Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

America today stands on the last few agonizingly slow upward feet of the great roller-coaster of history, about to take an enormous, scary plunge into glory or oblivion, who the hell knows which? Did I mention? I hate roller-coasters.

Whether Donald J. Trump emerges victorious, as I suspect he will, or the communists are allowed to cheat their way into power, in one sense, the path ahead is clear to all lovers of individual liberty. Freedom must be secured; private capitalism must endure; and with them, American exceptionalism. Four more years of Trump’s leadership won’t make that any less imperative. Two things, above all, must be accomplished.

The first concerns compulsory, tax-supported public “education”, which I recently posted about on Facebook and started a long discussion. I’m afraid I failed to make it sufficiently clear that this is a moral problem. No good can ever be accomplished by any institution populated by coercion and funded by coercion. Ends, means, and the Zero Aggression principle, remember? What I said, more or less, was this:

“If, by some happy chance, America manages to wriggle out of the current mess we find ourselves in, before we do anything else, we must attend to the one establishment that, more than any other, got us here in the first place: so-called “public education” a purely collectivist institution, inspired by Prussian authoritarianism, that has somehow neglected to teach our children about the deeply-flawed philosophical underpinnings of socialism which allowed 200 million innocent people to be murdered in the 20th century alone. I also neglected to tell them anything about the billions of individual human beings whom capitalism has fed, clothed, sheltered, and lifted out of the lifelong grinding poverty and abject servitude of the last ten thousand years of Mankind’s history.

“Forget the public schools’ lowly, ignominious, shameful failure even to inculcate elementary “reading and writing and ’rithmatic”. Their purpose has been to discourage young minds and to prevent learning—something they’ve accomplished brilliantly. Their abysmal—and unquestionably deliberate—unwillingness to defend the Founding Fathers’ monumental accomplishments can never be forgotten or forgiven. As I have written many times before, the public schools must be utterly obliterated, their buildings emptied out, razed to the ground so that not one tainted brick is left standing on another, and salt sown on the ruins. I don’t give a bleeding squat what replaces them. Whatever it is, anything will be vastly better than the festering mess we see steaming before us now.

“If the worst happens, our task is still the same.” Unquote.

Our other urgent task must be to … well, “extirpate” is the best word I can think of (look it up). We must extirpate every last, lingering microscopic trace of what they’re calling “socialism” from America. This is a vile socio-economic system under which your neighbors get to vote about your life, your liberty, and your property. “Sure, we’re gonna take away your AK-47!” Calling it something else doesn’t make it any better. If you remember nothing else from this essay, remember this: there is no such thing as “democratic” socialism. I’ll say it again, just to make sure: there is no such thing as “democratic” socialism. History clearly demonstrates that coercion is written indelibly into its very DNA. Once again it’s a moral matter. If the group decides that it has more rights than you, the individual, and that you must pay for whatever it votes among itself to take from you or do, that’s socialism, and it’s an evil that has killed hundreds of millions.

How do we fight it? Well, I’m firmly convinced that Rush Limbaugh saved us from the Clinton Co-presidency when they were in office, and he did it with the mighty weapon of ridicule. He made them the laughing-stock of the planet. The communist Chinese government and the leaders of Iran hate and fear ridicule and have made it a prison offense.

While we still have something resembling free speech in America, we must use our powers of ridicule to the fullest. Joseph Biden is easy. He will never truly be president of anything. At best, he is a worn-out rubber douche-bag somebody refashioned into a hand-puppet. Admittedly, Kamala Harris is a different matter. She’s clearly a hard-eyed, ruthless, professional collectivist. As I said of Hillary Clinton when her husband was elected, there is the reek of the death-camps about her.

A momentary aside for a story that will illuminate what I’m talking about. Back in 1974, almost half a century ago, I had just survived a very painful divorce. I was twenty-eight, and lived half a block from the college campus. I decided that was the best place to find feminine companionship. I enrolled in something—I don’t remember what—and for some reason began to attend weekly meetings of the Young Socialist Alliance, a youth offshoot of the Socialist Workers’ Party. I had been a libertarian for twelve years, by then.

I loved the banter. I told that handful of enthusiastic young kids about my experiences in the freedom movement, and they told me, “Of course we’re against gun control—how can you fight a revolution without guns?” I thought that was hilarious. I even went to a local bar with a bunch of them where a Congressman I knew (and who knew me) saw me and said, “You’re in kind of strange company aren’t you?” And, indeed, I was.

But there was one guy at those YSA meetings, about my age, with the hard-bitten look of a professional. He was their political officer, in effect, and he didn’t much like my influence on his charges. I looked at him across the room and he recognized the professional in me—except that I was truly dangerous. I was armed with the same sense of humor that had gotten me banned, more or less, from the local Objectivist group.

A few years later, a local bookstore manager had called me “the most dangerous writer in America” because my first novel, The Probability Broach won people over by making them laugh. It has been savagely suppressed ever since.

Time passed and I didn’t find whatever I was looking for on the campus. I gradually drifted away from the young socialists and their baleful ideological supervisor. I learned later that they’d been brought into line and now supported victim disarmament. But I never forgot that grim expression and those eyes. They are the same expression and the same eyes I see on Kamerade Kamala Harris. Happily, she’s not terribly bright, and socialism is a very fragile doctrine that can’t stand up to any amount of free speech—which explains why every one of its traitorous allies from Twitter to CNN is trying to censor us.

I once stood up to a self-important high school principal trying to censor my column in the school newspaper. I simply wrote around the son of a bitch, and he never realized that he’d been thwarted. You can do the same. Let’s start by collecting Kamala Harris jokes. Send them to Editor Ken here at TLE—if you’ve got any Russian friends they can probably help you—and go from there.

Let the humor commence! Where We Go 1, We Go All.