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Westmoreland, County, Pa. The race is on for the special election for the 59th Legislative District for the State House representing parts of Westmoreland and Somerset counties.

The vacancy was left when Rep. Mike Reese suddenly died in January after being elected to a seventh consecutive term in the fall.

It was reported that Reese died peacefully with his family by his side, at 42 years old, Saturday afternoon at Excela Health Westmoreland Hospital in Greensburg following an apparent brain aneurysm.

[LIVE UPDATES: Pennsylvanias primary election]

Mariah Fisher is known to the local political landscape as a Ligonier Borough Council Member.

Republican Leslie Rossi is best known as the Trump House Creator in Youngstown.

Libertarian Robb Luther is a political newcomer.

Channel 11 made attempts to meet up with Rossi, who said she was spending the day in Somerset county before returning to Westmoreland later this evening. We caught up with Fisher and Luther this afternoon about how the last couple of months of campaigning has boiled down.

I think we should have choices in these elections. These local and state races are important and they affect our daily lives, and I think people need to know that and get involved and get out there and vote, Fisher explained.

My North Star is personal liberty and fiscal conservative spending. I wont spend a dollar more unless were saving a dollar and a quarter more, Luther stated.

Unlike other primary races, you do not need to be affiliated with a party to cast your vote.

See more here:
Special Election: The race to fill seat left vacant by death of Rep. Mike Reese - WPXI Pittsburgh

Evan McMullin, a conservative ex-CIA analyst so disgusted with former President Donald Trump that he launched an independent presidential campaign in 2016, got on 11 state ballots, and finished in fifth place with 0.5 percent of the popular vote, has co-announced on Thursday a "new political movement" of 150 mostly right-of-center political figures, including former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, former Rep. Joe Walsh (RIll.), and former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, three conservatives so disgusted with Trump that they ran against him in the 2020 GOP presidential primary and lost by a combined 93 percentage points.

In a joint letter precipitated by the removal of Rep. Liz Cheney (RWyo.) from Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, and patterned consciously after the Declaration of Independence, McMullin and his anti-Trump co-signatories "declare our intent to catalyze an American renewal, and to either reimagine a party dedicated to our founding ideals or else hasten the creation of such an alternative."

As a political project, the would-be catalyzers face extremely long odds. The playing field of American politics these past six years has been littered with the corpses of failed or stillborn attempts to challenge Trump from the right. The only lasting third-party alternative in that span "dedicated to our founding ideals" is one that has put in a half-century of grunt work to get one percent of the vote.

But as a media and fundraising initiative, the effort may find more fertile terrain. McMullin's co-organizer of American Renewal is Miles Taylor, a government security analyst known mostly for being the anonymous author of the 2018 New York Times op-ed "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," which he then spun into the bestselling 2019 book A Warning. In August 2020, a no-longer-anonymous Taylor accused his former boss of "playingon the Russian team and not the American team," and filmed a two-minute advertisement for Republican Voters Against Trump, a project launched by the 501(c)(4) group Republicans for the Rule of Law, which was co-founded by veteran Washington commentator and political schemer Bill Kristol.

"I'm still a Republican, but I'm hanging on by the skin of my teeth because how quickly the party has divorced itself from truth and reason," Taylor told The New York Times this week. "I'm one of those in the group that feels very strongly that if we can't get the G.O.P. back to a rational party that supports free minds, free markets, and free people, I'm out and a lot of people are coming with me."

Those people attracted to such concepts as truth, reason, "free minds," and "free markets" may find themselves nodding along to some of the principles espoused in the letter, especially if they have a strong stomach for portentous language. (The first line of the declaration reads: "These United States, born of noble convictions and aspiring to high purpose, have been an exemplar of self-government to humankind.")

McMullin, Taylor, & Co. favor "open, market-based economiesconsistent with our natural liberty," reject "populism and illiberalism, whether of the right or the left," and stress that "it is the prerogative of all to make personal decisions in accordance with their free will." They want to welcome lawful immigrants, keep regulation limited, and protect property rights. So far, so unobjectionable.

