Speech to the Libertarian Party of Chicago on March 3rd, 2020

     The following text was written for a meeting of the Libertarian Party of Chicago, Illinois. It explains my platform and priorities for my fourth and current campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives, and also contains some comments on how World War II, and socialism and fascism, should be taught in schools. This speech was not delivered in full; instead, its first three sections were condensed into a two-minute speech.

     Thanks for having me. My name is Joe Kopsick, I'm running a campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives, up in the 10^th District, which includes Waukegan, where I live, most of Lake County, and parts of northern Cook County.

     I'd like to say a few things about unemployment and my campaign, and then I'd like to talk about a problem that's the primary concern of lovers of liberty: authoritarianism. Finally, I will address the issue of whether I am a communist and a Stalinist.

     We're being told that we've never had it so good; that the unemployment rate has never been lower. We're told that it's the lowest it's been since slavery! Well I guess we better bring back slavery, if our goal is full employment, right?

     It is not true that unemployment is at an all-time low. It was lower in the last quarter of 2019, and it was also lower in the late 1960s and early 1950s. Unemployment may be at its lowest in 50 years, but remember that there are six different ways of measuring unemployment (U1 through U6). Donald Trump loves to tout the unemployment rate as proof that he has helped the economy, but what he's neglected to mention is that he's stopped focusing on U6, which is the most comprehensive way of the six to measure general difficulty maintaining stable employment.

     But let's suppose that more people are working. So what? Most of the companies they're working for are companies that get handouts from government, like Wal-Mart, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Boeing, etc.. Do we really want more people employed by corporate arms of the corrupt government?

     Moreover, the decrease in unemployment started before Trump took office, statistics show his influence could lead to an upswing in unemployment, and his claims that black and Hispanic unemployment rates were at all-time lows, have been debunked as half-truths.

     But it's the same on the so-called “left”; we saw at a recent debate, that the mainstream media are letting candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have their own facts, rejecting objectivity in favor of neutrality. Over the past three years, not only have the Republicans and Democrats proven themselves completely untrustworthy, delusional, and cultish; each of them have sought illicit business and political dealings with both Russia and Ukraine.

     The time has come to stop believing our politicians.

     In the 10^th District, Congressman Brad Schneider is running for re-election. He has taken tens of thousands from the military-industrial complex, hundreds of thousands from companies that pollute our air and water, hundreds of thousands from big banks (including bailout recipients), and hundreds of thousands from the pro-Israel lobby.

     My platform stands in stark contrast to my opponent's. Unlike him, I promise to reduce the size and budget of the military, root-out corporate largesse and cronyism in government, fight the big banks by demanding an end to the Federal Reserve that gives them credit, and fight for the health of people in the 10^th District (without supporting the disastrous Obamacare or the unconstitutional E.P.A.).

     I want to usher-in a new era of race-relations through reviving the counter-culture. My top three issues are “POUND EMPATHIC SKA”. Which sounds like I want to just blare two-tone ska music until people of every race, color, and creed are jamming together and getting along. And I do. But “POUND EMPATHIC SKA” stands for my top three issues:

     1. (POUND): Pay Off the U.S. National Debt by 2047. We will drastically reduce spending, drastically increase taxes but only while making sure they're more efficient, or both; in order to run a trillion-dollar surplus budget for 25 years in a row until the national debt is fully paid off.
     2. (EMPATHIC): Eliminating Medical Patents to Achieve Human Technology for Immortality Cheaply. I want to shorten the “lifespan” of medical patents, in order to increase the lifespan of human beings. Stop protecting medical patents for so long, so that they become generics sooner; and tax the profits but not the sales of medical devices, so that they're less expensive and more accessible. As pharmaceuticals and medical devices become more abundant, their price will go down. As more machines do the work, and fewer people do the work, necessary to make them, their costs will go down.
     Research is being done on how to lengthen the human lifespan through genetic research on how the tips of our chromosomes (telomeres) work; bits of them fray each time our cells are reproduced; this is what leads to organ failure and eventually death. If we urge people to put more private funding into the research of telomeres, and implement the medical cost-reducing proposals I've outlined, then we can achieve human immortality through low medical prices. That is how we achieve free medicine without socialism: through mass production and automation; and through price competition (the freedom to offer lower prices).

