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 10th 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 10th
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 10th
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 2nd
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
