Category Archives: Libertarianism

Its voting season in the District. Heres what you need to know.

This years city-wide general election will be November 8. Contests will be for the mayors office, six D.C. Council seats, and for the first time a chance to pick a new D.C. Attorney General, as Karl A. Racine (D) the citys first elected AG is not running for a third term. The D.C. Council Chair position will also be on the ballot in addition to the D.C. Delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives and the citys shadow representative to the U.S. Senate.

The District will hold a party primary on June 21 to determine finalists on the November general election ballots. Given how heavily Democratic the nations capital is, the results of the Democratic Party primary tend to be decisive in the November elections.

According to the D.C. Board of Elections (DCBOE), primaries are held only for partisan offices (such as Delegate to the House, Mayor, Councilmember, and Senator and Representative). Therefore, only the following recognized parties will be holding primaries on June 21: Democratic, Republican, D.C. Statehood Green, and Libertarian. In the District only voters registered with one of these parties may vote in their partys [primary] election.

DELEGATE TO THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES FROM THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Democratic Party: Wendy Hope Dealer Hamilton, Eleanor H. Norton and Kelly Mikel Williams

Republican Party: Nelson F. Rimensnyder

MAYOR OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Democratic Party: James Butler, Muriel E. Bowser, Trayon Washington DC White and Robert White

Republican Party: Stacia R. Hall

CHAIRMAN OF THE COUNCIL OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Democratic Party: Erin Palmer and Phil Mendelson

Republican Party: Nate Derenge

AT-LARGE MEMBER OF THE COUNCIL OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Democratic Party: Lisa Gore, Nate Fleming, Anita Bonds and Dexter Williams

Republican Party: Giuseppe Niosi

ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Democratic Party: Brian Schwalb, Ryan L. Jones and Bruce V. Spiva

LOCAL PARTY OFFICES DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA DEMOCRATIC STATE COMMITTEE

NATIONAL COMMITTEEMAN: Kevin B. Chavous

NATIONAL COMMITTEEWOMAN: Denise L. Reed

AT-LARGE COMMITTEEMAN: Charles E. Wilson, James S. Bubar, Dave Donaldson, Keith Hasan-Towery, James J. Sydnor, Matt LaFortune and John Green

AT-LARGE COMMITTEEWOMAN: Monica L. Roach, Linda L. Gray, Dionna Maria Lewis, Patricia Pat Elwood, Andria Thomas, Maria Patricia Corrales and Chioma J. Iwuoha

WARD TWO COMMITTEEMAN: John Fanning and Brian Romanowski

WARD TWO COMMITTEEWOMAN: Janice Ferebee and Meg Roggensack

All other positions on Republican Party ballots are write-ins. There are only write-ins on ballots for the DC Statehood Green Party and the Libertarian Party.

Beginning on May 16, voter ballots will be sent to all registered D.C. voters giving citizens a chance to vote by mail. Ballot drop boxes may be used beginning May 27. Early voting in D.C. runs from June 10 through June 19. On June 21 Primary Election Day polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m.

Registration is required to vote in the District. However, the DCBOE must receive your Voter Registration at least 21 days prior to Election Day. So, the deadline to register for this years party primaries is: Tuesday, May 31. However, if you miss the deadline, the DCBOE website says, Same-Day Registration is available at Vote Centers during the Early Voting period [June 10 through 19] and on Election Day.

According to the Washington Post, a voter registration application swearing or affirming voting qualifications and a valid proof of residence is required. D.C. residents who are U.S. citizens ages 16 and older can register to vote online, or in person at the DCBOE office (1015 Half St. SE, Suite 750, Washington, D.C. 20003) or any voter registration agency, by mail, email or fax. Residents can call (202) 347-2648 for more information.

A list of answers to Frequently Asked Questions from the D.C. Board of Elections can be found here. Voting sites and locations can be found here.

Stay tuned for Election 2022 campaign profiles, updates and news in upcoming newsletters and our June print issue. For our recent exclusive interview with D.C. mayoral candidate Robert C. White, Jr. (D), see here.

Read more here:
Election 2022: Who's on the Ballot? - Georgetowner

A madman who describes himself as an ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist went on a racist shooting spree in Buffalo over the weekend. He cited radical views and conspiracies he absorbed from the internet to explain his turn to mass murder.

My question: Why are so many in the legacy media and the Democratic Party intent on watering down the insane things this shooter believed?

The most likely answer is that the media want to blur any distinction between the shooters evil and insane views on one hand versus the typical Republican views that the media and Democrats dislike on the other.

I wish all JEWS to HELL! the shooter wrote. Go back to hell where you came from DEMON!

He went further and laid out the case that white people are being replaced. The White race is dying out, that blacks are disproportionately killing Whites, that the average black takes $700,000 from tax-payers in their lifetime, and that the jews and elite were behind this.

Writing about white people, he commented, We are doomed by low birth rates and high rates of immigration. He attacked libertarianism as largely pioneered by Jews.

Later, he offered a different, more pedestrian critique of mass immigration, attacking conservatives for supporting anything to decrease the labor cost of production and line their pockets with the profits.

His political vision, Green nationalism, calls for population curbs: "There is no Green future with never ending population growth, he wrote, adding that the ideal green world cannot exist in a world of 100 billion, 50 billion, or even 10 billion people.

