If Trump really wants to outdo Biden on pardons, the smart thing isn’t to pardon a wider array of relatives than Biden did, nor a sleazier set of criminals. Trump should simply make good on a promise he made to the Libertarian Party and to America: pardoning website operator Ross Ulbricht on day one of his new administration. We all know Ulbricht is doing a long haul in prison not for the severity of any crimes he committed by operating the electronic black market called Silk Road but for being so hard to catch.
No government can abide commerce done in secret, or else its hollow pretense of being in charge of every activity under the sun will be exposed and its power destroyed. Instead of getting revenge on personal foes, Trump through pardoning Ulbricht could start his second term by showing government has limits, the most subversive message he could send. That’d be targeted, effective revenge against the Deep State (better, against the state in general) and a boon to humanity—though the ideal would be legalizing and deregulating all currently black-market trade that doesn’t involve assaulting or robbing anyone.
I don’t pretend a few such gestures would transform Trump from an authoritarian into a libertarian, but it would help. Populism has existed in the U.S. for about two centuries, but it has now ascended from being just a vague philosophy to being instead a vague governing coalition. If libertarians are sometimes expected to swallow their pride and frame their goals in liberal or conservative terms, surely now would be a good time to practice framing them in populist terms. It shouldn’t be all that hard.
As an optimistic James Creech posted on X on November 30: if things go as well as possible in the second Trump term, “[w]e have Elon and Vivek deleting 80%+ of the federal government, RFK Jr. in charge of health and the Covid reckoning, Tulsi in charge of all intelligence, Homan shutting down the border and deporting illegals, and now Kash is going to gut the FBI...” Libertarians should be able to work with most of that, and the more sweeping the reforms—the less reliant upon the whims of a president or lone advisor—the better.
Even the pardon of Hunter Biden wasn’t so bad by our standards, of course, since no one should be arrested for mere gun possession, drug use, or tax violations. Those things shouldn’t be illegal in the first place. Best of all, with Hunter now under no plausible threat of self-incrimination thanks to the oddly sweeping nature of his pardon—explicitly covering the whole past decade or, if you will, “the Burisma/Ukraine era”—he’ll be unable to plead the Fifth if called to testify against his dad and other (likely CIA-tied) operators in the blended criminal-and-political worlds of Eastern Europe.
Asking the Bidens about such matters in court with promises of immunity would mean, among other things, that we’d get a better understanding of why the only two actions that freaked out the establishment enough to inspire impeachments against Trump were (1) him asking the Ukrainians questions about Biden’s involvement there (within earshot of the traitorous and sweaty-looking Alexander Vindman) and (2) Trump treating the soon-to-be-pardoned J6 protestors a bit too gently—almost as if Trump had been told there were dozens of government-agent rabblerousers among the protestors who weren’t supposed to get rounded up too quickly. Government, like most bureaucracies, has no qualms about pushing people to do something and then punishing them for doing it.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want the J6ers treated any more gently than BLM members would be in comparable circumstances. Selective enforcement of the law, treating foes one way and friends another, is the truly corrosive thing in several of the conflicts to which I allude above. The current “bro”-right doesn’t understand—or doesn’t care—about the dangers of selective enforcement any more than the radical left does. But you’re not “winning” if your team gets a one-time reprieve that makes a mockery of logic and the long-term rule of law, even if for that one fleeting day you get to do 1000 smug victory laps, like the barbaric jackass you probably are (and were back in gym class).
Similarly, for example, the efficiency and overall awesomeness of a corporate system isn’t vindicated by that one time you managed to schmooze the secretary into giving you an extra sandwich in the break room, you self-absorbed moron. The world needs a few consistent, generally applicable rules. Idiots tend not to care about that.
That’s one reason idiots make natural racists. They see no problem with, say, shrugging at jaywalking when one of their own does it but then turning around and denouncing it as a threat to the fabric of civilization when someone from an out-group does it. Sheer hypocrisy. Yet a kidnapping isn’t evidence that we must expel all Guatemalans when a Guatemalan does it but merely a mark on the moral record of one solitary man when, say, an Irish person does it. I don’t think this simple truth has ever crossed the tiny minds of most of the current crop of border-enforcing white tribalists. I’ve never been a fan of the more highbrow form of reverse-racism briefly in fashion on the U.S. coasts in recent decades, either—but the old-fashioned dumb kind surely yet lives.
That should give pause to people like the only-moderately-intelligent, very bland, almost Skip Stephenson-like professional defender of everyday racism Steve Sailer. He’s right to criticize the kind of willful blindness that enabled liberals to ignore crime and education stats and pretend for decades that their version of improving race relations was going smoothly, but one must suspect Sailer of having his own stubbornly-maintained, change-averse blinders when you see him not just defending everyday racial bias but, apparently, defending the absurd and annoying practice of Daylight Saving Time (it’s always helpful when controversial people apply their shaky reasoning to a less-volatile, less-political topic than usual so there’s at least some small hope of people listening to a critique of the reasoning itself instead of just choosing sides in tribal fashion). Maybe he’s joking about DST. There can be a very thin line between deadpan and just boring.
