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The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin ignited nationwide protests. While we advise jurors to withhold judgment until presentation of all the evidence, video of the incident seems definitive. Mr. Floyd joins a much too long list of minority victims of police violence. Justice may be served in Minneapolis. The four officers involved were fired the next day and Mr. Chauvin charged with second degree murder within a week. The other three officers were charged with aiding and abetting second degree murder. Does this render the protests moot? Not necessarily. Mr. Chauvin was not charged with first degree murder, and the charges could be reduced when attention focuses elsewhere.

I am something of an anomaly, a law-and-order libertarian. I have great respect for police because of the injustice of crime. When someone takes your belongings whether milk money or a car we naturally feel the injustice. Bullies and criminals violate the social peace. The police respond to our calls for help. Bullies and criminals terrify many of us, but not the police.

Police use of excessive force is a danger for all Americans. Minorities, however, have far more such encounters. Jason Riley is a member of the Wall Street Journals editorial board guest. In Please Stop Helping Us, Mr. Riley details his encounters with the police as a law-abiding youth, often for nothing more than driving while black. He observes, Was I profiled based on negative stereotypes about young black men? Almost certainly. But then everyone profiles based on limited knowledge, including me.

I have never faced such discrimination nor experienced the ensuing reactions. Mr. Riley did not letting profiling poison his life view, and this is admirable. I also appreciate that some young men will show resentment, which might provoke police wrath. Minorities bear the brunt of police mistakes, like Breonna Taylor, killed in a botched police raid this March.

We should hold police officers to an extremely high standard because they can use deadly force. We should also remember how police officers experience encounters with us. Ninety-nine point nine percent of traffic stops will be routine, but an officer never knows when a confrontation might occur.

Minimizing inevitable tragic accidents provides a first place for change. Yale law professor Stephen Carter tells his first year students to never push for a law they would not want people killed to enforce. Mr. Floyd was apprehended for spending a counterfeit $20; Eric Garner was killed in 2014 while evading New Yorks cigarette taxes. We should not criminalize so many things.

I believe that the Derek Chauvins are a miniscule fraction of police officers. We lack institutional controls on misbehavior. Police officers have a common interest in disciplining their bad apples, but this rarely happens.

Misbehavior is likely tolerated because police officers, like fire fighters or soldiers, depend on each other in matters of life-and-death. I have never served in such positions and may not appreciate this need to trust colleagues. Nevertheless, bad apples abuse toleration; Mr. Chauvin ruined the other officers lives in addition to ending Mr. Floyds life.

Police unions vigorously defend and enforce privacy rules shielding rogue officers. A retired New York Police commander wrote that, The unions, at least in New York City, outright just protect, protect, protect the cops. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison cites the Minneapolis police union as contributing to the departments problems.

Asset forfeiture laws and militarization also contribute. Police departments can seize and keep cars, money and other property from people not convicted of crimes, often minorities unable to contest seizure. For decades, police departments have received surplus military equipment. Militarization and policing for profit must make officers feel like part of an army of occupation, not public servants.

Law enforcement is a noble profession when the police protect and serve citizens. Police should get the benefit of the doubt when using force but this is only possible if departments fire miscreant officers. Some encouraging incidents have occurred this past week. In Genesee County, Michigan, Sheriff Chris Swanson took off his riot gear and walked and talked with protestors. The cycle of violence will never end if police and citizens view each other as adversaries.

Daniel Sutter is the Charles G. Koch Professor of Economics with the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University and host of Econversations on TrojanVision. The opinions expressed in this column are the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Troy University.

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Will these things ever change? - The Troy Messenger - Troy Messenger

In a political first, Pueblo County delegates played a part in the Libertarian Party's first online convention recently.

This convention marked the first time that any American political party that is organized and active in all 50 states has held all or part of its national nominating convention online.

About 1,000 Libertarians from across America convened in the first 3-hour session to determine who will be the Libertarian presidential candidate in the November election.

I am John Pickerill, one of the registered Coloradans from the area who took part.

Some parts of this session were difficult since the whole online process was entirely new to all of us, but today, we established our schedule and procedures for the rest of the weekend and got to practice how to interact with each other online.

Everything was uncharted territory -- all of our partys previous 20 national conventions since 1971 were conducted face-to-face.

