
Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
Libertarian Party 2024 presidential nominee Chase Oliver is seen during the Libertarian National Convention at the Washington Hilton in Washington, May 26, 2024.
NEW YORK – At Reason magazine’s immigration night on Tuesday, the heat was off and the Mexican beer cold. Tendrils of frost licked up around the faux-gilded bathroom mirror, flanked by two enormous incandescent bulbs. The crowd of aging libertarians milled about trying to stay warm, as hoagies befitting a think-tank luncheon slowly solidified under more than one fedora bobbing in the throng.
The underground venue Sovereign House has hosted hyper-online far-right cultural theorists like Curtis Yarvin and Raw Egg Nationalist, evolving over the past few years as a petri dish for the New York MAGA intelligentsia. Too online for the aging NYC Republicans, too elitist for the NYC Young Republicans, and too weird to show their faces aboveground, the attendees of Sovereign House gather at dusk to bask in the wonders of blockchain technology and race essentialism in a bedrock basement.
The evening’s event was billed as a panel on immigration in the Trump era, but it quickly evolved into a pity party for a movement that had tried and failed to guide the hand of the president it helped to elect. Some begrudging bargain seemed struck with Sovereign House Baron Nick Allen to keep the doors open but the heat shut, as twilight descended on an ideology grown stale.
The MC for the evening, Reason podcast host Nick Gillespie, did an impression of Bill Maher if he was into even younger women. “We always ask for consent, but feel free to rub against each other to stay warm” he leered. Meanwhile, George Mason professor Bryan Caplan and Cato Institute Vice President Alex Nowrasteh sat frozen on stage, their D.C. aura adding to the chill.
The two Libertarian immigration experts—the Don’t Tread on Me party being generally wide open to restrictionless immigration—spent much of the evening bemoaning the bad rap received by immigrants and the excesses of American welfare, while batting around statistics on why both legal and illegal immigration are necessary to keep the insatiable dynamo of American capital in motion.
On Trump’s declaration that America is under a literal invasion by immigrants, the panel concluded that “a foreign invader doesn’t come by to repair your deck and mow your lawn.” On building the wall at the southern border? “Build a higher wall around the welfare state, not the southern border.” And on Ezra Klein’s abundance agenda? “When you produce abundance it is shared with everyone through normal market processes.”
If any new information was summoned, it was Caplan’s revelation, gleaned from senators speaking off the record, that the real jewel of the Laken Riley Act is the provision allowing state attorneys general to sue the federal government over any immigration policy that has cost the state over $100. Steve Bannon has indicated that he would use that provision to attack the H-1B visa policy and the tech oligarch agenda of Elon Musk.
In forecasting whether Musk will emerge victorious in his pro-immigration war against Bannon and MAGA’s populist base, the outlook was grim. Despite birthing the Tea Party movement and bringing about deregulation and corporate excess, the Koch-forged golem of astroturf advocacy groups and deep-pocketed lobbyists had now mutated into something its masters could no longer control. Stephen Miller has won out over Elon, they sighed. And this time, Miller wouldn’t make the same mistakes. We’re basically fucked.
Midway through the evening, as the two experts discussed the timelessness of American nativism and the renewal of anti-immigrant vitriol once aimed at “Jews, Jesuits, and steamships,” a woman in a mink stole slinked out the back. In this freezing cave on the Lower East Side, the anti-nativists now nursed their wounds under the same circumstances as the Five Point gangs some hundred years prior.
Meanwhile, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht as the night stretched on, without fanfare from the crowd. The Silk Road founder turned libertarian icon for his creation of an unregulated marketplace for sex, drugs, and hit men was used by Trump as a bargaining chip on the campaign trail. In courting the libertarian vote before the election, Trump had struck an easy deal: pardon a figurehead in exchange for a third party agreeing not to split the vote. Libertarians still ran a candidate, but Chase Oliver was hardly a factor with only 0.4 percent of the vote. Promises made, promises kept.
This devil’s bargain came into full relief at the end of the night, when a young man with the shiny eyes of a budding fascist took issue with the hosts’ closing remarks on the greatness of American assimilationism.
“A Finnish immigrant who comes to this country is not the same as a Nigerian man,” he began. “A bargain has been broken to white middle Americans …” The man went on to critique scientific denialism, and claim that we should create our immigration policy based on racialized IQ scores, and tear down the Statue of Liberty to replace it with some looming set of all-seeing calipers, casting long shadows down the Hudson.
The hosts didn’t bat an eye, and in their acceptance of this so called “heterodoxy”—a term used during the evening’s start to signal a bold stance against the ebbing tide of wokeness—they revealed their unwillingness to exclude an infection from their movement that has since spread like sepsis to poison the open-borders free-market utopia they once hoped to bring about. “We need to face some hard truths,” the young man said to a passerby, eyes shining, teeth glinting, as he made his way out of the basement and past a leaking bucket of Modelo cans, up the dark staircase and into the night.