Politics & Power Quote by Michael Badnarik

Badnarik’s line is a libertarian judo throw: it takes the language of “offense,” usually deployed to justify restriction, and flips it into an argument against state paternalism. The bite is in the inversion. If you’re looking for something to be offended by, he suggests, start with the idea that government gets to curate your mind like a children’s menu.

“Government tells me what I can and cannot watch” is pointedly domestic and ordinary. He’s not arguing abstract First Amendment doctrine; he’s talking about the living-room boundary where politics tries to feel like parenting. That’s the subtext: censorship doesn’t arrive as a jackboot, it arrives as “decency,” “protecting kids,” “harmful content,” or a regulator’s gentle hand on the remote.

Then comes the kicker: “Censor yourself.” It’s both a command and a challenge. Badnarik isn’t pretending media can’t be corrosive; he’s relocating responsibility from institutions to individuals. The intent is to make self-governance the moral high ground and government governance the moral trespass.

Context matters. Badnarik, a Libertarian Party figure who ran for president in 2004, was speaking into an early-2000s culture war ecosystem: FCC crackdowns after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction,” post-9/11 security expansion, and recurring fights over “indecency” on TV and the internet. His rhetoric cashes in on a period when many Americans felt the state was growing in both surveillance and sermonizing. The line works because it’s not polite; it dares the listener to accept adulthood as a political stance.