Category Archives: Libertarian

With pressure mounting from the global Black Lives Matter protest movement, Boris Johnson has put forward his adviser Munira Mirza to lead a new commission on racial inequality. However, her appointment undermines the commission before it has even started. Mirza has previously expressed scepticism about the existence of institutional racism in the justice system and has suggested that anti-racist lobbyists and activists have corroded public trust. She has also suggested that Britain does not have a serious problem with racism. This comes as no surprise: Mirza has long been associated with Spiked, an online magazine increasingly well known for its contrarian takes on current events and for its writers popping up in various places across the media landscape with rightwing views.

Infamous for its right-libertarian and iconoclastic style, Spiked has gained notoriety for arguing against numerous progressive positions, but using a rhetorical style indebted to its earlier incarnation as a Trotskyist group in the 1980s-90s, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). With a combative tone, the magazines writers have routinely sought to dismiss many political actions as not dealing with the real issues and put forward their own solutions, which often correlate with a populist right position. Previously dismissed as a fringe group on the outer limits of political discourse, more recently Spiked has become an influential force in shifting the Overton window to the right in the UK.

To understand how it has come to occupy this space and its rhetorical style, particularly concerning issues of race and racism, it is worth looking at the long road from the RCP to Spiked, via the journal Living Marxism (later titled LM). The RCP began in 1977 under the leadership of the sociologist Frank Furedi, and presented itself as the true vanguard of the British working class. The party made a name for itself for taking positions that rankled with others on the left. Among theses were enthusiastic support for the armed struggle in Northern Ireland and calling for a national ballot during the 1984-5 miners strike. Party members also criticised gay activists and were accused of undermining the message of safe sex during the HIV/Aids crisis.

At the end of the cold war, the RCP pronounced that class-based politics was a dead end, with ideas now being the key battleground. The party eventually dissolved in 1997, which left Living Marxism as the primary vehicle for its former cadre. It acted as a halfway house for former leftwing activists now increasingly interested in libertarianism. The journal itself was wound up in 2000 after losing a libel case against ITN over claims made about reporting during the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

Its successor was Spiked, under the helm of the former LM editor Mick Hume and involving many prominent RCP members. At the same time, many of the same members were involved in establishing the thinktank the Institute of Ideas, led by Claire Fox, a former RCP member and most recently an MEP for the Brexit party. This is where Mirza entered the orbit of Spiked and its various offshoots, writing semi-regular pieces for the magazine since 2001.

The crossover of many of these individuals between the journal, the website, the thinktank and other endeavours has been referred to as the LM network. It has gained attention not just because many of its members occupy a significant media and political profile, but also for the trajectory of its cohort from the far left to the hard right. While the story of former leftwingers becoming rightwingers is not new, the fact that the leadership of the RCP seemed to transition en masse makes it a compelling story. Some commentators have suggested that this is a coordinated case of entryism (although the end goal of this is unclear). But it is more likely that the politics and activities of the network have a certain appeal (and notoriety), which has seen a number of former members be willing to shift with the changing agenda, from revolutionary communism to a mixture of contrarianism and right libertarianism. In many ways, this owes something to the Leninism of the former RCP and an ideological coherence, even in the absence of the vanguard of the party.

In recent years, Spiked has been at the forefront of perpetuating the idea of the free-speech crisis on university campuses and elsewhere. Some at the magazine also disagree with laws against racial discrimination (particularly against racist speech) and with the Equality and Human Rights Commission, viewing both as overreach by the state into peoples lives. This approach to racism, free speech and the state are intertwined, and can be traced back to the days of the RCP.

Throughout the 1980s, some at the magazine opposed the no platforming of fascists and racists, stemming from an objection to state bans and censorship. Furthermore, use of racial discrimination legislation was seen as a call for state intervention in working-class and migrant communities. In reality, this meant that while the RCP (and its front, Workers Against Racism, or WAR) were involved in a number of anti-racist campaigns, it denigrated the work being done by other activist groups. One of the constant tropes of the RCP/WAR was to argue that while the rest of the left concentrated their efforts in one area, they really should be concentrating in another (which coincidentally was where the RCP dedicated their attention). This notion that everybody else is wrong and just tilting at windmills persists in the writings of Spiked today.

Actions against non-state racism in the 1990s, such as those by anti-fascists against the British National party, were often dismissed or framed as attacks on the legitimate concerns of the (white) British working class. The end point of this rhetorical stance has seen a writer in Spiked dismiss the threat of the far right, suggesting that the BNP could appear moderate and level-headed when compared with the anti-fascist left; and the magazine publish an article titled The Myth of Bigoted Britain. Simultaneously, while its predecessor had abandoned class politics in favour of ideas in the 1990s, Spiked has also criticised the rise of identity politics as pure ideology and an attempt to divide the working class.

These preoccupations have proven to be well suited to a moment in which the right has reduced racism to a component of a culture war being waged by the woke left. Mirzas previous comments on Spiked about institutional racism, diversity and multiculturalism reveal the mindset in which this new proposed commission on racial inequalities has been cast. They also reveal how the fixations of a contrarian, right-leaning, libertarian website, established by disillusioned leftists, has become part of the mainstream discourse in the UK.

Evan Smith is a research fellow in history at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. He is the author of No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech

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How a fringe sect from the 1980s influenced No 10's attitude to racism - The Guardian

George Floyd's death at the hands of the Minneapolis police has sparked nationwide protests against police brutality. Anew consensus is forming around the urgent need for criminal justice reform.

Six years ago, after the police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, just 43 percent of Americans believed that such incidents indicated a systemic problem. Now, though police killings have remained level since 2014, 69 percent of Americans agree that "the killing of Floyd represents a broader problem within law enforcement."

To better understand this shift and to get a sense of what changes would be most effective, Nick Gillespie sat down withWashington Post opinion writer Radley Balko, a former Reason reporter who covers police abuse, the drug war, and criminal justice reform. His Reason coverage of Cory Maye, a black man in Mississippi put on death row for killing a police officer during a no-knock raid, helped bring about Maye's acquittal, and his books Rise of The Warrior Cop and The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist document widespread problems with law enforcement, expert testimony, and media coverage of crime.

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Radley Balko on George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the Libertarian Case for Criminal Justice Reform - Reason

In a competitive election, critics of third-party candidates often regard them as spoilers, who may tip a close election to the candidate most ideologically divergent from them by drawing away votes from the candidate they are ideologically closer to.

Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis Party Chairman Chris Wright strongly disagrees with the characterization. He says that both major parties have failed to deliver on important issues and that by voting for one of them, voters are enabling the status quo to continue.

We havent spoiled the economy, social policies or the environment, he said. They like to call us spoilers because they feel they have an entitlement to power.

While DFL candidates might seem to be more in danger of losing some of their supporters to a pro-marijuana Party candidate, Gustavus Adolphus College Professor Chris Gilbert said its not that clear cut.

Gilbert said that while legalizing marijuana is traditionally seen as a liberal issue, and enjoys strong backing from young voters, who lean DFL in general, many libertarian-minded voters who hold right-leaning views on other issues support it as well.

According to the Star-Tribune/MPR News Minnesota poll, support for recreational marijuana is strongest among DFLers, with 59% expressing support. But with support from 50% of Independent voters and 42% of Republicans, it doesn't break down as neatly along party lines as many other issues.

Carleton College Professor Melanie Freeze said shes studied the spoiler issue extensively and the evidence is far from clear cut. While she said that third parties can tip an extraordinarily close election, she said their impact is often less direct.

Its hard to find evidence of the spoiler effect, she said. (Third parties) activate people who wouldnt have come out to vote and pull from both candidates.

On the other hand, young voters tend to be the strongest demographic of support for third parties, recreational marijuana and DFL candidates. Thus, many Republicans are expecting that the DFL side is more likely to take a hit if they do well.

Rice County Republican Party Chair Kathy Dodds said that she expects the district's conservative voters to largely eschew pro-marijuana candidates. Dodds said that many Rice County Republicans are comfortable with the party's skepticism towards recreational marijuana.

"I don't think it will hurt the Republicans so much, but I think there are a lot of liberals that want marijuana legislation to pass and they would consider voting for the third party," she said.

Dodds noted that while Republicans have expressed discomfort with recreational marijuana, many have also voiced support for medical marijuana. However, attempts to relax the state's restrictive medical marijuana laws have faced resistance from Republicans.

Since the medical marijuana program launched in 2015, the state has banned sale of the raw cannabis flower, only allowing marijuana extract to be sold in liquid, pill or vaporized form, which medical marijuana advocates say has driven up costs while limiting treatment options. An attempt by the DFL-controlled House to remove this ban was included in the state's healthcare omnibus bill. However, Senate Republicans blocked the provision, siding with advocacy organizations skeptical of marijuana who say the ban is needed to prevent smoking.

By simply being on the ballot, third parties can raise attention to certain issues and pressure candidates. Freeze noted that while a variety of factors are at work, DFLers have become increasingly vocal about the issue since both pro-marijuana parties achieved major party status.

Still, both Gilbert and Freeze agreed that both pro-marijuana parties are extremely unlikely to win seats. Even during the height of its popularity, the Reform/Independence Party of former Gov. Jesse Ventura rarely won more than 10% of the vote, Freeze said.

Last year, DFL House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler launched a listening tour, traveling the state to get feedback from residents across Minnesota on the issue. He subsequently introduced a bill in the legislature that would legalize it.

Similarly, Gov. Tim Walz ordered state agencies to prepare for the legalization of marijuana. However, the State Senate remains under Republican control, and has remained firmly opposed to marijuana legalization.

Scrambling

While both pro-marijuana parties are enjoying unprecedented levels of support, Minnesotas other minor parties have been left scrambling to maintain a presence on Minnesota ballots at all.

Currently, the state has three official minor parties. Any party which achieves more than 1% of the vote in a statewide election is granted minor party status for the next two elections, which brings several benefits.

Under that program, Minnesotans can make a contribution of up to $50 to a recognized major or minor party and receive a full refund. Currently, the Green Party, Libertarian Party and Independence-Alliance Party qualify as minor parties.

The Independence-Alliance Party, once known as the Minnesota Reform Party, was the party of Ventura and enjoyed major party status for 20 years. It lost that after failing to reach 5% in any statewide race in the 2014 elections.

With COVID-19 making it impossible to gather signatures for ballot access through face to face voter contact, the Libertarians, Greens, Independence Alliance Party and Veterans Party of Minnesota successfully lobbied for changes allowing signatures to be gathered electronically.

When it comes to getting on the ballot in local races, Libertarian Party Chairman Chris Holbrook said that electronic signature gathering has proved next to useless, because under state law signatures to get on the ballot in a local race must be gathered from residents of the district.

While signatures of residents living in a certain area could easily be gathered by going door to door, Holbrook said its nearly impossible to do that electronically. With most email addresses private, its exceptionally hard to electronically send a petition to a large number of people in a certain neighborhood. As a result, very few minor party candidates successfully managed to make it on to the ballot for Congress or state Legislature. In an attempt to gain more time, the four parties filed a lawsuit seeking additional time for signature gathering.

The Secretary of States Office fought them and court, arguing that as the minor parties had received other accommodations, including permission to gather signatures electronically, additional time should not be needed.

The minor parties lost their initial case, though appeals are ongoing. Holbrook noted that in a number of other states, courts have provided additional relief to make it easier for minor parties to get on the ballot.

Nominating petitions to get presidential candidates on the ballot are ongoing, and are not due until August. Last week, Minnesota Libertarians started circulating a ballot petition to get its candidates, Jo Jorgensen and Jeremy "Spike" Lee, onto the November ballot.

Holbrook said that while the Libertarian Party may not have ballot access, a number of Libertarians and libertarian-leaning candidates have taken advantage of the official party status held by the two pro-marijuana parties to run under their banner.

In general, he said that Minnesotas third parties have had warm relations and offered each other support. In addition, he noted that the Libertarian Party has strongly advocated for legalization of marijuana and an end to the War on Drugs since its inception.

Aided by the historic unpopularity of major party candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, third parties enjoyed a historic rise in support. The Libertarian ticket performed the best, winning about 3.8% in Minnesota and 3.3% nationwide.

Third parties tend to do better when they name someone who has some political resume, and that usually means someone who served for one of the major parties, he said.

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While pro-marijuana parties thrive, other minor parties struggle - Southernminn.com

S ROSS suggests that I should have spoken earlier with regard to Matt Hancocks handling of Covid-19, (HAS June 13).

I am not an expert in any of these matters, but I do read the newspapers and listen to the TV.

There has been much criticism of the slowness of the Governments decisions and particularly of the timing of their moves.

The WHO were warning in January that extreme measures were necessary and countries which responded quickly were rewarded with much lower rates of infection and death.