I am a Libertarian because I want people to be left alone to live their lives peacefully in whatever manner they choose. A vote for a Libertarian is a way to tell the world that you dont consent to the theft of your liberties or wallets by the parasitic political class.

Whenever our ideas are given a fair hearing, we win. Thats why the Democratic and Republican parties never allow Libertarians into debates -- because they know that on the day the philosophy of limited government is allowed to be heard, that is the day their grip on the American voter will slip away.

The daunting odds dont deter Libertarians. There are two times as many Libertarians now than five years ago. There are now almost half a million voters registered Libertarian across the country.

In another five, years we will be even bigger.

The big-government parties will eventually have to deal with us. And when they do, they will lose.

We will continue to persuade more of their supporters that less government is always better. The contributors and voters they depend on are going to continue abandoning them to join us.

In the last century, all of the ancient ideas for governing societies with huge, bloated, bossy, expensive governments have been tried. They have all failed.

Big governments dont protect their own people very well; nor can big governments and their teeming bureaucracies be trusted to mind their own

business. In the last century, governments were the biggest killer of people -- with about 200 million deaths to their credit -- most of those being their own citizens.

Its time to turn away from that Leviathan. Time has proven that only a frugal, limited government that is asked to do almost nothing is the only kind that brings about more justice, more peace, and more prosperity.

Only Libertarians are working toward those things.

Voters interested in learning more about the Libertarian Party are invited to visit the website at http://www.LP.org.

Those interested in finding out more about libertarianism in general can find several bibliographical resources at https://lpedia.org/wiki/List_of_Books.

Here are the top seven Libertarians who have been seeking the Libertarian Party nomination for president:

Jim Gray http://www.GraySharpe2020.com/

Jacob Hornberger https://JacobForLiberty.com/

Jo Jorgensen https://JOJ2020.com/

Adam Kokesh https://KokeshForPresident.com/

John Monds https://Monds2020.com/

Vermin Supreme https://VerminSupreme2020.com/

Arvin Vohra https://www.VoteVohra.com/

John Pickerill is a Pueblo County resident who has run for public office.

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Less government is the solution - Pueblo Chieftain

WASHINGTON From Harvard Law School comes the latest conservative flirtation with authoritarianism. Professor Adrian Vermeule, a 2016 Catholic convert, is an integralist who regrets his academic specialty, the Constitution, and rejects the separation of church and state. His much-discussed recent Atlantic essay advocating a government that judges the quality and moral worth of public speech is unimportant as a practical political manifesto, but it is symptomatic of some conservatives fevers, despairs and temptations.

Common-good capitalism, Sen. Marco Rubios recent proposal, is capitalism minus the essence of capitalism limited government respectful of societys cumulative intelligence and preferences collaboratively revealed through market transactions. Vermeules common-good constitutionalism is Christian authoritarianism muscular paternalism, with government enforcing social solidarity for religious reasons. This is the Constitution minus the Framers purpose: a regime respectful of individuals diverse notions of the life worth living. Such respect is, he says, abominable.

He would jettison libertarian assumptions central to free-speech law and free-speech ideology. And: libertarian conceptions of property rights and economic rights also will have to go, insofar as they bar the state from enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources. Who will define these duties? Integralists will, because they have an answer to this perennial puzzle: If the people are corrupt, how do you persuade them to accept the yoke of virtue-enforcers? The answer: Forget persuasion. Hierarchies must employ coercion.

Common-good constitutionalisms main aim, Vermeule says, is not to minimize the abuse of power but to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well. Such constitutionalism does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy because the law is parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits, wielded if necessary even against the subjects own perceptions of what is best for them. Besides, those perceptions are not really the subjects because under Vermeules regime the law will impose perceptions.

He thinks the Constitution, read imaginatively, will permit the transformation of the nation into a confessional state that punishes blasphemy and other departures from state-defined and state-enforced solidarity. His medieval aspiration rests on a non sequitur: All legal systems affirm certain values, therefore it is permissible to enforce orthodoxies.

Vermeule is not the only American conservative feeling the allure of tyranny. Like the American leftists who made pilgrimages to Fidel Castros Cuba, some self-styled conservatives today turn their lonely eyes to Viktor Orban, destroyer of Hungarys democracy. The prime ministers American enthusiasts probably are unfazed by his seizing upon COVID-19 as an excuse for taking the short step from the ethno-nationalist authoritarianism to which he gives the oxymoronic title illiberal democracy, to dictatorship.

