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Libertarian party presidential candidate, Jo Jorgensen, has appeared on a podcast associated with the anti-government boogaloo movement just days after an adherent of the movement was arrested for allegedly murdering two law enforcement officers.

One of the other people on the podcast also runs a Facebook page which is strewn with memes that reference insurrectionary violence, and appear to invoke white nationalist and neo-Nazi imagery and subject matter.

The Libertarian party is one of the largest political parties in the US, outside the dominant pairing of the Democrats and Republicans. Although the partys vote is still comparatively small, it has finished third in the last two presidential elections, and has increased its share of the vote in four successive elections, going from 0.4% of the vote in 2004 to 3.3% in 2016, when it fetched almost 4.5 million votes

On the Roads to Liberty podcast, Jorgensen was quizzed on her policy proposals by a group of men who were introduced as some of the head admins for some of the most influential pages in the so-called boogaloo movement.

The word boogaloo refers to the prospect of a second civil war in the US by playing off a reference to a movie sequel, Breakin 2: Electric boogaloo. For some in the anti-government boogaloo movement, any such civil conflict carries the possibility of an insurrection against an overbearing state and the law enforcement officers who serve it, particularly agencies tasked with enforcing restrictions on gun rights. But others who use the term conceive of the boogaloo as a race war.

Apart from the podcast host, who broadcasts under the name Hobbs, and the producer, Ben Backus, the questioners included a man identifying himself as Rick, an administrator of the North /K/arolina Facebook page; a man identifying himself as Justin, an administrator of the now-absent Thick Boog Line Facebook page; and Cameron Purser, a North Carolina man who runs Flytrap Firearms Consulting, a firearms training business.

Also questioning Jorgensen was a man identifying himself as Squid, an administrator of the Patriot Wave: V 2.0 (PW2) page, which currently has 10,000 followers. A group associated with a previous, since-banned incarnation of that page were responsible for the first high-profile public appearance of the boogaloo movement, when they paraded masked and armed at a large pro-gun rally in Richmond, Virginia, in January.

While some boogaloo adherents articulate a racially inclusive, universalist form of anti-government ultra-libertarianism, the PW2 page features dozens of memes which reference fascist, white nationalist, and accelerationist neo-Nazi imagery.

Several memes featured on the page venerate white soldiers of the Rhodesian army who fought to maintain white supremacist minority rule in that country before it became Zimbabwe.Several other PW2 memes positively couch images of Nazi Germany and second world war German soldiers.

Other memes feature a reference to Marvin Heemeyer, aka Killdozer, a Colorado businessman who demolished several buildings with a modified bulldozer in 2004 before taking his own life. The Heemeyer incident was referred to by Steven Carillo, the accused double killer and apparent boogaloo sympathizer who allegedly scrawled a Heemeyer quote in blood on the hood of a police cruiser before his arrest on 6 June.

Alex Newhouse is the Digital Research Lead at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute, and has recently published two research papers on the boogaloo movement.

Upon viewing a selection of PW2s memes, Newhouse wrote in an email: While Patriot Waves memes do not explicitly promote Nazi ideologies, they are clearly evocative of more fringe and extreme Nazi accelerationist communities, and the allusions to Rhodesia and South Africa are clearly racist dog whistles which attempt to stoke fears of white displacement and genocide.

Cassie Miller, a senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center who has written on the boogaloo movement, said: Patriot Wave reflects the overlap between the so-called boogaloo movement and the racist far-right.

The questioners ask Jorgensen about a range of policy areas, including taxes, veterans affairs, and second amendment issues.

Squid, however, asks about Jorgensens views on the boogaloo movement as a whole.

Jorgensen replies, Oh, can you please explain that to me again?, and appears not to know about the movement, despite recent arrests of alleged violent extremists who identified with the movement.

Squid explains the purpose of the movement as basically liberty and justice for all.

Well, I am definitely for liberty and justice for all, Jorgensen replies.

On Jorgensens appearance on a boogaloo related podcast, Newhouse, the extremism researcher, says: When politicians make outreach to boogaloo communities, they are mainstreaming this explicitly revolutionary, anti-government movement that has already been linked several instances of real-world violence.

He adds: Boogalooers routinely celebrate and call for deadly violence against journalists and government officials, which means that politicians who ally with them may tacitly legitimize anti-democratic actions, such as armed intimidation and confrontation of political opponents.

In an email, after being given examples of troubling images on the PW2 page, Jorgensen declined to specifically repudiate the support of the boogaloo movement, writing: I welcome the support of anyone who will reject violence and bigotry in favor of non-aggression, peaceful persuasion, and voluntary cooperation.