The dominant media narrative does not focus on the shooters atheism, isolationism, environmentalism, population-control demands, or hatred of Fox News. For most of the media, it is too much mental labor to tie those beliefs to his obvious white supremacist and antisemitic views.

So instead, they settle on an easy, lazy story: The shooter was motivated by the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. This isnt false it's just that it's a tiny part of the shooters foul melange of radical and bigoted views.

Its a tidy story because the killer's choice of targets was pretty directly attributable to the whole idea of white people being "replaced." In this, he was much like the antisemitic shooter at Pittsburghs Tree of Life synagogue who was very explicit about his insane beliefs. Attacking a Jewish charity called HIAS (originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), that gunman had posted online that HIAS likes to bring invaders that kill our people. I cant sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. He believed that Jews were importing foreigners who would wipe out his people.

Does this conspiracy theory trickle into the GOP mainstream? Yes. For example, while President Donald Trump in 2018 fanned flames about the migrant caravan heading from Central America to the U.S. border, Trump backer Matt Schlapp went on CNN, mocked the idea that the caravan was spontaneous, and then asked, Who's paying for the caravan? before referring to George Soros as a possible culprit.

This sort of conspiracy-theorizing is common in politics. People assume something they dislike or oppose is part of a grand plan with a mastermind behind it. Both the Left and the Right do it. When it has a racial element, and the Great Replacement theory has a doubly racial element, it becomes more pernicious and lethal. Trump may have brought this foul line of thinking closer to the heart of the GOP, which is one reason the party would have been better off had he lost the general election in 2016.

But the media and the Democrats are going far beyond saying Trump brought the Great Replacement theory closer to the GOP mainstream. They are deliberately watering down what the Buffalo shooter believed in order to make it sound more like regular old right-of-center politics: The manifesto, as the Reporter Times describes it, focuses on the great replacement theory. The theory claims that Democrats favor migrants from the other countries for votes while deliberately outnumbering whites in the U.S.

That Democrats favor greater numbers of immigrants and see an electoral advantage in it is not in any published quotation from the Buffalo shooter nor is it a racist statement or a conspiracy theory. It may be an unfair implication of Democrats motives, but thats typical politics.

Why would the news media try to water down the crazed shooters racist conspiracy theory in order to make it sound kind of normal? Because they want to broaden the definition of the Great Replacement to include as many Republican views as they can. They are explicit about this:

What is GOP Rep. Elise Stefaniks supposed venture into the Great Replacement theory?

Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION. Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington, her ads say.

Thats laughably over-the-top political rhetoric, which makes it no different in tone from stuff the average liberal columnist puts out every day. But theres no white genocide talk here no culpable Jews and nothing explicitly racial or ethnic. Theres immigration and electoral politics. Those topics touch on race and ethnicity, but if were going to brand every restrictionist immigration policy as racist, were basically declaring immigration debates off limits, and that just won't work.

Trying to blur the lines between a crazed racists crazed, racist views and a partisan Republicans partisan, restrictionist immigration views is not something you would do if you really cared about battling racism. Lumping mainstream Republican politicking with racist extremism might convince a few lazy journalists to treat all Republicans as racist, but it will also convince a lot of centrists that the "racist" label is meaningless because everyone gets called "racist."

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Why are liberals trying to water down the racist views of the Buffalo gunman? - Washington Examiner

The New York man who shot up a Buffalo supermarket Saturday kept no secrets about how and why he planned to murder "as many blacks as possible." From his racist radicalization on the internet due to the coronavirus lockdowns to his specific choice of a black neighborhood with few guns "NY has cucked gun laws," wrote the shooter, who made clear he intended to survive the massacre the Buffalo shooter is no enigma.

Hence, a seemingly concerted effort from the corporate media accusing the Buffalo barbarian of being some sort of Tucker Carlson acolyte would be baffling if it weren't so transparently malicious. In the 180-page document purported to be authored by the shooter, he does not mention Carlson once. The sole explicit mention of Fox News is an infographic demarcating top Fox hosts such as Maria Bartiromo and Greg Gutfeld as Jewish. (Rupert Murdoch is decried as a "Christian Zionist" who may have Jewish ancestry, "although it's never publicly admitted.) Ben Shapiro is mentioned multiple times, including as an example as the "rat" phenotype of Jewish people.

Moreover, the Buffalo shooter is a self-described "ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist" who loathes libertarianism and conservatism in particular.

"Ask yourself, truly, what has modern conservatism managed to conserve?" the shooter wrote. "Not a thing has been conserved other than corporate profits and the ever increasing wealth of the 1% that exploit the people for their own benefit. Conservatism is dead. Thank god. Now let us bury it and move on to something of worth."

Hell, the shooter admits that he's a socialist, "depending on the definition."

"Worker ownership of the means of production?" he writes. "It depends on who those workers are, their intentions, who currently owns the means of production, their intentions and who currently owns the state, and their intentions."

The diatribe implies "those workers" better be white gentiles who worship Mother Earth. Here, crucially, is the shooter on his homicidal obsession with environmentalism.

"Green nationalism is the only true nationalism," he wrote. "There is no conservatism without nature, there is no nationalism without environmentalism, the natural environment of our lands shaped us just as we shaped it. We were born from our lands and our own culture was molded by these same lands. The protection and preservation of these lands is of the same importance as the protection and preservation of our own ideals and beliefs. For too long we have allowed the left to co-opt the environmentalist movement to serve their own needs. The left has controlled all discussion regarding environmental preservation whilst simultaneously presiding over the continued destruction of the natural environment itself through mass immigration and uncontrolled urbanization, whilst offering no true solution to either issue. There is no Green future with never ending population growth, the ideal green world cannot exist in a world of 100 billion, 50 billion, or even 10 billion people. Continued immigration into Europe is environmental warfare and ultimately destructive to nature itself. The Europe of the future is not one of concrete and steel, smog and wires but a place of forests, lakes, mountains and meadows. Not a place where English is the de facto language but a place where every European language, belief and tradition is valued. Each nation and each ethnicity was molded by their own environment and if they are to be protected so must their own environments. THERE IS NO TRADITIONALISM WITHOUT ENVIRONMENTALISM."

The shooter's eco-fascism is as inextricable with his white supremacy and antisemitism as it was in Nazi Germany. Contrary to Carlson or any mainstream conservative thought leader, the shooter is functionally anti-natalist, viewing humanity in general as secondary in importance to the planet, and even his choice to murder blacks over Jews is "because [Jews] can be dealt with in time, but the high fertility replacers will destroy us now."

Most importantly, the shooter wasn't radicalized by watching Fox News with family after dinner or listening to Shapiro podcasts in the car to work. The dregs of the internet enraptured him during a government-mandated shutdown of normal social life. By every available statistic, the population at large ran rampant with vices during the isolation of 2020. A few succumbed to outright suicide. Even many of the more disciplined among us descended into drug and alcohol abuse. But for an already broken person like the shooter, his lockdown poison proved just as addictive as any opioid and, for Sunday's victims, far more dangerous.

Read more here:
The Buffalo shooter was an eco-socialist racist who hated Fox News and Ben Shapiro - Washington Examiner

A July 2020 protest in front of the Ohio statehouse in Columbus. (Jeff Dean / AFP via Getty Images)

EDITORS NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

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Last month, not long after Florida federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle ruled that the transportation mask mandate was illegal, I flew from New York City to Miami. Videos of airplane passengers in midflight ripping off their masks and cheering with joy had already gone viral following the judges ruling.

Ive traveled domestically and internationally many times since the start of the pandemic and I hate the mask as much as anyone. It makes me sneeze and it tickles. After 10 hours on long hauls, I can indeed feel like Im suffocating. It can be almost unbearable. But after two years of obediently masking up to enter airports and planes around the world, I found my first unmasked travel experience jarring indeed, even though I kept mine on. I was not the only masked person on that American Airlines flight, but I was definitely in the minority.

Writing a book, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of Americas Response to the Pandemic, about the politics and science of our Covid-19 experience, I came to know and trust public health policy experts and vaccine scientists. I learned enough about the mRNA vaccines so many (but not enough) of us have received that I regard them as a major medical milestone well worth celebrating. I also accept that scientific understanding is based on uncertainty and the advice of our health authorities is only as good as the latest peer-reviewed article.

So Ive maintained faith in science, even while understanding its limits. And I also understand the frustration of so many Americans. Who among us didnt chafe at the pandemic restrictions? Who wasnt going mad trying to work from a home or apartment reverberating with restless children locked out of their schools?

In March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, I thought the crisis might provoke wider support for a more universal health care system. Nothing of the sort materialized, of course, although the rapid, government-financed development and delivery of free and effective vaccinesto those who wanted themwas indeed a success story.

Now, in the pandemics third year, people are ripping off their masks everywhere as Greek-letter Covid mutations continue to waft through the air.

The viral joy of that unmasking, the giving of the proverbial finger to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), raises the question: Did the pandemic make average Americans more anti-government? Did it bring us closer to what decades of rightwing propaganda had not quite succeeded in doinggenerating widespread public support for the deconstruction of the administrative state (a phrase favored by Trump crony Steve Bannon)? Current Issue

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Government activity during the first two pandemic years was certainly intense. Trillions of dollars in business loans and unemployment money washed through the economy. At different points, the government even activated the military and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). States also instituted widespread lockdowns and closed schools. The panic, the isolation, and the quotidian inconveniences made some people barking mad.

Of course, a lot of us listened to Dr. Anthony Fauci. We trusted our public health authorities and their recommendations. To many of us, their intentions seemed good, their asks reasonable.

Federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, however, thought otherwise. Just 35 when Donald Trump appointed her a district judge, she had never actually tried a case. The American Bar Association had rejected her confirmation due to her inexperience, but like many Trump judges, she was a Federalist Society-approved ideologue and the Republican Senate confirmed her anyway to a district that, by design, has become a nest of extreme antigovernment judges.

The anti-maskers could have brought their case in any jurisdiction. Choosing Tampa was a clear case of legal venue shopping. Other judges in the district had consistently ruled against government Covid restrictions on cruise ships and against mandatory vaccinations. The plaintiffs couldnt actually select Judge Mizelle, but their chances of getting an antigovernment ruling in Tampa were high indeed.

