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This is the transcript of a speech I gave at the Libertarian Party of Ohio convention in 2020. Delivering this address was (almost) indescribably important to me. Being a veteran and descendant of veterans, writing this examination and doing the research for it was impactful. I hope you find it as insightful as the work behind it was for me.

As a veteran myself – having served six years in the United States Navy, twice deployed to the Middle East, the son of a World War II veteran who narrowly escaped death on the front lines in France, and the great-grandson of a Union Army soldier during the Civil War…

…I wish to take a few minutes to address a topic that is of significant personal importance and interest: U.S. military policy, military service, and how they interplay with presidential election year politics.

To achieve some measure of brevity, these remarks will focus on several presidential elections since I reached voting age in 1988.

As we will see, the ’88 election serves as a good starting point. That year, George H.W. Bush selected as his running-mate then-Senator from Indiana Dan Quayle.

Some in here and watching on CSPAN will remember how, within days of joining that presidential ticket, Senator Quayle was grilled over his choice to join the National Guard during the Vietnam conflict.

Going forward, his patriotism, his character, his dedication to his country, and of course his suitability for elected office were actively and aggressively assailed by the opposing major party. The starting point for all that being the nature of his military service.

Four years later, during the 1992 presidential race, the same political camp which eagerly took Quayle to task over joining the National Guard tripped all over themselves and one another in defending the nomination of then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton – who had taken multiple college deferments during U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

From there, fast-forward twelve years to 2004: the party of former Vice President Quayle demonstrated they would not be outdone in the arena of political hypocrisy.

With President George W. Bush locked in a tight reelection race, a political action committee calling themselves Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ran a series of attack ads against Bush’s main challenger, then-Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.

The Swift Boat Veterans PAC was heavily funded by a handful of party insiders from Texas, all deeply loyal to President Bush. Their commercials aggressively challenged and disparaged the nature of the senator’s service in Vietnam, where he was attached to a Naval swift boat unit.

The assertions in those ads eventually would be either proven false or revealed to come from unreliable sources who could not have known any such particulars surrounding Kerry’s wartime deployment.

Remember, all of this was coming from the political party claiming to hold veterans in high esteem.

On a quick side note: the controversy generated by these advertisements led to the term “swiftboating” being coined: meaning the use of dubious revelations and other misleading comments for political gain.

As a sad epilogue to all this, such hypocrisy from that party doesn’t even end there.

In 2008 and 2012, U.S. Representative from Texas, Ron Paul sought his party’s nomination for President, bringing with him an impressive resume punctuated by his service as a flight surgeon in the United States Air Force and then the Air National Guard.

Paul’s time of military service would include deployment to Vietnam.

During his 2012 presidential bid, in fact, Ron Paul would be his party’s only wartime veteran in the field.

The establishment may not have gone to the same extremes with the congressman’s time of service as they did with John Kerry’s…

…but they would do the next-best thing: ignore it… and do so to preserve their agenda.

No mention of Paul being a Vietnam veteran was made by any of the popular conservative pundits or election campaign reporters in the mainstream news media.

Taking the nature of Ron Paul’s military service into consideration on the campaign trail would have given his non-interventionist stance on U.S. foreign policy far greater credibility than many of his antiwar contemporaries.

It’s the same reason I emphasized my own personal and family history of military service as I did at the beginning.

At this point, I wish to revisit one individual mentioned previously because there is more that warrants examination.

When it comes to our nation’s foreign policy, few people in American Politics represent everything that is wrong in that arena than former senator from Massachusetts and
Secretary of State John Kerry.

Upon completion of his Naval active duty obligation, he began his antiwar activism. Kerry joined the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War and later gained some notoriety for participating in the Winter Soldier Investigation. He first made national news in April 1971 by giving controversial testimony during the Fulbright hearings of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

He would use that antiwar activism to springboard his political aspirations, running for Congress the next year.

As a career politician, Kerry maintained his antiwar position, including most of his time in the Senate – that is, until he ran for President and decided being antiwar was too unfashionable in post-9-11 America.

In 2004, the man who had once been an antiwar stalwart in America’s political landscape would campaign for the White House while keeping one foot in each camp: sometimes antiwar, sometimes a pragmatic warhawk as needed.

Then, in February 2013 – in what would prove to be the pinnacle of his political career – his appointment as U.S. Secretary of State was confirmed by his fellow Senators.

John Kerry then spent the next four years beating the drum for war at every turn at the behest of the Obama Administration.

What everyone who is antiwar – or even simply has begun to rethink the present nature of U.S. military interventionism – should stop and ask is this: what changed?

What. Changed.

My fellow Americans, if you are as weary as I am of this never-ending cycle of political hypocrisy, there is one path to steer this country away from it: on Election Day, November 3, vote Libertarian.

And, I don’t just mean for the presidential ticket decided at national convention. Vote Libertarian in every U.S. Senate and House race. Vote Libertarian in your statewide and state legislature elections.

Most importantly, vote for the Libertarians running in your local races at the county, municipal, and township levels. Today’s Libertarians elected at the local level gain the ever-valuable public office experience that will enable them to run for and win state-level offices and beyond.

And, they will bring with them on that path, not only an antiwar or non-interventionist philosophy, but that same fire inside of them to dismantle that cycle of hypocrisy driving public policy and which has become entrenched in our nation’s governmental establishments.

Thank you for your time and may Peace, Faith, and Liberty be yours.

When Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields starts tonight’s game for the Buckeyes in the NCAA national championship, most of the initial focus will be on whether or not he as sufficiently recovered from the injury he sustained during the second quarter of the Sugar Bowl.

I had heard significant speculation from fans that Fields had been dealt a fractured rib by Clemson middle linebacker James Skalski.

If that is revealed to be true, then such a revelation would merit an additional exclamation point to an already unbelievable performance by Fields in Ohio State’s semifinal victory.

To perform at the level Fields did while he endured the pain of a possible rib fracture is a sports story for the ages. It also speaks volumes about how much heart this young man brings to the table, especially during the biggest moments in which anyone could find themselves in life.

The word “inspirational” – all too often thrown-around in discussions of seminal moments in sports – is warranted in this instance.

To state the obvious, this will bode extremely well for him when the time comes later this year to embark on a professional football career.

The amount of home pride Fields has enabled for many Ohioans will have a lasting effect on quite a few of us for years to come.

But, when one considers the year we all recently put behind us as well as the already turbulent start to this new calendar, could there be other areas of life – especially life in America – where similar applications of that amount of heart would serve to uplift any number of people who could use that about now?

More than likely, Fields will continue to garner accolades in the NFL. We can expect to see a requisite display of philanthropy, on par with his peers in the league.

My hope is there would be more that some or all of us will get to see.

Can you imagine how much good can come from someone such as Fields putting even half as much of that heart into…

…marriage…

…fatherhood…

…civic involvement…

…as well as matters of equality…

…justice…

…liberty…

…faith.

Perhaps tackling these aspects would not draw the same attention and fanfare but to inspire even a few of us to emulate him in these endeavors, the impact on the world would be a much more lasting one.

People wonder why there is such division between generations of Americans in recent years.

Consider this: it was the Silent Generation which began entering academia and then actively took to advancing the message of nonconformity to the next generation – who themselves had just begun their pursuit of higher education.

That next generation would come to be known as the Baby Boom Generation.

The dangers of social conformity, a sentiment handed-down from one generation to the next was clearly centered around distrust of the older generations.

Fast-forward just over five-and-a-half decades. And, now it is the Silent Generation which predominantly constitutes those “old folks” who hold much of the top positions in our society’s institutions of power.

What is their prevailing message today?

It is one rooted in the demand of total conformity with their social edicts.

Such hypocrisy is not lost on today’s young-but-emerging population, even if they don’t necessarily understand it in the terms presented above.

A discernable pattern is developing in response to it.