Where the manifesto begins to diverge most sharply from the Libertarian Party platform is the unspecific yet ambitious paragraph titled "Leadership": "Having thrived in the abundance of a choice land, we believe that these United States must work in conjunction with friends and allies to advance worthy interests abroad and to promote freedom by example and with the judicious application of power."

This passage, in a document arranged by two security-state veterans, and unveiled in the service of supporting Liz Cheney, is a good prompt to cross-check some of the names on the bottom of the petition. Sure enough, #NeverTrump 6.0 is endorsed by several people with fingerprints all over an activist foreign policy.

There is Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency, who lied to Congress about torture programs, has likened air strikes to "casual sex," and made jokes about putting Edward Snowden on a kill list. There is former national intelligence director and serial ambassador to geostrategic countries (Honduras in the 1980s, Iraq in the aughts) John Negroponte, former State Department counselor and World War IV booster Eliot A. Cohen, and former Department of Homeland Security chief and indefinite-detention enthusiast Michael Chertoff, among several other lesser-known veterans of the George W. Bush administration.

Many of these same people lent their names to anti-Trump efforts in 2016 on foreign policy grounds, then cheered on the Russia-related investigations that dogged the 45th president, and are now threatening to start their own party if Trumpism isn't sufficiently cleansed from the GOP.

That pro-market anti-Trumpers are talking about a third party while ignoring the Libertarians, even though one of the signatories (Weld) ran as the L.P. vice presidential nominee as recently as 2016, touches on each of the three main obstacles to herding Trump-averse non-Democrats into anything like a single tent.

1) The three biggest anti-Trump blocs are ideologically incompatible. It has been clear since the dawn of the Trump era that opposition to the crudely mannered America First mercantilist would come most intensely from foreign policy hawks (John McCain, John Kasich, Bill Kristol), libertarian-leaners (Justin Amash, Mark Sanford, George Will), and Mormons (Evan McMullin, Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake).

While Latter-day Saints members can swing between hawkery and dovery (just think of the significant ideological split between Utah's Republican delegation to the U.S. Senate), the fault lines are obvious: Libertarians and neocons generally dislike one another, and even the most loosey-goosey of Mormons have a hard time embracing the full legal logic of personal autonomy for consenting adults. Any movement that requires these camps to get along will likely be short-term and transactional, not unlike the 2016 third-party voters who in 2020 held their noses to vote for President Joe Biden.

2) Noisy anti-Trumpism is mostly incompatible with holding elected office as a Republican. The American Renewal letter signatures look like the roster of a political reunion for the Class of '95. In addition to two-time Massachusetts Gov. Weld, there's former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former California Rep. Tom Campbell, former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson, former Oklahoma Rep. Mickey Edwards, former Maryland Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, and dozens of others unburdened by the need to win reelection from the modern Republican electorate.

Of the vanishingly few current office-holders on the list, they tend to share a rare characteristic: recent defection from the GOP. Jim Hendren was the Republican majority leader of the Arkansas Senate until this January, when, disgusted by the Capitol riot, he stepped down from leadership, and then the next month left the party altogether. And California State Assemblyman Chad Mayes, the former Republican minority leader, left the party in late 2019 after drawing fire for his criticisms of Trump.

Prior to his departure, Mayes engaged in the kind of Third Way/No Labels activity common among many signatories of the American Renewal letter. From his Wikipedia page:

In January 2018, Mayes formed "New Way California," aiming to broaden the appeal of the Republican Party by advocating for "individual freedom, shared responsibility, educational excellence, environmental stewardship, efficient government and an open economy." The group has been publicly supported by former governorArnold Schwarzenegger, and both Mayes and Schwarzenegger along withOhio governorJohn Kasich headlined the group's inaugural summit inLos Angeleson March 21.The summit was criticized by some in theCalifornia Republican Party, including former chairman Ron Nehring, who described them as "elites talking down to grassroots voters."