We do not know the details of the advice from SAGE and particularly when it was given, but many experts, independent of SAGE, who have been willing to speak out have acknowledged that the Government should have acted much sooner and that thousands of lives could have been saved.

It has been suggested that the libertarian beliefs of Boris Johnson, not to impose restrictions on people until they were absolutely necessary, was the reason for the delays, with their disastrous consequences and the staggering death rate.

Eric Gendle, Nunthorpe, Middlesbrough.

Originally posted here:

Letters: 'It is suggested that Boris's Libertarian beliefs were the reasons for delayed Lockdown' - The Northern Echo

Aimee Stephens gave one of her final televised interviews in January of this year, wearing a tasteful pantsuit, sitting next to her wife, explaining to the Today show how shed once stood in her backyard contemplating suicide because she couldnt bear to live as a closeted transgender woman.

But I realized I couldnt go through with it, she said. I was important enough to keep going.

So she came out, in 2013. She wrote a letter to her colleagues at a Michigan funeral home explaining that she would now be using a different name and wearing different clothes. It was difficult, but she did it, and the funeral home fired her because of it, and she sued.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Stephens dismissal seven years ago had been unconstitutional. Six of nine justices agreed that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred discrimination because of sex, should also protect LGBTQ employees.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, wrote the courts majority opinion. Those of us who dont make a habit of reading Supreme Court opinions might have skipped it in favor of skimming the news headlines. I recommend wading into the decision itself, though. Its history, after all. Its good to see how many citations and addendums go into the documents that will inform our rights as citizens.

One of the opinions repeated arguments is that the issue of sex discrimination cannot be viewed only as the equal treatment of men and women as classes, but as the rights of individual men, individual women, individual humans. An employer who has a blanket ban on hiring both lesbians and gay men might be technically treating women and men equally, but this perverse version of equality means nothing to the individual employee who has lost his job for bringing his husband to the company picnic.

An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex, Gorsuch wrote.

Gorsuch has a libertarian bent, and constitutional scholars might argue this is where the focus on the individual comes from. But in the opinion it has a more poetic effect: There is law, and there are policies, and there are companies and the jigsaw puzzle of compliance and theres a rope-ladder of courts, District to Supreme, made up of judges who might, like Samuel Alito, write a catty dissent invoking pirate ships and the ghost of Antonin Scalia, or who might, like Gorsuch, agree that the law means Aimee Stephens deserves to keep her job.

And then, there are the individuals. The Aimees. The human beings whose lives give meaning to the law, and test whether something is merely legal, or actually just.

Aimee Stephens didnt get to reclaim her job. She died of kidney failure last month.

The case outlived her, just as it had outlived Don Zarda, another plaintiff in Mondays decision. He was a sky diving instructor. Back in 2010, preparing for a tandem jump, he reassured a nervous female customer that he was gay, and then he was fired, and then he sued.

He died in 2014, in a base-jumping accident. It was four years after hed lost his livelihood, but six years before the Supreme Court would finally decide that he shouldnt have. He would just be beyond excited, his mother, Shirley, told the New York Post of the courts decision.

Aimee and Don were not trying to do anything but exist. They died while the legal system was still treating their existence as if it were a matter of philosophical debate. Thats one of the struggles of America, though. We have devils advocate debates, and we have provocative op-eds, and majority and minority opinions, and meanwhile our existential questions are someone elses actual existence.

Seven years of waiting. In the life of the law, its a blink. In the life of an individual, its an eternity.

Aimee Stephens had been open about her health struggles. Those who followed her story could see it declining in interview after interview: hair turning from auburn to white, wrinkles papering her skin, the eventual use of a wheelchair.

Year after year, her case meandered through a methodical legal system motions, objections, filings and appendixes and Stephens continued to wait. Because she was important enough to keep going. And because, when the countrys moral dilemma is your very own life, you dont have any choice but to keep living it.

In that same Today show interview, Stephens acknowledged the vast implications of her case. It is my life, but its also a lot of other peoples lives, she said.

Mondays ruling honored her as a hero. It came too late to honor her as a human.

Monica Hesse is a columnist for the Washington Posts Style section who frequently writes about gender and its impact on society.

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OPINION EXCHANGE | At the center of that Supreme Court ruling were people - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Two white guys in their 70s. Thats the best the two-party system has offered to represent the U.S.

Dr. Joanne Jorgensen believes this is the best time to be a third-party candidate. And the best candidate might just be a woman not in her 70s, which she is both.

Dr. Jo is the Libertarian Partys 2020 presidential candidate. And she says, for those who think voting third-party is, essentially, like voting for Donald Trump, theyre wrong.

History shows that we typically take from both sides equally, Jorgensen said on La Crosse Talk PM. However, we do take more votes from independents or people who havent voted. Thats who we take most of our votes from. People are so fed up.

She added thats pretty much how we got Trump in the first place.

It was a bunch of people who said, Were fed up with the professional politicians, we want an outsider, but then we get Trump, who promises us smaller government, but gives us bigger government, Jorgensen said. He was supposed to get rid of the deficit, but its just getting bigger.

Part of Jorgensens platform is, of course, ending government debt, but also to get the U.S. out of foreign wars and transition the world not just the U.S. away from coal and oil and toward nuclear power.

On that note, Jorgensen said that the new tech surrounding nuclear is what environmentalists should be pushing over green energy options, like wind and solar.

If they were efficient, if they were a good option, then people would have invested their own money in it to make a killing, Jorgensen said. If there were profits to be made, you know that the greedy capitalist would have done it, right? And I say that facetiously.

Thats the good part of the free-market system, is that the dollars go to the good market choices.

Green energy, however, at its most efficient, might not make capitalists any money, however, unless they figured out a way to charge to use the sun or command the wind.

Jorgensen also touched on income inequality, which she said theres not a problem at the top.

Whenever we have progress, she said, whenever we have technology and people working to better their lives we have a wealth gap, because there are opportunities that some people make that others, either choose not to or whatever.

Jorgensen was very much against anything having to do with a wealth tax, as that word, tax, is not anything Libertarians stand for. The problems, to her, with poverty has been the governments fault.

Her solutions to end poverty hover around eliminating government policies and regulations that, she says, drive up costs for anything from housing to health care to new businesses.

Jorgensen lays out some of the issues on her campaign website taxes, health care, social security, among others but notes that they are just brief overviews.

