Category: Update

Last weekend, we brought to you the spectacle of Donald Trump addressing the Libertarian Party in convention to nominate their presidential candidate. Donald Trump was not selected.

Who was? Well, after many ballots, the LP’s candidate is Chase Oliver. The Wikipedia entry begins:

Chase Russell Oliver (born August 16, 1985) is an American political activist, sales account executive, HR representative and nominee of the Libertarian Party for the 2024 United States presidential election. Oliver was the Libertarian candidate for the 2022 United States Senate election in Georgia and the 2020 Georgia’s 5th congressional district special election.

Mr. Oliver is the woke opposite of what the dominant faction in the party (called the Mises Caucus, which won most of the internal party seats, again, at this convention) was planning for and hoping for and working towards, but their candidate, Michael Rectenwald, lost on the penultimate round of balloting.

There were many typically political shenannigans involved in the selection, and the state of Oliver’s candidacy is up in the air, at least in one sense: most of the smart money is that he will nowhere reach the 3 percent level in the general election that Trump taunted his booers at the convention.

If he does well, however, that would effectuate a major shift in Libertarian Party politics. 

On May 3, Paul wrote about the then-​upcoming appearance of former President (and current candidate) Donald Trump before the Libertarian Party quadrennial presidential nominating convention, amusingly and perhaps tellingly given the motto “Become Ungovernable.”

Much has been made of the invitation. The same invitation was also extended to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who, like Trump, accepted) and to President Joe Biden (who did not accept). A typical reaction to Trump’s scheduled appearance at the convention can be gleaned merely by reading the title of a recent Washington Post op-​ed by Peter Goettler, President of Cato Institute: “Trump is hardly libertarian. But neither is today’s Libertarian Party” (May 23, 2024).

Well, the horror and dark thoughts about the appearance can now be judged by the facts, not speculations. The event happened. On Friday, RFK spoke, and was mostly courteously received. On Saturday — yesterday — Trump gave a perhaps too-​long but mostly rational case for why Libertarians at the convention should endorse him, or at least, as citizens, vote for him. He also promised to place a libertarian in his cabinet. Additionally, Trump pledged to commute Ross Ulbricht’s sentence “on day one” if elected. It was an extraordinary occasion. But the crowd was restless, and there were a lot of boos.

Most truthful statement? “This is the first time in U.S. history that a presidential candidate of a rival party will address the convention of a party that is presumably gathering to nominate its own candidate.”

Juiciest statement? “[T]he Libertarians want to vote for me, and most of them will.”

But is it true? Will libertarians vote en masse — or even as a majority — for Trump?

Today the Libertarians vote among their candidates for the presidency and vice presidency to choose the party’s 2024 presidential ticket. Which will presumably garner the mere (?) 3 percent of the vote that Trump mocked them for.

Here at Common Sense the subject of Oregon’s “red” county secession movement — to move the border to form a “Greater Idaho” — has been addressed several times. Such movements being slow creatures, the advances move along andante. Perhaps Andante con moto.

The story was in the news again this week. For example, Tim Pool brought it up and mused again about the new “civil war” possibility:

But it is also in the papers. Newsweek, for example:

On Tuesday, Crook County in Oregon became the 13th county to approve a proposal to secede from the state and join neighboring Idaho by 53.5 percent of the vote against 46.5 percent, as part of what supporters are calling the “Greater Idaho” project.

Backers of the plan argue the more conservative areas of eastern and central Oregon are currently dominated by liberal-​leaning cities such as Portland and Salem and argue their interests would be better represented in traditionally Republican Idaho.

James Bickerton, “Oregon Counties Voting to Join ‘Greater Idaho,’” Newsweek, May 23, 2024.

Talk of secession shouldn’t automatically conjure up “civil war” fears. The American experience in 1860 is the exception: usually secession is the peaceful alternative to unrest, avoiding civil conflict.

Rather early in pandemic there appeared a set of conspiracy theories to the effect that Great Britain’s National Health Service had used the coronavirus plague as an excuse to kill old people, thus pumping up the numbers of COVID deaths and fanning the flames of the pandemic panic while also thinning out the aging herd, relieving stress upon the medical system — which was said to be a paramount concern elsewhere, too.

As fuel for this theory were wild tales that the NHS had purchased vast quantities of Midazolam, a drug sometimes used in conjunction with other drugs at end-​of-​life situations.

What is the state of this accusation?

Well, Dr. John Campbell has been vlogging about Scotland’s COVID-​19 inquiry, dealing with widespread malpractice regarding DNR (“Do Not Resuscitate”) orders in the country. Last week, Dr. Campbell provided an overview of where the Midazolam/​COVID story is right now:

Note that Dr. Campbell is not taking seriously the extreme version of the Midazolam conspiracy theory, as cooked up early in the pandemic by David Icke. According to this accusation, there never was a new virus, and Midazolam was being used to kill thousands of patients to perpetrate a total fraud.

That theory seems a complete fantasy. But is the weaker version of the theory, where, for reasons not altogether clear, some COVID patients were given up on and “put out of their misery” — against the spirit and letter of the laws, as well as against the Hippocratic oath?

There does appear to be some evidence for that in Great Britain. We will see how this plays out. Though it may look like the fantasied projection of unhinged minds, the anecdotes are piling up, so perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss it at the start of inquiry. 

Besides, we know that in several welfare states, Canada especially, euthanasia is all the rage — new subsidies and protocols by government to kill patients by “suicide,” designed (some say) to cut costs.

On Friday, Paul Jacob provided some vivisection services to a review of Jerry Seinfeld’s stance on what the woke have done to comedy, in “The French King Flip Flap.” On May Day, in “They Don’t Get It,” Paul had dealt with the same subject, Mr. Seinfeld’s long-​running beef with the woke.

But the current context — the one that led to Friday’s target, an article in The Washington Post by Brian Broome — is the new movie on Netflix, Unfrosted, directed by Seinfeld and co-​written by him with Spike Feresten, Andy Robin, and Barry Marder. 

Is it funny?

This is of course something everyone must judge for him- or herself. The intent is clear, a retelling of the “wars” between the breakfast cereal companies to create a new breakfast product — what has become known as a “Pop Tart” — in a zany, cartoonish fashion. It is designed as a silly movie. Mostly good clean fun. Family fare.

But a survey of critics and audiences at Rotten Tomatoes gives us an indicator to how it’s doing: Early reactions were that the movie stinks. But now that more people have seen it, we are seeing something like a “ratioed” split, with an average of critics’ responses placing it in the splatted green tomato (rotten tomato) range, at 40 percent approval, while audience scores have run higher, at 55 percent.

In recent years, the audiences have split with critics at much wider margins, on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics giving low scores for unwoke creative products, while audiences have given ultra-​high scores, and vice versa. 

Sometimes it’s not Wokianity at issue, but simply orthodox religion: Aronofsky’s Noah (2014), for example, which yielded a 75 percent positive for the critics and a 41 percent negative for the audience. Noah owed as much to The Book of Enoch as to Genesis.

But 2019’s Captain Marvel was indeed about the woke issue, and audiences judged the movie at a weak 45 percent, while critics placed it pretty high, at 79 percent. Even more dramatic, in the same vein, went on with Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi (2019), which critics raved about at 91 percent, but audiences yawned at 42 percent.

But the ultimate split between audiences and critics may be Amy Schumer’s 2023 Netflix stand-​up special, with critics granting the comic a whopping 100 percent approval, while audiences scorned her product with jeers at a mere 18 percent. The split in appreciation was an epochal moment in the current culture wars.

Ms. Schumer plays Marjorie Post in the new Seinfeld flick.