I was delighted for about an hour when Trump suggested he wants to abolish Daylight Saving Time, but soon enough X, as it helpfully does on every topic, brought forth in response people, including Sen. Tom Cotton, choosing up sides on whether we’d be better off making Daylight Saving Time the permanent default or making Standard Time the permanent default, marshalling divergent purported historical evidence. Call me a nerdy fan of Hitchhiker’s and Doctor Who if you like, but I feel safe (and rational) saying the key is to pick one Time and stick with it, to avoid the annoyance of switching twice a year. I mistakenly thought we’d all agree and that the formality of which Time to render permanent would be a mere coin-toss, of no great consequence to any particular faction. Change for the better should be easy to achieve on this issue, if it can be achieved on any. But permanent war may be the human fate.
I fear Sailer isn’t joking when he cautions on X (like a true conservative, I suppose): “We used to have permanent Standard Time, but, outside of Arizona, we got rid of it. We tried permanent Daylight Saving Time in 1974 but it was so unpopular we got rid of it. The current system is popular enough that we twice extended it.” Is that it, then? We live with the absurd muddle in the middle because, what, history ostensibly showed the terrible folly of attempting change? Is there any form of past stupidity that couldn’t be defended in this glib fashion? Should we leave confusion-causing typos in math books because we tried correcting a textbook once and there was a problem with the binding at the printing plant, so we’re not gonna mess with things ever again? Who’s really guilty of extrapolating overbroadly here, the change advocates or the frightened traditionalists?
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the one time I was talked into attending a Sailer appearance (out of abundant tolerance and intellectual thoroughness), the audience contained a small but striking who’s who of cranks I’ve met, making it a sort of embarrassing This Is Your (Fascism-Adjacent) Life.
There was the nerd who’d been an anonymous fellow Brown student when I was there in the early-1990s but is now regarded as an important philosopher by a handful of New Right types because he scolds libertarians for their reluctance to crack heads, the other Brown nerd who went into finance and insists reputable tech companies and their algorithms aren’t listening in on users’ conversations, the Brooklyn traditionalist who votes in Democrat primaries because it’s the only political game in town but turns his nose up at pop culture and stays in touch with Continental far-right groups, the angry radical vegan turned evolutionary psychology professor who resumed eating meat when she became a mom, the paleoconservative who hates liberal individualism so much she prefers labor unions and sometimes even communists to markets, and several young males of the sort who seem to think weight-lifting and growing handlebar mustaches will fend off cultural decay. I’m allowed to suspect that Sailer’s appeal isn’t just his facility with math, in any case.
I wonder how that crowd would react if Trump did something universalist and consistent that hip presidents keep flirting with and pardoned all non-violent drug users, starting with everyone arrested for pot.
Sadly and strangely, one celebrity who now says he’d oppose outright legalization is Elton John. How far we’ve fallen from the days when John wrote a song for a celebrity Ayn Rand fan, “Philadelphia Freedom,” dedicated to tennis player Billie Jean King (not that she’s rigidly philosophical about it). Sir Elton, if now is not the time to put aside late-night drug raids with tanks and tear gas grenades and instead to embrace pot-smoking lesbian anti-government capitalists, when is? Give us freedom across the board—consistency!—not bits and pieces of freedom, scattered as the cultural whim or chance for electoral advantage strikes us.
Luckily for anyone out there who’s been living in fear of me crushing my own foes in an arbitrary and unpredictable fashion, I’ve basically lost my entire enemies list due to a severe computer crash. Mind you, I wasn’t keeping the list for purposes of eventual score-settling but, on the contrary, to remind myself that despite my own easygoing and forgiving nature, there’s this-or-that fellow intellectual out there who declared me cultural “poison” (that was one of several surprisingly rude and humorless Reason staffers, but I still love the magazine) or one who vowed to give me what-for if we met again, people who might not be grateful if I greeted them with a nonchalant hi at some event. Without the list, I might easily have a drink with some clique without recalling they’d said the world would be better off had I never been born, leading to an awkward, confusing, and avoidable night for everyone.
Erring on the forgiving-and-forgetting side is good, obviously, but I honestly don’t want to further offend anyone with my callous-looking forgetfulness. I’m a very accommodating guy, for all the good it does me.
But as a practical matter, all is forgiven thanks to the record-erasing crash, aside from the contract-violating lying bastards at Fox and the one person to unfollow me on X since the crash and refuse to explain himself, namely fellow libertarian, fellow comics fan, and once seeming-ally Franklin Harris of Alabama. But I shouldn’t make it sound as if the libertarians are the touchy ones. After you’ve been betrayed in various ways by all major factions, you realize, to quote the elf leader Elrond (who doesn’t appear in the current animated film War of the Rohirrim) that “Our list of allies grows thin.”
All the more reason to mete out punishments and rewards according to objective, evenly applied rules instead of vague, ever-shifting bonds of fealty and rifts of boredom or distance. But with the human race so combative and tribal it apparently can’t even tell time without first sorting the shirts from the skins, I imagine soon they’ll start openly telling us, as in long-past centuries, that there are some rules of justice for one class and some for another, some math for one tribe and some for another, some laws for the monarch’s family and other far more brutal ones for the rest of us—or for whoever was unlucky enough to lose the election this time. Maybe that’ll show ’em, once and for all!
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey