Monthly Archives: June 2020

The DEA’s Whitewashing of Harry J. Anslinger

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, I was doing a great deal of research on topical events tied to the murder. One of those topics is the racist War on Drugs. I had planned a two-part series on the War on Drugs and how it was a racist institution from its inception. What I found sent me off on a tangent.

During my research, I discovered that there’s a DEA Museum unsurprisingly owned by the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). The museum has a website that features some of their exhibits. The one that caught my eye is dedicated to the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (a precursor to the DEA) — Harry J. Anslinger.

All of this sounds pretty mundane until you consider the fact that Anslinger was a dedicated racist. Worse, the DEA Museum has completely whitewashed his racism from their website. Nary a mention of how he sold the War on Drugs using race, or any of his famously racist quotes.

Without getting into too much detail about Anslinger’s racism (covered in greater depth in Part I of the War on Drugs), I’ll leave a few quotes:

Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.
There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.
Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with (white) female students, smoking [marijuana] and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy.
…the increase [in drug addiction] is practically 100 percent among Negro people.
Two Negros took a girl fourteen years old and kept her for two days under the influence of hemp. Upon recovery she was found to be suffering from syphilis.
Their satanic music is driven by marijuana, and marijuana smoking by white women makes them want to seek sexual relations with Negroes.

Anslinger was so petty of a man that he directed his agents to arrest Billie Holiday in her hospital bed as she lay dying from liver and heart disease. Of course, you won’t find that on the DEA Museum’s website. You won’t find any of the quotes listed above, either. Nor will you find any mention of how he sold the War on Drugs using fears of race and race-mixing.

According to the DEA’s narrative, Anslinger was a saint of government service. As Americans, we should be ashamed that a taxpayer-funded entity has completely whitewashed his racist past.

I’ve archived the site in its present form as of 06/29/2020 here.

The War on Drugs – Part I

The Beginning

The War on Drugs started much earlier than most people think. The first salvo on the War on Drugs was the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act of 1909. Opium was banned for recreational purposes. The next volley was the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, which regulated and taxed cocaine and heroin. Additional laws adding further restrictions and bans were passed through the 1920s.

The true start of the War on Drugs was the creation of the The Federal Narcotics Bureau (a precursor to the DEA) in 1930. At that time it wasn’t an independent agency as we see The real start of the War on Drugs was the creation of The Federal Narcotics Bureau (a precursor to the DEA) in 1930. At that time, it wasn’t an independent agency, as we see with the DEA today; it was part of the Treasury Department. On paper, the agency was tasked with going after untaxed income from drugs, not the drugs themselves. But there’s a catch. You couldn’t obtain the tax stamps; they didn’t exist. Because there were no tax stamps, it was an effective ban on the sale and possession of the drugs.

The key isn’t so much the bureau itself, but who they appointed to lead the agency as the first commissioner — Harry J. Anslinger.

Harry J. Anslinger

Anslinger didn’t do much at first as there wasn’t much to do. He sought to strengthen existing drug laws and add harsher penalties for non-compliance. Anslinger’s essential problem was that there simply weren’t enough heroin and cocaine dealers and users to go after. So Anslinger did what so many bureaucrats do, which is to find a way to grow his power and scope. His first target was cannabis.

Now you may be asking, “How exactly is that racist?” At this point, it’s probably best to leave you with a few quotes to get an idea of the type of man Anslinger was.

Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.
There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.
Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with (white) female students, smoking [marijuana] and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy.
…the increase [in drug addiction] is practically 100 percent among Negro people.
Two Negros took a girl fourteen years old and kept her for two days under the influence of hemp. Upon recovery she was found to be suffering from syphilis.
Harry J. Anslinger

Ain’t he a peach?

War on Cannabis

Beginning around 1934, Anslinger ramped up the Appeal to Fear rhetoric against cannabis. Here are some of his quotes around that time period.

Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.
You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother.
Some people will fly into a delirious rage, and they are temporarily irresponsible and may commit violent crimes. Other people will laugh uncontrollably. It is impossible to say what the effect will be on any individual.
Harry J. Anslinger

Anslinger went to Congress and did the typical song and dance we see today. Present the outlier cases (or completely fabricate the narrative), have the “victims” testify to Anslinger went to Congress and did the typical song and dance we see today. Present the outlier cases (or completely fabricate the narrative), have the “victims” testify to Congress in typically weepy fashion, draft the bill, and have it pushed through. The result of this song and dance was the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. Following the same template used for heroin and cocaine, the law required a tax to be paid on sales, denoted by a tax stamp. Like cocaine and heroin, the stamp didn’t exist, making all sales illegal.

You may be wondering why cannabis has taken on the name marihuana in government documents. Well, Anslinger was an equal opportunity racist. By changing to the Spanish name, he could also gain from anti-Mexican sentiment.

Anslinger’s claims regarding cannabis did not go unchallenged. In 1939, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia set up a commission to study the effects of “marihuana.” The La Guardia Committee’s report refuted every claim that Anslinger had made.

Anslinger was enraged and went on the offensive. He claimed the study was “unscientific.” Anslinger did what bureaucrats do when they’re threatened. He rallied the sympathetic side of the press and worked behind the scenes to debunk and bury the report. Given that we still have a federal ban on cannabis, he was successful.

Target: Jazz

If you combine his “marijuana is violence” rhetoric with his racist speech, it’s pretty clear who Anslinger was targeting. Keep in mind that this man was the head of the Federal Narcotics Bureau for 32 years. You don’t think that the agency wasn’t ingrained with racism at its very core?

His racism was quite profound, and it permeated his words and actions. In Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Johann Hari writes:

“Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, relaxed, free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. ‘It sounded,’ his internal memos said, ‘like the jungles in the dead of night.’”
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari

To further his goals, he targeted prominent black entertainers to make an example out of them. The first targets to incur his wrath? Jazz musicians. Jazz was growing in popularity and nothing like some high profile arrests of a group he hated to make his agency look good. Most famously he waged war on Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday was never silent about the racism she experienced in her life, and as a result, she became Anslinger’s favorite target.

Holiday started using heroin in the 1940s, and when Anslinger caught wind of that fact, he had an agent assigned to tail her and frame her buying or using heroin. Holiday was first arrested in 1947 and sentenced to a year in prison where she had to go cold turkey. As a result of her arrest, she lost her cabaret license and was unable to sing anywhere where alcohol was served.

To get an idea of the depth of Anslinger’s hatred, he even had her arrested while she was dying at New York’s Metropolitan Hospital of liver and heart disease in 1959. Anslinger ordered agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to arrest her for drug possession.

Billie Holiday wasn’t his only target. Other jazz luminaries such as Ray Charles, Chet Baker, and Sonny Rollins were all arrested, convicted, and sent to the Lexington Prison Farm to clean up.

The treatment of entertainers wasn’t even-handed. Judy Garland was also addicted to heroin and other drugs and was handled with kid gloves.

With informants planted all over Hollywood, Anslinger knew what drugs Garland was doing and where she was getting them, so one day he intervened by visiting the heads of MGM and insisting they send her to a sanatorium, saying, “I believed her to be a fine woman caught in a situation that could only destroy her.” He was told they had $14 million invested in her and had no intention of giving her the time off she needed. An unsuccessful suicide attempt—even if only a cry for help—finally persuaded them that the best way to protect their investment was to send her to rehab. Later, Anslinger would imply that he had played the major role in helping Garland get clean, but that may also have been just a story only he believed.
America’s War on Drugs Has Treated People Unequally Since Its Beginning – Time Magazine

The End of Harry’s Reign, but not the War.

In 1962 after 32 years as the head of the Bureau of Narcotics, Anslinger retired at the mandatory retirement age of 70. Contrary to rumors, he was not ousted by Kennedy. Kennedy asked him to stay on until they could find a successor. As we all know, the War on Drugs has not only persisted but has escalated. The first escalation happened a mere eight years later under Richard Nixon. That is a story for Part II of the series.

