Category Archives: Libertarianism

WOODSTOCK, N.H. Jeers from about two dozen protesters gathered about a quarter-mile away from President Bidens visit didnt go unnoticed.

Shouts of Lets go Brandon could be heard clearly throughout Bidens 20-minute speech atop the deteriorating Pemigewasset River Bridge on Tuesday. Behind the bullhorn was Chau Kelley, a Hooksett Realtor with a penchant for protesting.

The anti-Biden slogan has gone viral over the last month after supporters of former President Donald Trump and Biden critics broke out into a chant of (Expletive) Joe Biden at an Oct. 16 NASCAR race. NBC reporter Kelli Stavast misreported fans shouts while interviewing driver Brandon Brown after he captured his first race win at Alabamas Talladega Superspeedway, turning the phrase into a viral, anti-Biden sensation.

Kelley said shes been actively demonstrating all over for about 20 years.

Im here because the Biden administration is hurting Americans every day, she said. People are suffering. Gas is almost $4 per gallon. Because of inflation the cost of food is rising. It costs me $60 two times per week to fuel up my car. Thats a lot of money.

New Hampshire Republican National Committeeman Christopher Ager of Amherst said demonstrators have seized onto the message as the polite way to taunt the president.

Red and blue Trump hats and several flags peppered the small crowd of protesters gathered at the bottom of the hill leading to the bridge, but it was just Trump supporters

Ager, who declined to align himself with Trump, said hes against the spending orgy in Bidens companion Build Back Better bill which proposes $1.85 trillion in spending for social programs.

The lower and middle class are really getting screwed here, said Larry Borland, a self-described Libertarian from Wolfeboro. Borland carried a sign showing how much inflation has driven up the price of food ahead of Thanksgiving.

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New Hampshire protesters taunt Biden with Lets go Brandon jeers - Boston Herald

Ive had mixed feelings about the COVID police since the beginning of the pandemics lockdowns.

As governors enacted shutdown orders and the country went into lockdown in March 2020, people began asking who would enforce the laws, how stringent would punishments be?

Now we know. A Buncombe County court found the Rise n Shine caf owner guilty of willfully defying Gov. Roy Coopers Executive Order 138 prohibiting sit-down dining. The eatery opened from May 16-19, 2020, and the order was in effect until May 22, 2020. After a jury found the restaurant guilty last week, the judge ordered its owner to pay a $1,000 fine and spend one year on unsupervised probation. The case was appealed after a similar ruling from a judge in July.

The restaurants lawyers argued that it was struggling to stay in business and so chose to open. It is the only business in Buncombe County taken to court for defying the states shutdown orders.

Remember how surreal it got back in April and May of 2020 when wed walk down usually busy streets lined with restaurants and bars and no one was open? Owners got creative and tried all forms of carry out, but the truth is the income businesses lost and the wages lost by laid off employees wont ever be regained.

Rise n Shine, it was reported in court, was the recipient of $118,000 of the federal aid that was offered to help businesses affected by the shutdown. So, the owners took advantage of what the government offered but also defied government orders aimed at slowing the spread of the pandemic.

My libertarian heart sways toward the live and let live. I almost always disagree with laws that deny rights related to personal matters (like sexuality, for instance, and even drug use).

As the pandemic spread, however, I was in the camp that advocated for small group gatherings, outside meetings, staying home, wearing masks, etc. For me, it was personal responsibility, doing my small part to try and slow the spread of the virus. For a society to have as many freedoms as we enjoy, citizens must also take personal responsibility for their actions. Otherwise, the system falls apart and chaos ensues.

This pandemic has been responsible for 18,463 deaths in North Carolina, 763,000 in the U.S., and 5.1 million worldwide. If more people had acted responsibly from the beginning, the death toll would not have grown so large. Now, as the economy staggers to recover from pandemic-related decisions made by the government and by businesses large and small, many likely regret some of the choices that were made very early.

As vaccine mandates have ramped up, Ive also found myself in the middle: I think everyone should get the vaccine, but Im not firing employees who are also friends who choose not to.

This pandemic has done plenty to divide us. It has thrown fuel on what was already a heated political divide that somehow must be tamped down. Thankfully, the COVID police arent brandishing debilitating punishments to businesses who defied the orders. In the end, we are all in this together, and thats the only way well find a path out.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Excerpt from:
Now we know what the COVID police will do - Smoky Mountain News

Years before he helped purge his local elections board, Michigan GOP official Shane Trejo hosted a podcast called Blood Soil and Liberty with a member of a white supremacist group.

Shane Trejo, chair of Michigans 11th District Republican Committee, made headlines earlier this year when he encouraged the ouster of a fellow Republican who had voted to certify President Joe Bidens election. You should quit all your GOP posts and never show your face at an event ever again, Trejo texted the Republican elections official, whom he and other Republicans later blocked from re-nomination for office. Previously in 2020, Trejo had spread election-fraud conspiracy theories as a writer for the far-right site Big League Politics.

But Big League Politics wasnt even Trejos most extreme venture on the far right. The local Republican chair used to host a podcast with a member of the white supremacist group Identity Evropa. The co-host, Alex Witoslawski, was recorded on an Identity Evropa leadership webinar giving fascists advice on how to make themselves appealing to mainstream conservatives.

Trejo did not return The Daily Beasts request for comment. His participation in the Blood Soil and Liberty podcast was previously flagged in 2019 by Gizmodo reporter Tom McKay, who noted that the podcast was racist even by the standards of Big League Politics, where Trejo works.

The podcast ran for 15 episodes starting in 2017, and appears to have been yanked from the internet by its creators the following year. Some podcasting sites still host its episode titles and descriptions remain online.

Libertarian nationalist podcasters Shane Trejo - a states rights activist in the patriot movement for many years - and Alex Witoslawski - former conservative political operative turned American Renaissance writer - discuss current events from a consistently uncucked perspective, the podcast description reads. Common targets of derision include commie trash, losertarians, cuckservatives, thots, tokens, welfare migrants, and the French. (American Renaissance is a white supremacist website. Tokens refers to people deemed to be token members of a minority group.)

Episode titles include Its OK To Be White, Right And Christian, Roy Moore Dindu Nuffin, The Paul Nehlen Pill, and Tanner Flake For Fuhrer.

The titles are a time capsule of racist slogans from 2017. Its OK to be white was a meme associated with an alt-right trolling campaign around the time of the podcasts. Dindu nuffin is another alt-right meme denigrating Black people, while Roy Moore was a Republican Senate nominee accused of sexual misconduct against minor girls. Paul Nehlen was a white supremacist congressional candidate who promoted terror tactics online. Tanner Flake is an ex-senators son who was caught using the screen name that included a racial slur and referenced killing Black people.

Witoslawski repeatedly called for a white ethnostate with an immigration system that virtually excludes non-European immigrants.

Although the audio from the podcasts is no longer available, Trejo and Witoslawski appear to have spoken favorably about white supremacists, describing Nehlen as the first alt-right candidate for public office. (The podcasts website uses the term alt-right favorably, including in an essay in which Witoslawski describes himself as a member of the movement.)

The podcast didnt try hard to obscure its political leanings.