As an independent and non-fan of Trump, I share the Renewalists' embarrassment at mainstream GOP fear of crossing Trump voters. Yet that is the world we live in. If you want to hold office as a Republican, and spend any measurable amount of time criticizing the former president, you better have a safe seat, stature, and bank vaults full of cash. Even then, you're going to get booed.

3) At a time of intense negative polarization, centrist scolds are popular mostly in limited corners of the media, and among opportunistic anti-Trump partisans. See: Jeff Flake, Howard Schultz, John Kasich, etc.

Arguably the most successful anti-Trump centrist initiative, at least as measured by revenue and media reach, has been The Lincoln Project, a political action committee of former GOP political operatives that raised scores of millions of dollars from Democrats to run anti-Trump ads in 2020. The project has been dogged by all kinds of scandal and controversy, particularly after the election was safely delivered to Biden.

Three of the American Renewal signatoriesGeorge Conway, Jennifer Horn, and Mike Madridwere co-founders of The Lincoln Project; former Michigan GOP executive Jeff Timmer, too, has been a key member. Evan McMullin's most likely path to success lies less in the direction of dreary third-party construction, and more in a Lincoln Project-style initiative to raise money and make noise about the Republican Party's regnant Trumpism.

But there's an obstacle on that road, too. America's high alert about Trump has nowhere to go but down. The man is not the president, he is not going to be the president, and most people worried about such have moved on with their lives. Sure, I would love to see a GOP that explicitly rejects its most internally popular figure, just as I would love to see a Democratic Party worried about the national debt. In either case, the short-term chances of that happening are the same: slim, none, and fat.

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Will a Coalition of Hawks, Mormons, and Libertarian-Leaners Form a New Third Party? - Reason

Robb Luthers campaign has announced that the Libertarian candidate will appear on the May 18 special election ballot for a vacant House seat in Pennsylvanias 59th Legislative District.

Luther, 46, a Ligonier Valley native, said he is vying to represent ordinary Pennsylvanians who feel left behind by the Commonwealths government.

He advocates placing reasonable checks on gubernatorial emergency powers to protect the economy from arbitrary shutdowns, maximizing school choice by putting education dollars directly into the hands of teachers and families, and ending the property tax to enable true homeownership.

As a lifelong native of Ligonier Valley, Luther said he is invested in the community and understands the unique challenges and needs of its people.

Ligonier Valley is my home, and has been for my entire life, he said. Im proud to have raised a family here. Like you, I want it to be a place where our children and families can thrive and prosper. I know that fostering a business-friendly environment and allowing our people to control their own money will lead us to financial stability.

Luther is a ninth-generation resident of Ligonier, who has lived in the Valley his whole life, where he and his wife raised four children, according to his campaign website. Hes currently a partner at a fast-growing digital marketing firm in Pittsburgh.

Like many other Pennsylvanians, Ive become concerned by the direction our state government is headed in, and the impact some of its decisions have had on our community, Luther said. Were faced with real challenges, and we need solutions that tap into the potential of our people not ones that trample over their choices and freedoms. That means getting leadership that understands how our community feels its actions.

Luther is running for the House seat left vacant by the death of Mike Reese, who died Jan. 2 of an apparent brain aneurysm. He was elected for a seventh-term in the state House of Representatives, running unopposed in the November election.

Leslie Baum Rossi, of Latrobe, earned the Rublicican nomination in the special election, while Mariah Fisher, a Ligonier Borough councilwoman, was selected as the Democratic candidate.

As your voice in Harrisburg, Ill work to ease the burden of taxes and regulations on our people, put choices in education back into the hands of teachers and families, and ensure our rights are safeguarded, he said. Together, I know well accomplish real change for our district.

