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Many observers expect New York authorities to arrest former President Donald Trump this week. It's hard to imagine this being anything but a boon for Trump, who is running for president again.

Decisions about whether to bring criminal charges against a politician or authority figure certainly shouldn't hinge on whether it will help or hurt the person's political fortunes. But it's tough to see why Trump opponents would actually be cheering for this arrest.

As it stands, the Republican establishment and electorate both seem much more enamored with the thought of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as their party's future than with the continuance of a Trump-helmed GOP. But Trump's arrest could boost his claims of unfair persecution in a way that Trump supporters find sympathetic, compelling conservative officials to rally around him and delegitimizing future attempts to prosecute Trump for more serious offenses. And for what? The expected charges in this casefalsifying business recordswill hardly lead to major punishment even if Trump is convicted.

And setting all politics aside, the charges are pretty weak.

The expected indictment stems from money that Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016. The money was intended to keep her quiet about a past Daniels-Trump tryst.

In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to paying Daniels $130,000 at Trump's direction "for the principal purpose of influencing the election." This counted as an excessive contribution to the Trump presidential campaign. (Individual donors are permitted to give only relatively small amounts to a candidate each election cycle. There was a $2,700 limit in 2016, though its since been raised to $3,300.) Meanwhile, Trump admitted to reimbursing Cohen for this payment, using his own (not campaign) money. It was "a simple private transaction," said Trump, seeming to believe this made everything legal.

And indeed, experts have been divided over whether this payment counted as a criminal act, a campaign finance law violation, or nothing. As Reason's Jacob Sullum points out, "there is nothing inherently illegal about that payment." The theory underlying the case against Cohen was that he paid the money to influence the 2016 presidential electionbut the money could just as well have been "to avoiding personal embarrassment for Trump or [to spare] Melania Trump's feelings."

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) investigated the matter as a possible violation of election law, but eventually decided not to pursue it.

Now, around seven years after Cohen paid Daniels, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is pursuing criminal charges against Trump. This time, the case rests on whether Trump falsified business records and with what intent.

In court, Cohen said that Trump's company had "falsely accounted" for the reimbursement payments he received, calling them legal expenses and citing a retainer agreement that didn't exist. Cohen has also claimed that Trump knew about this deception.

"In New York, falsifying business records can amount to a crime, albeit a misdemeanor," notes The New York Times. "To elevate the crime to a felony charge, Mr. Bragg's prosecutors must show that Mr. Trump's 'intent to defraud' included an intent to commit or conceal a second crime. In this case, that second crime could be a violation of New York State election law."

But proving that Trump intentionally violated campaign finance rules is hard, considering Trump's statements that he thought the personal payment was just a private transaction. The lack of evidence that Trump "knowingly and willingly" flouted election law seems to be why a federal case was never pursued. (It's also unclear how New York election law would cover a violation of federal limits on campaign contributions.)

"Even if Mr. Trump is indicted, convicting him or sending him to prison will be challenging," comments the Times. "For one thing, Mr. Trump's lawyers are sure to attack Mr. Cohen's credibility by citing his criminal record. The case against the former president also likely hinges on an untested and therefore risky legal theory involving a complex interplay of laws. Combining the falsifying business records charge with a violation of state election law would be a novel legal theory for any criminal case, let alone one against the former president."

The idea that New York prosecutors will somehow succeed in showing what the FEC and other federal authorities couldn't is suspect. They're also running up against statute-of-limitations constraints. "In New York, misdemeanors have to be prosecuted within two years, and Class E felonies have to be prosecuted within five years," writes Sullum, who points out that the "legal expenses" payments to Cohen were made sometime in 2017. "Prosecutors would have to cite records that were falsified more recently, which maybe they can do, but to what end?"

Considering all of this, prosecuting Trump now would basically be an exercise in chest-thumping to score some political points, not a pure effort to see that justice is served. Which means that Trump's claims of a politics-based persecution could, in this instance, be right.

Ballot access battles. Republican lawmakers are maneuvering to stop abortion measures from appearing on ballots, reports Politico. Meanwhile, third parties in New York are fighting efforts to keep their candidates off the ballot. Specifically, they're asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.