Blood and soil is a Nazi slogan used in Germany to evoke the idea of a pure Aryan race and the territory it wanted to conquer, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Since then, it has been adopted by neo-Nazis; the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 famously chanted the slogan the night before one of them murdered a woman with his car.

The Blood Soil and Liberty podcast launched soon after that deadly rally. The podcasts website, which hosted self-proclaimed alt-right blogs, was registered just four days after the car attack, during a tumultuous moment for the alt-right. But instead of disavow the racist movement, as some on the right did, Blood Soil and Liberty came to the defense of the alt-right and groups that had marched in Charlottesville.

In an essay on the podcasts website, Trejos cohost Witoslawski answered questions about the movement from my own alt-right or blood and soil libertarian perspective. In that essay, Witoslawski repeatedly called for a white ethnostate with an immigration system that virtually excludes non-European immigrants. Most Jews and members of Black Lives Matter should be encouraged through government policy to leave the country and resettle in their own ethnostates, Witoslawski wrote on the podcasts website.

Other articles on the site include a blog post defending white supremacist Christopher Cantwell, an essay by Ray Adolfson who describes going to a white lives matter rally in November 2017, where multiple prominent Charlottesville marchers were in attendance.

I had the chance to meet and speak with members from all of the groups that attended the rally including the Traditionalist Workers Party, Vanguard America, the National Socialist Movement, Identity Europa, Atomwaffen, and others, Adolfson wrote. (An overtly pro-terror organization, Atomwaffens small membership was connected to five deaths in just eight months beginning in 2017.)

Another essay on the site, by Identity Evropa member James Allsup, was a defense of the alt-right in the days after the deadly Charlottesville rally, which Allsup had attended. Allsups essay was previously published on the website The Liberty Conservative, where Trejo was a news editor. When The Liberty Conservative removed Allsups article, citing pressure from Googles advertising platform, Trejo penned a blog post defending Allsup, whose article he claimed contained no offensive content (it was merely distinguishing the many differences between the alt-right and literal Nazis).

For some on the alt-right, especially in Identity Evropa, Allsup was a prototype for infiltrating more mainstream Republican institutions. In 2018, The Daily Beast first reported, Allsup ran uncontested for a local Republican role in Washington. He soon bragged about his appointment on an Identity Evropa podcast.

Blood Soil and Liberty came to the defense of the alt-right and groups that had marched in Charlottesville.

You have a seat at the table, Allsup said of winning Republican offices. And thats the most important thing, getting that seat at the table, and you can get that seat at the table by, yes, showing up, yes, by bringing people in, and again this doesnt necessarily only have to be IE members.

Allsups local Republican committee later ejected him. Nevertheless, the far right continued to cite his political career as one to emulate. We cant all be Andrew Anglin, a racist podcaster noted in 2018, namedropping a particularly noxious neo-Nazi, but 10,000 of us can be James Allsup.

In a separate podcast appearance with Identity Evropa leader Patrick Casey, Witoslawski described tactics for making the group seem more palatable to a broader swath of Republicans. Leaked Identity Evropa chat logs show Witoslawski giving the same advice, in more candid terms, telling members to effectively avoid questions about the groups true motives.

The moment you say Were not Nazis [] thats going to be the topic of the media report, it's going to be whether or not were Nazis. And that is not a conversation we want to have, Witoslawski said, according to chats published by the outlet Unicorn Riot. We want to have a conversation about our issues and our topics, not whether or not were National Socialists, right?

(In a currently ongoing civil trial against participants in the Charlottesville rally, a former Identity Evropa organizer testified that members of the group embraced neo-Nazi language, using the slogan did you see Kyle? and a discrete Nazi salute as a way of announcing sieg heil in public.)

Trejo, who has authored articles in defense of Allsup on multiple websites, has found his own path to politics.

In a now-deleted Big League Politics post shortly before the 2020 election, Trejo shared audio from inside a training session for elections officials. Trejo claimed the clip showed officials practicing to flip votes and destroy ballots. The audio demonstrated nothing of the sort, the Detroit Free Press reported at the time. Still, Trejos deleted article was cited by election fraud conspiracy theorists as Biden appeared poised to win Michigan. When a Republican elections canvasser certified Bidens victory last November, Trejo texted her to quit her GOP posts and never appear at another public event.

By February, Trejo was named chair of Michigans 11th Congressional District Republican Committeea role that gave him partial control over the districts elections canvassers. The Republican canvasser who had certified Bidens election found herself blocked from re-nomination to the post, she told The Daily Beast last month.

Instead, Trejo and peers selected a new Republican canvasser, who told the Detroit Free Press that he would not have certified Bidens victory.

I believe they were inaccurate, the new canvasser told the Free Press of Michigans votes, adding that he had heard rumors about the vote from other people. I dont know, I wasnt there, you know? Its hard to second-guess that kind of stuff until youre there, thats one reason I wanted to be on the committee.

Original post:
Michigan GOP Official Hosted Podcast With White Nationalist - The Daily Beast

Libertarians face many trite and tired arguments against their ideology, but none is more famous than the ever-present Who would build the roads? attack.

But while libertarians are forced to spend a good bit of time talking about roads, the rest of the country is typically less focused on our nations infrastructure that is until this week when Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg made comments that ignited a firestorm over the topic.

In remarks made about the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, Buttigieg alluded to the racist design of Americas highways and his plans to use the funds to address the problems theyve caused.

I dont think we have anything to lose by confronting that simple reality, he said. And I think we have everything to gain by acknowledging it and then dealing with it, which is why the Reconnecting Communities, that billion dollars, is something we want to get to work right away putting to work.

In response, conservative pundits went to work defending the government which they often do when accusations of systemic racism come up. Its an odd stance given the fact that the Right claims to believe the government is inherently corrupt, vile, and perverse. But racist? Not a chance, how dare you allege such a thing.

If we step back from the culture war for a moment, though, it is easy to come up with a number of examples of systemic racism that most on the Right would not argue. Gun laws were implemented to ensure black people did not have access to firearms after the Civil War. Government schools, which are assigned based on zip codes that are affected by the policies of redlining, consistently produce racially disparate outcomes. And occupational licenses have commonly been put in place to block certain people from entering careers.

While the policies that built our nations roads may be less familiar to many, there are countless historical examples that back up Buttigiegs claims.

Our highways were mostly built throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Ambitious engineers sought means to link downtown business districts with the suburbs, and to do so, they often had to cut through existing neighborhoods, meaning a great deal of disruption to those residents and a good amount of eminent domain seizures. Wealthier neighborhoods, which tended to be white, had the political might to fight off these projects while the poorer neighborhoods, which were often mostly black, did not.

To build Interstate 10 in New Orleans, engineers cleared a large portion of land along the oak-lined commercial thoroughfare of North Claiborne Avenue. The black residents fought this plan unsuccessfully at the time, and dozens of homes and businesses in the community were destroyed while the nearby French Quarter was left untouched.

Its a pattern one can find replicated dozens of times throughout virtually every city. According toThe Pew Charitable Trusts , In Miami, Interstate 95 flattened swaths of a Black neighborhood called Overtown, forcing some 10,000 people to leave their homes. In Nashville, Tennessee, the I-40 expressway demolished 620 houses, 27 apartment buildings and six Black churches.