Asked if the boogaloo movement were anti-government extremists, Jorgensen wrote: The media tend to lump together peaceful protesters and those who advocate violence, and paint the entire group as being violent.

She added: The boogaloo movement is highly decentralized and comprises both those who are aligned with the principle of nonaggression, and some who run counter to it.

Squid, the PW2 administrator, denied that the group were racist in an email, writing that they were constitutionalists.

Dozens of boogaloo groups, including many of the largest ones, have been promoting Jorgensens candidacy in recent days, and a dedicated Jorgensen meme group involves many self-identified boogaloo adherents.

Facebook, meanwhile, banned hundreds of boogaloo-related accounts, pages, and groups on Instagram and Facebook on 30 June, explaining the move as designating a violent US-based anti-government network as a dangerous organization.

The Libertarian party formally condemns racism in its platform. However in 2017, after the Unite the Right rally, the partys leadership had to issue a public denunciation of white nationalism.

This was necessary because lawyer and recently accused domestic abuser, Augustus Sol Invictus, was a featured participant, having previously run in a primary to be the partys Florida senate candidate.

Asked about how the Libertarian party will keep extremists at a distance in future, Jorgensen wrote: The Libertarian Party is the only political party that favors non-aggression as a fundamental principle. Every Libertarian Party member has signed a pledge that they oppose the initiation of force for the purpose of achieving social or political goals.

Read more:
Libertarian 2020 candidate appears on podcast tied to boogaloo movement - The Guardian

Last month, I lamented the end of the long-running Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, and welcomed the establishment of 200-Proof Liberals, a new blog founded by several BHL alumni. I am happy to now welcome the Radical Classical Liberals blog, another new blog founded, in part, by former BHL contributors. It also includes numerous other prominent libertarian/classical liberal philosophers, legal scholars, and political theorists. I am familiar with the work of many of them, and a big fan of their writings, most notably Chandran Kukathas' important work on migration, multiculturalism, and the management of ethnic conflict. I wrote about some of his ideas here. Other prominent contributors include Hiller Steiner (known for his work on property rights and left-libertarianism), Neera Badhwar (who writes about happiness, among other issues), Fernando Teson (a leading scholar of international law and global justice, who is also a contributor to 200-Proof Liberals), and many others.

Philosopher Andrew Jason Cohen has written a helpful post outlining the blog's goals:

As many of you know, the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog ran from 2011-2020. At least two blogs are taking up elements of BHL's project. If you haven't checked out http://200proofliberals.blogspot.com, we highly recommend it. This, though, is Radical Classical Liberals. Welcome.

A view like that (re)developed and encouraged on BHL is needed in the blogosphere, in academia, and in our broader culture. This blog will provide thata classical liberal view that maintains a clear and unapologetic concern for the plight of the less fortunateat a point in time when it seems the world is finally being forced to take those concerns seriously. Importantly, we'll do so in a way meant to encourage greater civil dialogue. We hope to provide a counter to the sound bite culture so prevalent in contemporary media; we do so in order to provide greater understandingboth to our readers and to ourselves

Our hopes for the blog are varied. They include showcasing the attractiveness of dynamic markets and anti-authoritarian solutions to contemporary problems, how these are often the best hope for those concerned with issues of deprivation, exclusion, and subordination, and how, far too often, government solutions are more pretense than substance. We are all concerned to show how freedom (we may disagree about what that is) goes hand in hand with prosperity for all. Putting that differently, we all recognize the value of markets and social justice on some understanding that recognizes (minimally) the basic moral equality of all human adults. Within that framework, our opinions are likely to vary considerably.

We hope to appeal to those who are curious about moral, legal, political, and social thought. While we all have our own existing biases, we hope to be able to bracket our prior beliefs and argue from acceptable premises to important conclusionsall with respectful and reasoned discussion.

I look forward to their posts with great interest and anticipation!

Originally posted here:
Welcome to the New Radical Classical Liberals Blog - Reason

Libertarians want absolute freedom in all circumstances, even if this means reducing governmental amenities and retracting technological advances.

Libertarians by nature detest impositions by governments and financial institutions.

Right wing libertarians such as Ron Paul dislike complex economic systems and have called for a return to the gold standard a financial arrangement removed in the 1930s.

The gold standard was system where the value of a currency was defined in terms of the amount gold represented by the exchange of paper currency a system discarded by many countries in the Depression era.

These days, bankcards and computer-generated apps are replacing cash and the libertarians are typically upset.

