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I have always felt a libertarian streak in my view of society, but Im not sure that the term hasnt taken a turn for the worse (Free Staters test limits of N.H. libertarianism, Page A1, Sept. 4). As I recall how William Weld had to promise the Libertarian party that he would remain a Libertarian for the rest of his life in order to be nominated as the vice presidential candidate of that party in 2016, and as I read about Free Staters in Brian MacQuarries article, I wonder where the liberty is.

If democracy is soft communism, then Free Staters seem to be soft fascists, dictating to others what they may think and forcing them to leave their lifelong homes if they dont fall in line. They dont want to be told what to do but are ready to tell others, and with a totalitarian attitude.

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In N.H., its live Free State or leave thats libertarianism? - The Boston Globe

Democratic and Republican candidates for statewide office in Pennsylvania garner nearly all the attention, especially this year, but there are minor-party candidates angling for those seats, too.

The Libertarian, Green and Keystone parties have candidates on the general election ballot for U.S. Senate, governor and lieutenant governor.

If the Keystone Party doesnt sound familiar, dont feel bad.

The party just had its first convention on a small farm in York County in April after some members became disenchanted and left the Libertarian Party because they felt it was tilting too far right, particularly on social issues.

Gus Tatlas, the chairman of the Keystone Party of Pennsylvania, said members consider themselves a coalition of independents. The former Libertarians, he said, did not like hateful rhetoric coming from some Libertarian leaders.

In good conscience, they said they could no longer be affiliated with an organization that doesnt renounce that type of rhetoric, Tatlas said.

So far, Tatlas said the Keystone Party is getting a lot of great feedback and quickly managed to gather enough signatures to field statewide candidates.

Keystones website lists its party platform as government reform, including a part-time Legislature and term limits, an independent redistricting commission, open primaries, ranked choice voting, and school choice.

First, lets take a look at the candidates for U.S. Senate.

Erik Gerhardt, a Montgomery County resident who owns a carpentry business, is the Libertarian candidate for the open seat left by the retirement of Republican Sen. Pat Toomey.

On his campaign website, Gerhardt details a platform focused on jobs and the economy, social injustice, police reform, and ending the war on drugs.

Gerhardt, who sports a Philadelphia Phillies cap in his photo on the website, says, Most taxes are nothing short of theft. He supports cutting taxes to their absolute minimum, implementing a flat tax on sales and eliminating property taxes, though thats a state, not a federal, tax.

With fewer taxes, more of the money you work for will stay in your pocket, Gerhardt says.

Gerhardt agrees that police reform is needed, but opposes defunding the police, saying it hurts communities.

Instead, he said reform should begin with police recruits training, such as teaching them jujitsu to subdue suspects and avoid deadly force, and completing community service before graduating from the academy.

Gerhardt says he wants to end the war on drugs, beginning with decriminalizing marijuana, which Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman, the states lieutenant governor, also supports.

However, Gerhardt also backs legalizing many other non-addictive drugs, and insisted decriminalization would also stop smuggling across the countrys southern border.

Allegheny County resident Richard Weiss, an attorney, is the Green Party candidate for Senate. He ran for attorney general in 2020.

Weiss recently released a statement outlining a platform aimed at ending fracking, passing universal health care, pursuing peaceful resolutions in Ukraine and in other global conflicts, protecting abortion rights, legalizing marijuana and implementing police reform.

Fracking is ruining the water and health of Pennsylvania, Weiss said of the process to extract natural gas.

Weiss supports a just transition to renewable energy, which, he said, offers more jobs than the fossil fuel industry, protection for the environment and cheaper energy for consumers.

Universal healthcare is vital to help Americans as COVID-19 continues and victims experience prolonged medical problems.

Current health insurance has too many deductibles, co-pays and limitations on coverage, Weiss said. Employers who provide healthcare will benefit from Medicare-for-All by having costs reduced. Employers who do not provide healthcare will benefit from Medicare-for-All by having healthier workers. Medicare-for-All costs less for better care.

Keystone candidate Daniel Wassmer is a Pike County resident who ran for attorney general in 2020 under the Libertarian banner. Wassmer finished third in that race just ahead of Weiss.