The impacts on the black community were severe. Not only were they not compensated for their properties at market rates eminent domain seizures rarely are but the roads ruined black-owned businesses, caused home values to fall, increased pollution, attracted homeless camps and crime under overpasses, and cut communities off from one another.

This is what people mean by systemic racism. And whether it was done intentionally by government actors to cut black communities off from white neighborhoods as segregation became illegal, or if it was merely done because these communities lacked the political power to fight back, the results are the same.

We should not seek to tear down existing roads as Buttigieg has flirted with, but we should seek to learn from our history and use this as yet another example of the failures of government power and central planning.

One thing is certain: If libertarians built the roads, theyd have a lot better chance of not being racist.

Hannah Cox (@hannahdcox ) is a libertarian-conservative activist and a contributor to the Washington Examiners Beltway Confidential blog.

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If libertarians built the roads, maybe they wouldnt be racist - Washington Examiner

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Outside agitators: Hard-core libertarians from across the country, like Mike Parag of Delaware, converge at the annual Porcupine Freedom Festival in Lancester, New Hampshire.

One muggy June day in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, Bill Marsh, a Republican from the picturesque lake town of Wolfeboro, rose to buck his party. The chamber, newly under Republican control thanks to an alliance between conservatives and libertarian activists, was considering an amendment that would ban mandatory vaccinations amid a global pandemicall mandatory vaccinations, covering diseases from COVID-19 to mumps to hepatitis. Marsh, a retired ophthalmologist who has pushed fellow Republicans to take pandemic precautions more seriously, framed his objection as pro-business. He asked, Why would we interfere with private businesses right to protect themselves, their employees, and their patrons?

The amendments sponsor was Terry Roy, a veteran, devout Christian, and self-described constitutional conservative. He spoke next in defense of the measure, launching into a rambling diatribe that referenced child labor, slavery in the American South, Chinese bats, and the dangers of fluoridated tap water. Does my body, my choice only apply to abortion? he said, according to a House transcript. What about new advances in science? What if we determine someones characteristics can be genetically altered in utero? Would we allow mandated gene therapy? After all, propensity for carrying certain diseases costs billions in health care. What about vaccines for the flu? Will employers mandate those next?

Roys amendment narrowly failed, 193182.

Retribution for the speech was swift and decisiveMarshs speech, that is. Within days, Marsh resigned from his committee, Health, Human Services and Elderly Affairs, after party leadership informed him that he would be removed as vice chairman. Later that summer, Roy was appointed vice chairman of the influential Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, replacing another wayward conservative who had disobeyed the partys radicalnew leadership.

A key factor in the extremism, and the extraordinary conservative successes, of this New Hampshire legislature is a group of libertarian activists known as the Free State Project. Founded in 2001 in hopes of establishing a government-free utopia, the Free State Project encourages liberty-minded people to move to New Hampshire to help push its politics even further toward low taxes and minimal state intervention. As of 2021, there are more than 5,000 Free Staters in New Hampshire. Despite their small numbers, they have built a well-funded and organized political apparatus that has elected roughly 45 Republicans to the New Hampshire House of Representatives. The libertarians vote as a bloc that, with a slim majority, the party cant do without.

With Free Staters at their back, Republicans this year have cut taxes in the already income-tax-less state, banned critical race theory and late-term abortions, and launched whats likely the most sweeping education voucher program in the nation. Under House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, a Free State mover, anti-authority libertarians have joined with anti-elite populists to shoot down anything that smacks of expertise or specialized knowledge. Recently, a joint House-Senate committee tabled its acceptance of $6.3 million in federal funds for addiction counseling in the opioid-ravaged state, with members saying they needed to see proof that counseling even works.

Over the past two decades, Free Staters have walked a long path from obscurity and ridicule to undeniable power. And as popular Republican Governor Chris Sununu eyes a 2022 U.S. Senate run, he may remember that a Free Stater, Aaron Day, is often credited with spoiling the 2016 Senate race for Republican incumbent Kelly Ayotte. A year from now, the potentially vulnerable Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan may try to tie him to the libertarian extremism he has refused to reject, observers say. And if Sununu wins, hell enter the U.S. Capitol with a group of constituents he cant afford to offend.

The founder of the Free State Project, Jason Sorens, is a mild-mannered college professor with a mop of brown hair, a boyish smile, and a knack for making even the most outlandish ideas sound like simple arithmetic. During the 2000 elections, Sorens, then a graduate student at Yale, watched with dismay as the Libertarian Party failed to earn more than 1 percent of the national presidential vote. If disaffection with the major parties wasnt enough to swing elections, what was? Despair turned to anger over the course of the long New Haven winter, and then to determination. One day, Sorens sat down at his computer, queued up some heavy metal, and started a manifesto.

Libertarian activists need to face a somber reality, he wrote: nothings working. There are too few libertarians, spread too thinly across the United States, to make a difference through partisan politics, he argued. The only way to break free from oppressive government is to move together to one state, take over its political system, and use threats of secession to force the federal government to leave its residents alone. Uprooting ones life would be inconvenient, yes. But, he wrote, our forefathers bled and diedbecause of the Stamp Tax! The Free State Project requires nothing of that kind, and the stakes are so much higher. How much is liberty worth to you?

In July 2001, Sorens sent the 2,000-word broadside, titled Announcement: The Free State Project, to an obscure libertarian publicationL. Neil Smiths The Libertarian Enterpriseexpecting little response. Then the emails started coming. And coming. People from all over the country wanted to sign up.

For its first few years, the Free State Project existed just as an idea, an internet forum where liberty-minded folk could fantasize about freedom from government overreach during the height of the war on terror. Far-flung libertarians signed a pledge to move together to one place and change its politics, often with the assumption that it would never actually happen. But in 2003, the movement took a significant step toward reality. In a nationwide vote, members chose their Free State. Would it be Texas, independent and suspicious of authority, but perhaps too populous for a small group of activists to influence? Wyoming, sparsely populated, but geographically expansive enough to make coordination difficult? In the end, it was New Hampshire. Population 1.2 million, with no income tax, the land of Live Free or Die was small enough, and libertarian enough, for a little band of determined freedom fighters to swing even further toward liberty.

The revolution had begun. It lookedwell, a bit clownish. The pledge to move to New Hampshire did not technically take effect until 20,000 people, the number Sorens calculated would sway state politics, had signed. Until then, it was the most zealous, with the fewest connections to society, who chose to make the move. In 2004, as chronicled by the journalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling in his book A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears), New Hampshire got an early look at its colonizers-cum-liberators in the form of a grizzled, gun-toting posse of men who settled in the woods of Grafton, a town of some 1,100 with low taxes and no zoning regulations. Calling themselves the Free Town Project, the early movers took aim at local government, savaging the budget and constraining the town librarians bathroom breaks to a portable toilet. Bears, lured by the trash left outside the freedom fighters woodland shanties, made increasingly bold incursions into human settlements, which the Free Towners and another, separate commune of anarchists drove back with firecrackers, pistols, and nail-studded booby traps. (And, in one case, a llama named Hurricane.) Human society, meanwhile, nearly broke down. At annual town meetings, the Free Towners demanded that Grafton eliminate its police department and secede from the United Nations, which, they feared, might one day levy taxes or even invade. At one of these meetings, which regularly ran past eight hours, Free Towners reduced the moderator to tears.