The present situation is producing fertile soil for the budding of a new Punk Rock generation, which will arise just as its predecessor did during the second and third decades of the Cold War.

Parallels to social conditions on the other side of the Atlantic during a recently bygone era serve as a prelude to what we can expect here in the next several years.

In the late 1950s in Great Britain, the youth of the day found themselves caught between a society which had known individual freedom quite well and a nation that had become ensnared in a post-war phase during which the power brokers who had inherited an expanded central government – as a result of its growth during the war effort of 1939 through 1945 – were steadily developing new ways to over-regiment the lives of the country’s young people unlike anything their society had seen before.

Throughout the 1960s to the end of the Vietnam War era in the early 1970s, social conditions had become tense enough for the punk rock movement to splash across that country and cause further social shake-ups.

Here we are in 2020, the same frustrations – born from the confusion of understanding the value of freedom (which had been enjoyed to varying greater levels by older generations) while simultaneously being bombarded with concepts chiseling-away at individuality and individualism – are steadily mounting.

Similar forces are concomitantly at play just as were seen and felt decades ago: the stress of constant war-involvement on the other side of the world; shifts in media technology that enabled wider expression of outside-the-mainstream viewpoints; expansion of power wielded by public authorities; a growing sense of not fitting-in with each round of young people just entering adulthood; and discontent with how the country’s affairs are being handled.

The only X-factor is how that new punk rock generation will view the efficacy of the State in their lives and society at-large.

Distrust of the State still was high in Great Britain of 50 years ago. Today’s American young people have had a wider separation of time from when the strangling of liberty rapidly began accelerating to their coming-of-age.

Unfortunately, Generation X did not do enough to nurture the flames of individual liberty. We see the evidence of that all across social media.

Hope remains for us to redeem ourselves in this regard through our mentorship of that generation when its time comes. Our success there hinges on our credibility. Otherwise, we will become just another generation in the shuffle and find ourselves lost in it.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” – C.S. Lewis


It seems appropriate to state the obvious that I am an incurable Marvel nerd.

Not that Marvel Studios’ wider film franchise needs any additional exposure via armchair examination or other such help in order to continue their box office success…

Still, it bears noting there is something – almost subliminally so – about Marvel’s multi-film antagonist, Thanos, which makes him and this final go-around of Avengers films exceptionally worth watching.

The films’ directors, Joe and Anthony Russo, describe Thanos as “an ecoterrorist.” That only scratches the surface of this nemesis to Marvel’s ragtag band of heroes.

Whether it was their intention or not, the Russo brothers have adapted this character for the big screen in such a way that his ideology (of sorts) reflects multiple dark stretches of political discourse and governmental action in 20th century history – both here in America and abroad.

With his insistence that the universe’s sentient life population has grown too large in relation to the universe’s available resources and drastic measures must be taken in response, the big-screen version of Thanos is a quintessential representative of American Progressivism.

His motivation harkens to a time – 50 years ago – when one contingent of Progressives were actively sounding alarms over the impending over-population crisis facing our world.

Subsequently, Thanos serves as a throw-back to both the early Progressive movement of a century ago – the period when that movement was notably intertwined with the burgeoning eugenics movement in America – and ultimately the brutal Maoist purges of the 1950s and ‘60s.

In merging these sectors of Progressivism from the previous century, the audience is presented with an antagonist who has graduated beyond activism for curbing over-population and has – aglow with self-confidence in the morality of his crusade – committed himself to bringing-about the necessary reductions in population to conform the world (or, rather, the universe) to his narrow view of what constitutes the proper scheme of things.

Thanos is not just a Progressive, he is the Progressive.

So immovably self-convinced is he that he (and, he alone) has the necessary hard answers to a question no one else in the cosmos was even asking, there is no price too high Thanos is willing to force others to pay – especially those who dare stand in his way – in the quest to realize his vision for an orderly, universal population culling.

