Category Archives: Libertarianism

Miles Taylor, a man who was most famous when he was anonymous, threw his name last night into a hat most people were hoping wouldn't open until November 2022.

"If [former President Donald] Trump somehow wins the GOP nomination in 2024, I will run against him as an independent. And recruit more conservatives to do the same. We will split the vote and sink him," Taylor tweeted, insisting in a follow-up: "This is not a joke."

Taylor, a former Trump administration Department of Homeland Security chief of staff who wrote the bestselling book A Warning in 2019, starred in anti-Trump ads in 2020, and last month announced the intention to co-launch with 2016 anti-Trump independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin and a few former Republican elected officials an initiative to "catalyze an American renewal," made his latest splash on the same day as the official unveiling of the Renew America Movement (RAM).

RAM held a national town hall last night attended by such figures as 2016 Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee Bill Weld, Weld's fellow 2020 Republican presidential primary loser Joe Walsh, and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele. The renewalists vow to raise "tens of millions" of dollars to defeat pro-Trump Republicans in a handful of Senate races and a couple dozen House contests in the 2022 midterms, according to Bloomberg.

For the moment, the new group is raising that money through an old vehicle, McMullin's 501(c)(4) nonprofit Stand Up Republic, which he launched two months after coming in fifth place in the 2016 election. McMullin, whose candidacylike Taylor's threatened 2024 runwas a direct challenge to Trump from the right, exceeded the Trump-Hillary Clinton margin in just two states: His home base of Utah, where he received 21.5 percent while Trump won by 18.1 percentage points, and Minnesota (1.8 percent vs. Clinton's margin of 1.5 points).

Only two independent candidates for president have received more than 1 percent of the national popular vote in the past centuryRoss Perot with 18.9 percent in 1992, and John Anderson with 6.6 percent in 1980. More to the anti-Trump point, the 45th president failed to win reelection not because his voters were lured away by third-party or independent candidates, but precisely because they weren't.

Trump received a higher percentage of votes in 2020 than he did in 2016: 46.9 percent, compared to 46.1. The main difference was that support for third-party candidates collapsed, from 5.7 percent to 1.8, and most of that bloc went to the Democratic Party, whose nominee jumped from 48.2 percent to 51.3. As I noted in November:

Pre-election pollspredictedthis2016 third-party voters, and specifically Libertarians (who made up 57 percent of the third-party electorate that year),repeatedly saidthat a majority of them were going straight, and preferred Biden to Trump by more than two to one. There were 7.8 million third-party voters last time, and just 2.7 million this time, so any strong lean by the remaining 5 million-plus was always going to dwarf whatever impact partisans may attribute to "spoilers."

Never-Trumpers have lost just about every intra-Republican fight over the past six years, usually by lopsided margins. Where they have punched above their weight has been in media attention, and (relatedly) in raising money from Democrats dreaming of a fractured GOP. As ever, I am rooting for all new political competition while taking all bets against.

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Never-Trump Republicans Announce New Fundraising Effort To Re-Defeat the Ex-President - Reason

I FIRST BECAME aware of the United Nationss Agenda 21 proposal from a pamphlet my grandfather handed me when I was around 10 years old. The sky-blue booklet, which I still have in a storage box somewhere (a crude memento after his passing last year), was produced as part of a conspiracy theorist movement that saw the UNs proposal for equitable global trade and sustainable urban development as a dystopian campaign for a socialist one-world-order that would empty rural lands and forcibly condense people into cities. Its been a while since Agenda 21s debut in 1992, but the UN proposal still garners attention within ecological movements, urban studies programs, conspiracy fantasies, and science fictions. Recently, books such as E. O. Wilsons Half-Earth: Our Planets Fight for Life and Tony Hisss Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth have advanced visions inspiring the Half-Earth movement, which proposes that 50 percent of global lands and waterways should be turned into conservation areas an ecological prospect that has doubtlessly sent Agenda 21 truthers into a spiral.

Whereas the government-wary libertarian may balk at a Half-Earth proposal, Matt Bells latest novel, Appleseed (Custom House, July 2021), takes an approach that seems eerily more plausible amid the rising influence of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and any number of neoliberal lone genius types for whom saving the planet is just another business venture an industry ripe for disruption and monopolization.

Appleseed plays on the dystopian climate disaster genre, deftly weaving threads from Greek mythology, magical realism, and Americas settler-colonial folklore to create the parallel universe its characters inhabit. True to its title, the book opens on two brothers, one human and one faun, venturing across the unsettled Midwestern frontier planting apple orchards. Chapman, the faun, harbors a secret desire to plant and harvest the perfect apple, one that will make him human and end his agonizing struggle between embracing his horned wildness and his desire to live a normal life alongside his brother. His story forms the past portion of the novels tri-temporal triptych structure, wherein each chapter follows characters centuries apart from each other in a recursive past/present/future cycle.

The plots central narrative (a term used loosely) takes place around 2070 after climate devastation has forced the creation of a Sacrifice Zone across the western and central United States. Choosing between the consolidation of the population or widespread urban collapse, the government has evacuated cities and rural communities, pushing them toward the East Coast and life on the megacorporation Earth Trusts Volunteer Agricultural Communities (VACs).

Not everyone has relocated willingly. Some stay behind to brave the heat and drought, preferring a Mad Maxadjacent freedom. Others detonate hydroelectric dams, tear up roads, and destroy infrastructure in a bid to re-wild the Sacrifice Zone and prevent Earth Trusts re-incursion in the federal governments absence. John, the present-day character, falls in the latter group. Perhaps a millennials grandchild, he grew up in Ohio and saw crippling drought and the extinction of the worlds honeybees, tragedies that pushed him to co-found Earth Trust with his childhood friend Eury. What begins as a garage start-up, however, quickly becomes an agro-industrial corporation turned independent global techno-state (think Amazon meets Microsoft meets a public-private infrastructure project on steroids).

While John wants to design nano-bees to pollinate and revive the nations remaining plant species, Eury unleashes grander ambitions. After John leaves the company to dwell in the Sacrifice Zone, Eury launches the VACs where specially designed crops (among them genetically modified apples), algorithmic efficiency, and social engineering combine. The arrangement enables Earth Trust to feed whole countries while housing and employing their climate refugees as Volunteers.

Despite global efforts, or a potent lack thereof, the climate only continues to inch closer to complete ecological disaster. While some of the worlds elite plan for hypothetical evacuations to Mars, Eury announces plans to turn back the clock and restore Earths lost species and habitats with one final moonshot project. However, her gift to humanity comes at a high price, one that John and a group of resistance fighters plan to prevent the world from paying.

Meanwhile, in Appleseeds third narrative, a thousand years in the future, a 3D-printed creature named C descends from a broken-down science vessel into the depths of a glacier. He scavenges the remnants of a civilization that came before, long since buried under a new ice age. At the bottom of a crevasse, C finds a twisted wreck of a tree, a relic that may hold the key to what caused humanitys demise. In his haste to return to his ship, he suffers a climbing accident, which forces him to throw himself and the tree sample into the ships recycler. Moments later, C is reprinted and reimbued with the memories of generations of clones that came before him. But each C is a little different, cobbled together from core biological elements and synthetic replacements harvested from the ship. With the injection of the tree, however, this C becomes something else entirely. His search for the trees origin instead becomes a search for humanity, or whats become of it.

Unpredictable to the last page, Appleseed ties these disparate narratives together with a rich network of symbolism and sharp prose. While there are tensely written action scenes befitting a sci-fi thriller, at the books core is a burning ethical question that wavers on the knife-edge of climate optimism and fatalism: Faced with the end of the world, would you bet on humanity to finally come together and avert disaster? Or one woman, one company, with a vision and the means to guarantee the outcome?

To quote the book, The problem is bigger than any one person, any one company or government: the problem belongs to every last person; until its solved everyone remains complicit, even if they resist. Bell tackles this aphorism from the novels opening in the age of settler-colonial expansion across the United States. Chapmans quasi-magical and spiritual connection to nature, and his only partial humanness, opens a window into the original sin committed by successive generations of settlers that worked their way across the continent exploiting nature for their survival. There is beauty in the planting of orchards, yet a profound irony in the streams Chapman and his brother divert and the trees they cut down to make space for them. Thus, nature gives and gives over millennia until its exhausted collapse forces mankind back the way it came in a race against extinction.

Appleseed is propelled by the strength of its ideas rather than its specific characters or exotic worldbuilding. There are nods to Iain M. Banks and Ursula K. Le Guin, which might make the reader feel as though theyre watching an elaborate thought experiment untangle itself. The characters have lives of their own insomuch as they are tools to solve that greater puzzle. As such, the book occasionally breaks the fourth wall, veering away from the temporal plots into passages such as the one quoted above where the narrator speaks directly to the reader about their current and future complicity in the events about to occur. In this way, Bell pulls readers back and forth between seeing Eury and Earth Trusts enormous power as a villainous force to be fought, and the only means of survival in a world where governments are ineffectual and unsustainable resource consumption continues unabated. Moments such as these, and more ethereal scenes where Chapman is chased by three time-bending spirits in the Ohio woods, pull Appleseed out of the sci-fi genre and into something more a cerebral folktale all its own.

