Rand Paul Blocks Bill That Would Ensure New Moms Are Allowed to Breastfeed at Work

Kylie Cheung
Thu, December 22, 2022 

Photo: Anna Moneymaker (Getty Images)

UPDATE at 4:10 pm: The Providing Urgent Maternal Protections (PUMP) for Nursing Mothers Act passed the Senate on Thursday afternoon, through an amendment vote to add it to the 2023 government funding bill. It passed by a 92-5 margin. Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), and Patrick Toomey (R-Penn.) voted against it.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act also passed the Senate on Thursday after being blocked earlier this month when Democratic senators sought to pass it through unanimous consent. Like the PUMP Act, it was added to the year-end funding package by a 73-24 vote, with 24 Republican senators blocking the bill, which guarantees bathroom breaks for pregnant workers.

EARLIER: Earlier this month, Senate Republicans—many of whom have endorsed a federal 15-week abortion ban, which would force people to stay pregnant against their will—blocked a bill to let pregnant workers take bathroom breaks without being fired. And on Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blocked a bill to ensure new parents are allowed to breastfeed on the job.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) introduced the Providing Urgent Maternal Protections (PUMP) for Nursing Mothers Act and sought unanimous consent for the Senate to vote on the bipartisan bill, which would allow it to pass through the chamber swiftly. But Paul decided to block a vote on the PUMP Act because Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), the sponsor of the bill, didn’t include Paul’s amendment that would study the impact of increased regulations on businesses, a source familiar with his decision told Jezebel. Paul did not provide a comment.

On the Senate floor on Tuesday, Murray called the bill a matter of “common sense and basic human decency.”

“This is really straightforward. When new moms return to work, they should have the time and space they need to pump and breastfeed their baby,” Murray said. Speaking on the Senate floor, the Washington senator said the PUMP Act would have extended protections for breastfeeding while at work to about nine million potentially nursing working parents. The bill would close a loophole in the 2010 Break Time for Nursing Mothers Law, which mostly only covers hourly workers and excludes most salaried occupations, per the Economic Policy Institute.

Murray and Merkley’s bill would also ensure nursing workers receive reasonable break time and a private place to pump, and if they lose their jobs for pumping while working, they’ll have the rights to back pay and reinstatement.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wy.) had previously blocked the PUMP Act in August, claiming employers in the transportation industry wouldn’t be able to provide these accommodations and that the bill would somehow further hurt the supply chain amid an ongoing baby formula shortage. That a Republican is again blocking the PUMP Act, which senators reportedly hoped would pass before the holidays, is pretty much in line with what we’ve seen from anti-abortion lawmakers post-Roe v. Wade. Earlier this month, Paul joined Tillis in opposing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which affords pregnant workers basic protections like bathroom and water breaks, inexplicably equating the bill with “abortion on demand.” It’s almost as if Republicans want to force people to give birth and then refuse to give them one ounce of protection or support once they do.


Tillis claimed companies would somehow misuse the law to give workers paid time off for abortions (which sounds great!), citing how some companies have offered coverage of abortion-related costs—which wouldn’t have happened were it not for Republicans’ abortion bans. As the adage goes, the cruelty is the point—but it increasingly seems like the stupidity is too.

Jezebel

Liberal Republicans

From last nights Republican Presidential Candidates debate there were detectable liberal tendencies.

This gives a new meaning to neo-liberal as Republican candidates move left. Making them sound like Canadian liberal social democrats.

Brownback Is Pro-Labor Union!!!! In Iran that is...

And Mike Hucakbee embraced the social gospel....from the right

"Many of us who are pro-life, quite frankly, I think, have made the mistake of giving people the impression that pro-life means we care intensely about people as long as that child is in the womb. But beyond the gestation period, we've not demonstrated as demonstrably as we should that we respect life at all levels, not just during pregnancy. We shouldn't allow a child to live under a bridge or in the back seat of a car. We shouldn't be satisfied that elderly people are being abused and neglected in nursing homes."

Ron Paul sounds like Jack Layton.....

TEXAS REP. RON PAUL called pre-emptive war the most pressing moral issue in the United States: "I do not believe that's part of the American tradition. We, in the past, have always declared war in defense of our liberties or go to aid somebody ... And now, tonight, we hear that we're not even willing to remove from the table a pre-emptive nuclear strike against a country that has done no harm to us directly and is no threat."

You can't tell the difference between the players without a program....