Causes of Systemic Racism

Population Density and the Inner City

As a few readers pointed out in the last post, some of the data can be due to Black Americans living in higher density areas. Now you may be thinking, “How does that contribute to systemic racism?” Without going too deep down the rabbit hole, the clustering Black Americans together is not an accident. The federal government created much of that problem with racist housing regulations. [cm_simple_footnote id=”1a”][cm_simple_footnote id=”2″]

The clustering can best be visualized by looking at the Racial Dot Map. What is clear in many cities is the sharp dividing line between black and white (Detroit as a prime example).

Implicit Bias

There have been many hypotheses as to why there is systemic racism; one of the more recent theories has been implicit bias. In a study[cm_simple_footnote id=”3″] by Michael Siegel M.D., M.P.H., he used data on fatal police shootings and ran it against five key indicators of systemic racism in each state; racial segregation, incarceration rate gaps, educational attainment gaps, the economic disparity index, and employment disparity gaps. He concluded:

Our findings provide evidence that both the threat hypothesis and the community violence hypothesis are contributing to the explanation of the striking racial disparity in police shootings of unarmed suspects.
The Relationship Between Structural Racism and Black-White Disparities in Fatal Police Shootings at the State Level
Michael Siegel M.D., M.P.H.

Officer Performance Rating

Another factor listed as part of the cause is how police officers are rated as part of their performance. While quotas are illegal in most states, officers are still required to write tickets and make misdemeanor arrests (for things like drug possession). The loophole is that such metrics may be considered as a part of an officer’s overall performance review. Not reduced crime. Not reduced accidents. Not reduced complaints. Not improved community relations. Tickets and arrests. Why? Revenue generation. Law enforcement officials are less concerned with community relations and reduced crime than they are generating revenue for their agency.[cm_simple_footnote id=”4″]

Many cities have come under fire for such policies, including New York and their infamous “stop-and-frisk” policy. In 2012, Officer Craig Matthews spoke out about the policy saying:

…causing unjustified stops, arrests, and summonses because police officers felt forced to abandon their discretion in order to meet their numbers.
Officer Craig Matthews, NYPD

Consequently, the city retaliated against Officer Matthews by “punitive assignments, denial of overtime and leave, separation from his career-long partner, humiliating treatment by supervisors, and negative performance evaluations.” as claimed in a lawsuit Officer Matthews filed against the city.[cm_simple_footnote id=”5″] In 2015, the city settled the lawsuit for $280,000.[cm_simple_footnote id=”6″]

While these tactics may go unnoticed in the suburbs where the population is less dense, it becomes more problematic where the population is more racially dense. This effect was called out in the DOJ’s Ferguson Report.[cm_simple_footnote id=”7″] Officers assigned to the more racially dense Black neighborhoods, will naturally write more tickets and make more arrests of black Americans.

Conclusion

Systemic racism is not caused by any one factor, but a combination of many. I began with population density of Black Americans for a reason. It is that density that has some cascade effects down the line. Implicit bias and ticket quotas all feed into the population density and clustering that was baked into the system early on.

While these other factors may have a role, the single biggest factor of systemic racism in the criminal justice system is the War on Drugs. The Drug War from it’s inception in 1930 was specifically targeted against Black Americans. The War on Drugs was sold to white America using racist terms and imagery, and the laws were targeted toward Black Americans. Accordingly, the criminal justice system used the power they were granted to devastating effect. Exactly how it was designed

To better understand the War on Drugs, it is necessary to dig into the history of the Drug War. How the war began, who were the major players behind it, and the lasting effects it has today. That is something for Part IV.

Systemic Racism?

The Data

Traffic Stops

As many public interactions with police are a result of traffic stops, it’s useful to examine the data from the Bureau of Justice Police-Public Reports on Traffic Stops.

The table below lays out traffic and street stops as a percentage of all contacts with police. For context, white Americans make up 67% of the total driving population, and Black Americans make up 11%. Six times as many white Americans driving as Black.

Overall, 8.6% of all contacts with police were a result of traffic stops, 2.4% with the passenger was part of the stop, and 1% were from street stops. Also important is the number of arrests that resulted from the stops.