Antics like these soon expanded beyond Grafton, dominating headlines about the Free State Project for its first decade. In Keene, New Hampshire, a group of Robin-Hooders declared war on the citys parking officers starting in 2009, following them with video cameras and popping quarters into meters to foil local governments ticket-hungry schemes. Every summer in the White Mountains, Free Staters gathered for the libertarian version of Burning Man: PorcFest, a cryptocurrency and substance-fueled celebration with few rules, many assault rifles, and a giant wooden porcupine that the Free Staters (known as prickly, independent Porcs) set ablaze at the festivals end.

It wasnt until 2016 that the Free State Project reached 20,000 signers, the magic number that triggered the move to New Hampshire. After a triumphant press conference in Manchester, the states largest city, Jason Sorens and other Free State VIPs retired to an after-party at a local speakeasy bar. (The password: TRIGGERED.) Its happening! Sorens said giddily, imitating the popular meme of an arm-waving, celebrating Ron Paul. But Sorens, by this time the respectable face of the movement, with scholarly publications and an appointment at Dartmouth, had doubts, too. He no longer believed in secession, and he feared that the extremists in Grafton had cast a bearded, AK-47-wielding shadow on his brainchild. If all government should be eliminated, he mused, should we just let the roads fall apart? A sheepish grin stole across his face. I dont knowmaybe that makes me a bad libertarian.

Sorens wasnt alone. For years, mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike viewed the Free Staters with suspicion. That included former Speaker Shawn Jasper, who, as recently as 2017, warned fellow Republicans that they must distance themselves from the Free State Project. Sununu, however, has understood the importance of courting the liberty faction since his first run for governor, in 2016. The Free Staters preferred candidate, Frank Edelblut, came within 1,000 votes of defeating him in the Republican primary. After winning the general election, Sununu offered Edelblut, a financier and homeschooler with no public school experience, control of the state department of education. It was a preview for a danceneutralizing a rival, while recruiting from his basethat Sununu would do for years to come.

All the while, the Free State Projects numbers and influence have been growing. Five years ago, the group claimed 2,000 movers and 17 legislators. Though only about 3,000 more people have arrived since then, far from the hoped-for 18,000, the movements legislative numbers have nearly tripled in that timea function of outside investment and the peculiar structure of the New Hampshire legislature.

The New Hampshire House of Representatives has 400 total members, an enormous number of citizen legislators who receive nominal salaries and often run with little to no opposition. In recent years, political organizations such as the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity appear to have recognized that these seats offer good value for their money. In the 2020 cycle alone, the groups New Hampshire chapter spent nearly $847,000 on statehouse races and other statewide elections, often in support of Free State candidates, according to state filings. Meanwhile, as the Republican Party nationally has taken a populist, anti-elite turn, libertarians and conservatives are ever more unitedin what theyre against.

Jason Osborne moved to New Hampshire from Defiance, Ohio, in October 2010. He had signed the Free State pledge years earlier, during graduate school, and mostly forgotten about it. But as he looked for a place to raise his four-year-old daughter, he was drawn by the prospect of a like-minded community in New Hampshire. A few months before his move, he took the stage at PorcFest 2010 to belt a karaoke rendition of Minority, by the left-leaning punk band Green Day. He sang, with equal doses of irony and prophecy,

I want to be the minority

I dont need your authority

Down with the moral majority

Cause I want to be the minority.

Once in New Hampshire, Osborne, who manages his familys student debt collection firm, Credit Adjustments, Inc., gave generously to libertarian causes and built a profile in the community. He won his first election in 2014, and was elected majority leader this year. His financial profilehe donated $50,000 to a PAC financingliberty-oriented statehouse candidates this cycleand ability to deliver a growing libertarian base made him a strong choice for the leadership role. In an interview this fall, he said he hasnt attended Free State Project events such as PorcFest since 2013, though he remains part of the legislatures liberty faction, which includes sympathetic native New Hampshire-ites.

Osborne portrays himself as a bottom-up consensus builder, but under his leadership, the party has been strict in enforcing unity, and not just in the case of Bill Marsh. In summer 2021, nine-term state Representative Lynne Ober intentionally called a premature vote that threatened Republicans plans to kill Sununus paid family leave proposal and limit the governors emergency powers amid the pandemic. As punishment, leadership stripped Ober of her regular-session committee role. She and her husband, Representative Russell Ober, resigned from the legislature.

Punishments for speaking out havent been confined to Republicans. After the January 6 insurrection, Rosemarie Rung, a Democrat from Merrimack, was stripped of her committee assignments by the Republican speaker for tweeting a condemnation of a New Hampshire police chief who had attended the rally before the Capitol riot.

If there is irony in libertarians embracing a party controlled by a distant plutocrat who tried, and failed, to institute authoritarian rule, the Free Staters do not accept it. Sorens and other libertarians said they didnt believe Donald Trump had the same sway over the Republican Party in New Hampshire. But Sorens, now director of the Center for Ethics and Society at St. Anselm College, still has his doubts. He worries especially that libertarians will become more conservative as theyre embraced by Republicans. But, he noted, libertarians can still find things to appreciate about the party of Trump; for instance, the former presidents noninterventionist policy abroad.

And take the ban on critical race theory, an infringement on free speech from which liberty-minded people theoretically should recoil. Yet it was a Free Stater and friend of Sorenss, Keith Ammon, who brought forward that bill in the House. Here, Sorens hesitated. He thought college students and professors should be able to debate whatever ideas they wished in the classroom. But, he added, I also dont think I want teachers shaming five-year-olds because of their whiteness.

Whatever their methods and allegiances, the Republican majority has achieved results. This June, the legislature passed a $13.5 billion budget for the next two years, cutting nearly $300 million from Sununus original proposal. Onto the budget they tacked a ban on abortions beyond 24 weeks (unless to save the mothers life); the aforementioned ban on divisive race education in schools; a program creating education freedom accounts (essentially vouchers) that redirect public school money to private schools and homeschooling; and a raft of tax cuts.

Though familiar in Congress, the tactic of loading the budget with measures unlikely to pass on their own is new to New Hampshire, says House Minority Leader Renny Cushing. Cushing, an eight-term Democrat from the liberal seacoast region, offered grudging respect for Osbornes abilitiesHe knows how to count votesbut says he feared this would become standard practice in the New Hampshire legislature, giving minority constit-uencies such as libertarians and evangelicals a vehicle to push through policies the state as a whole doesnt want. And despite libertarians assurances that theyre willing to ally with Democrats to protect civil liberties and other shared priorities, Cushing says he hasnt found that cooperation to be forthcoming. I think the allure of the appearance of power quickly trumps any principled origins they may have had that caused them to migrate to New Hampshire, he told me.

If there was to be a breaking point between the legislatures liberty faction and Sununu, the law they passed limiting the governors emergency powers seemed to have potential. Free Staters and their allies resented Sununus mask mandate and limits on public gatherings, and even sent rifle-wielding protesters to picket his house, forcing him to cancel his outdoor inauguration earlier this year. But he has since repealed the precautionslaxer than those of surrounding states to begin withand has largely stayed silent as this legislature does its work.