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Robb Luther to appear as Libertarian candidate on ballot for 59th District seat - latrobebulletinnews.com

Former Police Commissioner William Gross endorsed Annissa Essaibi George today.

Throughout her time as a City Councilor, she has shown up, at all hours of the day and night, and met people exactly where they are - in the neighborhood, at community events or civic meetings, and even at the station - to have thoughtful, honest conversations

Gross formally declared himself an AEG'er during a tour of Mattapan Square.

The Greater Boston Libertarian Party, which exists, plans a demonstration at 1 p.m. on Friday, May 21 in Mattapan Square, along with City Council candidates Jacob Urea, Domingos DaRosa and Kevin Reed in "protest of the City of Boston's many aggressions against black and brown business owners."

Michelle Wu talked about her time at Harvard Law, including with Prof. Elizabeth Warren, as well as about campaign issues, in an online press conference with Harvard and other Boston-area student journalists.

State Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz, who earlier had endorsed David Halbert for one of the four at-large council seats, yesterday endorsed Ruthzee Louijeune for one of the seats, leaving her with two open spots on her at-large endorsement card:

Whether as an attorney representing families in housing court or an advocate for our kids in Boston Public Schools, Ruthzee has always used her expertise to give back to the community that raised her. She has the values, the smarts, and the conviction to meet the urgency of this moment and help lead us toward a more equitable Boston.

NECN's Sue O'Connell talks to Kim Janey.

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Election roundup: Essaibi George gets the nod from Gross; Libertarians jump into council race - Universal Hub

Peter Thiel appeared at a Zoom event one evening this past April in a familiar pose: his face sat tense and almost twitchy, and yet his voice radiated authority and calm. Even by Thiels rarefied standards, his main interviewer that evening, in a conversation hosted by the Nixon Foundation, was impressive: Mike Pompeo, Trumps former Secretary of State and a potential Presidential contender, who was treating the billionaire with deference while asking him the broadest of questions about the future of the U.S. and China. You spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the technology fight between the West and the ideas that the Chinese Communist Party puts forwardwhether thats disinformation or the capacity to move digits around the world, Pompeo said to Thiel, before asking the investor how the two powers compared, technologically. For anyone interested in who will hold power in the Republican Party in the near future, the event made for a stark tableau of clout. Pompeos eyes narrowed attentively as he listened to Thiel; the Trump national-security adviser, Robert OBrien, who had also been invited to ask questions, was nodding appreciatively beneath a formidable white coif.

Most of us, these days, operate downstream from one billionaire or another, and the most interesting and destabilizing parts of the Republican Party are operating downstream from Thiel, whose net worth Bloomberg recently estimated at more than six billion dollars. Eric Weinstein, who coined the term intellectual dark Web, is the managing director at Thiel Capital. (Man of many hats, Thiel said not long ago, when asked to describe Weinsteins role within his empire.) In 2015 and 2016, Thiel made a critical three-hundred-thousand-dollar donation to the campaign of Josh Hawley, who was then running for Missouri attorney general; once in office, Hawley had to answer questions about whether his announcement of an antitrust investigation into Google had anything to do with Thiel, an avowed opponent of the search giant. This year, Thiel has given ten million dollars to an outside group funding the Ohio Senate campaign of J. D. Vance, the venture capitalist who became famous as the author of the 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, and a voice on behalf of the parts of America that globalization had left behind. (He is now a regular on Tucker Carlsons Fox News show.) Thiel donated ten million dollars to the Arizona U.S. Senate campaign of his own aide, Blake Masters, who co-authored one of his books and has mostly worked for Thiel since he graduated from Stanford Law, a decade ago; he gave roughly two million dollars to the failed 2020 Senate campaign of the hard-right anti-immigrationist Senate candidate Kris Kobach. There is no obvious party line among the Thielists, but they tend to share a couple of characteristics. They are interested in championing outr ideas and causes, and they are members of an American lite who nevertheless emphasize, in their politics, how awful lites have been for ordinary Americans.

