by: Rob Yates
Trick or Treat, by Permit
Last Friday, Bill Maher closed Real Time with a New Rule he called “Halloween Safetyism.” He simply asked for a break from helicopter parenting for one night, namely, Halloween.
Maher brought receipts. Towns like Winslow Township, New Jersey, now publish official trick-or-treat hours and curfews, some as early as 5 PM, so a holiday built around darkness wraps up near sundown. Door-to-door has given way to “trunk-or-treat” — circling the wagons in a church parking lot.
Of course, the actual risk suggests this approach is based on nothing. The FBI says violent crime fell 9.3% last year, murder down 18.1%. The CDC estimates that roughly 90% of child sexual abuse is committed by someone the child already knows. The one famous poisoned-candy murder, in 1974, was committed by the boy’s own father. The documented Halloween danger is cars — pedestrian deaths run about 43% higher that night.
Maher did suggest that there is one monster that parents regularly hand their kids, unsupervised and open to the world… the smart phone.
So we fear the stranger and ignore the screen. We regulate the sidewalk and forget the street. That is not a Halloween problem. It is how we make nearly every decision now, and how we are asked to vote.
Afraid of the Dark, Left and Right
Two weeks earlier, podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey (I watched it so you don’t have to, but here is the link) told her Christian audience that they shouldn’t be fans of horror at all — no scary books, no true crime, no scary movies — because choosing content that frightens you defies Scripture’s command not to fear. Even Matt Walsh pushed back. She actually suggested, unironically, that the cure for fear is avoiding anything that might cause it.
Trunk-or-treat for the soul.
The left’s most recent version wears a lab coat. In September 2021 Jimmy Kimmel took Fauci’s warning that hospitals might ration ICU beds and said the choice seemed easy. For the vaccinated heart-attack patient, come on in; unvaccinated guy who took ivermectin, “rest in peace, wheezy.” Howard Stern said of the unvaccinated that same week, “Fuck their freedom,” and later said he’d turn them away at the door. The Los Angeles Times ran a column calling it “ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary” to mock their deaths. Biden said his patience was wearing thin, then ordered a mandate covering 84 million workers. The Supreme Court blocked it four months later.
Nobody proposed rounding anyone up. Just something quieter — turn them away, and laugh when they die.
Two tribes, one reflex. When we are frightened, the person who chooses differently stops being a neighbor and becomes the threat.
Every uniparty election campaign in America is built to harvest it.
The Monster of the Week
Politics learned the curfew lesson long ago. Fear travels faster than facts, and every cycle brings a new creature under the bed with a party beside it holding a flashlight and a donation link.
The menu rotates. Comic books in the fifties. Satanic panic, Dungeons & Dragons, and crack in the eighties. Senate hearings on Mortal Kombat in 1993 turned into teenage “superpredators” by 1996. After 9/11, “if you see something, say something,” bolstered constant warnings of Muslim terrorists. Then immigrants were the danger — from “the caravan” to migrants eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. First the gay agenda was coming for your kids, then the trans agenda. Donald Trump Jr. polled his followers on whether “Trantifa” was the country’s greatest domestic terror threat. Every December for decades we’re warned about the war on Christmas (relax, Christmas seems to be doing just fine).
The other team runs the same haunted house. Biden stood at Independence Hall and called MAGA Republicans a threat to the foundations of the republic. He clarified that he only meant “dark MAGA.” An FBI field memo flagged “radical-traditionalist Catholics” before the Bureau withdrew it. The Department of Homeland Security issued a briefing warning of the dire threat of people who challenge the government narrative on COVID, or express anti-government sentiment. Guns are an “epidemic.” Gas stoves became a public-health menace, with a federal safety commissioner saying any option was on the table. During COVID, your neighbor’s uncovered face was a weapon.
Both parties warn of the risk of having children online, and suggest ever-more-draconian verification restrictions before they grant the privilege of using the internet.
Some of these risks are real — terrorist attacks have happened, fentanyl overdoses kill, a pandemic was behind the deaths of over a million Americans, and predators do lurk on apps. That is why the formula works. Take a real risk, inflate it past recognition, and attach a fix that hands power to whomever is selling it. The question is never, “how big is this risk, and what does it cost to reduce it?” It is “whom should you fear, and which party will protect you?”
Trick or Vote
This year’s haunted house set a price record — $11.6 billion in political advertising, more than the last presidential cycle. An NBC review of 600-plus October Senate ads found Democrats closing on corruption, costs, and Trump; Republicans on immigration, crime, and transgender issues.
The crime pitch is particularly telling. Speaker Mike Johnson spent the fall bragging that violent crime is at its lowest rate in 126 years while his party’s ads warned Democrats would defund the police. Simultaneously, he says you are the safest you have ever been, and you are in terrible danger.