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As it happened, the plaintiffs got her and she relied on definitions of sanitation in mid-twentieth century English dictionaries to overturn the statute that allowed the mask mandate. None of them explicitly included the word mask in their definitions. So, she revoked it.

The ruling horrified public-health policy experts, although the Biden administrationprobably with the coming midterm elections and those viral videos of mask-free joy in minddecided not to challenge the decision directly. The continuing concern throughout the pandemic has been the politicization of these public-health measures, Dr. Bruce Lee, a public-health policy expert at the City University of New York, told me. We know that throughout history during public-health crises there has been a need to enact regulations. The big concern with this mask decision is you basically have a scientific or public-health decision made by a single judge.

It took that judge just 18 days after argumentsa nanosecond in judicial timeto side with two women who said airplane masks gave them panic attacks and anxiety and so unlawfully prevented them from traveling. They were joined by an organization called the Health Freedom Defense Fund.

The Fund, based in Sandpoint, Idaho, is run by Leslie Manookian, a wellness blogger and antivaccine activist who, after having a child in 2003, left a career in international finance with Goldman Sachs to become, as she describes herself, a qualified homeopath, nutrition and wellbeing junky and a health freedom advocate.

Manookian has declined to provide information about the sources of funding for her organization, to which the Internal Revenue Service granted nonprofit status in 2021. Its likely, however, to be just another green swath on the great field of right-wing Astroturf. While social democrats like me imagined that the pandemic might provoke a more equitable health care system, the crew on the right had other plans for how to manipulate the crisis.

Politicians, strategists, and chaos agents ranging from Donald Trump to Sean Hannity and Alex Jones, sometimes backed by dark money, have used the public-health restrictions to fuel their demands for more freedom from government. The definition of freedom among this crowd is primarily understood to be low or no taxes, with access to guns thrown in for good measure. In the spring of 2020, for instance, the billionaire Koch Brothers, who once funded the Tea Party largely to crush Obamacare, were among the conservative megadonors who helped activate the network behind the lockdown drive-bys of state capitols. Those initial lockdown protests would later devolve into Yall-Qaeda-style pro-Trump pickup convoys. In Lansing, Mich., a protest even ended with armed men entering the State Capitol. Among the intruders were members of a clan of gun-loving militiamen who would eventually plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan for restricting their freedom.

The pandemic seeded new Astroturf for the right. Americas Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), for example, was formed during the early months of the pandemic to challenge public-health policy in favor of keeping the economy rolling. Besides promoting antivaccine misinformation, AFLDS referred more than 255,000 people to a website created by Jerome Corsi, an author and longtime political agitator, called SpeakwithanMD.com. The site charged for consultations with AFLDS-approved physicians about the Covid cures ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that President Trump and his fans so loved.

The messages of such groups (eventually including just about the whole Republican Party) were, of course, amplified by the usual right-wing media outletsOne America News Network, Newsmax, and above all Fox Newsthat started out by calling the pandemic virus a hoax. When Covid-19 was undeniably killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, the messaging shifted to equating lockdowns, vaccines, and mask mandates with totalitarianism.

Globally, theres no doubt that the pandemic did indeed release the worst instincts of authoritarian governments. Real autocracies unleashed real abuses of power on vulnerable people in the name of Covid-19. Some of these were catalogued early in the pandemic by the democracy and human-rights organization Freedom House. In October 2020, it found that, in 59 of 192 countries, violence or abuses of power took place in the name of pandemic safety. It reported, for example, that the government of Zimbabwe was using Covid-19 restrictions as an excuse for a widespread campaign of threats, harassment, and physical assault on the political opposition there.

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In terms of hubris and scale, though, the totalitarian dystopia to beat has been China. Exiled Chinese writer Liao Wiyu published a vivid book earlier this year describing how the authorities there disappeared doctors, silenced the citizenry; and in a harrowing fashion nailed the doors of homes and apartment buildings shut, marking them with red banners to identify contagious inhabitants. The images were straight out of Daniel Defoes novel about the bubonic plague in 17th-century London, A Journal of the Plague Year, updated with modern gadgetry like biosurveillance.

Chinas zero Covid response has included epic crackdowns on freedom of movement. Forty-six cities and 343 million residents have recently been under strict lockdown. Some residents of Shanghai, forbidden to leave their apartments, have been running short of food and medicine. Videos of dogs being lowered by ropes and pulleys from apartment windows for daily walks only added an element of macabre hilarity to the scene.

In the United States, rather than increasing trust in government, the relatively mild pandemic public-health measures instituted by the CDC and state governments only inflamed Americas freedom fetish. Claiming that mask and vaccine mandates were the slippery slope to Chinese totalitarianism was certainly a stretch, but one that many on the right have been all too eager to promote. For years, the right-wing echo chamber has been priming the info-siloed and mentally vulnerable with warnings about FEMA camps for Christians and conservatives (and, of course, while they were at it, the feds were always coming to get your guns, too).

As it happened, though, the pandemic also triggered anti-government sentiment outside the usual quarters. Take Jennifer Sey, a self-described Elizabeth Warren Democrat and San Francisco liberal, who was forced out of her job at Levi Strauss & Co., when she started advocating against restrictive school closings. The mother of four and the companys chief marketing officer, she found it increasingly hard to understand why her children couldnt go back to school after the first Covid surge in 2020. Irritation and frustration led to public outrage, which led (of course!) to a social-media following. She became an online leader of parents for reopening schools. Her employer didnt like it and soon banished her.