The American right just now is in a state of nervous incoherence. Even the most basic questions (for democracy or against?) seem to trigger panicked, multidimensional calculations, with eyes always cast uncertainly at Mar-a-Lago. The temptation is to say that some of this uncertainty is ideological in naturethat, a decade ago, the organizing principle of conservatism was libertarianism (embodied by much of the Tea Party). Trump elevated a long-dormant nationalism that briefly energized the Party, and, after his loss, politicians are left trying to sort out which model still works. Thiel himself came out of the libertarian movement: he backed Ron Paul for President twice, and he donated lavishly to Pauls campaigns. But, like Hawley, Vance, and Kobach, Thiel developed a much more prominent role in service of Trumps nationalism, perhaps most of all in the address he gave, in 2016, to the Republican National Convention, in which he seemed bewildered by the fact that the astonishing prosperity he saw every day in Silicon Valley was not evident in Sacramento. Wait, wasnt Peter Thiel a libertarian? Reason magazine, the movements Bible, wondered in 2020. Thiel and the Thielists are a through line from the Partys recent past to its likely future; their persistence suggests that Trumps nationalism didnt represent as extreme a departure from the Partys prior libertarianism as it appeared to.

Before Peter Thiel was a billionaire, he had the biographical points of a pretty conventional Gen X young Republican. He was born in 1967, in Frankfurt, to a German family that followed his chemical-engineer father to jobs around the globe before settling in Northern California. As a teen-ager, Thiel was a mathematics prodigy who says he was comfortable taking contrarian positions early, supporting Ronald Reagan and opposing drug legalization in middle school. As an undergraduate, he founded the combative, conservative Stanford Review, and, after law school and a stint as an appellate clerk for a Reagan appointee, Thiel co-authored The Diversity Myth, in 1995, a book decrying mounting political correctness on campus. His career had scarcely begunafter a stint at a New York law firm, hed founded a small tech-investment company. But Thiel already had a fully formed political identity, and his rsum wasnt far from what you get from many Republican congressional candidates.

Silicon Valley was booming during the late nineties, and it did not take Thiel very long to have a huge hit, when he founded PayPal with a half-dozen friends and acquaintances. Thiels friends, George Packer wrote, in 2011, are, for the most part, like him and one another: male, conservative, and super-smart in the fields of math and logical reasoning. Thiel reportedly came out as gay to his friends in 2003 (he would be outed publicly by Gawker some years later, and went on to sponsor a lawsuit against the company). Thiel co-founded the defense-and-intelligence firm Palantir Technologies, in 2004; that same year, he became Facebooks first outside investor. Thiel donated to John McCains 2008 Presidential campaign after supporting Ron Paul in the primary, but his Republicanism received less attention than the fanciful, long-arc libertarian projects in which he invested: the Seasteading Institute (which aimed to build politically autonomous cities on platforms in international waters), the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (which wanted to insure that artificial intelligence was friendly to humans), and the Thiel Fellowship (which supported exceptionally talented young people in creating startup companies if they skipped, dropped out of, or took time off from college).

In 2012, Blake Masters, then a Stanford Law student, took a course on startups that Thiel taught, and published the notes on his Tumblr page, where they became a phenomenon. By 2014, Thiel and Masters had published the notes as a book, Zero to One, offering theories on startups and advice for founders. Reviewing it, Derek Thompson, of The Atlantic, said he thought it might be the best business book Ive read. Thiel and Masters emphasize the breadth of forces arrayed against any founder: In a world of gigantic administrative bureaucracies both public and private, searching for a new path might seem like hoping for a miracle. Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands of miracles. This would be depressing but for one crucial fact: humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.