According to Ballotpedia.com, Wassmer said in 2020 that he worked as an adjunct professor, attorney and business owner.

Now, lets meet the minor party candidates running for governor and lieutenant governor.

Matt Hackenburg of Northampton County is the Libertarian candidate for governor. He described himself as a computer engineer and former National Guardsman in his Twitter account bio.

Hackenburgs issues on his website include repealing all gun control laws, allowing parents to decide how to educate their children, ending the theft of taxation and opposing the action of the Wolf administration during the height of the COVID pandemic.

Timothy McMaster of York County is the Libertarian candidate for lieutenant governor. An auditor, McMaster ran unsuccessfully in a special election for the 48th Senatorial District seat last year.

Keystone gubernatorial candidate Joseph Soloski of Centre County ran for state treasurer in 2020 as a Libertarian. He is a certified public accountant and owned his own firm near Pittsburgh for 30 years before moving to Centre County in 2013.

Soloskis lieutenant governor running mate is Nicole Shultz of York County. She and her husband own a small business selling jams and other items.

Christine PK DiGiulio of Chester County is the Green candidate for governor. She is a former analytical chemist for the U.S. Department of Defense and co-founded the Watchdogs of South-Eastern Pennsylvania and the Better Path Coalition.

DiGiulio opposes the Mariner East pipeline and the fossil fuel industry and supports abortion rights.

Earlier this year, DiGiulio told cityandstatepa.com, Its time to focus on the people 100 percent. We need basic human rights. There are people without clean water in 2022 in Pennsylvania. Thats pretty pathetic.

In an interview with The Daily Local of West Chester in April, DiGiulio said abortion access is part of womens general healthcare and made the case that the country should move away from fossil fuels.

Michael Bagdes-Canning, a Butler County resident, is the Green candidate for lieutenant governor. A teacher, Bagdes-Canning has served as vice president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association and was a founding member of the Better Path Coalition.

Our economy is set up to keep us fighting against each other rather than for each other, he said in a Labor Day statement. The same forces keeping us as wage slaves are also destroying the very climate we depend on for survival, pitting us against each other, using race, gender, immigration status, and our ZIP codes to divide us. When we in the working class unite, that will all change.

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Major party candidates get the attention, but Pa. voters have minor party options, too - Williamsport Sun-Gazette

Queen Elizabeth II has passed away after 70 years on the throne. This is the longest reign of any British monarch and the second longest reign ever for the monarch of a sovereign country.

The United Kingdom has been plunged into a period of national heartbreak. Whether it be on social media, in peoples homes, or on the streets, British citizens everywhere have voiced their grief and condolences at the news.

And yet outsiders, especially libertarians, seem puzzled by this ostensibly bizarre, sentimental attachment the British have towards their ruler. How can a nation be so enamored with someone above their station?

When thinking about politics, libertarians can often become too focused on dry, abstract concepts, and overlook ones that many people value, notably culture, community, and history.

Queen Elizabeth II was a great unifier among the British people throughout the countrys ups and downs over the past 70 years. She was a constant figure to rally around who provided soul and national pride, someone who bound together the cultural heritage of the Commonwealth that makes trade and communication easier between peoples.

A representative for Britain across the world, utterly devoted to her duty with resolve, consistency, and humility.

She saw World War II and the ensuing rebuilding of the country, the troubles in Ireland, the Cold War, the industrial unrest that brought Britain to its knees, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and more recently Brexit.

Yet to a libertarian, monarchy is a form of evil. If all humans are to be equal and free, then nobody should have unjustified authority over another; there must be legitimacy, and birthright is certainly not a source of legitimacy in the 21st century.

Of course, this is a completely valid principle on which to construct your politics. The problem is that the real world is not valid, nor is it principled. We are not starting from scratch; we are dealing with nations where institutions, customs, and networks have developed over time, all around the world.

Hierarchical authority exists in every system, whether it be democratic, fascist, communist, or even anarchist. The question of politics is to organize society so that said authority maximizes certain values.

Libertarianism is about the sanctity of the individuals right to go about their life unhampered, on the condition that they do not harm others. Thus, society should be structured around that very principle.

Democracy is an important facet of this: it is the way we attempt to ensure accountability and renewal in governance. But democracy is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end.