Because the novels present-day timeline is so close to our own, the alternate world Bell creates feels jarringly prescient. Bill Gates is already the largest private owner of farmland in the United States and has plans to create a new city in the Arizona desert. Nevada is considering a law that would allow corporations to build and manage legally autonomous cities, and Elon Musk has long had his sights on Mars. Couple these realities with the long-standing American belief in the power of companies to innovate faster and further than state actors and its not hard to imagine a future where the fight against climate change isnt waged against multinational corporations but is co-opted by them.

Appleseed is not your typical sci-fi novel in the same way the 2016 film Arrival is less about an alien invasion and more about theories of linguistics-driven perception. So, while readers expecting a gritty climate dystopia, or a one-world-order, might be disoriented by Appleseeds bucolic opening chapter about an apple-obsessed 18th-century faun, theyre in for something incredibly unique and equally gripping.

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The Problem Belongs to Every Last Person: On Matt Bell's Appleseed - lareviewofbooks

So were funding Elon Musk's and Jeff Bezos next big adventure into space with our tax dollars and off the blood, sweat and tears of the underpaid, abused workers who made them insanely wealthy.

Its almost as big a waste as spending most of our tax dollars on a military whose mission lately seems to be looting and plundering the planet for cheap resources while committing genocide and creating refugees. For whom?Our corporate giants with their fat military contracts. Were even paying billions for them to stockpile more nukes which if we use just one, were goners.

So often I hear the Libertarian mantra about the people who live off the system: people who get housing, disability, food stamps, a free lap top or phone. What about these bloodsuckers. No one mentions them. Theyre hailed as heroes and jobs providers. This planet is in hospice due to our using our atmosphere and oceans as open sewers and destroying the nature we depend on.

Time to get our priorities straight. Time we took care of our Earth Mother and each other and stopped wasting our tax dollars on those who have too much as it is.

Charlotte Burns

Palmer

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Letter: It's time to take care of Earth and stop wasting tax dollars - Worcester Telegram

Jane Coaston, host of The New York Times podcast The Argument, understands why most people shy away from arguing. Good arguments are hard to come by, she told Sojourners, and thats part of what motivates her interest in hosting the podcast.

You kind of want to create what you arent seeing right now, and I think that for me was the act of good argumentation, she said. Im definitely one of those people thats said before, I hate arguing, Coaston said, adding that she hopes the show will model better arguements than the ones she sees.Thats a skillset Ive always been working on and developing. Its like a muscle.

Getting guests to talk with each other, rather than at each other, is one of Coastons specialties.

The Argument is an opportunity for peoples views to be challenged by people who are just as smart and just as passionate about the exact same issue, but on the opposite side, she said.

Take the episodeRepublicans Are Very, Very Close to Driving Democracy Into a Ditch, where Coaston talked with two people with different views on the value of Biden's approach to bipartisanship: Jason Grumet, who is founder and president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, and Aaron Belkin, the director of Take Back the Court, a campaign that seeks to rebalancethe Supreme Court by adding four more seats.

When Belkin suggested that bipartisanship would be appropriate during a moment of normal politics, Grumet replied that the idea that we should let four years of one president kind of break our democracy and give up on it, again, is kind of shortsighted. At this point, Coaston interjected.

[Belkin,] you said that bipartisanship was appropriate for a time of normal politics, but this isnt that moment. When did we have normal politics? Coaston asked. I was born in 1987. I have never known normal politics So it seems to me that we keep thinking about this halcyon time of normalcy. But has there ever really been one? By challenging her guestsassumptions, Coaston pushed them to expand and reconsider their argument.

The Argumenthas been produced since 2018, but Coaston took over as host earlier this year. She said the job is the culmination of a dream, and described her role on the podcast as part moderator, interviewer, antagonist, and ally. The job, she said, is not just to explore disagreements on a given topic, but to get people to recognize some of the flaws in their own arguments.

Before joining the Times, Coaston was a senior politics reporter at Vox, writing primarily about U.S. conservatism, the Republican Party, and white nationalism. She previously reported on politics for MTV News,worked as a speechwriterfor the Human Rights Campaign, and wrote about football for SBNation.

Coastons reporting for Vox often led her to write about Christians, specifically white evangelicals. Coaston grew up Catholic and now attends a Methodist church; she is also queer and biracial (her father and mother married in the late 1970s, when American support for interracial marriage was less than 40 percent).

My parents are very liberal Democrats, union Democrats. We went to church every single week, and my mom was on parish council, she said. ... Whether Ive been close to [Christianity], or walked away from it for a time, its always existed in this context its kind of like a web or netting around me.

Though she often covers Christians who haveacted with antagonism rather than ecumenism toward Christians like her, she remains compelled by the faith. The messy, complicated, imperfect nature of Christians tracks well with the story of the Bible, which Coaston describes as a story of people who were beloved by God, even though they drove him absolutely nuts.

Coaston often finds that Christian arguments, especially political arguments, subscribe to a view of God that is too narrow.