"After watching the pro-abortion rights side win all six ballot initiative fights related to abortion in 2022including in conservative states such as Kansas and Kentuckyconservatives fear, and are mobilizing to avoid, a repeat," write Politico's Alice Miranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly. To this effect, "legislatures in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio and Oklahoma are debating bills this session that would hike the filing fees, raise the number of signatures required to get on the ballot, restrict who can collect signatures, mandate broader geographic distribution of signatures, and raise the vote threshold to pass an amendment from a majority to a supermajority."

In other ballot access news: "The Supreme Court this week officially docketed a petition for a writ of certiorari in the case Libertarian Party of New York, et al. v. New York State Board of Elections, et al.," reports Reason's Brian Doherty. This means that the Court will at least consider hearing the hearing case, which challenges ballot access restrictions in New York state:

A press release from the New York Libertarian Party (NYLP) sums up the tightening of ballot access requirements in its state that led to the lawsuit, in which it is joined by the Green Party of New York: "The threshold for a party to maintain recognized party status and ballot access was increased from 50,000 votes to 130,000 votes or 2% of the vote in the previous gubernatorial or presidential election, whichever is higher."

This led, the press release points out, to four parties that used to have ballot access in New York suddenly losing it: the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Independence Party, and the SAM Party. The NYLP press release points out that of the four, only the L.P., whose 2020 presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen got 60,000 votes in the state, would have kept the party's ballot access under the pre-2020 lower threshold.

The NYLP's gubernatorial candidate in 2022, Larry Sharpe, failed to make the ballot under the new rules after gathering 42,000 signatures when he needed 3,000 more to make itmeaning, as the NYLP's press release put it, that Sharpe "actually got more signatures than any other candidate, and yet he was denied a ballot spot due to the increased thresholds for ballot access." The signatures requirement prior to the challenged 2020 change was just 15,000. The signatures must be gathered in a 42-day window, making it even harder. Thanks to the new tougher signature requirement and threshold for staying a recognized party, New York saw only two candidates on the ballot for governor in 2022, for the first time since 1946.

You can find the petition to the Supreme Courtwhich comes from the Libertarian Party of New York, the Green Party of New York, and several individualshere.

Wyoming bans abortion pills. Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, has signed a law explicitly banning abortion pillsa first for a U.S. state. "The pills are already banned in 13 states that have blanket bans on all forms of abortion, and 15 states already have limited access to abortion pills," reports the Associated Press. "Until now, however, no state had passed a law specifically prohibiting such pills."

Twenty years ago today, then-President George W. Bush ordered airstrikes on Baghdad, thus beginning the Iraq War. "The United States spent an estimated $2 trillion in Iraq over the two decades, a price tag that barely begins to express the toll it has taken on both countries," writes Robert Draper at The New York Times. "Roughly 8,500 American military personnel and contractors lost their lives there, according to Brown University's Costs of War project, and as many as 300,000 others returned home suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders. Iraq lost nearly half a million civilians in the war and the subsequent eight-year American occupation."

Two decades later, the war in Iraq is overright?

Bills in Hawaii, New York, and Vermont would decriminalize prostitution.

California is making its own brand of insulin.

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Little Upside to New York's Expected Criminal Charges for Trump - Reason

Observer book of the week

The politics professor deftly chronicles the errors and ideologies that have brought the post-Brexit Conservative party to the brink of ungovernability

Sun 26 Mar 2023 02.00 EDT

Napoleon was history on a horse. Since the Brexit referendum, Britain has been history in a clown car. We are now on our fifth prime minister in the six tumultuous years since that fateful vote. Some describe this revolving door of chaos as the Italianisation of our politics. Many have marvelled at how a country that used to have an international reputation as boringly predictable has so often resembled a banana republic with crap weather. And these years of almost unremitting mayhem have been unleashed by the Conservatives, a party that traditionally marketed itself as made up of hard-headed realists who could be relied on to provide stable, credible and professional government.

A lot has been written about what the Brexit misadventure has inflicted upon our country. Here, Tim Bale, one of the very best of our political historians, examines what it has done to the Conservative party. He contends persuasively that the Brexit virus has transformed the Tories from a mainstream party of the centre-right into an unstable amalgam of radical rightwing populists, hyper-libertarians and market fundamentalists.