Obama, Brownback want Iran divestment

Congressman Duncan Hunter contested the myth that the reason to import foreign workers is because American workers don't want to do these menial jobs. He sounded like AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.

“If you had your way with immigration who would fill the jobs that no one wants?” asked Tom Fahey of the New Hampshire Union Leader. Hunter referred back to the employment “sweep” in a meat packing plant in Iowa. “There were American citizens lined up the next day to get their jobs back at $18 bucks an hour” said Hunter.

And of course Rudy Gulliani cannot hide his very Canadian view on abortion.

'My view on abortion is that it's wrong,' he said, 'but that ultimately government should not be enforcing that decision on a woman.'

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Coronavirus truthers prey on the anxiety of the moment

© Provided by Yahoo! News Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh File)© Yahoo News

As the global coronavirus outbreak continues to shutter businesses and schools across America and upend the stock market, a number of commentators on the right have been busily floating conspiracy theories about what’s behind the outbreak, or even how real it is.

“People should ask themselves whether this coronavirus ‘pandemic’ could be a big hoax, with the actual danger of the disease massively exaggerated by those who seek to profit — financially or politically — from the ensuing panic,” former Rep. Ron Paul wrote on his website Monday.

The former Republican presidential candidate, a physician and the father of Sen. Rand Paul, described Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading scientific voice on President Trump’s coronavirus task force, as one of many government “fearmongers” who were part of a plan to institute martial law and permanently strip Americans of their rights.

Comments like Paul’s have stoked internet rumors about what’s to come and led more mainstream politicians, like Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., to attempt to calm fears over the government’s response, albeit with spelling errors.

Please stop spreading stupid rumors about marshall (SIC) law.

COMPLETELY FALSE

We will continue to see closings & restrictions on hours of non-essential businesses in certain cities & states. But that is NOT marshall (SIC) law.
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) March 16, 2020

Paul is not the only coronavirus truther on the right. Former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who was floated as a possible candidate for a Trump administration post at the Department of Homeland Security, sounded the alarm on Sunday about what he saw as “an exploitation of a crisis.”

GO INTO THE STREETS FOLKS. Visit bars, restaurants, shopping malls, CHURCHES and demand that your schools re-open. NOW!

If government doesn’t stop this foolishness...STAY IN THE STREETS.

END GOVERNEMNT CONTROL OVER OUR LIVES. IF NOT NOW, WHEN?
THIS IS AN EXPLOITATION OF A CRISIS.
— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) March 15, 2020

Clarke then raised the specter that the right’s favorite bogeyman, banker George Soros, might be behind the pandemic.

Not ONE media outlet has asked about George Soros’s involvement in this FLU panic. He is SOMEWHERE involved in this.

— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) March 15, 2020

Shortly thereafter, Clarke announced that he was “LEAVING TWITTER DUE TO THEIR CONSERVATIVE SPEECH CONTROL.”

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy has described himself as a “corona truther” who sees COVID-19 as nothing worse than the flu.

“It’s like a common cold,” Portnoy, whose website depends on business-as-usual in the sports and entertainment world, said on Jan. 30.

On March 11, Gavin Heavin, the co-founder of the fitness company Curves International, appeared on fellow conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s program to promote a view heard on the fringes of the right-wing media: that coronavirus was engineered by enemies of the president to discredit him.

“We know that it’s a weaponized virus because we see the RNA strands that were put into this virus from HIV, from MERS and from the SARS virus. There’s no way this could have happened in nature.”

Coronavirus, according to Heavin, was produced by those “who want to destroy Trump’s presidency.” But Heavin, whose business will be hit hard as millions of Americans avoid exercising in gyms, went even further.

“I’m trying to get to Trump to make him aware that this is not a nonevent. This is a very nefarious act against him,” Heavin said, adding, “This virus was designed to kill primarily Asian people. Now the problem is it’s going to kill a lot of Europeans and non-Asian people because it’s still lethal. But that’s one more evidence that it was designed as a bioweapon to attack China.”

Taking a different, although equally conspiratorial, view of the matter, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., posited that the coronavirus originated at a secret Chinese biological lab near Wuhan, the city where it was first detected.

Tom Cotton reiterates his suggestion that the Coronavirus originated at a super-lab in Wuhan pic.twitter.com/i1cSNSqU0d

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) February 16, 2020

Zhao Lijian, deputy director of China’s foreign ministry of information, took to Twitter to promote the conspiracy theory that the virus originated in America and was first spread in his country by U.S. soldiers visiting Wuhan province.