Looming ahead is 2022. Heir to a political dynasty that has sent members to both the U.S. Senate and the governors mansion, Sununu has both the establishment pedigree and broad appealincluding to libertariansthat could make him a strong challenger to Hassan, especially during midterm elections in a purple state. Virtually everyone surveyed this fall agreed that he would have to keep the libertarian wing in mind, though opinions varied over the degree. Some libertarians, including Sorens, were skeptical of Sununus dependability, but Osborne had fewer doubts. In 2016, Hassan defeated incumbent Republican Kelly Ayotte by a margin of 1,017 votes. Aaron Day, a Free Stater running as an independent, received 17,742.

He cannot afford to lose us, Osborne said.

Despite some recent successes, Sununus embrace of the libertarian faction has put him in a double-edged position that could turn against him in a matchup with Hassan, who can link him to the extremism of the Free State Project. Cushing, for his part, says he thought that the anti-abortion legislation passed this year, both in New Hampshire and places like Texas, would hurt Sununu in a race with Hassan. This September in the town of Bedford, Catherine Rombeau narrowly won a special election for state representative, giving Democrats two of seven seats in the conservative strongholdfor the first time ever. The backlash may already have begun.

By this fall, Bill Marsh, the physician chastised for his speech against an anti-vaccine bill, appeared to have learned his lesson. If he wanted to remain a Republican under New Hampshires new political order, it was best to be silent.

In a brief, cautious conversation in early September, Marsh referred a reporter to the Houses daily journal, which memorialized, as he put it, the speech that ticked everyone off. Otherwise, he said, I dont want to say anything that could jeopardize what I need to do going forward.

About a week later, the state Republican Party hosted a large rally in opposition to President Bidens nationwide vaccine mandate. For Marsh, this was the final straw. In December 2020, then Speaker Dick Hinch had died of COVID-19 after attending two unmasked, undistanced rallies of House Republicans. Marsh, who respected Hinch, publicly denounced Republicans role in the speakers death. For months afterward, he worked tirelessly to promote anti-COVID regulations that could survive libertarian backlashwork that was now being undone. On September 14, Marsh, a Republican since campaigning for Ronald Reagan in 1976, changed his affiliation to Democrat.

I still do see myself as a conservative, Marsh said in an interview afterward. I just dont think that Republicans are holding to the principles they once avowed. I cant call this conservatism. Its more likelibertarianism.

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The White Mountain Boys - Washington Monthly

Gen Z is politically homeless and increasingly so. In just a year, 2020srecord-breakingyoung voter engagement has plummeted astronomically. This year, the California recall election saw a48 percentdrop in young turnout as compared to 2020, and the governors race in Virginia also experienced a62 percentslump in voters under 30.

This comes as Gen Zs faith in President Biden and the Democratic Partys effectiveness has faltered. Theyreportthe largest generational drop in approval of Bidens performance, tumbling20 percentsince June to a mere 43 percent last month. We appear to be growing politically apathetic and that should come as no surprise.

Gen Z came of age in the lesser-of-two-evils era of American politics. The first major political event many of us were old enough to understand was the election of 2016, when we watched our families tear each other apart over politics at the Thanksgiving table. While older Americans experienced a slow-slide into divisiveness, a disjointed America is the only one Gen Z has ever known and, frankly, many of us are fed up.

With roughlyhalfof Gen Z registered as independents, my contemporaries are dumping the partisan system in droves, and were looking for alternatives. The third party options before us, however, are uninspiring to say the least. The two largest are theLibertarian Party, which attracted a meager1 percentof the popular vote in 2020, and the progressiveGreen Party, which couldnt even pull in a third of a percent. For dynamic young voters, these lethargic and ineffective parties are far from a logical fit.

Thats where former presidential and mayoral candidate Andrew Yang would like to step in. Last month, he launched theForward Partywith the slogan, Not Left. Not Right. Forward, with a platform that endorses various alterations to our democracys status quo, includingranked-choice voting,independent redistricting commissions,accessible and secure voting, andopen primariesto increase voter engagement in choosing candidates.

I personally feel terrible that we left your generation such a disaster, Yang told me in a recent phone interview. I get why young people are becoming apathetic. You look up and say, This system is not designed to work for me or my generation. Why should I have faith in this? And the answer is that you shouldnt. If I were a sensible young person today, I would feel there isnt a place for me politically.

Yang, 46, wants to modernize policies to keep up in the digital age by establishing aDepartment of Technology,protect personal data as a property right, and even formallyendorse cryptocurrenciesand blockchain technologies, which promises to be particularly popular with young voters who make up astaggering majorityof crypto buyers.

The plan is to animate those who are fed up which is most of us at this point and to point out that the system is rigged, he said. The Forward Party is unifying independents, libertarians, disaffected Democrats and disaffected Republicans who want to make a process change that will allow new points of view to be heard.

The Forward Partys economic platform, however, has proven quite controversial. Policies include handouts of money in the form of democracy dollars for donations to political candidates and a $1,000 monthly universal basic income, which has drawn awidearrayofcriticism. While many Americans see UBI as better suited to a socialist state than the United States, its a clear point of generational dissonance. More thantwo-thirdsof Gen Z hold a favorable view of the policy, at a two-to-one rate over older Americans.

While Yangs vision is definitely bold and perhaps utopian, it just may gain traction among a generation desperate for change. Gen Zs mountingvoting powerand general disaffection are going to shake things up and future third party alternatives will likely meet their demands in the coming years.

Id say this to a young person trying to figure out where to go: Do you really think that the Democratic or Republican Party will be the vehicle thats going to change things for your generation, or do you think its going to be a new upstart party that changes the game? Yang asked. If you think that its the latter, then join us because were making common cause with everyone whos fed up with the status quo.

Rikki Schlott is a 21-year-old student at NYU.

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Why Gen Z is fed-up with our two-party systemand will force it to change - New York Post

EUREKA, MONT.

Looking back at the Capitol riot, Tasha Adams ponders her time as an Oath Keepers wife and asks: What if I had not supported him?

Him is her estranged husband, Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government group whose members stand accused by federal authorities of having played a crucial role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. During nearly 23 years of marriage, Adams says she devoted herself to Rhodes aspirations. She worked as an exotic dancer to help put him through college, assisted in writing his papers and encouraged him to successfully apply to Yale Law School. When he was looking for direction in life a cause Adams helped him start the Oath Keepers.

Over the next few years, Adams became disillusioned by the far-right organization and her marriage. The Oath Keepers, she says, increasingly promoted conspiracy theories while engaging in extremist activities and rhetoric that demonstrated racial and ethnic biases. Meanwhile, her husband became emotionally and physically abusive, she says. In 2018, hoping to put Rhodes and the organization behind her, she left him and filed for divorce.

With congressional committees and federal investigators examining the threat posed by domestic extremists and their contribution to the insurrection, Adams has been conducting an exploration of her own life and culpability in the forming of the Oath Keepers. Her journey provides behind-the-scenes insights into how a Las Vegas car valet transformed into the leader of an organization that sought to overturn a presidential election.

Column One

A showcase for compelling storytelling from the Los Angeles Times.