Public-health policy expert Dr. Lee finds it less than surprising that even Americans like Sey rebelled. He mostly blames the way science was miscommunicated and politicized in public debate in this increasingly Trumpified country. There needed to be consistency. Once you start straying from science and becoming inconsistent, people get confused. We saw people talking about school closures, and many of them were off in different directions. School closings were not a long-term solution. The increased politicization of science and public health policy is largely a result of certain political leaders and certain TV personalities and anonymous social media accounts. What it does is, it damagesit causes chaos. You hear people saying, oh, they dont know what to believe anymore.

The question is: Where are we now? Along with the ongoing pandemic, are we experiencing a full-blown anti-government infection and is that, too, a symptom of long Covid? Or is the resistance to government mandates and vaccines simply a response to the Astroturfing of the rightwing echo chamber?

Or, in fact, both?

Conservatives have been smacking their lips over what they regard as signs of a resurgence of the flinty libertarian. A funny thing happened on our way to democratic socialism: America pushed back, a Cato Institute commentary proclaimed earlier this year. Across the country, in all sorts of ways, Americans reacted to the states activism, overreach, incoherence, and incompetence and kinda, sorta, embraced libertarianism. (Of course, thats putting it in an all too kindly fashion. Substitute, say, fascism and that statement feels quite different.)

Conservative commentator Sam Goldman, writing in the Week, hit the same note: As the pandemic has continued, opposition to restrictions on personal conduct, suspicion of expert authority, and free speech for controversial opinions have become dominant themes in center-right argument and activism. The symbolic villain of the new libertarian moment is Anthony Fauci.

Its not clear that this represents a lasting trend. An October 2021 Gallup poll found that Americans attitudes reverted from a desire for more government intervention at the outset of the pandemic in 2020 to essentially where they had been when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Since the 1990s, Gallup has been polling American preferences when it comes to the role of government in our lives. The long-term graph shows regular mood swings, although those between 2020 and 2021 were unusually steep.

Note as well that the American response to pandemic regulations differed strikingly from the European one. A study published earlier this year in the European Journal of Political Research explored attitudes in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, specifically the role of emotions in the way people responded to restricted civil liberties during the pandemic years (including restricted movement through Covid phone apps and army-patrolled curfews). Fear of contagion, not surprisingly, was the chief emotion and that fear led to a striking willingness to accept more government restrictions on civil liberties.

In Europe, safety won. In this country, it seems not. I havent seen similar research here (though there has been some suggesting that, in the Trump era, fear has been the driving emotion in individuals who lean right). It certainly seems as if the American response to the pandemic wasnt to accept more restrictions on civil liberties, not at least when it came to masks and vaccine mandates.

But look more closely and youll see something else, something far more deeply unnerving. In these last months, even as masks have come off and booster shots have gone in all too few arms, there has been an unprecedented assault on other civil liberties. Red-state lawmakers are attacking the civil rights of women, gays, and minorities with unprecedented ferocity. In its landmark upcoming ruling that will, it seems, overturn Roe v. Wade, a Supreme Court driven rightward by three Trump appointees has now apparently agreed that there is no right to privacy either.

As political journalist Ron Brownstein pointed out recently, conservative statehouses in red states are remaking the American civil liberties landscape at breathtaking speedand with little national attention to their cumulative effect. In the process, they are setting back the civil liberties clock in America to the years before what legal scholars called the rights revolution of the 1960s.

The speed and urgency with which right-wing judges and legislators are embracing a historic anti-liberty enterprise suggests panic and fear. This anti-freedom movement, ultimately, is not a response to the actions of the federal government or the CDC. It emanates from the frightened souls of the very people who have been shrieking about totalitarianism whenever they see a mask.

Now, excuse me for a moment, while I put my mask on and face an American world in which the dangers, both pandemic and political, are rising once again.

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The Pandemic Revealed Americas Deeper Sickness - The Nation

In Season 5 Episode 3, "How A Bill Becomes A Law," Diane Lewis (Lucy Lawless) is introduced to the cast of comic characters as a love interest for Ron, and the fans immediately fell in love with her. In the subreddit r/PandR, a picture was posted by u/deckhandpo with the caption, "These two don't get enough credit as a couple. I think they were great for each other IMO." Nearly all of the dozens of comments were in praise of the character, while those that spoke otherwise simply chose toinsult Tammys 1 and 2.

Diane is characterized by her kind bluntness and tender confidence. A single mother of two and a middle-school vice principal, she has no room for beating around the bush.In an interview with EW, Lucy Lawless said, "This is his first mature relationship she doesn't pervert his nature in any way. This is the sort of woman that you might want to see him with, and yet it's going to be damn near impossible for him to stay in it."

Fans, like u/video-kid, praised her for accepting Ron as he was while encouraging him to become better. Others, like u/TixHoineeng, loved her sense of humor. While not the highest rated comment, u/chrissilich summed it up perfectly by saying, "Of course the only woman who fulfills enough squares on the Ron Swanson Pyramid of Greatness is Xena Warrior Princess," which is a wonderful reference to Lawless' notable acting career.