     3. (SKA): The Safe Kids Act. We will keep kids safe, while preparing them for the future, by abolishing the Department of Education, or, failing that, threatening to withhold federal funds from all public schools that refuse to start teaching courses on the skilled trades. At the same time, high schools should be split in half, so that upperclassmen are the only ones exposed to the risk of harm from dangerous machines in such classes, and individual students may sign waivers to be around machines (thereby eliminating fear over potential lawsuits against schools). Splitting all high schools in half carries the added benefit of ending the practice of 14-year-olds and 18-year-olds going to school together. I also hope to propose needed reforms to end child marriage, and I believe that a constitutional amendment establishing a nationwide age of consent, will both help reduce child trafficking, and set up age - not just some vague definition of "maturity" - as a requirement necessary to consent to contract.

     But therein lies the problem; we cannot trust this current federal government to police child trafficking, because it does so much child trafficking. We are faced with the same problem Lenin faced; we want good government, but reforming the one we have now is impossible. Fixing child sex trafficking laws would be hiring the fox to guard the henhouse.

     In my recent research, I have identified more than twenty ways in which child trafficking is legal or government-supported. One of the first ones is obvious; the kidnapping of children by I.C.E. agents at the southern border. Others include both parties' complicity in the Jeffrey Epstein teen sex slavery ring case, and forms of government custody of children which could reasonably be called kidnapping or child trafficking. We must criminalize all of these legal forms of trafficking, in addition to prosecuting illegal child trafficking.

     There are “black sites”, or “concentration camps” at the border; it's true. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez called them concentration camps, and got criticized for it, but before she called them that, she called them black sites. When A.O.C. called I.C.E. detention facilities “black sites”, I thought, “The only person I've ever heard use the term 'black sites' is Alex Jones.” In a way, the “far left” and the “far right” have more in common than they might think; for example, opposition to authoritarianism, monopolies, corporate power, big banks, harm to the environment, and incursions into civil liberties. The “far left” and “far right” aren't “extreme”; they're just the libertarian wings of their respective parties, who are fighting the establishments in each party. That applies a lot less to Alex Jones than to A.O.C., but let's talk about that.

     Until Trump showed up, the nationalist, conservative, main street, and libertarian wings of the Republican Party, were the elements that were fighting the mainstream of the party. But Trump united most of those elements and triumphed, preventing another Bush presidency under Jeb. So for the last five years, Alex Jones has been claiming, and frantically trying to prove, that he and Trump are libertarians. Even after Trump betrayed Alex on Syria and Alex admitted it, even after Trump showed his distaste for the 2^nd Amendment by banning bump stocks, even after James Mattis convinced Trump not to torture but Gina Haspel let him do it anyway. Alex Jones betrayed us.

     He deserves some thanks for exposing the deep state, and government's complicity in child trafficking, and many other things. But he has also used his show as a way to disseminate hate-filled tirades against liberals and leftists, going so far as to use textbook Nazi dehumanization rhetoric to compare them to helpless worms and maggots, etc.. Don't get me wrong; Marx, Lenin, and Mao all stooped to using this sort of logic; but nobody should talk this way about another human being. Our children should not grow up thinking it is OK to call people of different races “dirty”, nor “viruses”, nor call people of different religions or ideologies “cancers”, nor suspect all foreigners of carrying diseases. If we let ourselves talk like that, it's not long before we're treating each other like animals and diseases, even exterminating each other.

     We can no longer say that extermination is no longer possible in America, since we know about these I.C.E. “detention centers”, where people are being told to drink toilet water. Where people are having their religious jewelry taken away, like what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust. Where mothers are being told they'll get their children back after a quick bath, which is not dissimilar to the method employed to trick Jews into entering gas chambers thinking they were showers. As a matter of fact, America was using Zyklon-B on Mexicans, twenty years before the Nazis were using it to kill Jews. Have you ever heard of the Bath Riots? Immigrants entering America in El Paso were sprayed with harsher and harsher chemicals, to “disinfect them” from disease, until a teenage girl started a riot because pregnant women were being doused with toxic chemicals. This occurred years after the Mexican typhus scare ended.