Originally posted here:

The other Jo, wants your 2020 vote, if youre fed up with the two-party system or if youre not - WIZM NEWS

After the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, America is finally embracing police reform. As is so often the case in matters of personal freedom, libertarians were here long before mainstream political counterparts and fought a frequently lonely battle against abusive government power. Now, just as they did with same-sex relationships, drug reform, and the ongoing battle against the surveillance state, people across the political spectrum seem ready to concede that a little more freedom could be a good thing. If the effort succeeds, we may not get the creditnewly converted reformers are already trying to separate the cause from its long-time promoters but at least we'll live in a better world.

"Where are the libertarians?" is such a knee-jerk cry after incidents of police brutality that it's safe to assume that it's a matter of bad faith rather than of ignorance. Having left the issue on the back burner for so long, some people don't want to admit that we were there ahead of them. Unfortunately, when it comes to police misconduct, we've been way ahead of them.

"Of the three political alternatives, a free economy, a mixed economy, a totalitarian state, only one provides the economic, political, and cultural context in which systematic police brutality cannot be a problem: a free society," wrote Reason founder Lanny Friedlander in a very '60s-ish 1969 essay. "The police of a free society, engaging in retaliatory force only, enforcing laws of a defensive nature only, would be bound by the same laws they enforced, and would stand fully accountable for their actions."

Going beyond window-dressing, libertarians favor minimizing opportunities for police to act against the public and making any interactions as non-confrontational as possible.

In 1971, the fledgling Libertarian Party (L.P.) called for "the repeal of all 'crimes without victims' now incorporated in federal and state laws," such as the prohibitions on drug use that have driven so much of the escalation in aggressive police tactics. The same platform declared itself opposed to "so-called 'no-knock laws'" of the sort that got Breonna Taylor killed by cops this year when they crashed through her door at night, unannounced, looking for illegal drugs.

In cases of police misconduct, libertarians favor holding government agencies and their employees accountable for their actions.

"We support full restitution for all loss suffered by persons arrested, indicted, tried, imprisoned, or otherwise injured in the course of criminal proceedings against them which do not result in their conviction," the L.P. proposed in 1976. "Law enforcement agencies should be liable for this restitution unless malfeasance of the officials involved is proven, in which case they should be personally liable."

That police agencies too often foster abusive conduct was no secret to libertarians long before the Minneapolis Police Department failed to implement reforms that might have saved George Floyd's life.

"When a rookie Houston patrolman named Alan Nichols did the unthinkable and reported three fellow officers for the vicious beating of a black prisoner, police internal-affairs investigators tried to have him fired, the chief publicly reprimanded him, and other police ostracized him," Glenn Garvin wrote in Inquiry, a Cato Institute publication, in 1979 coverage of violent and racially charged policing in Texas.

"Civil libertarians need to recognize that federal prosecution of law-enforcement officers who use excessive force often provides the only check on such unrestrained state power," Dirk G. Roggeveen urged in the pages of Reason as Americans reacted to the 1991 police beating of Rodney King.

Through these years, police not only misbehaved but also came to act like an occupying army lording it over a hostile populace.

Seattle's "police force has spied on local political activists for more than 20 years," Roxanne Park warned in Inquiry in 1978. "The intelligence abuses discovered in Seattle are 'typical examples' of the practices of urban police departments."

"Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work," Radley Balko cautioned for the Cato Institute in 2006. He expanded his argument in his 2013 book, Rise of the Warrior Cop.

Now, after decades of manifestos, journalism, research, and advocacy, America seems to agree with libertarians. "Americans by a 2-to-1 margin are more troubled by the actions of police in the killing of George Floyd than by violence at some protests," the Wall Street Journal reports from survey results. That just may result in policy changes.

Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, the only Libertarian in Congress, literally wrote the bill that would eliminate qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it so difficult to hold police accountable for their bad behavior unless courts in the same jurisdiction have already ruled that such conduct is wrong.

If Congress doesn't rise to the occasion, the Supreme Court could. Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor both look eager to revisit the mess the court created when it invented qualified immunity.

No-knock raids, which so often end in tragedy when police kick-in the wrong door, or when suddenly awakened residents try to defend against intruders, are also getting a second look. Louisville, Kentucky is considering banning such warrants, a half-century after the Libertarian Party proposed exactly that.

City council members in Minneapolis are even talking about disbanding the police department amidst a national, though ill-defined, movement to "defund police." Whether or not that's an improvement depends on what comes next. Retaining harsh enforcement by another name will continue the abuses, the intrusiveness, and the disproportionate use of state violence against disfavored communities under nothing more than different branding.

Maybe that's why it's taken so long for people to seriously consider police reform, and why they're so resistant to giving libertarians credit on the issue. Real change requires not just dropping the word "police" but reducing the opportunity for government agents to use violence against the public. That means fewer laws to be enforced and less intrusive enforcement of those laws. That's a hard pill to swallow for ideologues who are committed to forcing people to do what they don't want to do, or to forcibly stopping them from exercising their own preferences.

Libertarians should be happy that Americans are ready to discuss police reform. But we'll have to see if the country is actually prepared for less policing.

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'Where Are Libertarians on Police Reform?' Right Where We've Always Been. - Reason

Last Tuesday, I tweeted out a photo of a truck parked in downtown Washington, DC, not far from the White House and the protests against police brutality and the killing of George Floyd that had engulfed the city.

It was the bumper stickers on the back of the Toyota Tacoma that made me do it. They showed what seemed to be a political evolution of sorts, mirroring one that many Americans may be having in 2020: from a 2000 sticker for John McCains failed presidential campaign to a sticker supporting Mitt Romneys candidacy in 2012 to ones supportive of then-Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson in 2016 and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2020.

And in the middle, a handwritten sign stating Black Lives Matter.

I had a lot of questions about this truck, some simple: Whose truck was it? Was the BLM-supportive sign real or just put there to fend off possible thieves? And some not so simple how did this person get to this place? How did their politics change over time, and why? Or did they?

This week, 26-year-old Nathan, the owner of the truck, gave me the answers.

Nathan is a Korean-American self-described libertarian-leaning Republican who has never been a fan of the two-party system. But President Donald Trump was something of a breaking point for him.

I have pretty much felt politically homeless since 2016, he told me. Its been fucking internal screaming for almost four years.

Hes a Texas-born 2016 Virginia Military Institute graduate whose job search in Washington has been stymied by the coronavirus pandemic. He had never attended a street protest before last week, but he told me that being in Lafayette Park when Park Police used tear gas and rubber bullets against protesters radicalized him. I just had to fucking show up after that, he told me.