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Ron Swanson's Best Significant Other On Parks And Recreation Is Obvious To Fans - Looper

Published May 11th, 2022 at 9:34 am

This years June Primary Election will be the first time New Mexico voters can register to vote on election day itselfand not just weeks in advance. It will also be the first time decline-to-state or minor party voters can vote in the partisan primariesbut only if they register as either a Democrat or a Republican prior to casting a ballot. Currently, only voters who are registered with a major party (Democrat, Republican or Libertarian) can vote for a candidate of their own party in the primary election.

Taken together, these two changes have the potential for increasing the number of people who vote dramatically, said Mario Jimenez, campaigns director for the non-partisan group Common Cause New Mexico.

There are more than 300,000 voters who decline to state their partisan preference, about 21% of the total electorate. They are commonly referred to as independents. About 14,000 are registered with minor parties.

We dont advocate for one party or another, but now these folks can vote, and we encourage them to look into the candidates in their area, especially when the primary actually determines the winner in many areas, Jimenez said. They can then pick either a Republican, Libertarian or Democratic ballot, whichever appeals to them.

For new voters, and those who become aware of the election late in the game, same-day registration allows them to both register and vote on election day if they have the proper identification. They can also do both at their County Clerks office or selected Early Voting Locations during the early voting period.(See below for details.)

Heres some handy information from the Secretary of State:

Same Day Voter Registration

Any eligible voter in New Mexico can register to vote or update their voter registration and then vote on the same day at their County Clerks office starting May 10. They can also register and vote at any polling location in their county on Election Day (June 7) and from May 21-June 4 at participating Early Voting Locations.Contact your County Clerk for participating locations. In Bernalillo County all Early Voting Locations are participating.

In order to use same day registration, voters need to bring:

(1) a New Mexico drivers license or New Mexico identification card issued through the

Motor Vehicle Division of the Taxation and Revenue Department;

(2) any document that contains an address in the county together with a photo identificationcard; OR

(3) a current valid student photo identification card from a post-secondary educational

institution in New Mexico accompanied by a current student fee statement that contains the students address in the county.

How Decline-to-State and minor party voters can register and vote in the Primary Election

Decline-to-state voters in New Mexico are registered voters who have chosen not to affiliate with a major political party. Minor party voters are registered with political parties that do not have major party status (currently, only Democrats, Republicans, and Libertarians are recognized as major parties in New Mexico).

While the general election is open to all registered voters, only voters who are registered with a major party can vote in primary elections in New Mexico. Now, if you are registered as DTS or with a minor party in New Mexico you can vote in the Primary Election. You simply update your registration to one of the major parties, a process that will take from 5-10 minutes. You can then vote in the primary election for whichever party youve chosen.

You can do this at any polling place in your county on Election Day or by going to your County Clerks office starting May 10 or any participating polling place in your county during early voting from May 21- June 4.

Voters who utilize this option and who then wish to revert back to being DTS or registered with a minor party can update their registration online atNMVOTE.ORGafter theyve voted in the Primary Election.

Same day registration for decline-to-state voters carries the same ID requirements listed above for all newly registered voters and is available during the same time frame.

Important Exception

Voters who are already registered with a major party cant switch affiliations on Election Day or during the early voting period; those changes must be made by May 10.

For more information go to:

Same Day Voter Registration FAQ

Common Cause is a nonpartisan grassroots organization dedicated to upholding the core values of American democracy. We work to create open, honest, and accountable government that serves the public interest; promote equal rights, opportunity, and representation for all; and empower all people to make their voices heard as equals in the political process.

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Letter to the Editor:Important Information for Voters from Common Cause - The Paper

Attendees cheer on J.D. Vance, Republican Senate candidate for Ohio, as he speaks during the Save America rally with former President Donald Trump at the Delaware County Fairgrounds in Delaware, Ohio, on April 23, 2022.

Photo: Eli Hiller/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Since the mid-20th century, the U.S. has seen no fewer than three political movements broadly described as the New Right. There was the first New Right of William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and conservative student groups, with their right-libertarianism, anti-communism, and emphasis on social values. The second generation to earn the moniker the New Right of Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell, and both George Bushes leaned harder into conservative Christianity, populism, and free markets.

These New Right waves were different largely in tone and presentation; there was considerable overlap in ideology and even personnel. The high-minded conservatism of a Buckley and the pandering populism of a Bush have never been oppositional approaches, despite attempts to explain them this way. Every version of the New Right has been propelled by more or less explicit white supremacist backlash and robust funding.

Now, in our era of Trumpian reaction, we are seeing reports about a new New Right. Like the New Rights that came before it, its a loose constellation of self-identifying anti-establishment, allegedly heterodox reactionaries. The newest of the Rights is similarly fueled by disaffection with liberal progress myths and united by white supremacist backlash this time, with funding largely from billionaire Peter Thiel.

The new New Right has made headlines in recent weeks. In particular, Vanity Fair published a thoroughly and thoughtfully reported feature detailing the emergence of a rising right-wing circle made up of highly educated Twitter posters, podcasters, artists, and even online philosophers, most notably the neo-monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin. And the New York Times dedicated a fluffy feature to the founding of niche online magazine Compact, which claims to feature heterodox thinking but instead offers predictable contrarianism and tired social conservatism.