I think there are aspects of people attempting to discuss politics in Christian terms, or people interpreting their politics through a Christian lens, thats always going to lead to terrible arguments, she said. God cares about politics, Coaston said, but not in such a literal way that God has an opinion on something like Medicaid expansion. To those using God-talk to drum up votes, Coaston asks: Why would you want God to be that small?

Where some Christians of all political persuasions can be hyper-specific and declarative in their application of biblical themes, Coaston sees faith as larger than modern policy debates. The faith of those who committed themselves to the liberation of the poor, for instance, has always inspired her.

Coaston understands that some would find liberation theology which some associate with Marxism objectionable. But she said she always looked up to people like Jean Donovan and St. scar Romero, who were both murdered by U.S.-assisted forces of El Salvador because of their commitments to the poor and resistance to state power.

These were people who were living out their values, and they were living out, I believe, what Christiainty was supposed to be, [and] especially what Catholicism can be.

The desire to protect the marginalized and those with less power in society is also what drives Coastons political philosophy: libertarianism.

Libertarianism is a political philosophy that seeks to reduce state interference in lives and markets. While Coaston acknowledged that many of her fellow libertarians might be self-interested in their pursuit of limited government, one of the nice things about libertarians is that you dont have to agree with other libertarians, she said. And true to character, her own politics dont conform to cultural conceptions about libertarianism.

For Coaston, libertarianism is a way to empower others, especially minority groups. Take, for example, her approach to policing: In an opinion piece for the Times in 2017, she wrote about how too many laws can contribute to racial oppression and injustice.

For millions of Americans, laws can be safely ignored. Jaywalking is sometimes the easiest way to cross a road without sidewalks or where the crosswalk is far away. Speeding, though unsafe, happens when youre late for work. And sometimes you forget to signal when driving into the grocery store parking lot. But for other Americans black Americans any of these simple decisions can result in arrest, fines or even death, she wrote. If some people can ignore a law, and others cant, that law is not being enforced fairly. And if some people can flout law enforcement and survive, and others obey it and die, law enforcement is not doing its job properly.

Where others are seeking to limit the control others have on their lives, Coaston sees libertarianism as a statement about power: who should wield itand how.

I understand the corrupting nature of power, especially for myself, and I think about what if I had everything I wanted politically, what would that mean for someone else, she said. And if someone else had everything they wanted politically, what would it mean for me, and why should either of us have that much power over one anothers lives? I think thats the basis of it.

These are some of the meta-questions behind political debates, and Coaston isnt planning to shy away from those with different perspectives.

Too often we get ourselves hyped up by the people who already agree with us but this show is something where I can be the entity that asks the right questions; I can be the entity that raises the right points to challenge both the minds of the people on the show and the minds of the audience, she said. This is an opportunity to have the conversations Ive always wanted to have.

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Jane Coaston Wants To Have Better Arguments - Sojourners

Defund the police rally in Keene, NH

A socialist led organization the NH Youth Movement has been rallying its troops across NH this past week in an effort to get cities and towns to defund their police forces. However the rally that was planned for Keene didnt go quite as the organizers expected.

While there isnt a significant socialist presence in New Hampshire there are plenty of socialists in surrounding states that from time to time muster up the occasional rally in NH through the busing in of left wing extremists. This is particularly easy to do in Cheshire with the county neighboring Vermont and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts being right next door plus students from out of town attending Keene State College.

A few days before the rally was to occur the Keene City Republican Committee Chair Anne L. Farrington got wind of the socialists organizing of a protest and rallied her opposition country-folk to attend a counter protest for the same time and date.

We want to show our support for law enforcement by coming out in strength to Back the Badge! The rally will be in Central Square tomorrow from 5:30pm-8:00pm. Please join us and bring friends who support our police!

Anne L. Farrington

This attempt at undermining the NH Youth Movements protest turned out to be as hilarious as one might have anticipated. Not so much because there were people shouting back and forth, but in that it appeared that the rally attracted all of one intentional NH Youth Movement member and another five or so socialists who just happened upon the Republicans counter-protest.

To make for an entertaining afternoon a handful of libertarians got together to join in on the fun making a few signs in advance of the event, saying things both opposing sides would theoretically agree with and disagree with at the same time, like Defund the pigs & end socialism. Is it a socialist protest? Is it a right wing protest? Who knows, but certainly the passerbys didnt quite follow what was going on with all the shouting from every side and direction. Both from protesters and from passing cars alike.

After numerous conversations with the right-wing nut jobs and left wing extremists it turned out that each side had a lot in common. Both the republicans and the socialists were in favor of socialist programs, but the agenda for which programs to fund and defund were different. The young socialists wanted to see free college tuition and police dollars redistributed to other social programs like housing the homeless. The counter protesters expressed a desire to continue funding social security and the police state.