If I hadnt helped him start it, I mean, there would probably still have been an insurrection, Adams, 49, says in an interview in this old logging town, not far from where she lives. But what would it have looked like? That is what Im trying to figure out.

Adams has not been shy about sharing her experiences tweeting critically about Rhodes and his organization, while launching an online crowdsourcing campaign to fund her divorce. Last month, she spoke at length with investigators for the special House committee examining the Capitol riot.

Eureka, the town not far from where Tasha Adams lives, is known as an old logging town.

(Tailyr Irvine / For The Times)

Dissecting what transpired in any relationship can be a fraught endeavor. This story is based on Adams recollections, as well as reviews of court records and interviews with two of her adult children, Dakota Vonn Adams and Sedona Rhodes, who confirmed their mothers account. More than a dozen current and former officers and board members of the Oath Keepers did not respond to requests for comment.

Rhodes did not respond to repeated phone calls and text messages. The 56-year-old has not been charged in the insurrection. He has said the Oath Keepers were in town to provide security for advisors to then-President Trump and supporters and did not intend to enter the building.

Adams, who speaks in rapid-fire sentences that frequently end in quips, starts each day by firing up a laptop on her kitchen countertop, scanning for news about the Oath Keepers.

She has read how 18 Oath Keepers have been indicted on conspiracy charges for forcing their way into the Capitol, and she has studied prosecutors damning portrait of Rhodes. They allege in court papers that Rhodes urged Oath Keepers to come to Washington to fight for Trump.

He was on the Capitol grounds during the insurrection, prosecutors say, and provided live updates to his members storming the building. Theres no indication that he entered the Capitol during the riot. Rhodes described the rioters as patriots and later compared the insurrection to the Boston Tea Party, prosecutors say.

Adams met Rhodes when she was an 18-year-old dance instructor at an Arthur Murray studio in Las Vegas, and he was a 25-year-old student.

She was the daughter of strict white Mormon parents who ran a window manufacturing business. Rhodes was an intense and worldly former Army paratrooper who maintained his military physique and parked cars for a living. He told her of growing up in a multi-ethnic Christian family, spending summers picking fruit alongside relatives. Rhodes has described himself as a quarter Mexican and part Native American, invoking that heritage at times to deflect against allegations that the Oath Keepers are sympathetic to racists.

Adams says she was drawn to Rhodes life experience because it was so different from mine.

An archival photograph of Tasha Adams during her honeymoon with Stewart Rhodes rests on a table.

(Tailyr Irvine / For The Times)

They had been dating four months when Rhodes accidentally dropped a .22-caliber handgun and shot himself in the face, blinding himself in the left eye. She says she felt obligated to assist him.

I was suddenly taking care of a man with a hole in his head, Adams says.

With Adams contemplating becoming a professional ballroom dancer, the couple struggled to make rent; she says Rhodes began to press her to find a more lucrative trade.

Every day, Adams recalls, he was like, You should be a stripper and make more money. She took up exotic dancing, earning $100 a night.

They married in 1994, and she worked at a high-end strip club until she had their first child, Dakota. Each night, Adams says, she helped Rhodes with his assignments at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and nurtured his dreams of becoming a lawyer.

I wanted a house with a treehouse for Dakota. I thought, man, I struck the jackpot, she says, describing her emotion upon Rhodes acceptance by Yale. Im married to a future Yale Law School graduate!

But Rhodes turned down high-paying internships his first year and took a nonpaying summer gig at a conservative think tank. He was more interested in causes than money, says Adams, adding, I knew then I was never going to get the treehouse. She says Rhodes charted a similar course after graduating in 2004, working mostly in smaller practices or as a freelance writer of legal briefs.

Rhodes had always been interested in politics, Adams says, and they both subscribed to libertarianism, a philosophy that promotes free markets and limited government. They fervently supported one of its staunchest adherents, then-Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).

While volunteering for Pauls 2008 presidential campaign, Rhodes and Adams met veterans and former police officers who were drawn to the candidates libertarian views. Thats when Rhodes decided to form the Oath Keepers, a group focused on recruiting veterans, military personnel and police officers and encouraging them to remain true to the oath they swore to defend the Constitution and to disobey orders they consider illegal.

Adams says she liked the idea and believed in the groups focus. Its goals aligned with her libertarian views of limited government, and she saw it as a good way for her husband to tap his charisma to earn a living. She says she envisioned Oath Keepers as a a cigar club of like-minded libertarians.

I thought it was something he could do well, she says. What a great name, right? I thought, wow, we are going to sell a lot of T-shirts and motorcycle jackets.

By the time Rhodes launched the Oath Keepers in March 2009 two months after President Obama took office Adams says she realized the group was not going to be a cigar club, nor a libertarian version of the ACLU.

In a blog post that month, Rhodes wrote that his groups principal mission was to prevent the destruction of American liberty by preventing a full-blown totalitarian dictatorship from coming to power. Our Motto is Not on our watch!

Adams says she accepted Rhodes vision for the Oath Keepers because he seemed to mostly be pushing the boundaries of free speech and advocating for limited government.

For its first couple of years, the Oath Keepers operated on a tight budget. Adams says she handled its mailing lists and ran its website, keeping it updated with links to events, missives from Rhodes and links to news stories about the group.

According to pages captured by the Internet Archive, much of the site was dedicated to testimonials from members, many current and former military personnel, who expressed enthusiasm about joining the organization and its mission. I find no higher calling than to join forces with the Oath Keepers, and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow Americans in our own defense, wrote a member who identified himself as an Air Force officer in June 2009.

In November 2009, a person who identified himself as an Army veteran posted: Its time to stand up for liberty and truth above all else. To Reclaim the Republic for the people, by the people, of the people from the hands of tyranny. The poster added he was particularly concerned about puppet politicians, the Central Banking gangsters, the U.N. ...

With the rise of the tea party movement, the organization grew rapidly. At its height in 2015, the Oath Keepers had about 35,000 members, Adams says. Anti-hate groups have pegged its top membership at no more than 5,000.

Adams says she stepped away from the group in 2010 or 2011 and focused on raising her children. She and Rhodes would eventually have six. In her spare time, Adams blogged a bit, describing herself as a homeschooling, breastfeeding, homebirthing, libertarian, freedom fighting, gun-toting really cool mom.

On the blog, she described her husband as being cute and sexy and extolled his rise from being a down-on-his-luck car valet to leader of the Oath Keepers.

Adams cringes when she reads such posts. I was creating the world I wanted it to be, she says, not the one it was.

At the Oath Keepers height, in 2015, Adams says, the organization had about 35,000 members.

(Tailry Irvine / For The Times)

In 2013, Rhodes announced that the Oath Keepers would create teams, prepared with military-style training, to respond to the implosion of society. Until that point, such training had been prohibited, Adams says, because Rhodes didnt want his group to be considered a militia.

There is a stigma attached to militias, she says. And he wanted to avoid that.

Suddenly, she says, Oath Keepers were running around playing army.

The Oath Keepers in 2014 and 2015 assisted ranchers and miners in Nevada and Oregon in armed disputes with federal authorities. Rhodes also deployed Oath Keepers in 2014 to Ferguson, Mo., to patrol and protect businesses during protests unleashed by the shooting of a Black 18-year-old, Michael Brown, by a white police officer.