On a purely intellectual level – given the popular mindset he symbolizes among the ruling political class in our society – the convergence of all these components serves to make Thanos one of the most frightening and unnerving villains in modern cinema…

…and rightfully so.

When the most recent recession was in full swing, the outgoing and incoming presidential administrations decided it was time to use an emergency situation to spend a combined $1.5 trillion of debt-borne money in their efforts to “help” the problem.

This was as ill-advised as it was unnecessary.

A major component of Bush’s and Obama’s combined fraud was the notion the federal government could more wisely pick-and-choose how to distribute and award a combined $1.5 trillion than the people of the United States of America.

Let’s say for the sake of argument I agreed with the Washington brain-trust that the T.A.R.P. legislation and American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (the so-called stimulus) were absolutely necessary to prevent economic armageddon nine and ten years ago. A much smarter approach would have been to take that $1.5 trillion and evenly disburse it to every household which was under mortgage at that time.

In the late months of 2008 that would have been roughly 50 million homes. So, with my plan, almost 50 million households would have received a U.S. Department of Treasury check for roughly $30,000 each.

Common sense dictates that in light of the urgent nature of the situation for both the U.S. economy and international markets, the vast majority of those recipients would have done the right thing with that money and paid enough to their respective lenders to at least get current with their mortgages. Most, I’m inclined to believe, would have used enough sense to even pay-off several additional months’-worth of mortgage payments – which would have helped those homeowners knock-down the principle for those debts, thus significantly reducing their debt burden.

For some, $30,000 would have been enough to pay their remaining balances in full and rid themselves of that form of debt.

At the very least, this activity would have led to a flood of (let’s say) about $1 trillion into the American financial sector as the people at-large began feverishly making payments to save their homes.

So, this would have left about half-a-trillion dollars still to be used. Common sense (again) dictates many of the recipients would have opted to buy a new car – thus eliminating the need for the automotive bailouts. Unspent portions beyond that would have led to a surge of cash flow in domestic retail markets and created a potentially more legitimate recovery from the recession nightmare.

A small percentage, of course, would have gone into savings and other retirement/”rainy day” accounts. But even that option would have had positive benefits as still just $10-to-20 billion (just… sigh) out of all that would have shored-up the liquidity of banks nationwide and boosted confidence in financial markets.

And then, there is the largely unexamined positive consequence of tackling the 2008 crisis in the manner described above.

Over the course of 2008 through 2010, a total of roughly 8 million homes were foreclosed-upon (that doesn’t include the 1.3 million in 2007, when the housing bubble burst began to really get rolling). For the purpose of simpler math (and due to the absence of the hard data on this) let’s assume roughly one-quarter of those mortgages had two (or even more) signatures (spouses, co-signing parents, etc.) on them.

As a result of bypassing the homeowners and lending $700 billion directly to the banks and other financial sector entities in the manner the Bush Administration did, nearly 10 million people during that time had to endure having a foreclosure hanging like an enormous dark cloud over their credit histories. If you believe in a borrow-and-spend-on-credit economy much like so many advocate today, this meant as many as 10 million adults were completely taken out of that portion of the economy. Their credit ratings fell far too deep into disrepair for any of them to be able to establish credit again for the remainder of this decade.

That ongoing complication to the American economic picture played about as significant of a role in hampering recovery as any other factor.

And no one was talking about this.

The primary downside to everything laid-out above is if anyone in the capitol actually had taken a moment to think things through in the waning months of 2008 and handled the bailout intelligently – as opposed to the money carousel that played-out – it would have served, unfortunately, to cement in the minds of the general public the terribly misguided notion all the solutions to society’s ills can be found in government action.

Also, whether $1.5 trillion was squandered via the Bush and Obama plans or put to use more intelligently, recovery still was going to be hamstrung by the resultant inflation caused by rapidly flooding the domestic and world economies with that much additional currency. This was another aspect of bailouts and stimulus that was irresponsibly underreported.

So, the stable of critics of libertarian ideology obsessively trot-out their observation that Libertarians seem to be singularly focused on legalizing cannabis.