What both the left and right failed to grasp was that the money doesnt exist to fund all of these programs. The use of violence and the state to take money from the populous only works up to a point before that theft becomes so great that it undermines the revenues that can be generated. This leads to a failure of the programs both sides are trying to fund through theft.

Now this doesnt mean that all parties cant get what they want, but the means by which those funds are raised must not be through the violence that is the state. The overhead of state mandated programs is significant, the inefficiencies great, and the ever increasing amounts undermining to the objectives of both sides.

When the state gets involved a significant portion of the revenues generated are eaten up by the extraction of those funds from the populous and the overhead of management- not to mention corruption. When people are left to decide for themselves by comparison individuals pick the least expensive options which deliver the maximum benefit thus reducing costs and making such services affordable. Between competing offerings individuals can afford to pay for college when competition is left to run its course, government isnt handing out free money, and security (policing) doesnt cost six figures per employee. Lets end all of the social welfare programs: Police, education, health care, social security, corporate welfare, and so on, and then hand back the financial resources to the people by eliminating the taxes that make these programs perform poorly as only then will those dollars stolen be best and most efficiently utilized.

Check out the entertaining video with left wing extremists, libertarians, and right wingers all competing for air time in or surrounding the public square.

Link:
Right Wing Crazies & Libertarians Join In On Socialist Rally To Defund The Police With Hilarious Results - Free Keene

Last Tuesday was my first trip to the library since COVID shutdowns. On my way in, I admired the 10 or 15 volunteers working to beautify the grounds. I walked through a pollinator garden noticing all kinds of insects, hopping from the milkweed to the butterfly bush or the coneflowers, as though they had entered the Promised Land!

Once inside the cool air-conditioning, I couldnt help myself from checking out some DIY booklets about making curtains and flavored vinegars. A few retirees perused periodicals. Folks were busy with all kinds of things on the internet in the public computer area.

Downstairs I asked the friendly child librarian where I could find books at reading level F, so that my kindergartners brain retains some of the lessons hard-won by a combination of her and her teachers hard work. An added bonus is that I got to enroll both my kids in the summer reading program.

Libraries are a concrete expression of the abstract term, the common good.

Most people agree on the benefits of having a library in a community (though I suppose some libertarians might oppose taxpayer funded libraries!). They offer resources, incentives for learning, places to connect with others both physically and across time and space through reading. My trip to the library was a gift that challenged the veracity of the popular narrative of our ever-deepening division and tribalism.

I wonder where you, dear readers, go to see, participate in and appreciate the common good.

The Blue Ridge Parkway or tubing down Deep Creek in Great Smoky Mountains National Park? The dog park or playground, the local health department? And how do you support the common good? Paying taxes, yes, but how else? Picking up trash as you walk in your neighborhood? Voting? Reading the paper? Stewarding your land for the next generation?

The idea of the common good occurs very early in Christianitys ancient story.

In Genesis, even as God enters a special partnership with Abraham and his descendants, Gods intention is to bless the whole world (Gen 12:3). Or think about the prophet Jeremiah telling the Jewish exiles in Babylon that their well-being, as a distinct tribe, depended on the well-being of the whole city (Jeremiah 29:7).

Fast forward to the New Testament where Paul is teaching about the diversity of spiritual gifts. He reminds the early Christians that their gifts are given for the common good (1 Cor 12:7).

Just what is the common good? In Catholic Social Teaching it is defined as the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.

The common good stands in contrast with many isms, such as utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number; tribalism, the greatest good for people in my group; and individualism, which consistently prioritizes the good of the individual over the community. With the common good, the individual good and collective good benefit one another, like a single player on a winning sports team.

While policy-makers cant easily derive public policy from this concept, I believe trying to discern the common good is vital to help us frame productive civil discourse.

Life is always evolving, and so our vision of the common good changes and shifts over time. Yet one thing is constant in our pursuit of it: to remember that we do not live for ourselves alone. The temptation toward self-centeredness lurks within us and surrounds us, but with Gods help it need not overcome us, at least not all the time.

The Rev. Joslyn Ogden Schaefer is the Rector at Grace in the Mountains Episcopal Church in Waynesville.

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Noticing the common good | Religion | themountaineer.com - The Mountaineer

In Americas fraught debate over race and justice, a blend of Republicans, libertarians and conservatives have focused their ire on critical race theory.

Its not a well-defined target.

Supporters describe critical race theory as a collection of ideas, not a single doctrine, that explain why racial inequality and disparities persist long after civil rights laws and court rulings barred discrimination.

Opponents use it as a blanket label for any discussion of white privilege, and they have encouraged local school districts to forbid the teaching of anything that addresses systemic racism.