Nearly ten percent of Black drivers were subjected to traffic stops in 2015, compared to 8.6% for whites. Also notable are the higher percentage of street stops and the arrest rate.

EDIT: As one of my intrepid readers so gleefully observed while accusing this post of being slanted, whites are stopped 5 times as much as blacks. But the spreadsheet only shows a percentage of drivers of a race being stopped to make you think that’s an issue. Of course, he didn’t fully do the math. There are 6 times as many white drivers as black drivers so you’d expect if all things were equal, there would be 6 times as many traffic stops.,..not 5 times as many. Still not equal so the point is still valid.

Non-lethal Use of Force

With the increased police interactions, the next question is how are those interactions handled. A study by economist Roland G. Fryer, Jr. provides some insight.

“The results obtained using these data are informative and, in some cases, startling. Using data on police interactions from NYC’s Stop and Frisk program, we demonstrate that on non-lethal uses of force – putting hands on civilians (which includes slapping or grabbing) or pushing individuals into a wall or onto the ground, there are large racial differences. In the raw data, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to have an interaction with police which involves any use of force.
An Emperical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force
Roland G. Fryer, Jr.

The study found that the results were consistent across various data sets (different police departments).

Unarmed Fatal Interactions with Police

In Part I of this series, I presented a study that showed 20% of all fatal encounters with police involve unarmed citizens. That review also focused on race-gender differences in fatal encounters with police.

Using hierarchical linear models, we find the odds that black Americans will be killed by police when unarmed are nearly 7 to 1—more than double the odds found in research to date—and due primarily to the unarmed status of black women.
“Race, Gender and the Contexts of Unarmed Fatal Interactions with Police” Johnson Jr, Gilbert, Ibrahim[cm_simple_footnote id=”1″]

A government study published in 2018 titled “Deaths Due to Use of Lethal Force by Law Enforcement“[cm_simple_footnote id=”2”] concluded:

Victims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites. Most victims were reported to be armed (83%); however, black victims were more likely to be unarmed (14.8%) than white (9.4%) or Hispanic (5.8%) victims.

One thing of note, the data used in the first study presented was from 2013-2015, the 2nd was from 2009-2012, which may account for the statistical discrepancies. Nonetheless, it is clear from both studies than unarmed black males are far more likely to die at the hands of law enforcement than whites or Hispanics.

The Washington Post compiled a database on lethal use of force by law enforcement from 2015-2019 (unfortunately behind a paywall), but this graphic from their study shows the same pattern.

Drug Arrests/Convictions

Whites and blacks use illegal drugs in roughly equal numbers relative to percentage of population[cm_simple_footnote id=”3″].

Side rant: While researching these statistics, the most useful site for crime demographics was the FBI’s Crime in the United States 2018. It has all the demographic information you’d want for all crimes with one notable exception… drug arrests. This was the only demographic provided there…which is utterly useless.

However, the Bureau of Justice provides incarceration rates for drug offenses. The spreadsheet shown below shows that blacks as a percentage are once again higher than whites.

This pattern is repeated with cannabis, a non-addictive drug, and one that most rational people don’t consider dangerous (with many states decriminalizing or legalizing marijuana for recreational use). Below is a chart showing drug usage statistics comparison by race from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

Now compare that to arrests by race using the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting.

Gee, the use and arrest/convictions doesn’t line up, does it?

What is both interesting and disturbing are the trends regarding drug arrests. Arrests for drug possession of increased while arrests for drug sale/manufacturing have been flat since 1997. This image from an analysis of the Bureau of Justice Statistics and Uniform Crime Report.[cm_simple_footnote id=”4″]

It’s almost like they’re not even trying to “stop” illegal drug sales.

Civil Asset Forfeiture

The abuses of civil asset forfeiture have been widely reported. Civil asset forfeiture has been proven to disproportionately affect minorities and the poor. There are numerous studies and reports on this issue here, here, and here. With Philadelphia as the poster child for civil asset forfeiture abuse, here.