Now hes attending anti-police brutality protests outside the White House every day. Wearing a hard hat emblazoned with quotes from Mahatma Gandhi and Mr. Rogers, he carries a broom and dustpan and tidies the streets as he walks, because he wanted his form of protest to be a peaceful contribution.

We spoke on Saturday before he headed back to the White House to protest. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Nathans last name has been withheld to protect his privacy.

I moved around a lot. Virginia is the longest Ive lived anywhere. My story: born in Plano, Texas, near Dallas, and I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, [then] Seattle, Hong Kong, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

I wanted to join the military. So I asked my parents to send me to a military high school to see if military college was something I could hack. I liked it. And then I went to the Virginia Military Institute. My life goal was to be an infantry officer, a cavalry scout officer, or an armor officer so, like, a guy in a tank.

[I got a] medical disqualification and never got to serve. I worked for [a transport company] in Pennsylvania; life sucked, hated that. Quit that job, went to get my shit together in Oregon, worked in a restaurant. I was just cleaning dishes, cleaning tables. [At the time I thought,] I got a degree from, I thought, a fairly reputable institution, now Im doing this. I needed a calling.

I was always a libertarian-leaning Republican, still consider myself a Republican fighting within [the party]. So the son of a bitch I voted for president in 2016 [former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson] decided to run for Senate. I was willing to just go for something that I thought had meaning. And that felt like that was doing something worth doing. I was willing to go for free and just live off my savings from [the transport company]. But I got hired by an organization called Young Americans for Liberty, went out, knocked on doors, made a positive impression. A few months later, they invited me back working full time.

I had a blast, went, Im going to try Congress. I dont think Im gonna reveal who I worked for, but I ended up being on the Hill for a while [before I was] let go. And then two weeks later, coronavirus hit the US, and every job I applied for replied back with, We are no longer hiring. I did some side hustles online, managed to pay rent that way. And then this all happened.

Can we stand up and look at the back of your truck? I think a lot of folks were interested in that. So you mentioned [in our Twitter messages] that John McCain was one of your heroes.

In 2008, I watched [the campaign] and I was like, I like that guy. The reason for the stickers is what I do is I just [think], who did I like all the years? Cause Im just a fan. I put them up.

I found an original Ross Perot sticker. I slapped on that one [on my old truck]. And that one was just me rebelling against a two-party system. Im a guy who happened at that point to just vote Republican. But Ill vote for a Democrat you know, who gets in shouldnt fucking matter. As far as Im concerned, Id like to see the destruction of the two-party system, frankly.

But I liked McCain, I liked his campaign against George Bush. W, you know, I didnt put him up [on my truck]. I think in terms of a compassionate person, he definitely is. But as far as Im concerned, I think he should have been impeached for the Iraq War and leading us into that.

And then Romney was your first vote.

Yeah. First vote in 2012. Him, [Paul] Ryan. Those were the kind of Republicans I really identified with.

[On Sunday, Sen. Mitt Romney marched in a protest in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. In a direct message, Nathan asked me to add how extremely proud (he is) to see my man Mitt out today.]

Bipartisanship is not a dirty word to me. [Former House Speaker John Boehner] didnt do everything right. But I liked that he was willing to try to get that grand bargain with Obama. [Some of my colleagues have debated Boehners interest in bipartisanship.]

Then [theres] 2016, when I was chairman of the College Republicans at VMI, and thats like the most conservative school you could be at. And then the moment [Donald Trump] came down that escalator and talked about, you know, hes sure some Mexican people are okay, I was like, No, Im not. I cant. I wasnt going to vote for Trump. I couldnt.

And we all know what happened. So [for 2020,] I made a custom Joe Walsh, I guess, fine sticker. I had that up for a while and he dropped out. Then there wasnt a Republican primary. I couldnt vote. I was like, I guess I can do [Joe] Biden. But for a while, I thought I was staring down the apocalyptic scenario for me and a lot of moderates, of Trump versus Bernie Sanders. And that was like my nightmare.

And thats why you were supportive of Mike Bloomberg?

I mean, stop-and-frisk, you know, theres plenty of shit I can say. I was trying to pick between shooting myself in the fucking head and shooting myself in the foot, and that was an obvious preference for me. And he [Bloomberg] had appeal; hes a moderate and a centrist. And it looked like he was going to do it until Elizabeth Warren spanked him on live TV.

I have pretty much felt politically homeless since 2016. Its been fucking internal screaming for almost four years.

Do you think that this protest has given you a chance to get some of that out or speak out in some way?

It feels nice to do something. Id tell people that if you care about shit, just bitching on Facebooks not going to change anything; go out there. I guess trying to film and getting footage was my toe into it.

But here I am now, [and] its odd. I mean, Im still, I can vote for centrist Democrats, but Im too right of center. Im definitely not progressive, but, I mean, theres always overlap. Ive always thought that the militarization of police has been a bad idea. The drug war has been catastrophic, as far as I can see. I think if states want to legalize [drugs], thats up to them. I wouldnt do it, but Id even say psychedelics should be legal now. But it was weird because when I was at VMI, to [Republicans], I was a libertarian and then I worked with libertarians, and to them I was a statist cuck. You probably get this if youve been paying attention to right-wing stuff, but every libertarian agrees on two things: that theres only one libertarian and its them.

So whats your plan for the rest of the day?

All I do is clean the streets; thats it. Thats how I choose to protest. Trying to bring that energy. Like yesterday, I filled maybe three trash bags.

Everyones self-organized; its a beautiful thing. Im not far out enough where the people are saying abolish the police, Im not there, theres a lot of places that [other protesters and I] dont overlap, but Ive always thought where theres overlap, why fight it? Which I think they should do in Congress.

So whats your plan after this, after these protests?

Ive had five-year plans. Theyve all blown up in my face. I thought success at first was just chasing a fat paycheck. But Ive found out that doing this stuff out here, interacting with people, the activist stuff, was super rewarding. This is rewarding, Ive seen. [But] Im going to start applying for work.

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Continued here:

Protests: Meet the Romney-Gary Johnson-Bloomberg voter embracing Black Lives Matter - Vox.com

On March 3, in response to reports that some Republican lawmakers favored free testing and treatments for COVID-19, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic tweeted, There are no libertarians in a pandemic. The witticism bounced all over social media during the ensuing days and weeks and with good reason, since the jab hit its target squarely on the nose.

When public safety is threatened, whether by war or disease, our dependence on government becomes immediately and viscerally obvious. There are no Centers for Disease Control in the private sector. There is no possibility of swiftly identifying the virus, and launching a crash program to develop tests, treatments, and vaccines, without massive government support for medical research. And for those tests, treatments, and vaccines to be effective, their distribution cannot be restricted by ability to pay; government must step in to ensure wide availability.