Here is the long explanation why putting an end to the so-called War on Drugs (more than simply pushing cannabis legalization) becomes such a priority for so many Libertarians.

First, there is the billions of dollars spent in this country just on the prohibition effort: from street-level enforcement, to putting people through the courts, and then incarceration.

The well-intended point of cannabis prohibition is to keep it off the streets and away from America’s neighborhoods. To state the obvious, we’re spending billions on an ongoing policy that is not yielding the desired results.

Given that one of the pillars of modern conservatism is identifying and eliminating public policies that don’t deliver the intended results in light of their enormous expense, there is nothing conservative about cannabis prohibition (or, the wider War on Drugs for that matter – estimates have that costing roughly $100 billion per year).

Second, there is the impact on the protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights – particularly the Fourth and Fifth amendments.

The effort to enforce cannabis prohibition has generated all manner of legal gymnastics designed to empower law enforcement with circumventing and bypassing Constitutional requirements for:

1. court authorization to conduct searches and seizures (Fourth Amendment);
2. respecting due process as opposed to the pursuit of rampant civil asset forfeiture (Fifth Amendment).

Any such erosion of constitutional protections opens the door to the erosion of them all. If you need me to elaborate further…

Another issue that would see improvement/relief should cannabis be legalized is immigration.

What too many people debating various issues from a right-wing bent either fail to see or refuse to acknowledge: the issues of immigration and the illicit drug trade are heavily intertwined.

If we end the war on drugs and work with the other countries in the Western Hemisphere to follow suit, whether or not we have open borders with immigration would become moot…

…as we would for the most part end the policies that are turning the countries to our south into war zones – thus motivating their citizens to flee our direction.
 

Let’s be honest: the reason most citizens of Latin American countries immigrate to the U.S. isn’t in pursuit of welfare benefits or to take our jobs (I’ll acknowledge that these are undeniably incentives to stay after they have entered and gotten somewhat acclimated to life in America).

The vast majority of Latin American immigrants cross our border to flee the war zones their home counties have become. Those countries have become war zones as a result of the War on Drugs here in the United States and our government’s efforts to drag the rest of the western hemisphere into it with us.

Just as with alcohol prohibition when the 18th Amendment was ratified, this new round of prohibition has created ridiculously wealthy drug cartels in the exact same manner as the organized crime operations that profited off of bootlegging and rum-running.

Legalizing cannabis would dramatically slow the flow of cash to the drug lords south of our border and, thus, gradually give those countries relief in their respective efforts to get the absurd rates of violent crime under control.

Essentially, the overwhelming majority of so-called illegal immigrants really are refugees trying to flee the unintended consequences of the War on Drugs.

More people need to acknowledge this particular unintended consequence of America’s drug war.

Finally, there is the relief to be seen within our outlandishly congested court systems. Along with conducting expedient trials for actual criminals, our courts also should be used to arbitrate disputes over property, contracts, and the bulk of operations that are hyper-regulated by government.

However, prosecuting cases of simple possession have our courts so log-jammed that finding justice in matters of real crimes and settling civil disputes so as to render the regulatory state unnecessary are virtually impossible.

So, let’s summarize… legalizing cannabis would:

1. alleviate the budget-busting expense of a policy that is not bearing any real fruit other than to make do-gooders feel good about themselves and their good intentions.
2. set in motion restoration of constitutional protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
3. give significant relief to the stress on our country’s border enforcement efforts.
4. open-up the courts to tackle other matters better-suited for them.

Would it be a panacea for these issues or any others? Of course not.

However, given the absence of any actual benefits of modern prohibition vs. the relief on at least these four issues which legalization would provide, this one heavily advocated action is a perfectly logical priority.

But, please feel free to continue making this all about wanting to get high. Perhaps watching “Reefer Madness” for the 57th time is in order.

I have had my fill with the argumentation being used in recent years by both the Republican right and the Democrat left when the topic of immigration comes-up.