Rhodes was criticized by anti-hate groups for that action, and he was chastised by a local Oath Keepers leader for engaging in a racial double standard by failing to assist Black residents accusing law enforcement of abuses. Adams says she raised similar concerns with Rhodes, particularly after the Oath Keepers had defended white ranchers and miners.

Members of the Oath Keepers have generally avoided the kind of inflammatory rhetoric utilized by white supremacists. The groups bylaws prohibit anyone from joining who advocates, or has been or is a member, or associated with, any organization, formal or informal, that advocates discrimination, violence, or hatred toward any person based upon their race, nationality, creed, or color.

But experts say such circumspection belies how the Oath Keepers actions, and statements by members, have assisted in the spread of racist language and hate.

Members of Oath Keepers think of themselves as rejecting racism, yet they and allied groups have served as de facto security for neo-Confederate and alt-right groups, Sam Jackson, a professor at the University at Albany-SUNY wrote in his eponymous book about the Oath Keepers. In other words, like most of the contemporary patriot/militia movement, the [Oath Keepers] is not organized around a perceived racial identity, but neither is it as free of racism and bigotry as it likes to claim.

Jackson noted that Rhodes has wielded his Mexican heritage to push back on claims that he or the Oath Keepers are in league with racists, even as his group has disseminated videos that display bigotry toward undocumented migrants and Mexicans. Rhodes has compared Latino and Black Lives Matter activists to jihadist terrorists and well funded Marxist and racist agitators. He has said that illegal immigration was an invasion and described as dirtbags the mostly Black NFL players who protested racial injustice by kneeling during the national anthem.

Adams says she once believed that anti-hate groups were exaggerating the dangers the Oath Keepers posed because Rhodes convinced her the criticism was unfounded and a ploy to raise money.

After Ferguson and the armed standoffs, however, Adams says her views changed. While Rhodes and leaders did not tolerate discriminatory language I never heard him say anything like the N-word, she says, and he would get rid of anyone who did the estranged wife believes her husband and other Oath Keepers nevertheless exhibited racial and ethnic biases in several, frequently subtle ways. She cited their refusal to back Black residents protesting police abuse in Ferguson, their harsh rhetoric about immigrants and their vision for America. They described America as if they were looking out at a crowd at a baseball game, she says, and seeing a sea of white faces with rosy cheeks.

She adds that the Anti-Defamation League is correct in describing the Oath Keepers as a large right-wing anti-government extremist group. And the Southern Poverty Law Center is accurate, she says, in claiming the Oath Keepers is based on a set of baseless conspiracy theories about the federal government working to destroy Americans liberties.

Stewart Rhodes, founder of the citizen militia group known as the Oath Keepers, speaks during a rally outside the White House in 2017.

(Susan Walsh / Associated Press)

Among the conspiracy theories that Rhodes advocated on the Oath Keepers website and in frequent appearances on conservative TV and radio shows: A U.S. military exercise in 2015 might be a prelude to a coup, baseless claims about voter fraud in the 2016 election and a deep state takeover of the U.S. government. Later, after the 2020 election, he fully embraced and promoted unfounded conspiracies that the election had been stolen and supported Trumps efforts to stay in office.

Adams says she tried to temper Rhodes conspiratorial rhetoric because it didnt serve any purpose except make him look crazy.

By 2016, Adams says, Rhodes had become an ardent supporter of Trump, putting aside early doubts: Stewart thought Trump was too pro-government and pro-spending. Adams added that her estranged husbands attraction to the former president is obvious in hindsight: They are very similar in that they both push conspiracy theories. Its like watching a demagogue be attracted to a demagogue.

It was not possible to independently verify Adams descriptions of her role in the Oath Keepers. Jackson, the author and professor, says she did not come up in his research of the group. I would be surprised if they were coequals, the professor says, referring to Adams and her husband. He declined to speculate further on Adams role in the organization, saying he did not delve into Oath Keepers private lives because they could be difficult to untangle.

Living in remote areas of Montana, Adams says she had no friends, and her life revolved around keeping her husband happy and raising and schooling her children.

Those who know Adams say they rarely saw her outside the presence of Rhodes. Marcy Kuntz, Adams midwife for three births starting in 2006, recalls that Adams didnt speak much about herself, except to apologize for failing to pay bills on time. She was always accompanied on appointments by her husband.

Kuntz delivered the babies at Adams homes, which were generally located deep in the Montana woods. The house was busy, with all the kids, Kuntz says, and I got the sense that her and her childrens world was in that house. They didnt get out much.

She seemed like a very private person, adds Kuntz, who has spoken to Adams a few times in the years since she separated from Rhodes. You could tell she supported what Stewart did as his wife, as a wife supports a husband. ...

In retrospect, it is clear he was very controlling. She kept it all to herself for so long.

Adams and two of her adult children say that by 2015 a year after her sixth child was born they were becoming increasingly disenchanted with Rhodes as a husband and father. He was gone for long stretches, leaving her to raise their children in an isolated part of Montana, said Adams, Dakota and Sedona.

When Rhodes was home, he belittled and berated his wife and kids, kept tabs on their whereabouts and engaged in physical abuse, according to Adams and the two children, as well as allegations included in court records filed by Adams.

In a 2018 application for a restraining order, Adams alleged Rhodes grabbed their then 13-year-old daughter by the throat. Whenever he is unhappy with my behavior (say I want to leave the house he doesnt like me to leave), he will draw his handgun (which he always wears), rack the slide, wave it around, and then point it at his own head, she wrote in the application, which was denied by a judge. It is not clear why the judge declined to grant the order.

According to Dakota and Sedona, their father didnt just promote conspiracy theories he brought them home. One night the power and phones went out, Dakota says, and his father became convinced the FBI had cut the lines, presaging a raid.

Tasha Adams, seen in the reflection of a window, ponders her time as an Oath Keepers wife and asks herself what would have happened if she had not supported her husband.

(Tailyr Irvine / For The Times)

It took us 45 minutes to pack the vehicles, says Dakota, 24. If the FBI was really coming, would they have given us that much time? We drove off and about an hour later, he was like, I guess they arent coming. So we turned around and went home to bed.

Sedona, 22, says her father once ordered the children to dig a tunnel so the family might escape if authorities raided the house. It had a plywood roof, and he had the little kids go through it to get used to it, Sedona says.

Adams and her children say it took years of enduring such behavior for her to see the truth.

Your reality gets warped. He controlled our reality, says Dakota, who succeeded on Nov. 8 in legally changing his name from Dakota Stewart Rhodes because he disdains his father.

His mother was also concerned that Rhodes could use his legal expertise and connections to keep the children. She says she put those fears aside in 2018 and filed for divorce. Rhodes moved out of the house, and appears to live out of state. The divorce case, which was filed under seal, remains unresolved, in part, because Adams says she is in debt to her lawyers.

Earning a living selling used clothes on the internet, Adams has been pecking away at a memoir and says she has been thinking about getting a college degree in extremist studies. Her goal, she says, is to teach about the dangers posed by extremist groups and their leaders.

