In Wisconsin, the Democrat party successfully kept the Green Party off the 2020 ballot on a technical filing infraction. As of this writing, Biden has a 20,000 vote lead over Trump in the state. In 2016, the Green Party's Jill Stein received over 30,000 votes. But the Green's candidate this year, Howie Hawkins, drastically underperformed... Read More

Apropos the previous post, the partisan divide regarding the utility of the carceral Covid state has really opened up: Parenthetically, what a disappointment the Libertarian party is. Could the circumstances have been any more ideal for a third-party putatively priding itself on liberty to have staked out a bold position starkly contrasting itself with the... Read More

In a quixotic quest to find reasons to cast doubt on our predictions of a Biden/Harris blowout in November, here's one that may be flying under the radar, apropos the previous post--the Libertarian ticket. The party's presidential candidate: There's a reason (nearly?) all politicians who identify as libertarians (Ron Paul, Justin Amash, Gary Johnson, Bill... Read More

I had a chuckle when I saw a notification that the latest episode of The Tom Woods Show successfully downloaded this morning. A title a bit too fitting for its spot in the show's enormous audio library, I'd say: The episode's feature is actually an interview from 2014. The frustration of the libertarian right--for which... Read More

More evidence gun grabbers are disproportionately geriatric (or in the case of David Hogg, have the bone density of the average geezer) from Reuters-Ipsos: Age ranges per generational cohort are 18-26 for Zurs, 27-38 for Millennials, 39-53 for Xers, and 54-71 for Boomers. For the purpose of obtaining adequate sample sizes, Zurs thus also include... Read More

Agnostic, in the context of explaining why ¡Ocasio!'s victory means the invasion will end: Here's her campaign platform flyer: And here's her two-minute TV spot:

John Derbyshire expresses sentiments I share: The Derb has arrived here after decades of thoughtful reflection. My trip has been much shorter. These sorts of one-off instances overwhelm my knack for teasing out simple but often overlooked patterns. Some observations, none particularly novel: - The AR-15, the gun used in Florida, has been around since... Read More

Heartiste: Let's recruit the GSS to pile on. The survey has a question that gets right at the heart of the growth of the state. Unfortunately it was only asked in a single year (1996) but the sample is large enough and the trend stark enough to serve our pedagogical purposes here. It reads "If... Read More

I've previously created indices based on GSS responses to questions about whether various 'controversial' speakers should or should not be permitted to speak publicly. The selection of five types of speakers does a pretty good job running the political gamut (atheists, communists, and homosexuals on the left; militarists and racists on the right). That means... Read More

In this week's Power Hour, Z-Man discussed a poll headlining with the finding that more millennials say they'd rather live in a socialist country than a capitalist one. Z gives several reasons not to read too much into this, the most salient one being that millennials don't know what socialism is--just 33% of millennials surveyed... Read More

In a great discussion between two leading libertarian minds who forthrightly deal with immigration and the National Question--that is, they don't ignore HBD--Stefan Molyneux asserts a strong association between atheism and socialism:

The 2016 iteration of the GSS asked respondents about who should be the primary provider for the sick, the old, and of education, along with five possible responses--the government, private businesses, non-profits, religious organizations, or family and friends. The following graphs show the percentages, by selected demographic characteristics*, who said the government should be the... Read More

Unsurprisingly, men are generally more tolerant of controversial speech than women are, with homosexuality existing as a marginal exception. The subsequent graph shows the percentages of people, by sex, who do not believe representatives of the following groups should be allowed to speak in public. For contemporary relevance, all responses are from 2000 onward. To... Read More

Then the Gary Johnson godsend is your guy:

Many people who swim in libertarian circles have complained for years that Gary Johnson is an incurious intellectual lightweight. He makes Ron Paul, who has never worn a suit that fits, look like Percy Blakeney by comparison. He's an open borders purist even by libertarian standards*. His most vociferous criticism of the major party candidates... Read More

In addition to ruling the academic and professional roosts, Keynesians control the public mind. The monetarists (ie Milton Friedman) aren't impervious though, even if their spiritual leader is: Combined interest in the Austrian triumvirate is still dwarfed in comparison to what is directed towards the princeps Keynes and Friedman: � Economics is apparently like mechanics... Read More

Think about the worst illness you've ever experienced, the kind of infection that sees you prostrated helplessly in front of the porcelain throne after making seven consecutive offerings to it while you desperately--and unsuccessfully--try to sneak a breath in edgewise, followed by a miserable, aching eternity of darkness in which your thoughts are, almost by... Read More

As has been reported here (and iterated elsewhere), Jews in the US--including Orthodox--are, on the whole, further to the left politically than white Democrats are. There are lots of varying explanations for this--Jews being yoked to the American left wing because "it represented the closest American counterpart to the forces on the left that had... Read More

In a previous post, I tried to convey that self-described tea party members are essentially uber conservative (in the contemporary American political context) rather than being decidedly libertarian in their emphasis. I didn't articulate the point too well, because, well, verbal articulation isn't my forte. So let's turn to the Arizona exit poll results for... Read More

The fact that Ron Paul blows the rest of the GOP presidential field out of the water when it comes to campaign contributions from military personnel is one that the Republican establishment can't profitably address. This isn't 1975. In 2012, US military personnel are among the most respected and honored people in the country. Consequently,... Read More