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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is facing a test of his hard-right political brand in New Hampshire, one that requires him to strike a more moderate tone on some of the cultural issues that have come to define his rise to prominence.

Since launching his presidential bid last week, DeSantis has leaned into his credentials as a conservative culture warrior, hoping to outflank his chief rival, former President Donald Trump, from the right.

But that strategy carries significant risks in New Hampshire, where libertarian-leaning Republicans and a sizable cohort of independent voters play an outsized role in determining the winner of the critical first-in-the-nation GOP primary.

“Culturally we’re less conservative so there’s definitely a difference there,” Jim Merrill, a veteran Republican consultant in New Hampshire, said. “We have more of a fiscally conservative, more socially moderate general electorate. The pro-life community here isn’t as big as it is in Iowa.” 

“Candidates here really need to think through their strategy,” he added. “Not only appealing to base Republican activists, but also that undeclared vote and what may draw them in.”

As he swung through the state on Thursday in his first tour as a presidential candidate, there were signs that DeSantis was aware of his audience. 

He still discussed fixtures of his typical stump speech, railing against “woke indoctrination” and touting his feud with Disney and his work on universal school choice. And he praised New Hampshire for “holding the line” in deep-blue New England, noting that, like Florida, the Granite State doesn’t collect a personal income tax.

Yet not once did he mention the six-week abortion ban that he signed into law in April, avoiding an issue that he highlighted repeatedly while he toured culturally conservative Iowa earlier in the week.

“This tends to be a state where issues like abortion energize Democrats and divide Republicans,” said Dante Scala, a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. “I heard DeSantis speak for about an hour and he didn’t mention abortion once.” 

Multiple Republicans said that DeSantis is starting his campaign in New Hampshire in a strong position. While polls show him running well behind Trump in the state, he’s already amassed the support among dozens of New Hampshire legislators, including a few who previously backed Trump for the 2024 nomination.

On Thursday, New Hampshire state Rep. James Spillane announced that he would be flipping his endorsement from Trump to DeSantis, arguing that the former president’s recent attack on his former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany had shown that Trump had not learned any “measure of control” since leaving the White House.

DeSantis’s swing through New Hampshire also earned some praise from the state’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, who is weighing a 2024 bid of his own. In an appearance on Fox News, Sununu said that DeSantis had demonstrated that he’s about more than “the woke stuff.”

“He talked about fiscal discipline,” Sununu said. “He’s talking about doing things in Washington that folks haven’t gotten done, and whether that’s Ron or all the candidates, that’s what we have to be talking about.”

New Hampshire holds a unique role in the early presidential primary calendar. Unlike Iowa or South Carolina, religious conservatives tend to hold less sway, Republicans tend to home in on fiscal issues and independent voters are seen as a critical bloc in the primaries.

The state also has a better recent track record of determining the GOP’s White House nod than Iowa. In the last three Republican nominating contests in which an incumbent president wasn’t on the ballot, the winner of the New Hampshire primary ultimately emerged as the eventual nominee.

“This is a pro-choice state and that goes right down through both parties,” said Tom Rath, a longtime GOP consultant and former New Hampshire attorney general. “Now, there is clearly a pro-life segment of the Republican vote, but that’s offset by the impact of independents.”

It’s not as if abortion restrictions are the central theme of DeSantis’s presidential campaign. While he backed the six-week ban in his home state, he’s so far avoided getting behind calls for the kind of federal ban that has been championed by anti-abortion rights groups. 

Trump has also skirted the issue of a federal abortion ban, suggesting that such decisions should be left up to individual states. DeSantis criticized Trump last month, however, after the former president insinuated that Florida’s six-week prohibition is “too harsh.”

Other candidates, like former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), have signaled support for some kind of federal abortion ban.

Yet there are other areas that DeSantis may have to approach with caution. Rath noted that many New Hampshire Republicans lean toward a version of small-government conservatism that, in some ways, stands in contrast to DeSantis’s reputation as a muscular executive.

That image was on full display in Iowa this week, when DeSantis kicked off his 2024 campaign with a vow to “impose our will on Washington, D.C.”