Alongside GOP candidates for office like J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, this motley scene follows the ideological weft and warp of Trumpist nationalism, while alluding to greater intellectual and revolutionary ambitions, sometimes wearing cooler clothes, and receiving money from Thiel.

The turn to the New Right is a choice, by people with privilege and options, in favor of white standing, patriarchy, and crucially money.

The focus on these groups is all fine and well: Why shouldnt the media do fair-minded reporting on a burgeoning political trend? Yet there is the risk of reifying a ragtag cohort into a cultural-political force with more power than it would otherwise have.

More crucially, theres a glaring omission in the coverage. Todays New Right frames itself as the only force currently willing to fight against the regime, as Vance calls it, of liberal capitalisms establishment power and the narratives that undergird it. The fundamental premise of liberalism, Yarvin told Vanity Fairs James Pogue, is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.

The problem is that characters like Yarvin had another choice; the march to the far right is no more inexorable than misplaced faith in liberal progress. There is a whole swath of the contemporary left that also wholly rejects liberal establishment powers, the logic of the capitalist state, and liberalisms progress myths. Rejection of liberal progress propaganda has been a theme of left-wing writing, including mine, for years, and Im hardly alone. Such positions are definitive of a radical, antifascist, anti-racist left.

Donald Trump delivers remarks at a Save America event with guests J.D. Vance, Mike Carey, Max Miller, and Madison Gesiotto Gilbert in Delaware, Ohio, on April 23, 2022.

Photo: Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

These leftist, liberatory tendencies may not be empowered in the Democratic Party, even on its left flank, but they are still present and active throughout the United States. They exist, they are accessible, and they have raged against the regime of contemporary power long before the current New Right came into its embryonic form.

This matters when thinking about the forces of neo-reaction because it clarifies the type of choice members of the New Right are making. While neo-reaction is indeed often based on the rejection of the liberal mainstream and its hollow promises, that rejection alone does not itself push someone into the New Right; moves to the anti-racist far left can begin the exact same way.

So what distinguishes the New Right turn? Its a choice, by people with privilege and options, in favor of white standing, patriarchy, and crucially money. You cannot discount the cash: Theres serious money to be made, so long as your illiberalism upholds all the other oppressive hierarchies. And its of note that the key source of funding Thiels fortunes skyrocketed due to President Donald Trumps racist immigration policies, which remain almost entirely in place under the Biden administration. Ethnocentrism is central to Vances and Masterss platforms now.

The Vanity Fair piece highlights the irony that these so-called anti-authoritarians of the New Right, obsessed as they are with the dystopianism of the contemporary U.S., wholly overlook the most dystopian aspects of American life: our vast apparatus of prisons and policing.

Pogue is far from credulous and has said in interviews that the subjects of his story however heterogeneous they claim to be share an investment in authoritarianism. Yet the failure of New Right figures to talk about prisons and policing is no oversight: It is evidence of a white supremacism that need not be explicitly stated to run through this movement. This strain of reaction, after all, comes in the wake of the largest anti-racist uprisings in a generation, one that cannot be dismissed as liberal performance. The timing lays bare how this New Right fits into the countrys unbroken history of white backlash.

The decision of the disaffected to join the forces of reaction might appear understandable when it is presented as the only route for those willing to challenge the yoke of liberal capitalism and its pieties. This is harder to justify on those terms when it is clarified that an anti-capitalist left exists. The difference is that, unlike the New Right, thefar left abhors white supremacist patriarchy and rejects the obvious fallacy that there is something pro-worker, or anti-capitalist, about border rule and labor segmentation.

The matter of money should not be understated. Radical left movements, unlike the New Right,arenot popular among billionaire funders; thats what happens when you challenge the actual regime of capital. To highlight the path not chosen by the New Right, then, is to show their active desire not for liberation but for domination which is nothing new on the right at all.

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The New New Right Was Forged in Greed and White Backlash - The Intercept

(Briana Scroggins | Special to The Tribune) Utah independent Evan McMullin walks with supporters to the auditorium during the Utah Democratic Convention at Cottonwood High School in Murray, Utah on Saturday, April 23, 2022.

By James Hansen | Special to The Tribune

| April 29, 2022, 2:30 p.m.

This past weekend, independent Evan McMullin successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of the Utah Democratic Party. Masquerading as a healthy alternative to U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, a slight majority of Utah Democratic Convention delegates opted not to advance their candidate, Kael Weston, to shoehorn Democrats across the state into supporting McMullins Not Mike Lee campaign.

In an opinion piece to The Salt Lake Tribune, Weston writes a clear and scathing criticism of McMullins key message, Campaigning against someone is not enough. This election year we should insist that candidates address the issues that matter to Utah families. Voters deserve to hear what candidates are for and how they intend to help improve our lives and futures.

Evan McMullin is a D.C. man through and through. Statements from his 2016 campaign are indicative of a candidate who would support expanding the defense budget, more conflicts and interventions abroad, tougher civilian-killing sanctions on uncooperative nations, anti-LGBTQ and marriage equality, expansion of federal powers to surveil and apprehend U.S. citizens and follow GOP party leadership in partisan voting.

With a resume that includes CIA operative, Wall Street banker and GOP analyst and consultant, we can easily predict McMullins political career style and focus. Federal power and special interests. Evan McMullin is the poster child of Wall Street and the Pentagon, precisely the kind of person Utahns should not elect.