TheFlorida State Board of Educationbanned it from classrooms June 10, putting it in the same category as denying the Holocaust. Idaho alsopassed a lawto keep it out of public schools.

At the federal level, Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott recently introduced aSenate resolutionthat said critical race theory serves as a prejudicial ideological tool, rather than an educational tool, and should not be taught in K-12 classrooms. The resolution encourages states and localities to take actions that would discourage critical race theory.

In the style of resolutions, the measure is built on a sequence of Whereas clauses to establish what the sponsors consider to be the factual basis for the resolution.

We vetted a handful of these clauses in Scotts resolution, and found that they included distortions of critical race theory and practice to present a one-sided view of a more complex issue.

We asked the three senators who co-sponsored the resolution for specific information to back up their claims. We also contacted three groups that play a dominant role in fighting critical race theory in schools. We got no answers.

This is wrong.

TheCivil Rights Act of 1964 was the fulfillment of decades of work by civil rights activists to end legal discrimination. Supporters of critical race theory generally applaud those efforts. Their complaint is that the legacy of discrimination persisted after the law passed.

When the law passed, it was hailed as a major step towards equality.

President Lyndon B. Johnsonsaid when he signed the bill July 2, 1964, those who are equal before God shall now also be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.

The law and its proponents envisioned that discrimination would be weeded out of government programs, out of housing, and out of the job market. That didnt happen.

The gap between the promise and the results is what drove the formation of critical race theory. Almost exactly three decades after Johnson spoke, Harvard philosopher Cornel Westcreditedthe founders of critical race theory for exposing societys failure to deliver on the possibilities for human freedom and equality.

In her 2018 book Critical Race Theory: A primer, University of California-Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges noted that Blacks remained disproportionately poor. The Civil Rights Act, Bridges wrote, was necessary but insufficient.

Critical race theory seeks to make real the promises of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Bridges told PolitiFact. To claim that it is inconsistent with the Civil Rights Act is dishonest.

We found no current article by a critical race theory supporter that advocated resegregating schools. If the desire exists, it appears to be limited.

According to theCivil Rights Projectat the University of California-Los Angeles, desegregation peaked in 1988. That year, about 6% of minority schools were classified as intensely segregated that is at least 90% of the students were non-white. By 2016, the fraction of intensely segregated minority schools tripled to 18%. So non-white students are increasingly segregated.

Taking a snapshot of the mix of ethnicities in schools, in 2016, the typical white student went to a school where nearly 70% of the other students were white. The typical Black or Hispanic student went to a school where about 25% of the students were white.

Dorinda Carter Andrews, education professor at Michigan State Universitys College of Education, said talking about race, racism and oppression in the classroom is not the same as teaching students critical race theory. It is, though, important to cover.

Young people are not colorblind or color mute, Andrews said in aJune 4interview. If children of color are old enough to experience racial discrimination and injustice, then all children, especially white children, are old enough to learn about racism in ways that enhance their cross-cultural competency, racial literacy skills and skill set for improving our democracy.

A1993 bibliography of scores of articleson critical race theory identified some writings that held that people of color can best promote their interest through separation from the American mainstream. But that was just one out of 10 themes the researcher tracked. It showed up infrequently and, when it did, was only occasionally directed at schooling.

The intellectual grandfather of the theory, law professor Derrick Bell, had a pragmatic take on desegregation. Integration alone, Bell said, was a poor guarantee of an equal education.

Bell was less concerned about Black and white students going to the same school, and more about them getting the same quality schooling the same books, the same course offerings and the same sort of facilities.

While the rhetoric of integration promised much, court orders to ensure that Black youngsters received the education they needed to progress would have achieved much more, Bell saidin 2004.

This is unsupported.

In the first place, officials who want to ban critical race theory cant point to examples where it is being taught in their K-12 schools. So the indoctrination of schoolchildren described in this claim would be difficult.

There is classroom teaching around historic and ongoing racism, which is an element of the theory. One of the pioneer theorists, University of Wisconsin professor emeritus Gloria Ladson-Billings, wrotein 1998that critical race theory starts with the premise that racism is normal, not aberrant, and the strategy becomes one of unmasking and exposing racism in its various permutations.

As for hatred of American institutions, the U.S. economic system does come under fire for its emphasis on private property. Ladson-Billings wrote that at the countrys founding, property defined who could vote. And by allowing humans to be owned, the founders put property rights above human rights.

African Americans represent a unique form of citizen in the United States property transformed into citizen, Ladson-Billings wrote. This process has not been a smooth one.

Ladson-Billings does not denounce capitalism. Neither does she equate it with democracy, which she aims to uphold.

We may have to defend a radical approach to democracy that seriously undermines the privilege of those who have so skillfully carved that privilege into the foundation of the nation, she wrote.

