John Clifton - Libertarian for Governor, New York

National LP | NY LP

Short Autobiography

I am a 76 year old former self-declared liberal who discovered fifteen years ago that the name libertarian better characterizes my long held political values. My values have not changed; only the label I put upon myself has changed.

I believe there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who also apply to themselves incorrect political labels. It is mainly such people to whom I plan to address my remarks during the six months ahead.

I was born and raised in York, Pennsylvania, and was graduated from York High School. I rode a Harvard scholarship into a new life, and watched the psychic distance behind me lengthen and grow strange. My first wife and I entered medical school together. She became a physician, while I – a loose cannon in the mid Fifties – wound up teaching high school physics and chemistry in East Cleveland for two years before entering graduate school at the University of Washington. Eventually I earned a Ph.D. in mathematics.

I taught in colleges and universities since 1958, lived for short periods in Canada and in Mexico, traveled throughout the Lower Forty Eight states and resided in eleven of them. I lived for five years in Brazil, and participated there in the graduate program in mathematics of Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Florianopolis. I return to Florianopolis every two years in order to maintain my resident visa there and to work with my former thesis students who have, in the interim, become professors and deans and university presidents, and all of whom are very kind to me during my periodic visits among them.

I have published several short stories and a few dozen poems and many political essays. I have written several novels, and have not sought to publish any of them. But, thirty research articles in combinatorial algebra, elementary number theory, probability, and graph theory bear my name in the international mathematical literature.

By instinct I am a radical. That is, I am a fairly original social thinker with a low tolerance for subtleties and intrigues. Thus I have been an initially isolated advocate of a number of causes which, after one or two decades, became reality, sometimes to my chagrin.

I was one of America’s first hippies, years before that term existed. From 1948 on, I have opposed censorship of all sorts, I have advocated for sexual and reproductive liberty, I have spoken for the rights of people to choose sexual partners of whatever gender they preferred, and I have participated in the movement for racial equality. Since 1960 I have been a proponent of drug legalization. From 1964 on, I actively opposed the Vietnam War. Since my arrival in NYState in 1983, I have written and spoken for the individual right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, and our constitutional republic.

In 1993, two days after the BATF assaulted the Mount Carmel Center in Waco, Texas, I was convinced by my intensive email correspondence that the attack was evil, and that mass murder would be its ultimate outcome. I came close to taking leave of my job here in New Paltz to join the unfortunately tiny protest against the FBI’s siege against the Branch Davidians. The Davidian massacre, and the fraudulent and largely hidden trial of the few Davidians who survived, galvanized my reaction against what I came to perceive as incipient police state totalitarianism on American soil.

Since about 1985 I have struggled to induce the drug legalization movement and the gun-rights movement to recognize their common enemy in the state’s usurpation of unconstitutional power over the individual citizen. I argued for them to join forces. For decades, cultural differences between gun owners and social liberals impeded their making the common front I called for against tyranny. But now the ice may at last be breaking, and a hopeful union of political forces may ensue.

The Libertarian Party is the natural nexus for that union.

The focus of my campaign’s effort will be on restoring the Bill of Rights as an effective limitation upon the excessive actions, the growth, and the limitless funding of the bureaucracy that rules our country.

The Second Amendment is not the only portion of the Bill of Rights which the drug war causes to be violated. Governmental attacks on American citizens are not the only violent evils linked to it. Citizens’ earnings are confiscated, their liberties are trampled, their choices are curtailed, and their fear and dependency upon the federal megalarchy is augmented.

The same entity that increasingly oppresses its citizens at home also carries violence into countries around the world. Thus it invites violent retribution into our homeland from aggrieved foreigners. For, power not only corrupts; it breeds hubris. In hubris our arms-heavy rulers initiated international aggression. That aggression, carried by our armies across the seas, returns to assault us where we live.

In 1998, when Chris Garvey was the LPNY’s candidate for Governor, I served as his lieutenant gubernatorial running mate. I campaigned hard, but I found that most of the media people wanted to talk with the gubernatorial candidate, and not with his sidekick.

As once again the LPNY candidate for the Lt. Governor, I am delighted that this time I am allowed my own voice. There has already been some reasonable attention to my campaign in the media, and I expect a great deal more in the months ahead, because my message offers voters a distinct and unique option.

For more than a decade I have been a faithful worker for the Libertarian Party – consistently one of its more productive unpaid collectors of nominating petition signatures. Now I am happy to have my own shot at serious campaigning about issues which I myself consider important.

Whereas the launching-pad issue of my campaign is the war on drugs, I intend to relate this war on the people to other vicious and cynical and absurd wars wherewith the health of the state is maintained at the expense of our citizenry. My central issue is: the abuse of power via incessant violations of that intended bulwark against such abuse; namely, the United States Constitution.

I have four daughters, ranging in age from 26 to 46, and a son of 23. Three fine ladies have been the mothers of my five children. My eldest daughter is the mother of my eight-year-old granddaughter, and my youngest daughter is the mother of my one-year-old grandson.

I read copiously, accompany my joyous dog by the Wallkill River, socialize and work with friends and colleagues and students, captain our New Paltz Pistol Team, play occasional chess, watch many movies and delight in HBO. I hike the glorious landscape in and around New Paltz. My life has been blessed. I love the people and other creatures who surround me, and I cherish the memories of those dear ones, both living and dead, who have passed out of my life.

Thus far my campaign has been a source of pleasure and satisfaction. With help from friends and compatriots, I hope to awaken a significant political awareness in the months ahead.

If you are among those who wish to make a contribution or assist me in my campaign efforts Click Here, and thank you for joining me in my fight to restore individual liberty and personal responsibility.