The Conservatives the clue was in the name used to be the party that revered and defended the institutions. Now Tories act like or at least think it convenient to pose as an anti-establishment outfit. Which requires epic amounts of cheek, given theyve been ruling for nearly 13 years. They rage not just about the woke and lefty laywers, but also against the judiciary, the civil service, parliamentary scrutiny, the universities, the BBC, the Bank of England, the CBI and any of the other shadowy forces determined to deny the people the common sense policies they supposedly long for. Traditional Tories used to flinch at ideological fanaticism, thinking both themselves and Britain best served by the pragmatic adaptation to circumstances. Juvenile zealotry and extreme partisanship have become very prevalent in todays Tory party.

The author is an expert, deft and fluent guide to the story. He brings clarity of explanation to even the most tortuous twists of the tale while offering penetrating and frequently caustic commentary on the consequences, many of them never intended by their architects.

One of his compelling themes is the disproportionate power of what he calls the party in the media by which he principally means the rightwing press. They have been significant actors by being hugely influential over Tory members and MPs as well as possessing an outsize voice in the national conversation. Without their clamorous support for the enterprise, which had been preceded by years in which they fomented hostility towards the EU, you can make a strong argument that Brexit would not have happened at all. The rightwing media also played a critical role in propelling the UK towards a much harder form of Brexit than could be rationally justified by the closeness of the referendum result (52-48) or the great economic hazards entailed in opting for an especially severe form of rupture with the UKs most important trading partners. It was in part to pander to them that Theresa May embarked on the withdrawal negotiations with delusionally uncompromising positions. When she declared, to the horror of key members of her cabinet, that she would be prepared to walk away with no deal at all, the rightwing press was ecstatic. STEEL OF THE NEW IRON LADY blared the front page of the Daily Mail, with an accompanying cartoon of May standing in defiant pose on a chalk cliff, the union jack fluttering on a flagpole behind her and the EU flag underfoot. Even the usually more temperate Times went with: May to EU: give us a fair deal or youll be crushed. As Bale drolly notes, it was never convincingly explained how the UK was going to crush the collective strength of the EUs 27 member states.

The Tory party in the media played an equally baleful role during the pandemic by allying with the anti-lockdown libertarians in the Conservative parliamentary party and amplifying their opposition to life-saving restrictions. On the telling of Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson regarded the Daily Telegraph as his real boss. It was not just Johnsons own libertarian impulses, it was also fear of provoking opposition from the rightwing media that resulted in him introducing measures to curb the virus later and more feebly than he ought to have done.

Another theme of these torrid years is weak prime ministers presiding over hideously dysfunctional regimes at Number 10. The strong and stable May became flimsy and ever more wobbly after an atrocious election campaign in which she threw away her parliamentary majority. Johnson won a near-landslide in December 2019, but had little idea what to do with office other than pig out on its perks. Truss was an excruciatingly bad communicator with a calamitously dreadful plan. A run of low-calibre leaders has been accompanied by a collapse in the deference Tory MPs used to display towards their chiefs to the point where it is now regularly suggested that the party has essentially become ungovernable. The factionalising of the parliamentary party has seen its MPs divide themselves up into an alphabet soup of agitative groups. Theres the belligerently anti-woke Common Sense Group. The anti-lockdowners organised themselves into the Covid Recovery Group. Then theres the Northern Research Group, representing red wall Tories. These titles were adopted in conscious imitation of the most potent of the parties-within-a-party, the European Research Group, the voice of the Brextremists. The ERG has often been lampooned as a collection of monomaniacs, oddballs and fruitcakes, but by god, have they been successful in imposing what was once a very fringe agenda on the government and therefore on the country. At the time of the referendum in 2016, the great majority of the Cameron cabinet and most Conservative MPs backed remain. By the time of the exit from the EU, the cabinet was packed with Brexiters and the ERG had played an instrumental role in impelling the UK into a rock-hard form of departure that had never been on the original prospectus of the leavers.