The incoming president of the National Academy of Education, Carol Lee, said critical race theory is one of several perspectives that can shine a light on American society. Lee oversaw the academys guidance to schools onteaching civic reasoning.

We essentially argue that young people, in fact all citizens and those living within the U.S., need to understand both the inequalities that have (been) and continue to be embedded in our practices and institutional configurations, Lee told PolitiFact. But at the same time they must understand the unique and powerful features of legal governance in the U.S. that provide pathways for engaged citizens to struggle peacefully to transform laws and practices that oppress people.

This distorts the 1619 Project and how it was received.

In 2019, the New York Times Magazine unveiled aspecial editionon the legacy of slavery and racism in America. The project, which took its name from the year that the first slaves arrived in the colonies, also made curriculum materials available to schools.

The magazines editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein, bluntly explained the premise of the project. Out of slavery and the anti-Black racism it required grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional, Silverstein wroteDec. 20, 2019.

The 1619 Project drew two letters of critique from historians.The first, signed by five historians from Brown, Texas State, Princeton and City University of New York, said the project provided a praiseworthy and urgent public service. But they raised several issues of fact.

They objected to the claim that the colonies declared independence in order to ensure slavery would continue. They said the article cherrypicked Abraham Lincolns thinking on slavery. They also took issue with a line that said for the most part, Black Americans have fought their freedom struggles alone.

The New York Times pointed to the historical facts it relied on and ultimately softened the wording about independence and slavery.

We recognize that our original language could be read to suggest that protecting slavery was a primary motivation for all of the colonists, Silverstein wroteMarch 11, 2020. The passage has been changed to make clear that this was a primary motivation for some of the colonists.

The magazine got a second letter from12 historians. Its central complaint was that giving slavery such a pivotal role in American history oversimplified matters and left out too much context. Like the first group of historians, they also said Lincolns words had been misrepresented.

Silverstein replied that criticism of the project is separate from errors of fact. The magazine shared its notes on historical points and made no corrections.

The project drew criticisms, but to say it was debunked goes too far. Plus, the classroom version came with more materials and wasnt identical to what was first published.

This article was originallypublished by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. It is republished here with permission. See the sources for these fact checkshereand more of their fact checkshere.

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How a GOP Senate resolution condemning critical race theory distorts the facts - Poynter

Timothy Holdiness, Letter to the Editor Published 9:48 a.m. CT June 22, 2021

Everyone should get the COVID-19 vaccine, though I can understand any uneasiness tied to it.

Our government hardly ever gives anything out for free, which can cause some concern when the vaccine is being provided for free. The proof of vaccination that comes with it shouldnt be seen as a tool to segregate anyone. I have not personally been asked for proof of my vaccination, even though I have it readily available on my LA Wallet app that includes my drivers license.

Those who refuse the vaccine should know that they are putting others at risk by going to events where they could contract the virus or pass it on to others.

To say that citizens are being pitted against each other over race and political beliefs is nothing new. We must remember that the civil rights movement has not ended.

The separation between political parties has become increasingly divided which should bring to light the need for more than two parties. The Green and Libertarian parties should be included in national politics instead of being blacklisted and excluded from debates. Having only two controlling parties is just asking for this division between citizens.

The claim that the military is weeding out anyone who doesnt agree with global warming, agrees with the Second Amendment, and has conservative opinions is incorrect. The military is trying to keep extremists from enlisting, not simply refusing all Republicans.

Having claimed that critical race theory is purely Marxism is incorrect. It is not a political faction, rather it is teaching the youth of the country about how racism shaped the way we live and how our public policy was shaped by the racism that has run rampant in our country for hundreds of years.

The First Amendment is one of the most well-known across the country, and it must be known that there are consequences when used to make statements that are hateful or incite violence. Just because we have the right to speak our minds freely, does not mean that people should be allowed to be hateful online with no repercussions. When anyone can post anything online without moderation, online environments will become toxic and ineffective at their goal of giving people a commonplace to have a voice virtually.

No time soon do I see the citizens of The United States of America losing their freedoms. If anything, we will have more individualized freedom away from the exclusive ways of the past.

Timothy Holdiness

Bossier City

Read or Share this story: https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/opinion/readers/2021/06/22/letter-freedom-not-being-lost-united-states/5304329001/

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Letter: Freedom could be more individualized, but not lost in the United States - Shreveport Times

Libertarianism"DON'T TREAD ON ME!"Likes

Militias, Capitalism, Liberty, Limited Government, Negative Rights

Statists, government

He believes in a very limited government and the individual's natural (negative) rights of life, liberty, and property. He likes the use of militias to watch them.

They technically believe in the same principles of Classical Liberalism of equality before the law and the basic rights to life, liberty, and property, along with most librights, although some people debate most Libertarians are only Libertarians because of the precise ideology and not the principles of it.