In addition, vigorous use of the governments emergency powers banning large public gatherings, temporarily shutting down schools and businesses, issuing stay-at-home orders, quarantining the sick and those exposed to them has been needed to help contain the outbreak. When a highly contagious and fatal disease can spread before its victims even show symptoms, the libertarian ethos of personal responsibility do what you want, and bear the consequences for good or ill leads not to mass flourishing but to mass death. Only the government has the power and resources to internalize the externalities of contagion and coordinate a rational response.

Despite being put on the defensive, supporters of free markets and limited government were able to respond with some fairly effective counterpunching. In the first place, the fact that certain kinds of government action are necessary under the extraordinary conditions of a public health emergency a fact freely acknowledged by many libertarians and partisans of small government does not mean that expansive government across the board is a good idea in normal times. Further, in the emergency now upon us, overweening government has contributed significantly to the scale of the pandemic here in the United States. Effective responses to the outbreak have been badly hampered by inadequate supplies of test kits and equipment, and primary responsibility for this failure rests with the Food and Drug Administration and its heavy-handed regulatory approach. A key blunder was the decision in early February to allow only the CDC to produce and conduct tests; problems with the CDCs initial test then led to weeks of disastrous delay.

Meanwhile, responding to the crisis has necessitated a string of regulatory waivers at the federal and state levels to allow doctors and nurses to work out of state, to facilitate telemedicine, to expand the scope of work that non-M.D. health professionals can do, to allow restaurants and bars to sell alcohol to takeout customers, and more. The relevant rules have been put aside temporarily as obviously dysfunctional now but perhaps that means at least some of them are dysfunctional, if less obviously, all the time?

And although emergency measures to slow transmission of the virus were clearly called for, the actual restrictions imposed were certainly not above criticism. As we have learned more about how the virus spreads, it appears that bans on outdoor activities went too far and may have been counterproductive. Where to draw the line between permitted and proscribed was never going to be an exact science in the fog of crisis, but there were plenty of cases of seemingly arbitrary distinctions (for example, one jurisdiction banned use of motorboats but not nonmotorized boats) that did nothing to advance public safety but did undermine the legitimacy of necessary restrictions.

The points scored on both sides in this back-and-forth hold profoundly important implications for the intellectual future of the political right. To begin with, the pandemic makes clear that there will always be a vital need for critical scrutiny of governments actions, and thus an important role to play for those with a skeptical view of government power and competence. Even in the middle of a public health emergency, when the case for broad government powers is overwhelming, there is no guarantee that those powers will be used wisely or effectively. The CDC and the FDA both have thousands of employees and multi-billion-dollar annual budgets; notwithstanding those considerable resources at their disposal, and the obvious importance of controlling infectious diseases to their missions, those two agencies failed in the relatively simple task of developing viral infection tests in a timely manner with a staggering cost in lives and dollars lost as a result of their incompetence.

Just because we give government the requisite authority and funding to perform some task, we cannot assume that the result will be mission accomplished. Indeed, there are sound reasons to assume otherwise. Overconfidence and the lure of technocratic control provide an ever-present temptation for governments to overreach; the lack of clear feedback signals about the effectiveness of government actions dulls incentives to recognize problems and improve performance; there is always a risk that government authority, no matter that its exercise is unquestionably called for, will be misappropriated by insiders to benefit them at the publics expense. Placing and defending limits on government, preventing and rolling back excesses, are therefore jobs that will always be with us.

But if the pandemic has shown that a critical stance toward government is always needed in formulating and evaluating policy, it has demonstrated even more forcefully the limitations and shortcomings of libertarians exclusive focus on government excess. The gravest failures in the government response to the pandemic were sins of omission, not commission not unnecessary and ill-advised interference with the private sector, but the inability to accomplish tasks for which only government is suited. Yes, at the outset of the crisis the FDA was disastrously over-restrictive in permitting labs to develop their own tests for the virus, but it is flatly risible to suggest that everything would have worked out fine if only government had gotten out of the way. Leaving aside the decades of government support for medical research that made it technologically possible to identify the virus and test for its presence in a human host, there is no way that private, profit-seeking firms would ever develop and conduct the testing, contact tracing, and isolation of the infected needed to slow the spread of the virus. Government funding and coordination are irreplaceable. Looking ahead, there is no prospect for rapid development and wide distribution of treatments and vaccines without a heavy dose of government involvement.

The pandemic produced not only a public health crisis, but an economic crisis as well the sharpest and most severe contraction of economic activity since the Great Depression. While the economic collapse was doubtless aggravated at the margins by forced business closures and stay-at-home orders, those interventions largely codified the publics spontaneous response to the uncontrolled outbreak of a highly infectious and potentially fatal disease. Its quite simply impossible to run a modern economy at anything near its potential level of output when people are afraid that going to work or going shopping might kill them or their loved ones.

Government excess, in other words, was not the fundamental problem. On the contrary, a large and activist government was all that stood between us and mass privation and suffering on a mind-boggling scale. Only government can mitigate the economic effects of the pandemic in the same way it responds to other shocks that lead to other, less drastic slumps by acting as insurer of last resort, using its taxing, spending, borrowing, and money-creating powers to sustain household spending and keep businesses afloat until resumption of something approaching normal economic activity is possible.

Unfortunately, the patchwork kludgeocracy that is the American welfare state was poorly suited to meet the challenge of the coronavirus shock. Our employment-based health insurance system left people abandoned in their hour of need as layoffs spiked into the tens of millions. The absence of any well-designed system of automatic stabilizers sent states and localities hurtling toward fiscal collapse. Many state unemployment insurance systems fell victim to antiquated software based on long-defunct programming languages while one states system was exposed as having been designed purposefully to discourage people from claiming benefits. Policymakers flailed in their efforts to extend emergency aid to businesses, forced to go through banks with improvised lending programs that too often funneled money to where it was needed least.

In the current double crisis, what has been lacking is not restraints on government power. What has been lacking shockingly, shamefully, tragically lacking is the capacity to exercise government power effectively. Of course that incapacity has been most obvious at the top, with the shambolic failures of the Trump administration to prepare for the outbreak and lead a coordinated, coherent national response. But the backwardness and incompetence of American government have been visible at all levels especially in contrast to the sophisticated and efficient governance on display in places as diverse as South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany.