Tuesday, the voters answered. Democrats took the House and the Senate. Republicans lost 27 House seats, incumbent senators in Kansas and Ohio, open seats in Iowa, North Carolina, and Texas, and the governorship of Texas. For the third time in eight years the House has changed hands.
More importantly, the surveillance authorities, the emergency powers, the agencies, the debt – none of these things changed hands. Every tool one party builds to fight its monster gets inherited by the other party, which has a different monster.
For Libertarians, Tuesday was about survival, and it went well. Colt Shelby cleared Arkansas’s ballot access threshold with room to spare, Don Kissick cleared Ohio’s, and Indiana is down to a matter of a few votes (we will likely not be sure until final results are certified). Thus far, of the ten races deciding whether we keep a ballot line, seven have been called our way and none against us. The wasted-vote warning turns out to be one more boogeyman — the fear that voting for what you believe will summon the thing you were told to fear most.
Why Freedom Feels Scary
Liberty is not a warm blanket. It asks you to own your choices — if you are free to decide what you eat, drive, take, say, or teach your kids, you are free to get it wrong, and there is no agency or committee to blame. Every outcome has your name on it.
And it asks you to let other people make choices you never would. Your neighbor’s gun, his gas stove, her unvaccinated kids, their drag brunch, his Latin Mass, her pronouns, his weed. Liberty means living next to decisions you think are foolish, and trusting people to run their own lives better than strangers can from a distant city.
Fear attacks both at once. It tells you that you cannot be trusted with your own life and your neighbor cannot be trusted with his. Erich Fromm observed this in Escape From Freedom in 1941, “When freedom’s weight becomes unbearable, people turn to those who promise certainty, surrendering their autonomy in exchange for security and order.”
We are hardwired to make this easier to exploit. We judge risk by how easily an example comes to mind, so one viral clip outweighs a murder rate that just fell 18% in a year. A rule being in place — a ban, a mandate, a curfew, a watch list — feels like safety. It transfers a decision, and the responsibility for the outcome, from you to somebody you will never meet and who will never answer to you.
“There Are No Solutions, Only Trade-offs”
That quote from the venerable Thomas Sowell is the crux of the issue. Every law bought with fear carries a price, even those that provide some tangible benefit:
- PROHIBITION, 1920. The fear was the saloon. The trade-off was a national liquor market handed to organized crime, poisoned bootleg booze, and a new federal enforcement machine. It became the only constitutional amendment we ever repealed, but the FBI, reefer madness, and wild failure of the war on drugs lived on.
- THE PATRIOT ACT, 2001. The fear was Muslim terrorists. It passed the Senate 98–1 six weeks after the towers fell. The trade-off was secret bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, which a federal oversight board later could not tie to a single terrorism case it actually cracked. Its cousin, Section 702, let the FBI search Americans’ messages without a warrant — a FISA court found agents misused those searches some 278,000 times, including on January 6 suspects, racial-justice protesters, and donors to a congressional campaign. Section 702 lapsed this June. Collection continues anyway under a court certification good through March 2027. Somehow, even though the statute expired, the spying did not.
- THE ANTI-DRUG ABUSE ACT, 1986. The fear was crack. Len Bias died in June; the bill was law by October. It punished crack a hundred times more harshly than powder cocaine, ignoring that Bias died of powder. Before the law, federal drug sentences for Black defendants ran 11% longer than for whites. Four years later, 49%. Congress cut the ratio to 18-to-1 in 2010. It is still on the books.
These are three of the biggest among hundreds of examples, large and small, but the pattern never changes. The fear is vivid, the benefit is promised, and the cost is diffused, delayed, and dumped on somebody with no lobby — pain patients, schoolkids, defendants, soldiers, anyone with a phone. The law almost never goes away. At best, it gets refurbished, and appears somewhere else under a new name.
The Way Out Is Through Liberty
None of this is an accident. When power is concentrated at the top, every election becomes a fight over who controls it, and, at those stakes, fear is the cheapest fuel available. Each party has to convince you the other is the monster. The alternative — admitting they are both fighting to run the same machine — would cause us to question the existence of the machine itself.
You cannot vote your way out of that by picking the enemy of the scarier monster. The only exit is a smaller machine, so it matters less who holds the keys. If Washington could not read your messages, ban your stove, close your kid’s school, or decide which powder sends you away for a decade, you would not lie awake over who won on Tuesday.
That is the libertarian bargain, and yes, it is the scary one. You run your life, your neighbor runs his, nobody needs a permission slip. More responsibility for yourself, less control over everyone else. And nobody gets to build the cage the next guy in charge will lock you in.
But it’s also the beautiful one. You get to run your life, your neighbor gets to run hers, and no one can deny anyone else a permission slip.
Maher asked us to let the kids roam the neighborhood after dark for one night. My ask is bigger. Stop letting fear write the rules for the other 364. Turn on the light and look under the bed. Most of the monsters are smaller than advertised. The one we keep feeding to protect us from them is not.
Rob Yates is the Communications Director for the Libertarian Party