“One thing that New Hampshire likes is accountability,” Rath, who’s unaligned in the primary, said. “We have a two-year term for governor. We don’t like people to get too comfortable. They take these things seriously; it’s part of our ethos. And accordingly, they’ve tended to take a good hard look at the people who are respectful of that.”

Scala, the political science professor, said that that attitude may be changing among New Hampshire Republicans, especially in the years since Trump entered the political scene, portraying himself as a candidate capable of muscling through even the most difficult priorities.

“There’s definitely a contrast between the small-government conservatism of someone like Chris Sununu with DeSantis’s more big-government conservatism,” Scala said.

Still, he added: “I think there’s this feeling among Republicans right now that we need a strong executive at the national level to clean things up because things are such a mess.”

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DeSantiss hard-right brand faces test in New Hampshire - The Hill

Dear editor:

Rod Miller has written a lot of awful columns over the years. Who can count them? Who has the time?

But surely his most recent entry, which tries to justify queer pornography in our schools under the cover of a tough-guy libertarian approach to parenting, takes the cake.

On Thursday, Cowboy State Daily published Clair McFarlands latest reported piece on the progress that queer pornography is making in Wyoming schools: specifically, the presence of Lets Talk About It, a graphic novel depicting cartoon teens and other characters exploring the nuances of sex, gender, sexuality, relationships, consent, STDs, sexting, abusive behavior and birth control, in Lander Valley High School.

Sure enough, the next day, there was Millers column, celebrating Johannes Gutenbergs invention of the movable-type printing press. Why choose June 2nd, 2023, of all days, to celebrate Gutenberg? The date has nothing to do with Gutenbergs life or invention, and everything to do with gaslighting Wyomingites into accommodating themselves to LGBTQI+ Pride Month, which (havent you heard?) has become Americas premier national holiday.

Millers real purpose is to persuade his libertarian and conservative readers that they should shrug ator even applaudqueer pornography in Wyoming schools.

Millers column combines a cartoonish progressive historical narrative with a deceptive encomium to self-reliant individualism. Both are ill-informed and misleading.

Millers progressive bit goes like this. Before Gutenberg, there was nothing as far as the eye could see but popular ignorance and theocratic tyranny. Since Gutenberg, books have made possible the flowering of human intellect and the Age of Reason, and ultimately the Age of Revolution when humans threw off the yoke of religious empires in favor of individual self-expression, culminating, of course, in the U.S. of A. itself.

Set aside Millers idea that Europe before the 15th century was an unending oppressive Kingdom of Darkness. (If thats right, then every family that wants to educate their children in Holy Scripture and the classics of Western Civilization, going back to ancient Israel and classical Greece and Rome, is on a fools errand. Miller is with our Western-Civ-bashing progressives: out with the old, in with the new!)

Millers more important point is about American identity. Redefining America as being all about individual self-expressionrather than a nation that recognizes and safeguards our God-given natural rights under a divinely-established natural law, as affirmed by the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Constitution of Wyomingis a tiresome, unoriginal, and transparently progressive trope. Like an old Obama speech, it employs fuzzy-sounding, familiar words for utterly destructive ends.

Miller is in good (progressive) company. Justice Anthony Kennedy put it like this in 1992s Planned Parenthood v. Casey: At the heart of liberty is the right to define ones own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. This time last year, Nancy Pelosi told the hosts of : Its my honor to be here, to say to all of you how proud we are of you [...] your freedom of expression, of yourselves in drag, is what America is all about. Last week, President Biden introduced Pride Month by telling us that Pride is a celebration of generations of LGBTQI+ people, who have fought bravely to live openly and authentically.

If you havent seen how the language of individual self-expression ends up justifying the replacement of the Stars and Stripes by an ever-uglier Progress Pride Flag, the replacement of Christianity in America by Satanism in America, and the replacement of natural sexual relations by killing the unborn and mutilating children, I can only ask: where have you been these last 20 years?

Unsurprisingly, Miller steers his own column to the same conclusion as progressives like Kennedy, Pelosi, and Biden: the leading edge of left-wing self-expression requires queer porn in public schools.