Bankcards and ATMs have a long history in Saskatchewan dating to the 1970s.

Saskatchewan and Alberta had the first financial institutions on the Canadian Prairies to use card-based, networked ATMs beginning in June 1977.

Later, credit unions in Saskatchewan introduced debit cards, which were usable wherever credit cards were accepted in 1982.

By the 1990s, most of us were carrying bankcards in our wallets and purses. Bank websites were supplanting personal interactions with tellers at regional branches since the early 2000s.

Digital payments gained partiality over banknotes in the 2010s, as recorded in article by the Independent in May 2015.

PayPal, digital wallets like Apple Pay, contactless and NFC payments by electronic cards and smart phones are preferred for transactions in 2020.

Electronic payments can be insecure, mismanaged and data can be easily stolen.

Yet, the convenience of electronic cash is obvious, even if the libertarians dont agree.

Security measures for electronic payments are improving, as we buy groceries, gas, cigarettes and other goods with bankcards and apps, instead of pulling out masses of coins and bills from our pockets to spread over shop counters.

Electronic cash transfers are the bedrock of modern personal finance, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when cash is considered grimy and disease-bearing.

Although COVID-19 is a genuine threat, the growing apprehension over physical cash is ridiculous.

According to SCOOP Business in June 2020, There is no evidence linking cash to the transmission of COVID-10. Cash is sanitized before being delivered by cash companies to venues and ATM operators.

To have cash as an option for buying goods and services, instead of being solely reliant on electronic payments, will always be desirable.

Sometimes, cash is the only option with services such as coin laundromats.

Cash is defended by a libertarian group known as Cash is Legal Tender, but these Luddites are more than champions of banknotes and coins.

From reading several posts, these libertarians on the far right share French philosopher Michel Foucaults ideal of personal ethics in favour of the collective a development founded upon Nietzschean self-creation.

Foucault believed all human-led organizations had grown far beyond the needs of the individuals who were engaged with them.

Thus, Foucault decided the participants in society were trapped in games of power.

But the pro-cash libertarians arent gathering online to discuss French poststructuralism and German nihilism. More exactly, the online, anti-bankcard sect are using social media to disperse the views of American pop culture paleoconservatives like Tucker Carlson, who once shared their libertarian ideas on economics long before he became a Trumpist.

The Cash is Legal Tender sect are right in defending cash but their denunciation of organized societies is alarming and meaningless.

Society funds libraries, schools, roads, electrical grids and other public aims. Without communities, weve returned to the Hobbesian age of fear, loathing and self-interest.

Governmental organizations on all levels often misrepresent society but the outright rejection of society is short-sighted and founded on ignorance.

Critical theorist Jrgen Habermas accused Foucault and other like-minded postmodern libertarians as uncaring individualists disguised as philosophers who disdained the constraints of governments, but in turn scorned progressive ideals such as emancipation and equality in a 1981 paper he wrote titled Modernity versus Postmodernity.

Habermas disliked Foucaults libertarianism but like Foucault, the German philosopher and sociologist hated dictatorships. Habermas promoted the idea of a public sphere, where societies were occupied in public debates and where every citizen had access to forming public opinions a superior ideal compared to Foucaults nihilistic individualism.

Cash is Legal Tender are spot-on for defending banknotes and coins we still need cash for payment alternatives, but the groups libertarian-based fears about governments, societies, technology and globalism are mistaken and conspiratorial.

See the original post:
We're a cashless society now and the libertarians are nervous - Assiniboia Times

This story originally appeared on PA Post.

Musician Kanye WesttweetedSaturday night that he intends to run for president in 2020. He has not formed a campaign committee, filed the necessary paperwork with the Federal Election Commission,or, for that matter, done anything since Saturday to indicate he will follow through on the announcement.

But, just hypothetically, what would it take for him to get on the ballot in Pennsylvania?

Thanks to arelatively recent court settlement, not as much as it used to.

After six years of litigation, Pennsylvanias minor parties the Libertarian, Constitution, and Green parties reached a settlement with the Department of State in 2018 to lower the threshold for ballot access to 5,000 signatures for presidential candidates and 2,500 signatures for all other statewide offices (except governor and U.S. senator, which would require 5,000, but are not on the ballot this year).

Previously, third party and independent candidates needed to get enough signatures to amount to two percent of the statewide electorate, a number that often reached into the tens of thousands. That was a barrier to candidates from outside the two major parties.

