People sure did interpret that “No Kings” anti-Trump protest slogan in many different ways after the June 14 events across the nation.
Elon Musk, who just last month was part of the Trump administration, posted the slight variant “No gods or kings, only men” the next day (accompanied by footage of one of Musk’s rockets), which an anarchist or true libertarian has to appreciate, though it may not have gone over well with the many religious people among the Trumpers, nor the handful of actual monarchists. I’d guess Musk’s “natalist” fans, who want to boost the human population, might dislike Musk’s slogan for echoing abortion defender Margaret Sanger (“No gods, no masters”), though some may in recent years have grown fond of her eugenics sympathies. The masculinists among Musk’s admirers probably dislike Sanger but might be pleased Musk said “men” instead of “people.”
Gamer Musk got the precise phrasing of his post from the videogame BioShock, though, which raises the interesting question of whether he sees himself as a sympathetic yet failed quasi-capitalist dictator, like the Ayn Rand-influenced villain in that game.
Another odd question raised by current discussion about Musk’s use of the slogan, coming two days day after Israel’s strike on Iran, is whether Musk’s A.I., called Grok (that itself being a nerd term for “know” derived from hawkish libertarian Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi), is a little obsessed with Israel, as many computer programs seem to be. Asked to explain Musk’s “No gods or kings” formulation in the past few days, Grok matter-of-factly replied that it was likely an expression of support for Israel as that country resists Iranian tyranny. Huh. Asked how it drew that oddly specific conclusion, Grok just said it was a matter of timing and theme. Talk about segueing quickly to the next political hot topic.
One right-leaning libertarian who, to his credit, has not forgotten the past is comedian Dave Smith, who vowed after helping to nudge the Libertarian Party into closer contact with Trump that if Trump started a war with Iran, Smith would not only apologize for voting for Trump but would continue apologizing for it “for the rest of my life.” And he has indeed begun the apologies, even calling for Trump’s impeachment. Regardless of what you think of Trump or Iran, you have to respect anyone’s willingness to admit error.
If the current crackdown on immigration gets ugly and authoritarian enough, perhaps Smith will even concede he was wrong to defend Trump on that issue. By audience vote, Smith narrowly won his Soho Forum debate last month against fellow libertarian Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute on that issue, arguing (reasonably enough) that while ideally there should be no public (that is, government-controlled) property, taxpayers are within their rights in the meantime to exclude people from that public property or other government resources. An earlier Reason debate covering some of the same ground more briefly, between Smith and Chris Freiman, can be seen here. I think it’s true—and probably a fresh idea to some in the audience, thus explaining their votes—that taxpayers should retain control of that which they paid for, but, to put it in profound but less-philosophical terms, you don’t have to be a dick about it.
Or rather, in gentler terms, one can recognize a political gray area, such as how to handle public property, or for that matter how fiercely to retaliate against a military foe, without simply deciding like an opportunistic psychopath that whenever no clear rules apply, it’s time to go all-out and deploy the body armor-wearing shocktroops, the missiles, or for that matter the rudest-possible-replies to an ambiguous X post. Smith didn’t too badly elide the crucial distinction (one might even say the defining moral distinction for libertarians) between public and private property in his arguments against Nowrasteh, but he must by now know that most of Trump’s anti-immigration fans happily use that ambiguity to suggest that all border-crossing people are fair game for anything the government wants to throw their way.
The right-wing attitude during Trump’s second term—which may lately be a more common excuse for the erasure of property lines than the old left-liberal nostrums about “our American family’s infrastructure” and “our shared public goods” and all that—is not simply that public property foists collective management upon reluctantly-political citizens but that we jointly own everything within the national borders, not just parks and roads and such, and, by gum, we’re gonna let any visiting outsiders know it good and hard, especially the highly exotic ones. The prior left-liberal appeals to solidarity easily led to totalitarian thinking, and so does the current fascist anti-property or pseudo-property attitude on the right.
We don’t jointly own everything from Atlantic to Pacific and have the right to treat anyone within that area we don’t like as the moral equivalent of burglars. And let us never encourage that belief simply because, hey, close enough, LOL, stupid foreigners.
Some ostensibly libertarian figures have forgotten the vast divide that should exist between, on one hand, liberty and a welcoming attitude (or at least a tolerant attitude toward others on the continent who want to interact with visitors) and, on the other hand, a grasping monarchical authority. They might want to spend three short minutes revisiting one of the best aesthetic encapsulations of that dichotomy, even if it describes a very different geopolitical era: Schoolhouse Rock!’s “No More Kings,” my own favorite variation on the slogan.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