How far weve fallen is truly shocking: The country that beat the Nazis, conquered the atom, and put a man on the moon now struggles to produce enough masks for its doctors and nurses. Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger, wrote Irish columnist Fintan OToole, voicing the emerging and humiliating verdict of global public opinion. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.

As to how to close Americas deficit in state capacity, a question with millions of lives in the balance, libertarianism has nothing to say. The libertarian project is devoted exclusively to stopping government from doing things it ought not to do; its only advice about how to improve government is less. When it comes to making government strong enough and capable enough to do the things it needs to do, libertarianism is silent.

Actually, worse than silent. It is quite simply impossible to lead any institution capably without believing in the fundamental integrity of that institution and the importance of its mission. And the modern libertarian movement, which has done so much to shape attitudes on the American right about the nature of government and its proper role, is dedicated to the proposition that the contemporary American state is illegitimate and contemptible. In the libertarian view, government is congenitally incapable of doing anything well, the public sphere is by its very nature dysfunctional and morally tainted, and therefore the only thing to do with government is in the famous words of activist Grover Norquist to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

The gradual diffusion of these anti-government attitudes through the conservative movement and the Republican Party has rendered the American right worse than irrelevant to the project of restoring American state capacity. It has become actively hostile, undermining the motivations needed to launch such a project and the virtues needed to pull it off.

As Ive already argued, none of this means that libertarians are wrong about everything, or that libertarian ideas are worthless. But it does mean that skepticism about government, standing alone, is an insufficient foundation for good governance. The insights of libertarian thought suspicion of centralized power, alertness to how even the best-intended government measures can still go horribly wrong, recognition of the enormous fertility of the marketplaces decentralized, trial-and-error experimentation are genuine and abiding. But they are not sufficient.

The ideology of libertarianism claims otherwise: It asserts that a set of important but partial and contingent truths are in fact a comprehensive and timeless blueprint for the ideal political order. The error of this assertion has been made painfully obvious by the pandemic, but it was increasingly evident for many years beforehand. The overlap between genuine libertarian insights and the pressing challenges facing the American polity has been steadily shrinking since the end of the 20th century.

I say this as someone who discovered libertarian ideas in the 1970s. Back then, the intellectual orthodoxy tilted heavily in favor of top-down, technocratic management of economic life. Paul Samuelsons bestselling economics textbook was still predicting that the Soviet Union would soon overtake us in GDP. John Kenneth Galbraith argued that competition was as pass here as it was behind the Iron Curtain; the technostructure of central planning reigned supreme, whether it took the form of the Politburo or Big Business. As to the newly independent countries of the postcolonial world, there was widespread confidence that a big push of state-led investment would put them on the fast track to prosperity. Here at home, the dominant economic analysis of regulation continued to assume that its scope and content were guided purely by considerations of the public interest as opposed to any political factors. And inflation was widely assumed to be an affliction endemic to advanced economies that could be subdued only with price controls.

The intellectual turn against markets had derived enormous momentum from events. The catastrophic collapse of the Great Depression had seriously discredited capitalism, while the energetic experimentation of the New Deal showcased government activism favorably. Belief in the benevolence and effectiveness of American government, and the crucial importance of collective action for collective welfare, gained further strength from the experience of World War II. And the glittering economic performance of the postwar decades under the Big Government-Big Business-Big Labor triumvirate seemed to confirm that government management and economies of scale had permanently displaced upstart entrepreneurship and creative destruction as the primary engines of progress.

But by the 1970s, events had turned. Stagflation, the combination of soaring prices and slumping output, was afflicting the country despite the fact that its very existence was a baffling mystery to the reigning practitioners of macroeconomic fine-tuning. In cruel mockery of the noble goals and soaring rhetoric of the War on Poverty, a major expansion of anti-poverty programs had been followed by waves of urban riots, a soaring crime rate, and the catastrophic breakdown of intact families among African-Americans. The auto and steel industries, pillars of the economy and only recently world leaders in efficiency and innovation, were buckling under the competitive challenge of imports from Europe and Japan. Gas lines and periodic rationing suggested a grim future of ever more tightly binding limits to growth.

Against this backdrop, the rising movement of libertarian thought and free-market economics represented a much-needed corrective. The information processing and incentive alignment performed by markets had been seriously underappreciated, as had the gap between the theoretical possibilities of government activism and what was actually achievable in practice. Under the circumstances, it mattered little that the new movements philosophical foundations were shaky and its empirical claims overstated. At the relevant margins, the critics of Big Government had the better of the argument overall and were pushing in the right direction. After a massive increase in the size and scope of government over the course of decades, the nation was reeling from multiplying economic and social ills. The time was ripe for a thoroughgoing critique of top-down, centralized, technocratic policymaking.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the return of boom times at home, the collapse of communism and the rise of globalization abroad, and the entrepreneur-led information technology revolution seemed to affirm the conclusion that the era of big government is over. But with the dawn of a new century, the tide of events shifted again. The failure of another round of tax cutting to unleash dynamism and growth; the incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina; the bursting of the housing bubble and the ensuing financial and economic meltdown; the opening of a yawning class divide along educational lines; the spread of social problems once identified with the urban underclass to broad swaths of the country; the rise of deaths of despair; and now the coronavirus pandemic in the face of all this, the one-size-fits-all prescription of cutting taxes, government spending, and regulatory costs imposed on business looked increasingly irrelevant, if not like outright quackery.

The ideals of free markets and limited government remain vital, and vitally important. But the times have made plain that the dominant conceptions of these ideals, rooted in libertarian ideology, are fatally flawed. That ideology is based on fundamental intellectual errors about the nature of politics and the conditions that make individual freedom and competitive markets possible. And as that ideology has moved beyond theoretical inquiry to exert real influence over political actors, its effects on American political culture have ultimately been nothing short of poisonous.

For those of us who continue to believe in the indispensability of a critical stance toward government power, the task before us is one of intellectual reconstruction. We must reject minimal government as the organizing principle of policy reform. Making or keeping government as small as possible is an ideological fixation, not a sound principle of good governance. Small government is a false idol, and it is time we smash it. In its place, we should erect effective government as the goal that guides the development and evaluation of public policy. For maxims, we can look to Americas greatest stateman. The legitimate object of government, wrote Abraham Lincoln, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselvesin their separate, and individual capacities.

Guided by the principle of effective government, we will sometimes conclude that government needs to be smaller, and sometimes that it needs to be larger depending on the circumstances. Given where things stand today, we will often conclude that government can be made simpler. We will continue to champion the ideals of free markets and limited government, but we must reconceive those ideals to free them from their libertarian baggage.