     The Nazi-sympathetic German-American Bund, headed by Fritz Kuhn, held a rally thousands of people strong in Madison Square Garden in 1940. The German-American Bund was allowed to march in Grafton, Wisconsin around the same time. Nazis were allowed to march in Chicago, Illinois in 1980 after unsuccessful attempts to march in Skokie. F.D.R. advisor Henry Stimson, probably the most anti-Semitic public official America has ever had, not only advised F.D.R. to refuse to let the M.S. St. Louis (a ship full of 900 Holocaust refugees) allow people to disembark in America, he advised F.D.R. against approving a plan to bomb the train tracks leading to the Auschwitz death camp.

     America is deeply ultra-nationalist. If being a nationalist means loving your country or being proud of it, then there's nothing wrong with that. But if you're an ultra-nationalist who believes “My country above all others”, or, worse, “My country, right or wrong”, then you value patriotism more than you value knowing the difference between right and wrong, and acting as such. Too many Americans believe that, since America contributed to defeating the fascists in World War II, it should never have to worry about being accused of being fascist ever again.

     Well right now there are people in the Trump Administration who used to work for George W. Bush, and he and his father were fed on Nazi war profits, because Prescott Bush, while working for Brown Brothers Harriman, managed the American accounts of Fritz Thyssen, a German industrialist who financed hard labor camps and gave millions to Adolf Hitler. As George Carlin said, “Hitler lost World War II. Fascism won it.” America didn't defeat fascism; it helped defeat the Nazis, but then adopted fascism for itself, to make a new brand of uniquely American fascism.

     We are in complete denial about the grip the C.I.A. has on our information. Communists are just people – mostly industrial workers and farmers - who want to get compensated adequately for the work that they do. The fact that they sometimes commit violence, doesn't mean they're “fascist”, nor terrorists; it means that they've been cheated out of the fruits of their hard work, and they're willing to fight the people who cheated them, because their and their families' lives are on the line.

     Wage theft is real. There is no difference between a politician, a boss, a landlord, and a banker; each makes his living only by oppressing another. We must fight all relationships of domination if we are to ever get rid of the rule of one man over another.

     So... am I a communist? Hell yes, I am a communist. But a libertarian communist; a pure communist, who rejects the state, borders, classes, and money. You might say, “Sure, abolish the state, but why the others?” The state creates the money, creates the borders, and incentivizes the class system by creating a well-paid permanent political class that's subject to corporate capture! Isn't the professional licensing system, just another form of classism, to perpetuate the rule of the employed over the non-employed? So establish that stateless, classless, borderless, moneyless society.

     You might say “How can you be a libertarian communist if you support Stalin?” I believe that Stalin wasn't an authoritarian communist, because I don't buy the propaganda that the U.S.S.R. helped the Nazis; Stalin tricked the Nazis. But I will explain that fully in a moment.

     High schoolers are becoming increasingly attracted to “extremist” ideologies like ultra-nationalism and communism. We can either view that as a problem, or lean into it and see what good we can take from it. We could use memes to teach history; history meme pages exist by the hundreds on Instagram and other sites. We could take this opportunity to adequately teach the history of World War II.

     All today's high schoolers know about World War II is that Hitler and Stalin were bad, they killed a lot of people, and don't be a fascist or a communist. We ought to teach them things like whether they ever fought each other, who killed more people and what the debate is on that topic, which one attacked Poland first and which attacked the other first (because it does matter who threw the first punch; remember, we oppose aggression and initiatory violence, not self-defense), and whether and when each were allied with America.

     Holocaust denial is terrible, and it is becoming more prevalent. The easiest way to nip this problem in the bud is to teach kids that Hitler hasn't only been accused of killing six million Jewish people; he has also been accused of killing some 13 million other Germans and 27 million Russians. People will stop asking “Did Hitler kill six million, or zero?”, and they will start asking “Did Hitler kill 40 million, or 50 million?” That is how you stamp-out Holocaust denial promptly, before racist kids become adults, and come out in the world where we have to deal with them without their parents around to protect them.