In between slightly batty charts (one distinguishes between the definite optimism of societies like the U.S. in the nineteen-fifties and sixties and the indefinite pessimism of others, like present-day Europe), Thiel and Masters offer a vision of the founder that is patterned after Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged, in which imaginative individuals are forced to fight through a society that is bureaucratized and stultifying in all its institutional forms. They wonder why the educational system compels people to strive for mediocre competence in many things instead of trying to be uniquely great at one thing, and bemoan the way large organizations stifle ideas. In Washington, libertarianism tends to take the form of a stark anti-government position, usually putting Republicans on the side of large businesses, which want to reduce their tax burden. But Thiels more elemental libertarianism casts big business as an opponent of progress. (The seeming paradox of Hawley and other members of an ideologically pro-business party routinely calling for the breakup of Google, Amazon, and Facebook on antitrust grounds may not be a paradox at allit may simply be Thielist.) The deepest quality of Thiel and Masterss book is its outsized vision of what a heroic individuala foundercan do. In a late chapter, they argue that successful founders tend to have the opposite qualities of those seen in the general populationthat they are, in some basic ways, differentand compare them to kings and figures of ancient mythology. In a section on Steve Jobs, Thiel and Masters write:

Apples value crucially depended on the singular vision of a particular person. This hints at the strange way in which the companies that create new technology often resemble feudal monarchies rather than organizations that are supposedly more modern. A unique founder can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades. Paradoxically, impersonal bureaucracies staffed by trained professionals can last longer than any lifetime, but they usually act with short time horizons. The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme; we need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.

The heightened vision of what a single leader can do, the veneration for more ancient and direct forms of leadership, the praise for authoritative decision-making and disdain for bureaucraciesits a short hop from here to the Donald Trump of I alone can fix it.

During Trumps 2016 Presidential campaign, Thiel appeared to be developing some alliances with the far right: BuzzFeed News later reported that he had hosted a dinner that included a prominent white nationalist, Kevin DeAnna; that story also noted that Thiel had backed the startup of a prominent far-right blogger named Curtis Yarvin, known online as Mencius Moldbug. But by the summer of 2020 Thiel, like many other Republican funders, had tired of the President. The Wall Street Journal reported that he was not backing Trumps relection campaign, which he found so chaotic that he privately termed it the S.S. Minnow.

By Thiels own account, his libertarianism had evolved. When I was in college, in the nineteen-eighties, I used to think that libertarianism was a timeless and eternal thing. It was just these absolute truths for all places in all times. And Ive now come to think that there are certain contexts when its more true or less true, Thiel said, in a long interview with Dave Rubin, the comedian and libertarian commentator, who is a mainstay of the intellectual dark Web. If you had an incredibly well-functioning government and politics, he went on, libertarian principles seemed less relevant. When Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged, in the nineteen-fifties, it felt like it was crazy, Thiel said. America was booming, and yet the books were so bleak, so pessimistic. It was so busted, so broken. When I first read them in the late eighties it still felt pretty crazy. And then, the last decade, it in many ways felt much more correct. He remembered the vision of Detroit that Rand had conjured: Detroit was sort of falling apart, someone was farming in the middle of the cityand this was 1957, it was sort of a crazy thing, and its disturbingly more true today.

For a long time, Thiels venture firm had a slogan on its Web site: We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. Even if many elements of Thiels politics were not a good match for Trumps, they both were sure that the outlook was bleak. In 2011, Thiel published an essay in National Review titled The End of the Future. In a 2018 debate with his old PayPal friend Reid Hoffman, now more famous as the co-founder of LinkedIn, Thiel suggested that differing views on the technological future shaped political categories. Thiel said, The rough political mapping I would give on this tripartite division is, the centrist establishment in this country is accelerationistthat would be Clinton, that would be the Bush family. Obama was broadly in this camp. Theres a non-establishment leftthat would be inequality, which is the Sanders line. Then the non-establishment right, which Trump represented, thats stagnation. Make America Great Again is very offensive to people in Silicon Valley, because youre telling people in Silicon Valley that the futures not progressing.

Excerpt from:
The Rise of the Thielists - The New Yorker