Yet what exactly has their triumph been for? The penalties for Brexit are as legion as they are more and more manifest. Pollsters report that increasingly large majorities of the public now wish the UK had never left the EU. Even the fiercest advocates of the enterprise struggle to enumerate any tangible benefits. This excellent book opens with an apposite quotation from Polybius: Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories. May interpreted Brexit as being centrally about taking back control of Britains borders. For Johnson, it was, at least rhetorically, if not much in reality, about levelling up the left-behind areas of the country that had expressed their discontent by voting leave. For Truss, it was all about purging Britain of the EU-inspired rules and regulations that had purportedly been holding back the UKs growth potential for decades. She grabbed the premiership by persuading Tory party members that she knew where to find the end of the rainbow and the pot of Brexit gold that had eluded her predecessors. At the time of the maxi-disaster of the mini-budget, the rightwing media was in raptures. AT LAST! A TRUE TORY BUDGET enthused the Daily Mail in gushing admiration of Truss and Kwamikaze Kwarteng and their slug of recklessly unfunded tax cuts. KWARTS NOT TO LIKE? asked the Sun. Financial markets answered that question by dumping UK debt, crashing the pound and pushing mortgage costs up to levels not seen in decades. Truss sacked her chancellor. A few days after that, she was obliged to sack herself. The foundational myth of Brexit, that British governments would henceforth have the freedom to do pretty much what they wanted, ought surely to have been exploded by Trusss self-immolating experiment.

Mad Queen Liz gained the unenviable distinction of becoming the briefest prime minister in our history. That was not the only dismal new record set in this period. Bad King Boris was the first to be sacked as prime minister by his own MPs for lacking the basic probity to hold the office.

The arrival of Rishi Sunak at Number 10 has prompted debate about whether we are witnessing a reversion to something more resembling an orthodox Tory government. Boring is back, claims Michael Gove. Bale cautions us against investing too heavily in this idea that the Conservatives are morphing back into a more conventional centre-right party. He registers the irony that they are now led by an incredibly rich Atlantic-hopping member of the global elite, precisely the kind of citizen of nowhere scorned by May in her first conference speech as prime minister. Yet Bale also notes that in his appointments, such as Suella Braverman as home secretary, and in some of his rhetoric, Sunak is as ready as May, Johnson and Truss to try to exploit populist tropes at the same time as being ultra-Thatcherite in many of his attitudes towards society.

Bale concludes with another warning, this time for all those who ache to see them out of office: support for the Tories in their current incarnation might just prove more resilient than many of their opponents imagine. He would not yet bet the farm on them losing the next election. However dreadful they so often are at governing, the Tories have a history of being scarily successful at winning power.

Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer

The Conservative Party After Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation by Tim Bale is published by Polity (25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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The Conservative Party After Brexit by Tim Bale review why conservatism turned into chaos - The Guardian

When Jesse Ventura speaks at the Minnesota State Capitol, people listen. And it is only partly due to the fact that he often speaks very loudly.

The former one-term governor remains a celebrity in state politics, and his appearances can draw crowds and attention. Such was the case earlier this month when he testified on an issue at the core of his political persona. Senate File 1827 would make it much harder some say impossible for a third party to achieve major party status.

Major party status means the party can automatically qualify its primary election winner for the general election, whereas minor parties must follow a process of signature gathering to place candidates on the ballot. Under current law, when a candidate from a minor party wins 5% of a statewide vote, that party achieves major party status and enjoys the benefits for the next two years.

But the bill brought by House and Senate DFL sponsors and supported by the chairs of both the state DFL and Republican parties would increase the vote threshold to win major party status from 5% to 10%.

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During fiery testimony before the Senate Elections Committee, Ventura blasted the major parties and accused them of trying to stifle other viewpoints.

If these rules had been in place back in 1998, the state of Minnesota would not have had a chance to elect Gov. Jesse Ventura, he said. Im sure that pleases both of the parties because I believe that is why this is being done, so there can never be another Gov. Jesse Ventura. The people of Minnesota wont be able to shock the world again.

Ventura in 1998 ran on the Reform Party ticket, a party that had gained major party status in the 1996 election when Dean Barkley won 6.98% of the vote as a candidate for U.S. Senate. During that same election, however, Ross Perot won 11.75% as the Reform Party candidate for president, so it would have had major party status by 1998 even under a 10% threshold.

Still, his plurality victory over GOP nominee Norm Coleman and DFL nominee Hubert Skip Humphrey was a surprise, one that Ventura said on election night would shock the world.

Sponsors of the 10% bill point to recent struggles that the two most recent major parties the Legal Marijuana Now Party and Grassroots Legal Cannabis Party have had with their new status. As minor parties, party offices and active members have control over which candidates run under the party name. They lose that control when they become major parties when anyone with money for a filing fee can enter the party primary.