Free markets are the foundation of our prosperity and an important motor of social advance. But we need to see them, not as something that exists in the absence of government, but rather as complex achievements of good government. Free markets as we know them today are impossible without the modern state, and they function best when embedded in and supported by a structure of public goods that only government can adequately provide.

The guiding principle of effective government, meanwhile, continues to impose important limits on the exercise of state power but the contours of those limits are quite different from those demanded by libertarian ideology. Here the limiting principle addresses not the scope or subject matter of government action, but rather the effect of that action: The government policy or program in question must actually succeed in advancing its stated public purpose, and under no circumstances may benefit narrow private interests at public expense. The limiting principle, then, grows out of commitment to the public interest, not antipathy to government. The critical stance associated with policing the proper limits of state action thus shifts from anti-government to anti-corruption.

But reconstruction cannot proceed until demolition clears the scene. Accordingly, in Part Two of this series of essays, The Dead End of Small Government, I will identify what I see as the fundamental deficiencies of the libertarian ideology that has done so much to shape economic orthodoxy on the American right. Then in Part Three, Free Markets and Limited Government Reconceived, I will turn to how these important principles of good governance can be rescued from the errors and blind spots with which they are now tangled up.

Let me conclude this essay with an important qualification. My argument here is about economic and social policy: To meet the looming challenges of poor economic performance; widening social divisions; and threats to public health, we need more capable government, not more constrained government. Accordingly, the exclusive libertarian focus on restraining government power is not just irrelevant to confronting our problems, but actively counterproductive. But as recent events have made painfully clear, there are other areas of public concern where restraining government power remains not only relevant, but morally urgent. Here I am referring, of course, to the police murder of George Floyd, the latest in a long string of such incidents, and the weeks of protests in its wake (which have regrettably resulted in many further examples of inexcusable police violence). But not just that: In all the agencies of American government that deal directly in physical force not just the police, but the larger criminal justice system, the immigration authorities, and the military problems of excess and overreach and abuse are widespread.

The militarization and brutalization of police tactics; the immense waste and suffering caused by the War on Drugs; the moral stain of mass incarceration, deepened by the appalling cruelty that is widespread in Americas jails and prisons; the specter of mass surveillance; the caging of children on our border and betrayal of our heritage as an asylum for refugees; the forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with spinoff military engagements in countries all over the region on all of these fronts, libertarians portrayal of government as Leviathan is all too accurate, and their calls for additional chains to bind it are well founded.

This qualification, though, only highlights how misguided it is for libertarians to conflate the provision of public goods, social insurance, and pro-market regulation with real problems of unchecked power. The vital work of controlling the instrumentalities of state violence is always difficult, but libertarians worthy efforts along these lines are badly undercut by their small-government fixation. Not only do they compromise their case by mixing bad arguments with good, they alienate themselves from their natural allies in particular, those communities that suffer most at the hands of excess force and thereby weaken the coalition needed for constructive change.

See more here:

What the Pandemic Revealed - Niskanen Center

The Air Force staff sergeant suspected of killing a Santa Cruz sheriff's deputy last Saturday and wounding another, as well as fatally shooting a federal security officer in Oakland on May 29, had been ranting on social media and making references to an extremist group that espouses anti-government, anti-law-enforcement views.

32-year-old Steven Carrillo is being arraigned today in Santa Cruz Superior Court, and on Thursday he was formally charged with murder, lying it wait, attempted murder, and multiple other charges and enhancements. He faces life in prison for the killing of 38-year-old Santa Cruz Sheriff's Sergeant Damon Gutzwiller.

According to court documents, per the Mercury News, Carrillo had recently been posting libertarian, anti-law-enforcement rhetoric on social media, and he seemed to have a particular vendetta against law enforcement in general. According to a former friend and fellow Air Force officer, Justin Ehrhardt, Carrillo specifically had aligned himself with the so-called "Boogaloo" movement, a far-right, citizen militia group composed partly of current and former military people who believe that an armed conflict with the government is on the horizon. And Ehrhardt speculated further that watching police use of force against unarmed demonstrators on the news during the week of George Floyd's death may have finally pushed Carrillo over the edge.

Federal prosecutors reportedly believe that Carrillo was also responsible for a shooting in Oakland on the night of May 29, during the height of protest activity there though the targets were two Homeland Security officers stationed outside the federal building in downtown Oakland who had nothing to do with the quelling of protests by police a few blocks away. 53-year-old David Patrick Underwood of Pinole was killed in that shooting.

Underwood, who was black and the sibling of Southern California congressional candidate Angela Underwood-Jacobs, was working as a federal security officer, and the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement calling the shooter an "assassin," and characterizing the act as "domestic terrorism."

Underwood-Jacobs, who is a Republican, complicated the political lines in the current national unrest in testimony earlier this week before the House Judiciary Committee. She spoke out against police brutality and the death of Floyd, but went on to condemn calls for defuning the police. And she said, it is "blatantly wrong to create an excuse out of discrimination and disparity, to loot and burn our communities, to kill our officers of the law."

My brother wore a uniform," she said, "and he wore that uniform proudly. Im wondering, where is the outrage for a fallen officer that also happens to be African American?"

Federal charges against Carrillo in the killing of Underwood and the wounding of another officer are expected to be filed in the coming days, but federal prosecutors have yet to confirm that Carrillo is a suspect in the shooting.

The only information that was publicly released in the case, along with a surveillance image, was that the shooter fired shots out of a white cargo van like the one that Carrillo owned, and like the one he ambushed the Santa Cruz officers with last Saturday.

Carrillo, who was stationed at Travis Air Force Base, was living with his father in Ben Lomond, where officers confronted him. They were responding to a call from a resident who said they had seen explosives and weaponry inside Carrillo's van.

Carrillo was heard by witnesses after the shooting, before he was detained, talking about being "tired of the duality." He scrawled a similar message (using the word "duopoly," possibly in reference to the two-party system) in blood on a vehicle before his arrest. He also wrote the word "boog," and the phrase, "I became unreasonable," which is a meme used by the Boogaloo group, referring to anti-government icon Marvin Heemeyer.

Previously: Air Force Officer Named In Killing of Santa Cruz Sheriff's Deputy May Be Linked to Killing of Federal Officer in Oakland

Here is the original post:

Santa Cruz Shooting Suspect Preached Libertarian Ideals, Was Pushed Over the Edge By Police Actions Against Protesters, Friends Say - SFist