I am offering a stark contrast to Evan McMullins and Mike Lees campaigns for Utahns to choose from this Fall. As a father of four, working as a high school physics teacher and coach, I have an authentic and grounded connection to the issues facing our students, families and communities. I am striving to bring a focus to tax burdens on lower and middle-class families of our state, the ballooning defense budget and the fallout of decades of warfare, removing barriers to quality primary care to improve health outcomes, protecting our environment and managing our precious water resources, defending the rights of LGBTQ Utahns to have fair and equal treatment under the law, eliminating subsidies/bailouts for oil and gas and all special interests, criminal justice reform and greater accountability in our law enforcement agencies and connecting federal education dollars to the student and their outcomes, not institutions.

Pressing issues need fixing in our great nation, and there is no time to squander on partisan politics and fearmongering. I promise to go to Washington with a deep focus on these issues and work with like-minded members of Congress to accomplish them, party affiliation be damned!

I invite you to visit my campaign website at JimmyForUtah.com and read more about the key issues facing Utahns and how I propose to solve them.

James Hansen is the Utah Libertarian Party nominee for U.S Senate. He resides in Heber City and teaches physics and geology at Wasatch High.

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McMullins is a DC man through and through and won't do what Utah voters need. - Salt Lake Tribune

Dear Capitolisters,

As Ive mentioned here before, I hail from the right side of the libertarian spectrum and have long worked with conservatives, center-right media, and Republican politicians on various policy issues.Back then, wed surely disagree on specific line itemsIraq or the drug war, for examplebut we always shared a core belief in certain fundamental principles about government, public policy, and life.These principles, not necessarily shared by the left (for better or worse), ensured that wed remain close allies in the political arena, regardless of our disagreements on discrete issues. (I even recall one time scoffing at a former colleagues liberaltarian project in the early 2000s, because the left and libertarians had far more fundamental disagreements about natural rights, limited government, the rule of law, and related issues.)

As readers of The Dispatch are surely aware, this fusionist alliance has, in recent years, frayed, with many self-identified conservatives today accusing us libertarians of not only being turtleneck-wearing, election-losing chart jockeys but actually causing many of the rights (and Americas) problems.But I think the Florida-Disney sagaparticularly many mainstream conservatives reactions theretomay take the schism to a whole new (and bad) level and reveal in the process that, if this is the new conservatism its not very conservative at all.

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What's Conservative About the New Conservatism? - The Dispatch

Independent voters will have a lot of power during the midterm election. They outnumber Republicans and Democrats.

"Even though a Republican can say and promise A, B, C, a Democrat can promise D, E, and F, but I might like A and a little bit of E so its not just red and blue anymore," said Esmeralda Villeda, one of the millions of independent voters in the U.S.

Villeda is like many Americans who are frustrated with politics.

I dont watch the news because, at this point, all it is, is 'this candidate said this, this candidate that, let me find something else to talk bad about this person,'" she said. "That's not what politics is about."

Villeda, a Las Vegas native and first-generation Mexican-American, was the first in her family to graduate from high school.

She used to be politically active, even helping national and local political campaigns

Its a little heartbreaking," Villeda said, "because right out of high school, I was full-on Democrat and voting Democrat all the way.

After the 2020 election, Villeda said she was fed up with party politics.

It got very messy. It got very, 'Youre with me or against me,'" Villeda said

According to Gallup, as of March, 40% of voters say they are independent, more than the 28% who say they are Republican and 30% say they are Democrat.

In 2004, 27% of voters identified as independent, while Republicans made up 38% of voters and Democrats made up 35%.

I think thats one of the things you see nationally is this sort of swinging from Democrat to Republican control, youre seeing voters say no to both parties not saying yes to either one here," said University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) political science professor David Damore.

Damore has taught politics at UNLV for 22 years. Non-partisan and minor party voters, like Libertarians, now make up the largest group of voters in Nevada, which has one of the fastest-growing populations in the country.

Damore said Nevada has seen a non-partisan voter boost because of the state's automatic voter registration. New residents are registered to vote when they get a driver's license and non-partisan is the default option.

Damore contends non-partisan voters have a lot of power.

You look back in '16, Trump carried them narrowly here, they shifted to Biden two years ago, so its a real uncertainty here," Damore said.

This November, U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, could be voted out. Independents could be the group tips the scales in favor of a Republican challenger.

A lot of them are new to the state, so the question is how much are they going to spend learning about these candidates or are they just going to go with the national flow," Damore contemplated.

Independents might have even more power if people like Jeremy Gruber get their way.

His nonpartisan, nonprofit group, Open Primaries Education Fund, is pushing for all states to open their primary elections to independent voters.

This year, 12 states are not allowing independents to vote in primaries. They will only be allowed to participate in general elections.

Theyre taxpayer-funded. We pay millions of dollars every year to fund primaries," Gruber said. "They are for all intents and purposes public elections, but we let the parties decide which members of the public can participate."

This fall, Villeda will vote in her first election as a non-partisan and she is OK with it. She will be voting for the person, not the party.

"This what America is," she said. "We have a right to our own voice."

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The power of the independent voter - Denver 7 Colorado News