In 2020, the DFL and some in the legalization parties complained that candidates with GOP leanings filed as legalization candidates to skim votes from DFL nominees. In at least one case, the defeat of once and future incumbent Rep. Brad Tabke was blamed on a questionable legalization candidate. (Tabke ran again in 2022 and won his seat back.)

In 2021, a bill with DFL sponsorship would have given a major party a legal path to challenge in court any insincere candidates. It went nowhere. In 2022, DFL and legal marijuana advocates launched efforts to convince legalization voters to support DFLers rather than legalization party candidates as the best way to pass recreational marijuana.

Now comes SF1827 and its House counterpart, House File 2802.

It makes it much more difficult to do whats called spoilers, to put spoilers on the ballot, said Senate Elections Committee chair and bill sponsor Jim Carlson, DFL-Eagan. Theres been a lot of mischief around the state, and its been more than one party. House Sponsor, Rep. Luke Frederick, DFL-Mankato, called what happened with the questionable marijuana legalization candidates shenanigans.

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The chairs of both the DFL and GOP parties submitted letters of support.

Ken Martin

GOP chair David Hann said making it harder to be considered a major party under state law will save taxpayer time and resources, minimize voter confusion, and improve administration of our states elections. Hann also said because all major parties receive money via the states public financing of campaigns, a higher threshold will help improve stewardship of taxpayer dollars.

MinnPost photo by Tony Nelson

Minnesota Republican Party Chair David Hann

Both chairs said minor parties could still gain access to the ballot through nominating petitions with signatures totalling 1% of the vote in the last election for that office.

Secretary of State Steve Simon has not taken a position on the bill.

Oliver Steinberg

Grassroots Legalize Cannabis failed to meet the 5% threshold at the 2020 and 2022 elections and is no longer treated as a major party. Legal Marijuana Now, however, retains that status due to winning 5.9% of the vote in the 2020 U.S. Senate general election.

Other minor party members were much less enthused with the 10% bill.

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I hope you guys are all proud of yourselves for putting this forth, former Libertarian Party candidate Chris Holbrook told the House Elections Committee. Im assuming thats why you all ran for office, to use the power of law to ban your opponents from running for office.

MinnPost photo by Peter Callaghan

Chris Holbrook

Chip Tangen said he attempted to run for secretary of state as a Libertarian but failed because, unlike what Martin described as the need for a nominal number of signatures, it is difficult.

There are 201 seats in the state Legislature, he told the House committee. Since the year 2000, a total of 12 Libertarians have managed to claw their way onto the ballot through petitioning. Parties must collect signatures in a two-week window in the spring, they must use legal-sized pages and signers must ink a pledge that says they will not take part in any other partys process.

Cara Schulz, a Burnsville City Council member, suggested letting minor parties have conventions and then be allowed to place their nominated candidates on the general election ballot. But bills to reduce the odds of them making major party status were a means of killing competition.

If you want to abuse your power to keep your power, just push this bill forward, she said. And Phil Fuehrer, the chair of the Independence Party, said the bill is being pushed with anecdotes without acknowledging how difficult it is to reach 5% of the general election vote. Since 2002, he said, 101 candidates have run from 20 third parties, and just three have achieved major party status.

Richard Winger is a writer who follows election law nationally, especially how it treats access to the ballot for third parties. He said that while Minnesota is one of 21 states that makes a legal distinction between major and minor parties, other states allow third parties on the ballot without petitioning like Minnesota does.

Minor parties cannot thrive in a system in which all of their nominees have to file difficult petitions, Winger told the Senate committee. And Minnesotas petitions for independent candidates are miserable. Winger also responded to sponsors claims that a 10% vote threshold is comparable to other states. Only two states match that total Virginia and New Jersey and only one is higher with Alabamas 20%.

Minnesota is already one of the most difficult states in the union, Winger wrote in response to an email. The Minnesota vote test for being a qualified party is 5%, but the median vote test in the 50 states is only 2%. As one of the Libertarian witnesses said, the Libertarian Party at one time or another has been a qualified party in 44 states, but never Minnesota. So already Minnesota is unusually difficult.

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The House committee held the bill for possible inclusion in an omnibus bill. The Senate bill was approved by the elections committee on a party line vote.

You might have seen the letters (from the two party chairs) and thought this was a unified agreement that we came in with ahead of time, said Sen. Andrew Mathews, R-Princeton. That is not the case.

