This is long, and I'm not sure how much to copy and paste or just link. I've decided to copy and paste most of it, or you can read it on Ken's website here.

To me, this sounds batshit nuts -- the worst of both worlds, in that the woman is neither supported in being able to keep her child (if her reason for abortion is lack of resources) nor given control over the fetal remains. Essentially, it's total intervention. Is this something many Libertarians support?

I don’t know about you, but as for me, I’d wish for the best of both worlds. I’d decree a world where you could respect the unborn life and a respect woman’s right to choose. And it’s possible. It’s an approach I call “pro-option”.

So were I “just this king” instead of just this guy, I would decree that if a woman does not want her unborn child, she must first sign a legal document saying that she thereby abandons her unborn child. If she doesn’t want the baby, she doesn’t have to keep it; that’s pro-choice.

But, at that point, any individual or organization could then step forward and offer to adopt the abandoned child. If someone else wants the child, they can have it. That’s pro-life.

Now follow the consequences of that one decree allowing for pre-natal adoption. Me, I see four options available regarding the unborn child.

The first option is that the adoptive parents could ask the woman to please bring the baby to term. The request would be made through the doctor so that the woman’s privacy is respected; and it’s a request, not a demand. The woman can agree or not.

If the woman agrees to bring the child to term, then we’ve saved one baby, haven’t we? That’s pro-life. But we’ve also let the woman decide, haven’t we? That’s pro-choice.

By the way, if the woman agrees to have the baby, I think it’s only fair that the new parents should be responsible for paying the woman’s medical bills for the delivery. Since many babies are aborted for economic reasons, this first option is guaranteed to save more babies.

But I digress. What happens if the woman says “no”; what if she doesn’t want to carry the baby to term? Again through the doctor, the second option is for the hopeful adoptive-parents-to-be to ask the woman to carry the child as long as possible, long enough that labor could be safely induced before the nine months are up without endangering either the mother or the child-to-be.

With the current state of medical technology, a premature baby can be safely delivered around the seventh month, depending on the circumstances. Sure, it would cost more for the premature delivery, but it would still be paid for by the adoptive parents.

Will people step forward to adopt? I believe that there would be no shortage of willing foster parents, because one of the biggest tragedies in the world today is that there are not enough children to adopt.

Do you know how many people want to adopt a child, but can’t? Or how long it takes? Or the bureaucratic hoops that must be navigated?

Do you know how difficult, how expensive, how chancy it can be? It takes years, and tens of thousands of dollars. That’s one of the reasons why so many adopted children are from overseas. It’s easier, cheaper, and quicker.

So the foster parents are there. The demand is there. The babies are there. The love is there. All we need do is alter the rules, just a little, to help match the supply to the demand.

But what if the woman still says “no”? What if she chooses not to hang on into that “third trimester” when safe delivery is virtually assured? Then the third option would be to attempt to transplant the unborn child to a host mother, and bring it to term that way.

​

In 1890, New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy was assassinated.

Police responded with mass arrests of random Italians. Nineteen men were indicted. Nine trials ended in mistrials or acquittals.

An enraged mob broke into the jail and lynched eleven of the nineteen men.

Scour the whole neighborhood. Arrest every Italian you come across.
— New Orleans Mayor Joseph A. Shakspeare

The rhetoric leading up to the lynching was inflammatory. Immigration was blamed for Chief Hennessy's death - newspapers blamed "alien hands" and called Hennessy a martyr.

Rise, people of New Orleans! Alien hands of oath-bound assassins have set the blot of a martyr's blood upon your vaunted civilization! Your laws, in the very Temple of Justice, have been bought off, and suborners have caused to be turned loose upon your streets the midnight murderers of David C. Hennessy, in whose premature grave the very majesty of American law lies mangled with his corpse—the corpse of him who in life was the representative, the conservator of your peace and dignity.
— Daily Statesman, New Orleans newspaper

After the lynching, leading newspapers continued to justify the murder. The immigrants, they argued, were inherently criminal; they came from poor countries, what some have referred to as "shithole countries." They wouldn't assimilate, it was claimed.

These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigation. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they... Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans.
— The New York Times

This wasn't a fringe belief. It was mainstream. The entire country was caught up in anti-immigrant, anti-Italian hatred.

Prominent politicians called for an end to open immigration and literacy tests to weed out "the paupers and criminals of Europe."

Monday we dined at the Cameron's; various d*go diplomats were present, all much wrought up by the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans. Personally I think it was rather a good thing, and said so.