In 2009, Orban said, We have only to win once, but then properly. And in 2013, he said: In a crisis, you dont need governance by institutions. Elected to a third term in 2018, he has extended direct or indirect control over courts (the Constitutional Court has been enlarged and packed) and the media, replacing a semblance of intragovernmental checks-and-balances with what he calls the system of national cooperation. During the COVID-19 crisis he will govern by decree, elections will be suspended, and he will decide when the crisis ends supposedly June 20.

Explaining his hostility to immigration, Orban says Hungarians do not want to be mixed ... We want to be how we became eleven hundred years ago here in the Carpathian Basin. Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, authors of The Light that Failed, dryly marvel that Orban remembers so vividly what it was like to be Hungarian eleven centuries ago. Nostalgia functioning as political philosophy Vermeules nostalgia seems to be for the 14th century is usually romanticism untethered from information.

Last November, Patrick Deneen, the University of Notre Dame professor whose 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed explained his hope for a post-liberal American future, had a cordial Budapest meeting with Orban. The Hungarian surely sympathizes with Deneens root-and-branch rejection of classical liberalism, which Deneen disdains because it portrays humans as rights-bearing individuals who can fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life. One name for what Deneen denounces is: the American project. He, Vermeule and some others on the Orban-admiring American right believe that political individualism the enabling, protection and celebration of individual autonomy is a misery-making mistake: Autonomous individuals are deracinated, unhappy and without virtue.

The moral of this story is not that there is theocracy in our future. Rather, it is that American conservatism, when severed from the Enlightenment and its finest result, the American Founding, becomes spectacularly unreasonable and literally unAmerican.

Will is a columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group.

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Will: The rise of conservative authoritarians - Roanoke Times

Two Republicans and three Democrats are seeking their respective parties nominations for Indianas Sixth Congressional District in Tuesdays primary.

The seat is currently held by Rep. Greg Pence, R-Indiana, who is seeking a second term.

Pence is being challenged in the GOP primary by Mike Campbell of Wayne County, according to candidate filings.

In 2018, Pence defeated Democratic challenger Jeannine Lee Lake, winning his first term in Congress.

In Bartholomew County, Pence received 16,161 votes (60.86%), while Lake received 9,607 votes (36.18%), and Libertarian Thomas Ferkinhoff, 56, of Richmond, received 782 votes (2.95%). All sought political office for the first time in 2018.

Lake is running for the Democratic nomination again. She is being challenged by Barry Welsh of Hancock County and George T. Holland of Rush County, according to candidate filings.

The winners of the Republican and Democratic primaries will face each other in Novembers general election.

The Republic reached out to all five candidates to talk about why they are running and how they would address major issues affecting voters in their district. Only Pence and Lake responded.

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Candidates seek party nominations for Indiana's Sixth Congressional District - The Republic

Media executive, investigative journalist, and U.S. Senate candidate Jon Ossoff announced Thursday that his campaign raised $738,539 between April 1 and May 20 for his bid to unseat Senator David Perdue (R-Ga.), who, during that same period, raised $544,940.

In the seven-week span, Ossoff received over 15,500 contributions, with an average contribution of just $46, highlighting his grassroots support and momentum all without accepting any contributions from corporate PACs.

Since launching his campaign, Ossoff has received 17,491donations from within the state of Georgia, and Ossoffs campaign has more than 8,525Georgia donors in 132 counties.

The Ossoff campaign says the efforts and statewide outreach have made the race with Perdue neck-and-neck. Ossoff must first make his way through a crowded Democratic primary on June 9th before facing Republican David Perdue and Libertarian Shane Hazel in the November election.

Arecent Civiqs pollfound Ossoff leadingPerdue 47-45 percent. GOP internal pollinghas found the race is a dead heat, while expert political analysts likeThe Cook Political Reporthave upgraded the race for Democrats in light of Ossoffs strong polling against Perdue.

Ossoff outraised Perdue without accepting any contributions from corporate PACs and Ossoff says Perdue has been fined by the FEC for excessive corporate fundraising.

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With Average Contribution of $46, Ossoff Reports over $735K Raised in Pre-Primary FEC Filing - All On Georgia