If Im not spending months on end trying to fight to get on the ballot, well then we can spend all of our time campaigning and talking about the ideas with voters and debating with each other, so that the election is actually what its supposed to be, Dale Karns, the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate in 2018,toldThe Philadelphia Inquirer.

Before the 2018 settlement, a federal judgeruled in 2015that the Commonwealths ballot access requirements violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution by placing an unequal burden on non-major party candidates. The court then imposed interim guidelines that, in some cases, required signatures to come from multiple Pennsylvania counties. Under the settlement the parties reached in 2018, however, no such county-based requirements exist.

For presidential candidates, the candidatemust also name 20 electors(as well as their occupations and place of residency) at the time their petition is filed.

The deadline to submit paperwork for the 2020 general election is August 3. The filing fee is $200.

Read more:
What would it take for Kanye West to get on the ballot in Pennsylvania? - WHYY

Were all socialists now, apparently. No, really it turns out even the most rugged of the free marketeers have been coaxed by the coronavirus to fall into the government safety net.

The national press has been filled with stories this week about how the well-connected, the billionaires, the white-shoe lobbying firms and the most anti-government think tanks all got relief money under Congress $2 trillion coronavirus rescue act.

The latter includes no-new-taxes activist Grover Norquist, who infamously wants to drown the government in the bathtub. Also the libertarian Ayn Rand Institute, and anti-debt crusader Citizens Against Government Waste. All these groups that pillory big government suddenly found common cause in lining up to get a piece of one of the biggest government spending programs of all time.

And Im actually OK with that. Its what it was for to provide a measure of relief to businesses in need, of any and all types. The Seattle Times got a Paycheck Protection Program loan, too and we definitely didnt head into 2020 thinking wed be the recipient of government aid.

But I wonder whether this awkward moment will spark any internal reflection about the lift-yourselves-by-your-bootstraps, no taxes ever mantra that dominates the conservative political world.

Take, say, Washington states own free-market think tanks. The Washington Policy Center, a Seattle-based conservative group, got between $350,000 to $1 million from the federal relief program (the loans, which can convert to forgivable grants, were reported in ranges in data released Monday).

Meanwhile, heres the philosophy the think tank uses to describe itself in its annual reports:

We dont receive government money. We dont ask for it and we wouldnt take it even if it were offered. WPC relies on the generous support of our donors people like you who understand that free-markets are superior to a government rigged economy, and liberty is the air that a free people must breathe.

Except for this one time, I guess. To keep on breathing those liberty vapors required being put on a government ventilator.

Or take the Freedom Foundation, a business-backed outfit out of Olympia. Its been rallying against government spending and taxes since the early 1990s. Recently its been on a jihad against unions. During the pandemic it has called for governors to halt all public-sector union dues payments, on the grounds the union organizations dont need the money and the workers do.

But unions specifically werent eligible for the paycheck protection program, so they were left to fend for themselves. Not so the Freedom Foundation, though it got between $350,000 to $1 million from the federal relief fund, records show.

We have a vision of a day when opportunity, responsible self-governance, and free markets flourish in America because its citizens understand and defend the principles from which freedom is derived, the Freedom Foundation says on its website. We accept no government support.

Maybe just this one eensy-weensy time.

The laissez-faire capitalist Ayn Rand Institute, in California, went still further, rationalizing that going on the dole this one time would somehow strike a moral blow against big government.

It would be a terrible injustice for pro-capitalists to step aside and leave the funds to those indifferent or actively hostile to capitalism, it explained in a statement, titled To Take, or Not to Take.

Look, Im a capitalist too, but what a crock all that is. As I said up top: Its fine for any qualified business or association to get the relief money. Yes, even Kanye West, whose Yeezy clothing and footwear line got between $2 million and $5 million. Even the paid anti-government scolds. The programs point was to disperse the money as rapidly and widely as possible, to keep the economy somewhat functioning during this pandemic. It did that to more than 16,000 businesses in Washington state alone.

But To Take, or Not to Take that is not the question. The coronavirus has shown, if nothing else, that we all sometimes need a little boost. We have just been treated to a national case study in how we all depend on strong governmental social and health safety nets and not only when theres a pandemic.

This is not about taking at all, or shouldnt be. Its about giving back paying for basic good government and then, sometimes, when you need it, receiving help.

So can we at least dispense now with the breath of liberty canards? The drowning the government in the bathtub nonsense? The whole no-tax bluster?

Because now we know: Even groups that put freedom right in their name have apparently concluded theyre A-OK with some big-government, debt-financed, taxpayer-backed collectivism after all.

Here is the original post:
Local anti-tax groups find even they need big government aid sometimes - Seattle Times