Anymore, the Right asserts that if you’re not lining-up with Trump on the immigration debate you must be for open borders.

Likewise, the Left endlessly insinuates that if you’re not for open borders you’re automatically all-in with Trump on the immigration issue.

That is a false dichotomy: pure and simple. The solution lies in the middle between those two perspectives.

Just as with so many other political and public policy discussions, this is not a black-and-white issue where conditions have to be to one extreme or the other.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) as well as Customs & Border Protection (CBP) are able to operate under legislation that authorizes them to engage in heavy-handed border enforcement operations as far as 100 miles from any physical U.S. border.

Reports from communities in the Rio Grande valley detail how agents from both Department of Justice entities have been demonstrating complete disregard for Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure and even setting-up operations on private property without concern for consent from property owners – a mind-boggling violation of the Third Amendment.

In my youth, when I was learning about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, if you would have told me in the 21st century our government would begin skirting the Third Amendment, I would have laughed in your face…

…This is no laughing matter.

Perhaps the most important nugget of truth residents in the northern span of Ohio need to bear in mind: the precedents set at our southern border can all-too-easily be applied to our northern border – and impact almost one-third of Ohio.

It bears noting that I do not favor open borders. One of the legitimate functions of government (and, it is a short list) is to establish and maintain secure borders. As a nation, we have every right to know who seeks entry into the United States (as well as observe who seeks to exit in order to stop fugitives fleeing justice). That is not unreasonable.

At the same time, “Building the Wall” also will not solve anything. To the tune of well over $25 billion, all that will do is motivate those who profit off the border crossing black market to innovate new ways to defeat it. Our government helped spawn that black market situation with this notion of overzealous border enforcement.

To further skew any conversation, the American Right will even go so far as to liken today’s state of immigration to an “invasion.” Rejecting this rhetoric on its face is easy. The use of such a term is nothing more than conservatives taking a page out of the Progressive Left’s playbook: inject as many fear-oriented/emotionally-charged terms into the discussion as deemed necessary.

Ultimately, what we have going at present is absurdly restrictive and diametrically opposed to historical American values. Even before President Donald Trump embraced “zero tolerance” at our southern border, that observation held true.

Moreover, it was not even President Trump who established the Zero Tolerance policy being carried-out by I.C.E. – it has been only in the last year this policy finally began grabbing headlines in the manner it has.

The uncomfortable truth for the vast majority of Trump’s opposition is that during President Barack Obama’s administration I.C.E. was separating children from their parents at the border at double the pace of his successor. However, no one in Washington, D.C., or America’s leading news media outlets seemed concerned enough about it to make any noise during that eight-year span. At the end of the day, the Democratic Party has absolutely no moral high ground on this issue.

To reiterate, the tighter the restrictions imposed by the U.S. government on legally entering this country, the greater the black market environment it has created. Loosen the criteria and you alleviate the incentive to cross “illegally.”

Just as important, the majority of those who have been slipping across the southern U.S. border for years should be acknowledged for what they are: refugees from the War on Drugs. Since the Controlled Substances Act was enacted in 1970, our federal government hasn’t just created a mess here in our own country, it has expended a great deal of energy pushing the remainder of the Western Hemisphere to follow-suit.

That has been a primary driver in causing the conditions in Mexico and across Central America that have been prompting citizens in those countries to flee northward.

We shaped this mess as a country. To tell victims of our failed policies, “Sorry for your luck,” is crap.

I would like to offer one more additional point for consideration.

You don’t have to favor open borders to recognize that the “zero tolerance” approach to breaking-apart every single family crossing the border is draconian and in complete contravention to everything for which America once stood.

Ponder this: beginning in 1993, after President Bill Clinton took office, the popular mantra the Republican right began to advance in earnest was “the family is under attack”…

…Now, fast-forward 25 years and that same political camp demands we all accept the idea maintaining a secure border necessitates I.C.E. and CBP attacking families as a deterrent to illegal border crossings.

Brilliant. Positively brilliant.