But Miller doesnt leave it there. True to form, he wraps his apologetics for cultural leftism in the mantle of tough-guy libertarian individualism. If you think books will corrupt your kids minds, be a better parent.

Toughen up, Mom and Pop! Never mind that Wyoming parents are fighting school officials transitioning their kids behind their backs. Never mind that schools should complement parents natural role in raising and educating their children, rather than subvert parents by trying to replace them as the true, expert guardians of the childrens well-being.

Miller continues: If you think that reading Mein Kampf will turn Junior into a Nazi, or Das Kapital will turn Sis commie, then do a better job of teaching them to be Americans. Maybe read Wealth of Nations to them at bedtime.

No one is talking about Hitler or Marx or Adam Smith. Were talking about obscenity versus decency: were talking about the cartoon-figure queer pornography of Lets Talk About It and a dozen similar titles, pumped into every small town school and library in red state America by our left-wing elites.

Clair McFarland and Cowboy State Daily have done readers a service by publishing a photo gallery of pages from Lets Talk About It. Check it out, and judge for yourself.

What does Miller want Wyoming parents to do? Shrug at the fact that queer porn is in their kids schools, and read the Bible to them at bedtime?

Can you imagine anyone, left or right, in deep red Wyoming or deep blue California, arguing that way just a few years ago?

For Miller, public institutions have no moral responsibility; once theyve maximized the opportunities for individuals to choose freely from a gazillion options, theyve done their job. Never mind that the Wyoming Constitution disagrees with him: As the health and morality of the people are essential to their well-being, and to the peace and permanence of the state, it shall be the duty of the legislature to protect and promote these vital interests by such measures for the encouragement of temperance and virtue, and such restrictions upon vice and immorality of every sort, as are deemed necessary to the public welfare (Article 7, Section 20).

As our state Constitution recognizes, politics is inevitably moral, and the public square is never neutral. We are either affirming the natural law and God-given natural rights, or advancing the latest left-wing perversionsor, if youre Rod Miller, youre pretending to do neither, while actually capitulating to the latest filth pumped out by our progressive elites, and trying to drag your small-government, tough-it-out libertarian individualist readers along with you into your same posture of total surrender to the cultural left.

Miller equates any and every attempt to keep queer porn out of school libraries to burning or banning books.

Its a silly fallacy. But lets be honest: a saner society wouldnt publish these books in the first place, much less have to argue about whether or not they belong in its schools. A saner society wouldnt put up with schools, corporations, and government institutions celebrating public obscenity, sexual perversion, and child mutilation every June.

If you, dear reader, think its odd that our schools keep stocking their library shelves with picture books that depict and celebrate anal sex, pornographic consumption, teen sexting, gender fluidity, and genital mutilation well, according to Rod Miller, you would feel right at home in the Dark Ages before books.

Miller has penned many an article that condescended, mocked, and talked down to normal Wyomingites. By brushing off the moral indignation and anxious concern that Wyoming parents have at queer pornography in our schools, he has sunk to a new low.

All this is a fitting way to kick off the month of June. Over the last decade, activists, corporations, and politicians have turned June into the centerpiece of our civic liturgical calendar. Rod Miller is helping our left-wing elites. A few sane parents in Wyoming are trying to fight back to protect their children. Pick a side.

Sincerely,

Pavlos L. Papadopoulos Assistant Professor of HumanitiesWyoming Catholic College

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Letter To The Editor: Don't Let Rod Miller Gaslight You Into ... - Cowboy State Daily

A review of Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America by Michael Lind, 240 pages, Portfolio/Penguin Random House (May 2023).

Real wages in the United States have been stagnant for five decades. Since 2021, inflation has been outstripping real wage growth, driving down living standards for many American workers. But mainstream economists and political commentators on both the libertarian Right and much of the liberal Left treat low wages as an unfortunate but unassailable facet of the modern globalized economy. Low wages are the price we pay for free trade, efficient markets, and low prices. If liberals and libertarians diverge at all from this point of the neoliberal consensus, it is only in how to best respond to low wages. Liberals may support government welfare to supplement low wages while libertarians contend that redistribution disincentivizes workers from upskilling or moving laterally into industries and occupations in higher demand, but both accept low wages as the natural byproduct of technological progress (i.e., automation) and the global free markets of goods and labor that lower prices for everyone.

