug legalization, and live-and-let-live tolerance. All that began to change as the new faction moved in and took over the party’s communications channels. Suddenly the Libertarian Party was employing some of the ugliest tropes in the alt-right lexicon.
“The caucus began taking over state parties, packing members into sparsely attended conventions,” recounts Andy Craig in the Daily Beast. “As they did so, they quickly started attracting negative attention for saying … things that sounded less like liberty and more like the tiki torch brigade.” For example, Libertarian Party social media posts equated COVID-19 vaccines to the Holocaust with yellow Star of David patches, denounced Pride Month as “degeneracy,” told a Black politicianshe should pick cotton or go back to Africa, and pronounced it “obviously correct” that “the end of apartheid destroy[ed] South Africa.”
Like evangelical Christians who still worship Christ instead of Trump, Libertarians who are still actual Libertarians must be feeling politically homeless right now.
Some - maybe most - will rationalize a vote for Trump, and others will support RFK, Jr. because he won’t make them take (shudder) vaccines.
But if you’re an “economically conservative, socially liberal” type, well, at least the Democrats fulfill half of the bargain. Maybe even most of it, when you consider what the first Trump Administration did to the country’s finances.
And while there are nearly as many neo-Red Guards on the left are there are little Falangists on the right, most of them aren’t Democrats.
If anything, they despise “Genocide Joe” even more than Trump. Almost like horseshoe theory is 100% real, or something.
Meanwhile, across the pond, the Green Party (which, in contrast to the Libertarians, actually has too many elected representatives to fit in a Tokyo sleeping pod) is apparently becoming a refuge for “anti-Zionists” who believe they no longer have a home in the post-Corbyn Labour Party but are at least savvy enough not to join George Galloway’s latest scam:
The Greens were last night facing fury over their failure to suspend a councillor who launched a hate-filled tirade against a rabbi.
Mothin Ali, who was elected to Leeds city council last week, had called Leeds University's Jewish chaplain, Zecharia Deutsch, a 'creep', a 'low-life' and an 'animal'.
The 42-year-old had been allowed to stand for the Greens despite branding Israelis 'white supremacists' after the Hamas Palestinian terror group killed 1,200 people on October 7 last year. He was filmed shouting 'We will raise the voice of Palestine – Allahu Akbar!' after winning his council seat.
Yesterday the party faced a string of calls to take action against him, including from Jewish leaders who accused it of hypocrisy for not distancing itself from his 'extremist nonsense'. Back in February Daily Mail feature writer Guy Adams presented the Greens with a dossier of offensive comments made by Mr Ali, including the tirade against Rabbi Deutsch, who was later forced into hiding.
When presented with the evidence at the time, the Green Party told this paper it 'believes in free speech' and Mr Ali was allowed to stand, and win, as a councillor. But staggeringly, when asked about Mr Ali's offensive remarks in a television interview on Sunday night, Carla Denyer co-leader of the Green Party, appeared not to know about them.
I’m not sure where it came from, but an awful lot of people are under the curious impression that city councils in the United States and Britain have enough pull to make the IDF lay down its arms. Maybe it’s a viral rumour spread on TikTok or something.
Either way, it’s not just Ali:
The Green Party has denied one of its candidates shared a video showing Hamas defending the October 7 massacres and calling Israel “a cancer that should be eradicated” – despite being shown a screenshot of the evidence.
The JC has also seen inflammatory social media posts by a number of other local Green candidates, raising troubling questions about the views circulating in the party as the country goes to the polls tomorrow.
Abdul Malik, who is standing in Bristol, appears to have shared an 18-minute video of a Hamas press conference in which a spokesman for the terror group described the October 7 massacre as a “supremely defensive act” that “targeted only Israeli military bases and compounds”, and said Israel was an “an animal state… a cancer that should be eradicated”.
After the video was raised by Lord Mann, the government’s adviser on antisemitism, a Green party spokesman apologised, saying Malik was “unwittingly tagged into an offensive post that he assures us he did not himself publish”.
However, the JC has obtained a screenshot of the post which shows the video being shared from what appears to be Malik’s own Facebook account.
[…]
The JC has also unearthed inflammatory posts by Wayne Fitzharris, a Green candidate in Hyndburn, Lancashire. Among the posts on a Facebook site he runs called Hyndburn Green Future is a claim he posted on 23 March that Israel was the “real terrorist”. Whether or not you believed this, the post went on, “depends on what moral values you live your life [sic]”, on “whether you live by western colonial values or by global that means everyone in the world is equal” and “on your humanity and how you view injustice”.
In other posts, Fitzharris linked to an article claiming new research “challenges Jewish DNA links to Israel”, asked “will Jewish people around the world call out the mass slaughter in Gaza” and suggested Israel was behind Isis.
Three Green candidates in Peterborough have also posted inflammatory statements. One of them, Imtiaz Ali, joined the party after he was deselected as a council candidate by Labour in 2021, when he accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid”.
Having switched parties, Ali issued a post on Facebook in December saying “Zionists are nothing more than common thieves. Willing to massacre thousands in the process.”
His fellow candidate Mohammed Munir posted in May 2021: “Repeat after me. F*** the Zionist state of Israel!!! To hell with the Zionist state of Israel!!!”
In February this year, he posted: “We have members in our very own community who have become Zionist sympathisers!!!”
Another Peterborough Green candidate is Shahzad Ali. In 2020 he called Israel a “terrorist state”, and then, two weeks after the October 7 massacre, posted that Israel “just want the people of Palestine to roll over and accept defeat by robbing them of their lands. This Zionist movement crossed the lines on many fronts of war crimes”.
With “Greens” like this, no wonder the British National Party isn’t really a thing anymore. (Actually, I wouldn’t be that surprised if Nick Griffin ends up as a Green Party candidate at some point, though he might be too squishy and moderate.)
And if old-school Greens think they can ride this tiger, well, I wish them luck in thinking their party will survive where the GOP (and its new G league affiliate, the Libertarian Party) couldn’t.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. held the monkey’s paw tightly and wished he could get a famous Oscar-winning celebrity to endorse his campaign.
(I’ll forgive Woody Harrelson, for reason number 5 listed above.)