Libertarian principles have a strong current of anti-politics. Political decision making, where collective resources and will is used to achieve ends, should be minimized, while private decision making should be maximized.

I can think of no greater nightmare than unchecked, radical political forces having the audacity and entitlement to enact their vision on the populace to reshape a society in whatever twisted image they feel is right at the time.

So why would a libertarian want the highest authority to be political? Why would we make heads of government, who wield hard, active power, also heads of state?

It is often said that the monarchy is useless because it doesnt do anything, but that is exactly the point; it is the unmoving, apolitical bulwark against the political nonsense we all hate. The monarch occupies positions, not to enact anything significant, but to prevent others from occupying them.

I enjoy the fact that every week, the prime minister, the head of government, has to humble themselves and bow to someone who has been around for far longer than they have. I enjoy the fact that the armed forces swear allegiance to the crown, not the political wing of the state.

They are, in essence, conditioned to defer to the embodiment of the nation, the land, and its history, and not the short-termism, greed, and psychopathy of politics.

Constitutional monarchies typically do not have secret police or gross overreaches of government power. They consistently have solid records on stability, civil liberties, and the rule of law.

It is no coincidence that the execution of the Tsars led to the horrors of communism, and the execution of Louis XVI led to imperial France under Napoleon.

This is the great tradition of British politics, law, and philosophy. Unlike in most of continental Europe, we do not deal in grand political visions and all their chaos. We value discovery, cynicism, experimentation, and pragmatism, all anti-political, and thus libertarian values.

We have no time for heavy-handed, radical politics, where everything we know and grew up around is cast aside every four years and subject to whatever theories some maniac has read in a book.

As a libertarian Brit, I do not feel less free knowing the head of state is unelected.

I feel less free when the single-payer National Health Service (NHS) makes me wait half a year for anything beyond a simple doctors appointment.

I feel less free knowing how our horrendous bureaucracy and tax system eats up swathes of public resources.

And I feel less free when the government imprisons people for making fun of others on the internet.

These are the fault of politics and of government, and that is where our attention is most needed. Rest in peace Queen Elizabeth II, long live the King.

For more content on the topic of liberty and monarchy, be sure to check out our short video on the topic by clicking on the button below.

This piece solely expresses the opinion of the author and not necessarily the organization as a whole. Students For Liberty is committed to facilitating a broad dialogue for liberty, representing a variety of opinions.

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You can be pro-freedom and a royalist - Learn Liberty

The NY Post today makes a troubling claim, attributed to FBI whistleblowers -- that without probable cause Facebook has given the FBI the private posts of conservatives upset about the 2020 election, triggering numerous investigations.

The Post article offers some compelling details. My favorite is the agents' complaint that the project produced a very large volume of data about people who weren't really threats, thus wasting investigative resources. If you want to inspire FBI agents to discover their inner civil libertarian and blow the whistle on a surveillance program, nothing does the job better than giving them lots of intrusive but unproductive make-work.

But as the story is written, it has one big problem. The conduct it describes would violate the law in a way that neither the FBI nor Facebook would likely be comfortable doing. Federal law mostly prohibits electronic service providers from voluntarily supplying customer data to the government.

What's more, Facebook has issued a denial. A very careful denial. It says that "the suggestion we seek out peoples' private messages for anti-government language or questions about the validity of past elections and then proactively supply those to the FBI is plainly inaccurate and there is zero evidence to support it."

A compound denial like that often means that portions or slight variations of the statement are true. Thus, if Facebook is screening for something just a bit more alarming than "anti-government language or questions about the validity of past elections," the denial is inoperative.

The Post tries to square the denial with its story by suggesting that the FBI has recruited a Facebook employee as a confidential human source (CHS). I doubt that. Being a CHS doesn't mean you can do things with your employer's data that your employer can't do. And I doubt the FBI would feel free to evade a limit on its investigative power by using a CHS this way.

But there is a provision of federal law that allows electronic service providers to volunteer information to law enforcement. To do so, they need to believe "in good faith that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure without delay of communications relating to the emergency." 18 USC 2702(c).

So, Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies could have developed an AI engine to search for strings of words that its legal department has precleared -- in good faith -- as evidence of an emergency involving a danger of death or serious injury. (And after the fact, the injuries that occurred in the January 6 riot could be used to predict such a danger from a lot of antigovernment and "rigged election" talk.)

These passages could be excerpted by social media platforms, along with identifying information, and sent to Justice, under the "danger of death or injury" exception. Justice could then use them to subpoena all of the less inflammatory posts by the same people and then farm out the results to local FBI offices for investigation across the country.

Important caveat: I have no way of knowing whether any of this is happening. I'm just trying to find a legal way in which the troubling facts in the Post story could be true. The program I've sketched above would better fit the facts in the story, including the Facebook denial and the improbability that FBI and Justice are flouting the law.

But just because something is legal doesn't mean it's a good idea. Any mass effort to find "bad" speech on a big social media platform is bound to make a lot of mistakes, as all students of content moderation know.

And, as with content moderation, no one would be surprised if mass Silicon Valley criminal referrals were biased against conservatives. (That bias would be built in if Justice is using an existing grand jury tied to January 6 to generate the subpoenas.)

So, assuming I'm right, it's fair to ask how any such effort was designed, how aggressively conservative complaints were turned into emergency threats to life and limb, who's overseeing the process to prevent overbroad seizures of legitimate speech, and whether the same thing could be done to Black Lives Matter, environmental groups, animal rights campaigners, and any other movement whose more extreme followers have sometimes lapsed into violence.

Edited to fix broken link and make clear that the allegation in the story relates to private messages.

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Is Silicon Valley Spying on Conservatives for the FBI? - Reason

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The Texas Supreme Court on Friday rejected a Republican effort to remove a host of Libertarian candidates from the November ballot, saying the GOP did not bring their challenge soon enough.

In a unanimous opinion, the all-GOP court did not weigh in on the merits of the challenge but said the challenge came too late in the election cycle. The Libertarian Party nominated the candidates in April, the court said, and the GOP waited until earlier this month to challenge their candidacies.

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On Aug. 8, a group of Republican candidates asked the Supreme Court to remove 23 Libertarians from the ballot, saying they did not meet eligibility requirements. The Republicans included Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and others in congressional and state legislative races.

State law requires Libertarian candidates to pay filing fees or gather petition signatures, the amount of each depending on the office sought. The Libertarian Party has been challenging that law in federal court, arguing it is unfair because the fees do not go toward their nomination process like they do for Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans also tried and failed to kick a group of Libertarian candidates off the ballot in 2020. In that case, the state Supreme Court said the GOP waited until after the deadline to challenge candidate eligibility. This time, the Republicans filed their challenge before that deadline but apparently still did not satisfy the courts preference to deal with election challenges as soon as the alleged issues arise.

In its opinion Friday, the court suggested the emergency timeframe argued by the GOP is entirely the product of avoidable delay in bringing the matter to the courts.

"The Libertarian Party of Texas is thrilled with this outcome," Whitney Bilyeu, who chairs the Texas Libertarian Party, said in a statement. "As we did last time, we resisted this haphazard attempt by Republicans to limit voter choice and obstruct free and fair elections."

Republicans have long sought to marginalize Libertarians under the thinking that they siphon votes from the GOP. Democrats, meanwhile, see the Green Party as a threat.

Among the 23 races in which the GOP challenged Libertarian candidates this time, few are expected to be close. The most clear exception, though, is the 15th Congressional District, the most competitive congressional race in the state and a top target of Republicans nationwide. Libertarian Ross Lynn Leone will remain on the ballot there against Republican Monica De La Cruz and Democrat Michelle Vallejo.

Patricks race could also be competitive. He won reelection by 5 percentage points in 2018, while the Libertarian candidate then took 2% of the vote.

The full program is now LIVE for the 2022 Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 22-24 in Austin. Explore the schedule of 100+ mind-expanding conversations coming to TribFest, including the inside track on the 2022 elections and the 2023 legislative session, the state of public and higher ed at this stage in the pandemic, why Texas suburbs are booming, why broadband access matters, the legacy of slavery, what really happened in Uvalde and so much more. See the program.

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Republican effort to remove Libertarians from November ballot rejected by Texas Supreme Court - The Texas Tribune