In 2018, a consent decree agreement with the City of Philadelphia was announced. The result of that agreement is that the city will have tight restrictions on when they can seize assets. It was further agreed that the city would pay reparations to those victimized by civil asset forfeiture.[cm_simple_footnote id=”5″]

Conclusion

I went into researching this post with an open mind. The goal was to analyze the raw data, consult scholarly studies, and form a rational position based on the data.

This post examined traffic stops, non-lethal use of force, fatal interactions with police, and drug arrest convictions/incarceration rates. It also touched on civil asset forfeiture and who is most affected by it. The totality of the evidence is simultaneously enlightening and depressing.

While Mark Twain famously popularized the saying, “lies, damn lies and statistics,” the data is pretty damning when it comes to the existence of systemic racism in our criminal justice system.

The big question is “why?”. That is something I’ll tackle in Part III.

The Murder of George Floyd – Minimization

The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin has aroused a range of emotions across the country. Some are sympathetic, some are enraged, some are defensive, and inexplicably…some are in outright denial. As it took me some time to carefully research and consider the facts before writing this post, it will be broken up into a series.

Victim-blaming

I’ve seen far too many people resort to victim-blaming to minimize what happened. It does not matter who George Floyd was, what his criminal history was, what drugs were in his system, and the reasons for his arrest. None of these things are the least bit relevant. Anyone making that claim is using a red herring logical fallacy. I’ve seen memes and commentators attempting to make that same point. As an example, Candace Owens went on a long rant about attacking George Floyd’s character which was brilliantly deconstructed by Larry Sharpe. [cm_simple_footnote id=”1″] Nobody is making George Floyd out to be a “hero” but he has become the face of a cause.

The fact of the matter is that law enforcement has a duty to the care and well-being of an individual in custody.[cm_simple_footnote id=”2″] [cm_simple_footnote id=”3″] Make no mistake, Floyd was in custody. He was lying prone while handcuffed. If he was resisting at some point off-camera (and I’ve seen and heard nothing that indicates he was), it’s pretty clear he had stopped. You simply cannot defend a police officer kneeling on a man’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds by stating that the victim was not an upstanding citizen. He was a human being, a U.S. Citizen and at a minimum was entitled to due process for his alleged crime.

Unarmed White Individuals killed by law enforcement

The other common red herring I’d like to address are the posts, memes, and commentaries about unarmed white men being killed by law enforcement as a way to minimize the racial component and the BLM movement. Typically, these posts like to point out that people did not protest or riot (SIDE NOTE: Protesters are not rioters) over the deaths of unarmed white individuals (like Duncan Lemp, Daniel Shaver, Tony Timpa, and Kelly Thomas) at the hands of law enforcement. Well gee America, how noble of you to remain silent while your unarmed white brothers are killed by law enforcement. Where was your outrage when these men were killed at the hands of law enforcement? Where are the posts pointing out their criminal histories? Are you trying to say you didn’t care about those deaths but only care now to bring them to everyone’s attention because…”All Lives Matter.” Outside of civil libertarians, nobody else was showing outrage or concern that unarmed citizens have been and are being killed by law enforcement.

Missing the Point

All of these fallacious arguments miss the point. We should ALL be outraged when ANY individual dies at the hands of law enforcement while unarmed. Their criminal histories do not matter. Whatever drugs are alcohol they were on do not matter. More disturbing is the fact that 20% of all fatal encounters with police involve unarmed citizens.

Table 1 (see chart below) provides descriptive information of the agency sample and the sample of fatalities. Our samples reveal that a fifth (20%) of all fatalities were of unarmed individuals (column 3), and that they were committed by approximately 9 percent of the (law enforcement) agencies in our sample (column 1).
“Race, Gender and the Contexts of Unarmed Fatal Interactions with Police” Johnson Jr, Gilbert, Ibrahim[cm_simple_footnote id=”4″]

The first step in solving any problem is admitting there is a problem. Resorting to logical fallacies to minimize the problem is not going to solve a thing. At some point Americans need to come to terms with the facts on fatal police interactions. In my next post I’ll address the racial component and if there is systemic racism in law enforcement.