     Stalin did bad things; for example, the gulag system of work camps. People were worked to the bone, yes, but these camps were spaced far apart, and thus suffered none of the overcrowding, and much less of the communicable disease and male-on-male rape, for which American prisons are known. Furthermore, Stalin saved the world from Hitler. Many Americans will brag that their country helped win World War II, but America simply came in at the last moment and made the war end more quickly than it would have. Additionally, few Americans know the grave cost the Soviet Union paid for “helping” to defeat Hitler; 27 million lives. That's 50 Soviet soldiers for every American soldier killed in World War II. Take a moment to reflect on that fact.

     This is stolen valor. The C.I.A.'s America is treating communists like fascists, when the communists have historically been more staunch and fierce enemies of fascists than liberals and libertarians have. What was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty(commonly known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact) but a treaty of non-aggression and mutually-beneficial trade? Any libertarian regime would have fallen for that.

     Stalin at least had the idea to use the materials that the Nazis traded to him – in this last opportunity to trade, when they knew war would come only in a matter of time - to feed the Soviet war machine, to eventually fend off the Nazi invasion. Stalin tricked Hitler by using against him, the extra resources he was willing to trade away. Stalin used Hitler's capitalism against him. Not to say that Hitler was fully capitalist; fascism has its own distinct economic ideology, which is called dirigism (referring to the direction of the economy by the government).

     We should not teach high schoolers that Hitler and Stalin were evil, unless we also teach them about the violence committed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the name of imperialism, capitalism, and “making the world safe for democracy” (such as interning 110,000 innocent Japanese-Americans).

     Alex Jones has discredited himself as a liberty lover, by using his show to urge his listeners to show up to protests with weapons, when they believe that Antifa members are likely to show up. I am making it a plank of my platform to oppose declaring Antifa a terrorist group, for the following two reasons.

     1) Have you ever noticed that Antifa usually have shields, instead of weapons? It's a stupid decision, true. But if they showed up with weapons – like the guns that nationalist protesters have been known to bring to protests – then the right would call Antifa “armed terrorists”. Nationalists bring weapons to protests to incite violence; Antifa bring shields because they expect that they will have to defend themselves from such people.

     2) Antifa was not founded two weeks ago by some loser in his mom's basement; it was founded in Germany in 1932, the year before Hitler took power.

     If you're anti-fascist, then you're Antifa. If you support declaring Antifa a terrorist group because you're anti-fascist and you think they're fascists, then logically you would have to support declaring yourself a terrorist (because you're anti-fascist, and therefore Antifa, which is an unincorporated movement that has no leaders and is directed by nobody).

     George Soros is not a Nazi, he was forced to join Nazi Youth as a teenager. Communists are not Nazis; Communists fought Nazis to the death and invaded the German capital. Communists with the Ukrainian brigades helped stop trains headed for death camps, and helped fully liberate Auschwitz after the Jewish prisoners partially liberated themselves in January 1945. Communists are not Nazis; Hitler banned Marxism in 1933, purged the Nazi Party of socialists, and faked being a socialist in order to avoid real socialism in addition to communism. The Nazis had quotas to confiscate Jewish wealth; not wealth in general. Nazism was not real socialism because it did not consider Jews part of that society, and the Nazis were not trying to do socialism.

     If you support taking people's money on their way out of the country - or requiring people to have permits and licenses in order to work, travel, or carry a weapon – then you're a fascist. Plain and simple. If not, then you might want to vote for me. Because there are real concentration camps in America, just like the ones funded by associates of the Bushes 80 years ago. And any day your driver's license could stop being accepted outside your state lines, and any day your school could “lose track” of your kid.

     Any day you could get swindled into thinking there are lots of jobs in the East, as the Jews were made to believe. And there were jobs; in hard-labor camps that eventually became death camps (as more and more people died from being overworked, and disease, and the Nazis resorted to extreme measures to prevent the spread of disease, which they knew would only make their prisoners sicker). After all, people from Honduras and El Salvador have been tricked into thinking there are jobs in America that you can easily leave, only to get stuck in I.C.E. facilities (when undocumented), or trapped in America at the end of harvest season (when documented).

