Dear C4SS Supporters,

It’s been a great month at the Center!

In February, I made 37,311 submissions of op-eds by our authors to 2,588 media outlets worldwide. That’s a little off my current goal of 40,000 submissions, but not for lack of content. It’s just that most of our op-eds were “US-centric” rather than of global interest. I’ll be encouraging our authors to cast a wider net across those imaginary lines that politicians draw on the ground to look for commentary topics.

My usual goal (for the last year or so) for pickups and mentions is 50. Last month we hit 60. This month, 70!

Of those, 68 were pickups of our material by “mainstream” or popular political media. The other two were mentions on Bloomberg — per Alexa, the 345th most popular web site in the world and ranked 135th most popular in the US — by David Weigel, who covered the 2015 International Students for Liberty Conference: “Edward Snowden and Ron Paul Kick Off Libertarian Student Conference With a Little Kerfuffle About Russia,” and “Bow Ties and Slam Poetry: This Is Libertarianism in 2015.”

Of course there’s been some controversy about the presence and actions of people associated (and in some cases not associated) with C4SS at that conference. If you haven’t read all about it yet and want to, Google is your friend.

I tend to focus my activities at C4SS on audiences outside the movement, so I’m not going to opine here on the details of the intra-movement arguments about this. But what strikes me about the whole thing is the old saying attributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

We just got name-checked in major media as libertarian thought leaders, at least among the student activist crowd, and the follow-up ruckus hasn’t been humorous. So to the extent that left market anarchism is competing with other schools of thought for mindshare both within the libertarian movement and outside it, it looks like we’re at the “fight” stage.  And to the extent that that second article reflects the views and interests of younger libertarians,  it looks like we’re winning the fight for the minds of the movement’s next generation (who will be the ones taking libertarian ideas out into the world at large for the next 50 years or so).

So, like I said, great month. With your support, we are shifting the debate both inside and outside the movement. And with your support, we’ll continue to do so.

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society