Among the questions she thinks she can answer for students: How has Rhodes managed to avoid arrest while other Oath Keepers were indicted in the riot on conspiracy charges? In dissecting her life as an Oath Keepers wife and following coverage of the federal prosecutions, Adams says she has a theory: He is very good at getting others to take the risks.

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She helped her husband start a far-right militia group. Now the Oath Keeper's wife says she has regrets - Los Angeles Times

Thirty-two years ago the Berlin Wall fell, a Cold War victory viewed as one of the crowning achievements of the movement conservatism associated with Ronald Reagan. An important development in its own right, this anniversary of the wall's fall is an opportunity to take stock of conservatives who want to replace the "dead consensus" of Reaganism with something else.

We've seen social conservatism take on a bigger role in the political coalition at the expense of individualists (often described as libertarians, no matter how big the government continues to get under the GOP's watch), winning a recent election in blue Virginia by campaigning on parental control of local public schools. Conservatives have begun thinking through some of the contradictions between Reagan's vision of a secure Main Street and untrammeled Wall Street, especially as big corporations side against them in the culture wars.

The most ambitious Republicans are seeking the approval of these new strains of the right. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has fought both public and private COVID-19 restrictions that rankle the base. Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Marco Rubio (Fla.) made pilgrimages to the National Conservatism Conference, a gathering of the right's new nationalists.

And yet with former President Donald Trump back on the golf course, much of this still feels like a work in progress. The conservatives for the common good have sounded libertarian, even libertine, about the pandemic except for the fact that they're willing to regulate masking and vaccination policies by private companies, too. There are arguments for why the "free market" doesn't simply mean businesses get to do whatever they want. But the overarching philosophy here, to the extent there is one, is that members of my political coalition get to do whatever they want in defiance of the wrong people trying to tell them what to do.

Perhaps the new conservatism's answer is that this is how the left has always done things, and a movement too committed to abstract principles to take on its own side in an argument will always lose. But, for the moment, old-fashioned "tear down the wall" conservatives have more to show for their efforts than the newfangled "build the wall" crowd.

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The post-Reagan GOP is still a work in progress - The Week Magazine

For political conservatives, countering big governments alluring but empty promises are challenging. The task is tenfold harder when libertarians pretend to speak for conservatives.

The Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF) was founded, in part, with a bequest from activist Ralph Smeed. A mentor of my old boss, Senator Steve Symms, I spent many hours escorting Ralph around Washington, D.C. He rejected the label conservative, proudly claiming to be a libertarian.

A mutual acquaintance recently mentioned Smeed when talking about the IFF, noting If Ralph could see what it is today, hed be appalled.

Who could predict that Smeeds legacy would today be aiding President Bidens Attorney General, Merrick Garland, to keep parents away from public schools?

Garland has threatened parents passionate about their kids education. Using a letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) as a fig leaf, he directed the FBI to investigate a disturbing spike in irate school board patrons.

Keep in mind, Garland heads the same Justice Department refusing to investigate the free speech of Antifa protestors marching down burned and vandalized city streets.

Professor Maud Maron, of Cardozo Law School, an advisor to the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, criticized Garlands move, noting that actual violence should be condemned without reservation, but the incidents cited by the NSBA are not criminal and they definitely do not warrant federal intervention.

Garlands motive is obvious. His own son-in-law sells social-emotional learning assessments that use a racial lens to pigeon-hole students, an approach opposed by many parents. He doesnt want parents challenging school boards and wishes they would stop advocating to improve their public schools. He is joined in that cause by IFF President Wayne Hoffman.

Hoffman has been pushing to get parents to quit public schools altogether. He presumably doesnt know or doesnt care that many rural Idahoans have no alternative. And he may be funded by purveyors of private schooling and home-school curricula, although the IFF is notoriously quiet about who pays their bills.

Hoffman recently attacked public schools for teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT). He conveniently neglected to mention that this turn toward Marxism surfaced early in elite private schools.

Even worse, Hoffman bungled the definition of CRT, a mistake that led Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin to a fruitless survey of statewide curricula. Critical Theory is more about tactics than content. Its insidious outlook on the world is imbedded deep in educational philosophy, influencing how some teachers think, but rarely showing up as a topic in a K-12 classroom.

And getting the theory wrong has had devastating consequences. One teacher in Idahos Magic Valley offers an inspiring syllabus using the Minidoka Internment National Monument as an object lesson. Students learn how widespread fear can lead a government to heavy-handed tyranny despite a constitution that guarantees individual rights. Could any topic be timelier?

After Hoffman scolded legislators for not doing enough to ban CRT, that teacher was warned to downplay the Minidoka lesson a direct result of Hoffmans focus on what history is taught, not how the history either illuminates or obscures constitutional principles.

Making IFF even more problematic is its political grassroots drawing from anti-government voices, including some uncomfortably allied with civil rights objectors. A vocal faction of IFF activists recently affiliated with an organization opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

To have any credibility, those of us who oppose CRT need to stand as unequivocal defenders of civil rights. IFF cannot do that.

The democrat running for governor of Virginia has said, You dont want parents coming in on every different school jurisdiction saying, This is what should be taught here. The IFF delivers that same message.

Parents educational choice is a long-desired conservative goal. Libertarians prefer private education. When IFF undermines public schools while parents have limited private alternatives, that sound you hear is principled libertarian Ralph Smeed rolling over in his grave.

Trent Clark, of Soda Springs, is the acting chairman of United Families Idaho and has served in the leadership of Idaho business, politics, workforce and humanities education.

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Guest Opinion: Calling out the Idaho Freedom Foundation - Idaho County Free Press

Of all the speeches at this months National Conservatism Conference, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawleys call for men to abandon video games and pornography for work and family has drawn the most attention.

The Washington Post, NPR, and Axios all followed up with stories questioning Hawleys premise: that through policy choices and cultural messages, the Left has devalued men and weakened the nation.

The Washington Posts coverage by Christine Emba was the most encouraging as Emba readily admitted that increasing numbers of men are disconnected from their work, families and children. And that mens labor force participation has fallen from 80 percent in 1970 to 68 percent in 2021. And that more men are deciding to opt out of higher education. And even that pornography is a problem.

Embas only real beef with Hawley appears to be that he should be pressed to offer solutions.

But Hawley did!

We must rebuild an economy in this country in which men can thrive. And that means rebuilding those manufacturing and production sectors that so much of the chattering class has written off as relics of the past, Hawley said before offering a policy solution. We can start by requiring that at least half of all goods and supplies critical for our national security be made in the United States.

Hawley then moved to tax policy, noting, We must make the family the center of political life. There is no higher calling, and no greater duty, than raising a family. And we should encourage all men to pursue it.

I believe the time has come for explicit rewards in our tax code for marriage. Forget the marriage penalty. There should be a marriage bonus. And we should allow the parents of young children to keep more of their own money as well, Hawley said.

Now, one can argue about the feasibility of Hawleys domestic manufacturing requirement or attack his marriage bonus as social engineering, which many of our libertarian friends like to do, but these are real policy solutions being offered to solve the defining problem of our time: the disintegration of the American family.

If anything, we need more politicians like Hawley willing to lead on the issue.

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Josh Hawley is dead right about men and marriage - Washington Examiner