     We are trapping Hispanics at the border and we are trapping black people in the jails. We are hunting human beings. America has made war and policing – killing and hunting human beings – into its national pastime and one of its most popular jobs. We have legalized treating people like animals, in our words and in our actions.

     It should be no surprise, then, that our teenagers are so prone to violence, with these murderers as their heroes. We blame violence on video games, but I blame school shootings, in part, on high taxes. Think about it: When our income is taxed, what we fairly earned through working for wages is taken away, and confiscated, and for the most part wasted. When our housing value is taxed, we lose all impetus to improve our property, because when our property value increases, our property taxes go up as well. There is no way to get ahead through producing something; the only way to make money is to destroy and invest in weapons, and the only way to save money and save on taxes is to produce less and own less. Kids are being taught that wasting and destroying things, gets you more money than producing and improving things. And it does! But this teaches them that they'll never be rich, because of high taxes (and barriers to employment, like lack of skilled trades classes), and so if they can't be rich, they can still be famous without being rich, by killing large numbers of people.

     If they do learn violence from violent video games, then yes, school shootings happen because kids are obsessed with who has the most kills. But if they're obsessed with who has the most kills, then there's a simple way to let those thoughts, and their politically extremist feelings, out: by debating Hitler vs. Stalin death tolls in high school. Hitler's fifty million dead will not only distract students from how many people they want to kill; it will also reassure them that they'll never be able to kill more people than the Nazis did. So why should they even try?

     It may sound ridiculous, but is that really more dangerous than what we're currently doing? Rationalizing the idea that the C.I.A. adopted from Winston Churchill; that the West should have aligned with Hitler from the beginning, because the Soviet Union and communism were the real enemies the whole time? Well, guess what: America did try to align with Hitler before World War II. It resulted in the deportation of Holocaust refugees and American assistance in the construction of forced-labor camps.

     I would much rather “teach the controversy” about World War II in high schools, than let troubled kids who understand extremism well, go without being challenged in front of their peers, and risk ending up isolated loners who kill their classmates. Socialists, nationalists, libertarians, anarchists, and others, all need to be respected alongside Democrats and Republicans in our public schools, and given equal time, or else the federal support of public schools should end forever.

     There is hardly any reason left to keep funding public schools anyway. The proponents of gun control argue “Even if it will save only one child's life, it will be worth it to ban guns.” And they make a good point; one child is shot or killed every school day in America. But you never hear anybody say “Even if it will save only twenty-four children from being molested a day, we should ban the public schools where this molestation takes place, with the help of our taxpayer money to defend the teacher.” I will be the first candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives to ever say that.

     I will also aim to lower the likelihood of school shootings through three methods: 1) Allowing students to take gun safety training courses; 2) Depend on private security guards to protect schools instead of the police, and 3) Pursue lawsuits or legislation which will result in the overturning of the 1980s Supreme Court case Warren v. District of Columbia, which holds that the police have no duty to protect and serve, unless there is a private contract.

     In my mind, the outcome of Warren is that we do not have a police force in America; we have a for-profit mafia-style protection racket. And the last thing it wants is for vulnerable people and minorities to be armed, defend themselves, and make the cops look bad.

     As your candidate, I vow to fight this mafia protection racket until the day I die. If I am elected to the U.S. House, I will do whatever I can to curtail the power of sovereign immunity, and charge police officers with an actual duty to protect and serve the general public (and, in doing so, restore civic order). I suspect that Warren has something to do with why these cops stand around at protests, and refuse to do anything when Antifa members come up to them saying Nazi sympathizers punched them and they're getting away and you can stop them.

     I will stop letting Nazis get away with all of this. I will do whatever I can to end the taxation of your children into joblessness, homelessness, debt slavery, depression, and despair. I will do whatever I can to restore the American dream of equality of opportunity and equal protection of the law.

     Please join me tomorrow at the public library in Lake Bluff, the town where I grew up, for the first meet and greet of my campaign. I will be giving an hour-long presentation about my platform, followed by an hour of question-and-answer from the audience. Feel free to take some of my campaign literature with you. Thank you.

Written and Published on March 3rd, 2020

Introduction Added on March 5th, 2020