MinnPost's in-depth, independent news is free for all to access no paywall or subscriptions. Will you help us keep it this way by supporting our nonprofit newsroom with a tax-deductible donation today?

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Jesse Ventura, others oppose restricting major party' in Minnesota elections - MinnPost

Most people have no idea that pinball was illegal in New York from the early 1940s until 1976, when a journalist named Roger Sharpe finally won his crusade against the city to free the flippers.

The story of that insane ban is the subject of the new movie Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game, which Richard Brody of The New Yorker called "better than all ten of the Best Picture nominees."

The film is written and directed by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg, longtime producers at Reason best known for collaborating with Remy on his massively popular song parodies and for making libertarian versions (often featuring Andrew Heaton) of Star Trek, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and other pop culture franchises. A production of MPI Original Films, Pinball is available for streaming on Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon Prime Video, and other platforms.

I talked with the Bragg brothers about how they came to tell Roger Sharpe's story, what goes into making the perfect satire in an era when reality is far stranger than anything we can imagine, and the libertarian message of Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game.

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The Bragg Brothers: Remy Videos, Libertarian Parodies, and 'Pinball.' - Reason

For a group of people eager to position themselves as thought leaders this was not exactly a PR triumph. Others in the industry saw the display as counterproductive.

Theres a universal agreement that libertarian VCs screaming for bailout money was not helpful, said one person involved in managing Silicon Valleys response to the crisis, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about tech industry peers. Elevating startup founders or even business owners outside of tech those are better faces for the industry than a guy in Atherton whos scared that his portfolio companies might get hit.

At the same time, anticipation was growing for some VC comeuppance, among tech critics on Washington Twitter.

Uninsured depositors who are sophisticated risk-managers are going to take a loss. There is no bailout here, tweeted Matt Stoller of the Economic Liberties Project, which advocates for more aggressive federal intervention to counter monopolies.

The stage looked set for a big, messy collision between two countervailing forces. Except that turned out to be little more than a revenge fantasy.

In fact, Washington was ready and willing to step in. Coming off a historically bad year for bond markets, Silicon Valley Bank was far from the only depository institution to take a huge hit on its bond portfolio. And Silicon Valley startups were far from the only businesses with huge piles of uninsured cash inside banks.

And most of Silicon Valley was earnestly happy to have the help. Good news, Sacks tweeted, with an applause emoji, when the Fed, Treasury and FDIC announced their rescue plan.

Does this mean the end of the sparring between the Valley and the capital? Of course not.

Now that Silicon Valley has what it wants from Washington, the VCs may be free to go back to plotting the capitals planned obsolescence. And members of Congress want to keep hauling Big Tech CEOs before them for browbeatings.

But both sides have quite a bit at stake, and as the SVB collapse makes clear they know it.

Washington needs tech entrepreneurs to stay in the U.S., and not get too disillusioned. As the current generation of Silicon Valley offerings make it easier than ever to start a global business from anywhere, the possibility that the next generation of global tech giants arise somewhere other than the U.S. has become more real.

Washington needs tech entrepreneurs to stay in the U.S., and not get too disillusioned.|J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo

As for Big Tech as those once-nimble startups have matured into corporate giants, theyve become more and more tethered to the federal government. As Amazon and Facebook explore fields like drone delivery and payments, their collisions with government policymakers like the FAA and state money transmission authorities become more frequent and consequential.

This has affected their corporate cultures, according to Nu Wexler, a former congressional aide and veteran of Google and Facebook who now works in public relations. The companies were more libertarian just because they were operating in more unregulated spaces, he said.

Last year, even as Elon Musk railed against the powers that be on Twitter, his network of satellites was helping to keep Ukraine online as it responded to Russias invasion. Even Thiel, despite his libertarian provocations, is financially intertwined with the Pentagon and the intelligence community, some of the biggest customers for his data analytics company, Palantir.

The libertarian ethos of startups and their most vocal backers may be in for some tempering, too. Last year, A16Zs Katherine Boyle published an investing thesis titled Building American Dynamism that called for building companies that support the national interest, including in national security. Once, in Silicon Valley, the idea of American dynamism might have seemed cornily patriotic. Today, at A16Z, its just the name of a fund.

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When Silicon Valley Libertarians Realized They Needed the Government, and Vice Versa - POLITICO