Keith Bessette

Tonight’s outcome isn’t about placing faith in Democrats or socialist principles; it’s about holding Republicans accountable for betraying their promises. All Republicans had to do was: 1. put Americans First 2. not start another war 3. prosecute sex traffickers

Back in 2004, I went to the Libertarian Party convention in Atlanta, and after the long weekend decided that I would not join. The people who run it are just too removed from the rest of the movement and the rest of the society. They didn't give shit about Iraq! the most important thing in the world at the time. Hardly heard of it apparently. Didn't know how horrible it would look invite hawks to give speeches. Just facepalm. I tried advising the LP presidential nominee that year. That reinforced the same lesson: This is not worth the effort. I have more important things to do. A few years ago, I finally joined the LP at the urging of my friends who were working to take the party over in the name of the actual American libertarian movement, as exemplified by the thinking and writing of Dr. Ron Paul, especially. The real point was to get the party together before we ran Dave Smith for president, which he thankfully in retrospect decided not to do. Well, at the last convention the libertarians didn't show up, only the Libertarians. So, a gay porn producer and new wave haircut lady and their crew took the party back over. It really sucks because there are so many good people in the party who work very hard and fight good fights. But the organization itself, as a democracy, is just completely retarded and it always will be. Today a friend sent me screenshots of these degenerate scum -- specifically the LP of San Francisco -- claiming the right to hurt children because they think freedom means getting away with being a piece of shit and violating the rights of helpless victims. Send in the SWAT Team. It's a foregone conclusion that the party leadership will do nothing about this. The LP always has been and remains a disaster for the good name of our movement. They'll probably run that filth Joe Walsh for president next time. He fits right in there. So I hereby officially resign from the Libertarian Party, and will instead continue to fight for liberty by other means.

The US presidency is the most dangerous office in the world. Here are the top 3 best and worst presidents ever: Let's start with the best: 1. Grover Cleveland vetoed 414 bills in his first term alone, including congressional handouts to drought-stricken Texas farmers in 1887, on the grounds that the Constitution authorized no such charity. He was right. 2. Warren Harding inherited the sharp 1920-21 depression and did almost nothing, cutting federal spending from $6.4 billion to $3.3 billion and slashing tax rates. The economy recovered within eighteen months, precisely because Washington stepped aside. 3. John Tyler, largely forgotten today, vetoed a national bank bill twice, endured expulsion from the Whig Party, and refused to let Henry Clay transform the Treasury into a political instrument. These three men share a rare quality: they treated the federal government as a cage, not a tool. Now the worst. 3. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned 14,000 political opponents without trial, shut down opposition newspapers, and conscripted men at gunpoint. The war's financing required the Legal Tender Acts of 1862, which forced irredeemable paper greenbacks on US citizens regardless of what contracts previously specified. Centralization of federal power over the states never fully reversed after 1865. The constitutional republic that emerged was a different animal from the one that entered. 2. Woodrow Wilson delivered the Federal Reserve in 1913, the income tax through the Sixteenth Amendment, the military draft, and the Espionage Act, which could imprison anyone for criticizing the war. He segregated the federal civil service. He took the country into a European slaughter with a propaganda apparatus, the Committee on Public Information, designed to manufacture consent. Every major expansion of state power in the twentieth century traces a direct line back to Wilson's two terms. 1. Franklin Roosevelt gets the top prize for catastrophe. He criminalized gold ownership via Executive Order 6102 in 1933, forcing Americans to surrender their gold at $20.67 per ounce, then immediately revalued it to $35, confiscating roughly 41 percent of savings held in the hardest monetary form available. He extended a cyclical recession into a decade-long depression through the National Industrial Recovery Act, agricultural price controls, and relentless uncertainty about property rights. Businesses do not invest when the rules change by executive whim every quarter. Real unemployment never fell below 14 percent throughout the 1930s. He packed the Supreme Court when it resisted. The regulatory state you live inside today, with its 188,000 pages of federal rules, grew from seeds Roosevelt planted between 1933 and 1945. Power corrupts budgets, currencies, and constitutions with equal efficiency. The best presidents understood their job was to leave you alone.

Covid is still a thing. Got my annual vaccine to protect myself and my community. Thanks to anti-vaxers, their god-king RFK, Jr. and troves of misinformation, we’ve seen vaccine hesitancy nationwide. Science is real. I trust our local public health officials and my doctors.

Secession was not a southern idea. Northern states threatened secession at least 5 times during America’s first 60 years: 1. The first time came in George Washington’s presidency when Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton warned that the Northern states would secede unless the Federal Government agreed to assume an obligation to pay off their Revolutionary War debts.  2.In 1803, New Englanders threatened secession over the Louisiana Purchase. They worried that the new territories would ultimately become new states thereby reducing New England’s influence.  3. In 1807, New England again threatened secession after America announced a trade embargo, hoping to avoid the War of 1812, by use of economic sanctions. 4. When the British finally blockaded New England during the last seven months of the thirty-month war, the region held a convention in Hartford to discuss secession or other steps to protect their interests from Federal powers. 5. As late as 1844, leaders in the Northeastern states threatened to secede over the proposed annexation of Texas.