Liberty-minded people need to distance ourselves from crazy folks

By David McElroy · October 1, 2013

Every political group attracts a few crackpots, but no group attracts as high a percentage of crackpots as groups with unpopular opinions. Outcasts are drawn to fringe groups — and fringe groups have little enough support that they don’t want to alienate any potential supporters.

I’ve been aware for a long time that libertarian and some conservative groups attract crazy people. Many times, these crazy people are highly intelligent, very weird and often obsessed with something strange. Those folks aren’t generally going to be accepted among the mainstream parties, because those groups have plenty of support and it’s easy to edge the weirdos out. But fringe groups accept the weirdos more readily.

And why not? One of the core libertarian beliefs is that people have the right to be whatever they want to be. If somebody’s life centers around promoting drinking colloidal silver to cure every ailment under the sun — or trying to communicate with aliens or researching conspiracies about how the Bilderbergers rule the world — hey, that’s his business, even if he’s nuts. As long as he agrees with us that other people have the right to believe and act as they choose, he’s welcome in the “liberty tent.”

I’ve become convinced lately that a desire to be tolerant has led libertarians and conservatives to be associated with people whose beliefs are toxic, both personally and to the political groups they attach themselves to. In think it’s time that we stop averting our eyes from the crazies who attach themselves to us and be willing to say that there’s no place for certain kinds of insanity — and all kinds of dishonesty.

It’s easy to ignore this when you only see people at a political meeting every now and then, but the spread of social media such as Facebook and Twitter have made it impossible to ignore it anymore.

In the past six months, I’ve been on something of a mission to unfriend and block many of certain types of people on Facebook. So far, I’ve blocked more than 600 people for various reasons. Some were just annoying jerks. Some liked to personally attack people. But many of those people were well-meaning people who simply post political lies as truth. I can’t passively look the other way when I see that anymore.

Take a look at the graphic above. That was a link posted by a number of former Facebook friends. It follows a typical pattern with scare stories such as that one. The headline makes a dishonest inflammatory claim that the story doesn’t even come close to backing up, but the headline is what conspiracy-minded people remember.

“Did you know ObamaCare is going to get us all implanted with microchips? I saw a story about it the other day,” they tell people they know. They don’t remember any of the facts from the story — and they don’t remember the fact that the headline’s claims were never supported in any way. They just spread the lie over and over, both on social media and in their private conversations.

I’m completely opposed to government intrusion in the health care system and the insurance industry, so I think ObamaCare is an abomination. But the reality of the law is bad enough. We don’t need to make up lies to scare people.

Here’s another example of an insane story posted by this sort of person and reposted by other gullible people. It was posted on Facebook by a number of people who were among my “friends.” This story claims that the recent shooting at the Washington Navy Yard was actually some kind of bizarre coverup. The story goes that the Navy uncovered an Obama plot to set off a nuclear bomb in Washington — as part of a “false-flag attack” — and there was an attempt to arrest the president, but the people who were going to arrest him were actually the ones who were killed.

Seriously. There are people who believe this sort of garbage and spread it as truth.

I’m opposed to pretty much everything Barack Obama stands for — just as I oppose pretty much everything from any politician seeking to impose his will on individuals — but I’m not stupid enough or dishonest enough to claim something this bizarre without evidence. Facts matter.

To many people — of all political stripes — it matters less whether something is true than whether it attacks the person or group they hate. When George W. Bush was president, those on the progressive left attacked him personally in dishonest and vile ways. Now that Obama is president, the same thing is going on from other groups.

Libertarians and hardcore conservatives have attracted some serious nuts to “the cause.” I’ve argued before that we need to be more vigilant in cutting any potential ties with anti-semetic and racist bigots. I think it’s past time to distance ourselves from all sorts of nutcases who are willing to believe — and spread — any lie or conspiracy theory that comes their way.

If liberty-minded people want to be taken seriously, they need to take truth, evidence and fairness seriously. I’m going to continue to actively distance myself from anybody who doesn’t respect those values. I think people of every political group ought to do the same, but I’m most concerned with starting among the groups I care about.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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