— Theodore Roosevelt, letter to his sister, 1891

Congress tried and failed to stop President Benjamin Harrison from paying restitution.

One year later, Harrison issued the first national Columbus Day proclamation.

It was meant to ease Italian diplomatic tensions and establish Italian immigrants as fully American.

Today, Columbus Day is unpopular to some on the left. It's seen as a celebration of a man whose actions so shocked and outraged even his contemporaries that he was hauled back to Spain in chains to stand trial for his tyranny and cruelty.

This is a messaging mistake.

In reaction to this, the right has embraced Columbus Day.

But it's a shallow celebration. It goes no deeper than "owning the libs" for NOT embracing Columbus Day.

They still repeat the same anti-immigrant rhetoric: "Immigrants are here to do crime and steal elections!"

On this Columbus Day, let's all remember the history that progressives and conservatives would both prefer you didn't know:

Columbus Day is the only federal holiday that celebrates immigration.

What makes America great is that anyone who wants to be American can be American.

So lately the big stink on Reddit is how Trump announced that the US government is going to Livestream the execution of the Fort Hood killer. I personally don't think that the state should be killing people at all (at the very least it needs to be voluntary) but if they are going to do it, I am completely fine with it being public, especially if the person being executed consents to it. Any additional government transparency is usually good and if you don't care for it, you aren't forced to watch it if you don't want to.

Thoughts?

I saw this post on X recently about how the Amish in New York are being fined by the state government for not vaccinating and the legacy media is really pushing the measles outbreak mostly among them in my state as well. As libertarians, we might not be entirely in agreement with the Amish lifestyle but ultimately it's their decision to live like that and they mostly keep to themselves as a voluntary collective. The state can't stand this and is increasingly seeking to enforce it's laws on them as much as possible and it just goes to show you that they won't leave you alone even if you are part of a voluntary collective that is self-sefficient and insular because it goes against their world view that the state is in charge of everyone in it's claimed territory.

Thoughts?

So over the weekend a guy from my county LP was at a booth for our state LP at a Cannabis Festival, think it was this one out in Kutztown. He tasked me with adding the names from their signup sheet that they had into CiviCRM, which is where we store data on people who may be interested in getting involved with the LP. I decided to make sure that I was adding the right people to Google them to double check. Some of the headlines I found (not including any location names as to not completely dox these people) were:

• Man found for cocaine possession (in fairness this one was from 1989)

• Man charged in thefts of motorcycle, trailer and UTV

• Man charged with threatening to kill wife, resists arrest

• Meth found on driver who flashed gun in road rage, cops say

• Man chokes woman until she 'taps out,' police say (these last 3 were all from the same guy)

I get that the Libertarian Party is not always going to attract the best talent compared to the two major parties but at some point you do have to question why there seems to be a pattern like this. And it's not just prospective signups like this either, our party chair has been charged for armed robbery in the past and one of the guys I sat next to at one of my LP county meetings was later charged with murdering someone with his girlfriend (he was one of the Jorgensen's electors back in 2020). What should be done about this? Is it okay to let stuff like this slide in order to boost our numbers?

I got buried in r/AskReddit for saying Trump isn’t a libertarian, but that parts of his agenda overlap more with libertarian principles than Biden/Harris on things like taxes, deregulation, gun rights and shrinking parts of the federal bureaucracy. I also acknowledged that tariffs, immigration restrictions, deficit spending and government ownership stakes are clearly not libertarian.
The replies mostly said “Trump isn’t libertarian” as if it disproved the narrower comparison I was making.

Am I missing something, or is “Trump the furthest thing from a libertarian” just as overstated as calling him one?

Either way I’m being downvoted because of Reddit hive mind…

As an independent that thinks for myself and isn’t influenced by anyone else…this is what I see.

I watched Biden pass the first infrastructure bill in decades so red states could have better roads and bridges. Biden had internet expanded to rural areas so these deep red areas could get online access. Biden got rid of lead pipes in red states so their kids could have safe drinking water. Biden made it so medical debt couldn’t affect their credit, and fought bank & airline junk fees for us. He passed the PACT Act so that even veterans that voted against him could get disability for illnesses from burn pits and brought them home from the Republican-started Afghan war. He got lifesaving drug prices drastically reduced. And how do they repay him? They all shout “Fuck Joe Biden.”

Yet all Trump does is pass another tax cut for himself and corporations, reversed the law that kept medical debt from affecting our credit, reversed the bank and airline junkfees so they can fee us to death again, and uses tax payer dollars to build monuments to himself, starts another war, drives up inflation and gas, and they all lick his boots. Make it make sense.