In his new book, Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America, Michael Lind rejects this status quo. Enabling employers to pay low wages, he contends, is a political choice. Far from being natural or inevitable, low wages are the spoils of a successful war being prosecuted by employers against worker bargaining power.

Lind concedes that low wages translate into lower consumer pricesbut, as the title of the book suggests, the price Americans pay for low prices is far too high. He places low wages at the root of the biggest problems plaguing Western countries, especially the United States, where the assault on worker bargaining power has been most extreme. His contention is that low wages contribute not only to poverty but also declining marriage and birth rates, toxic identity politics, partisan polarization, moral panics, loneliness and social atomization, deaths of despair caused by depression and addiction, and more.

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The Real Cost of Cheap Labour - Quillette

Henry George, a 19th century reformer who famously favored an end to all taxes except a levy on land, believed his system would allow us to "approach" the "abolition of government" as a coercive force. He also wrote that his single tax could fund various public services, transforming the state into "a great co-operative society." Depending on which way you tilt your head, he can sound like he's either almost an anarchist or almost a social democrat.

In Land and Liberty, the Georgetown University historian Christopher William England shows that both sides of George's thinking bore fruit after his death.

In the early 20th century, George's followers found homes in a host of progressive reform movements and progressive-run governments. But other followerssometimes the same followershelped create contemporary libertarianism. (Some even had a hand in contemporary conservatism: He kept it low-key, but National Review founder Bill Buckley was a George fan.) By the time the New Deal arrived, Georgists sometimes found themselves lining up on opposite sides of the era's debates.

Perhaps because he is so hard to classify, George is often misremembered as a momentarily popular radical of the Gilded Age, his influence on later movements forgotten. England restores him to his place in political history, both in the U.S. and abroad. (George's international fans stretched from Cuba's Jos Mart to China's Sun Yat-senfigures later honored in name but not in spirit by Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong.) And while England mostly traces George's influence on modern liberalism, he does not ignore Georgism's libertarian current. As he notes, even progressive-minded Georgists often clashed with actual Progressives: While the "dominant strands of Progressivism are now seen as opposed to individualism," most Georgists "were classically liberal, individualistic, and even libertarian on questions like vice enforcement and regulation."

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Review: 'Land and Liberty' Charts Henry George's Influence - Reason

LAS VEGAS (KTNV) Nevada is now solidified as a safe-haven for abortion patients.

Wednesday, Governor Joe Lombardo signed Senate Bill 131 into law, which protects out-of-state patients seeking an abortion and providers who perform them.

In a rare move, hes one of three republican governors in the country to sign an abortion protections bill.

Governor Lombardo describes himself as Catholic and pro-life, but has said the issue of abortion should only be decided by Nevada voters themselves.

Dr. Sondra Cosgrove, a professor for College of Southern Nevada and executive director of Vote Nevada, says the move is as unique as Nevada politics, calling it libertarian' rather than blue or red.

If you live in Clark County, we're pretty libertarian down here when it comes to people doing what they want and just being safe. So it really fits within that Clark County paradigm of letting people have personal freedom and having the state not give them their way, Cosgrove said.

When Roe V. Wade was overturned in June of last year, it sent thousands of patients to Nevada for abortions. Planned Parenthood said half of their patients were from out-of-state and wait times were getting longer.

Dr. Cosgrove points to the history, when Nevada had more lax divorce laws than the rest of the country, it became a divorce destination. She predicts this enhancement could send more patients our way.

The Nevada Democratic Party sent the following statement after Gov. Lombardo signed the legislation.

We reached out to Nevada GOP for comment, but did not immediately hear back.

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Gov. Lombardo one of few republicans to sign abortion protections ... - KTNV 13 Action News Las Vegas