I attended CPAC in 2010 and worked the Campaign for Liberty (who managed to get me in free) table. C4L’s main selling point were three anti-Abraham Lincoln books. That subject outnumbered books on the Federal Reserve, the War on Terror or Alexander Hamilton. The next year, blatant white supremacists came out unapologetically. This is not coincidence.

Given that, I could see myself voting for Gary Johnson. Johnson is a West Coast guy, and while the West Coast isn’t a racist free zone (is anywhere?), the bigotry is not reminiscent of a brutal historical institution like Jim Crow, slavery, segregation or the Ku Klux Klan. Johnson is absolutely on the right side of immigration, seeing immigrants from Latin America not as a bain on our existence but as a boon to our economy and cultural fabric, as is he a firm opponent of the war on drugs. The worst complaints about him that I’ve heard have been typical liberal gripes about his spending policies (he would advocate a drastic cut in many programs) but he doesn’t have the creepy Confederate flirtations of Paul and his sons.