Part II

Principles and Pragmatism

I’ve been voting for Libertarian Party candidates for 26 years. That’s a lot of write-in candidates over the years. I fully stand on our principles but the fact of the matter is that the Libertarian Party has not made a substantive impact on American Politics since it’s founding.

What are our goals as a party? Do we want to effect real change? Do we want to make an impact on policy? Are we satisfied merely being a protest vote? Or do we want to continue to founder on our hard-line principled high ground only to criticize the duopoly for their folly? Honestly, I’m tired of that as I’ve been doing it for the better part of my adult life. I want to see this party grow and make a real impact on American politics.

Clearly, people are fed up with the two-party system. The Democratic and Republican party registrations are shrinking and independents make up the largest voting bloc. There’s a real opportunity here for a 3rd-party to make a real impact.

So why haven’t we made an impact?

You could point to several external factors. The CPD keeping us out of the debates. The duopoly tilting the system against us. The winner-take-all voting structure. You could say “everything will be better if we change to ranked-choice, STAR, or SCORE voting” or “If we could only get into the debates!” Yes, those are all factors. But they’re really excuses.

The truth of the matter is we’re our own worst enemies.

Why?

Because we have consistent principles, we tend fall back those principles in any political conversation. We think our principles are simple while our detractors have made simple memes about “What about the roads?” and “Somalia, libertarian paradise.” The truth of the matter is that our ideas are not that simple to explain in application to a world now accustomed to bite-size morsels of media, memes, and slogans.

In my opinion the other way we hurt ourselves is that too many people in this party are tone-deaf when it comes to our image. We don’t care how we appear to non-libertarians…even those that we could attract to the party. We should be looking at independents and moderates from either party as potential libertarians. We just need to sell them on ideas, then explain the principles behind those concepts. We tend to do it the other way around. We explain the principles, then how it applies. People just really want to know what we want to do but they are not ready for the end goals. It’s actually beyond their comprehension.

Too often I feel that there are people in the party that treat the LP like the Cool Kids Club. That if you don’t take a hard-line on principles, then you’re booed at our conventions or excoriated on social media. The attitude seems to be, “This is who we are, screw you if you don’t like it.” This is not furthering our cause.

These flaws are all fine and dandy if you want the Libertarian Party to continue to be nothing more than a protest vote. I’m tired of the protest vote when I believe we’re capable of so much more. We have to be willing to change…to be more self-aware. Being a pragmatist does not mean sacrificing principles. The end goal is still the same. Where pragmatists and hardliners diverge is how we get there and how we present ourselves to the American public.

The fact of the matter is that the American public has been indoctrinated for decades that government is the solution to whatever problems Americans think need to be solved. You can’t undo that with a snap of the fingers and stroke of the pen. Undoing the damage from this mindset will take decades. The American people aren’t ready for that. So how do we get there?

I can tell you how we won’t get there. By maintaining a hard line. By giving serious consideration and nominating candidates that a majority of Americans would consider to be a joke. At that point, you can’t even counter the “lesser of two evils” argument with a majority of Americans. How we position ourselves and how we sell ourselves matters as much as anything when it comes to candidates…that’s been true since the first televised debates with Nixon vs. Kennedy.

The way to real change is to move everything to a more libertarian position. By selling our libertarian principles in a way that resonates with the American people. Things like ending foreign wars, shrinking the military, balancing the budget, legalizing marijuana, reducing police power, decreasing regulation, ending bailouts, reducing crony capitalism, etc. But we can’t do that by sticking to the hard-line. Slogans like “End the Fed” and “Taxation is Theft” while correct on principle, are lost on a majority of Americans.

I don’t consider libertarianism to be a joke and It shouldn’t be merely a protest vote. It’s something that I believe is the only thing that can save America from itself. It is possible to be principled and pragmatic so long as our end goals are the same. We need to be cognizant of how we present libertarian ideas to others in order to sell the party as a legitimate option. The rest of the time we can continue to argue amongst ourselves as is tradition. 😀