While now associated with free-market capitalism and right-wing politics, there are Left-Wing Libertarian ideologies. And thus, by this definition, Libertarianism is essentially a broad category of ideologies that all oppose large government and support civil liberties.

A narrative often held up by Left-wing Libertarians is that the term "Libertarian" was originally a socialist term, which was later appropriated by the right. This conception is a half-truth.

There are two origins of the term.

The term "Libertarian" was originally coined in the Enlightenment to describe supporters of free will (as opposed to determinism) and with it generally free action. With the first recorded usage of the term being in 1789 in reference to metaphysics. While the first political usage belongs to the Libertarian Communist Joseph Djacque who used the French word libertaire in a letter to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. As such, to say that "Libertarianism" is a strictly leftist term is not intellectually honest.

Although, it is true that the term "Libertarian" came in a wider use within left-wing circles in the 1890s as a euphemism for Anarchism, and different variations as Libertarian Socialism, Anarcho-Communism, and Anarcho-Syndicalism solid decades (Almost half a century) before the term was popularised within right-wing circles.

Although the term Libertarianism was present at the time, it acquired its current meaning that we use at the split from Liberalism before the 30s. Put simply, what was originally Liberalism split into what we now know as Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism. Although, during the campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt the term started to be associated with the Democratism of the United States.This, in turn, created two definitions of the term Liberalism, the American definition, by which Liberalism was associated to the Democratic Party and the definition in the rest of the world Liberalism kept its meaning being borderline the same thing as modern day Libertarianism, but later, with the radicalization of the Classical Liberal circles, Libertarianism some of them prefered to stop being called Classical Liberals to adopt the term "Libertarian" completely and Classical Liberalism started to be associated to Classical Economics only while Libertarianism became closer to the Austrian School of Economics.The western definition is also closely tied to Anarcho-Capitalism, as they share similar beliefs.

While Libertarian ideals could be considered to be rooted in history since antiquity (with examples being the 6th century B.C. Chinese Philosophers Lao-Tzu and Chuang-tzu), the modern incarnation of them can be traced to the radicalisation of Classical Liberal principles that occurred through the later half of the 19th century and through the 20th.

The most influential of these 19th century movements is generally considered to be French Liberal School, of Frederic Bastiat and Gustave De Molinari fame. With the former being known for positing that law becomes unjust and corrupted when it punishes the right of self-defence of one individual in favour of other individuals' plunder and the latter for being originator of ideas that were essentially Voluntaryist.

Flag of Libertarianism

Libertarianism's design is based on the Gadsden Flag.

For more detail add "DONT TREAD ON ME" or the simpler "NO STEP" under the rattlesnake.

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Libertarianism | Polcompball Wiki | Fandom

Neo-Libertarianism AliasesNeolibertarianismNeobertBootlickertarianLibertarian Neoconservatism Shapiroism

LiberventionistsNeoconservatarianism

The first neolibertarians to use the term did so in response to the Iraq War. Distancing themselves from the generally anti-war response of the mainstream libertarian movement, neolibertarians proudly set out their reasons for supporting the War on Terror and an effort to secure the freedom of the Iraqi people.

While most libertarians tend to adopt isolationist positions in issues and matters of war, neolibertarians range anywhere from ambivalent to strongly for intervention. The largest debate is actually the American Civil War, where mainstream libertarians take the side of the Confederates against the Union, generally holding that the right of secession in principle trumps other concerns. The neolibertarian position favors the Union, primarily for the reason that freeing the slaves represents a moral justification to bring down the Confederacy. The Iraq War and to a lesser extent the U.S. Invasion of Afghanistan represent ongoing disputes between these factions.

Another key difference is regards to domestic policy, where neolibertarians are strong advocates of incrementalism, i.e. making many small changes over time. By contrast, mainstream libertarians tend to advocate for drastic, almost-immediate policy changes.

Despite getting along better with Neoconservatism, they have arguments with them as well. Where neoconservatives strongly support the building of democratic governments in the wake of militarily defeated dictatorships, neolibertarians are more concerned with letting Capitalism operate after any military victory. If capitalism is allowed to operate, they argue, the former subjects of militarily defeated governments will naturally arrange governments (whatever the form) which are, if only out of political expediency, more friendly to their subjects' newfound economic freedoms and therefore much less likely to jeopardize the benefits which neolibertarians believe capitalism offers.

Flag of Neo-Libertarianism

Neolibertarianism is usually represented with a gold and black version of the NATO flag.

And you're done.

Flag of Neo-Libertarianism

Neolibertarians are often made fun of by other libertarians because of their support of foreign wars and their willingness to pay tax to the state. Subsequently, they are sometimes called "Bootlickers".

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Neo-Libertarianism | Polcompball Wiki | Fandom