Rubio, meanwhile, continued to try to steer the truthers’ focus back to the task at hand.

It won’t change anything but wanted to leave it for the record

Given what #COVID19 did to #China & now #Italy political potshots from all sides are really trivial

If we don’t change the trajectory of our current infection rate, in a few days no one will care about politics — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) March 16, 2020

Trump finds his MAGA movement fracturing over coronavirus

By Tina Nguyen 

Just two weeks after President Donald Trump rallied conservatives to focus on the threat of socialism, his followers are splintering over the coronavirus pandemic.

© Brian Blanco/Getty Images President Donald Trump.

On one side are those like Bill Mitchell, who dismiss it as nothing worse than the flu, and the drive to eradicate it as “climate change 2.0” — as in, a media-lefty mass hysteria. On the other side are pro-Trump fixtures like Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller, who had been sounding the alarms on the coronavirus since January, and are calling for harsher lockdowns and urging social distancing.

While the MAGA movement is divided over how seriously to take the coronavirus threat or how to tackle it, the message among his supporters is increasingly unanimous: If Trump fails to control the virus, prevent its spread and prove his leadership, much less save the economy, he will lose the election and cripple his movement.

Trump’s supporters elected him because he was a “wartime leader” who could fight against the swamp and the elites, so they expect the same against a truly invisible threat, said War Room host and former Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam. “If, for a second, people think that he doesn't have that strength, or he doesn't have that fortitude, then it will become a problem,” he said.

The mounting health and economic risks from the coronavirus outbreak present a monumental political challenge for a group vowing to Make America Great Again. With just under eight months to go before a presidential election, Trump’s followers face the prospect that their core message — about deconstructing the “deep state” of government workers and transforming the nation’s power structure to serve everyday Americans — could collapse in a crisis environment.

“I would think that the very pro-Trump people maybe would like to downplay this, but actually, I don't even think that,” said Chris Buskirk, the editor-in-chief of the nationalist magazine American Greatness. “Because on this particular issue, the nationalist-MAGA crowd are all over the place. It’s totally individual.”

The divide was in stark contrast on Fox News last week, as the crisis snowballed into the public eye. One host, Tucker Carlson, delivered grave warnings about the coronavirus. He accused officials — who his conservative audience “probably voted for” — of minimizing “what is clearly a very serious problem.” Another host, Sean Hannity, called it “fear-mongering by the deep state.”

Across Trump world are other attempts to deflect blame — following an approach used by the president himself in recent weeks, as he attacked the Obama administration and others outside his administration for his team’s response.

Jerry Falwell Jr. suggested that North Korea created the virus. A conference promising “supernatural protection from the CoronaVirus” [sic] through the “blood and power of Jesus” initially advertised that Trump’s White House faith adviser, Paula White, would speak. (White is not attending.) And the more grounded, less conspiratorial-minded in the Trump base still found ways to take aim at the Democrats and the media.

On Sunday night, as Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were debating the response to the virus, Breitbart’s snarky homepage headlines questioned whether the septuagenarians were up to the challenge, while Newsmax’s John Cardillo openly targeted conservatives who were “enabling” the “leftists salivating at the power grab COVID-19 presents.”

“80% of these cases are mild, meaning you get common cold, like people are recovering. I just don't see the need for all the panic,” said Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier, who praised the fact that Trump’s speech in the Rose Garden raised the Dow by nearly 2,000 points. (They were under pressure overnight.)

The other half of MAGAland is urging their peers to look at the bigger picture.

“If you take that perspective, that it’s just the flu and it’s roughly the same thing that other people are going to get, and it’s probably going to have the same outcome, why would you want to have two separate viruses like that circulating at the same time as you can on that assumption?” Buskirk countered separately, worried about the potential strain on hospitals. (Admittedly, he joked, he had also been preparing for catastrophic events since 9/11.)

Other prominent figures in the loose confederacy of pro-Trump media recognized the potential for trouble. “That would be a massive vulnerability … if he started downplaying the disease again, and it were to get worse,” agreed Will Chamberlain, a pro-Trump commentator and the editor-in-chief of Human Events.

“Every president has the sort of out-of-the blue instances that happen that you can’t really plan for and it tests your leadership ability. It tests everything,” conceded Fournier. “And I think it is a fair assessment to say that the president has to exert strength here.”

Seth Mandel, the editor-in-chief of the conservative Washington Examiner magazine, noted that the rapid flip on the right from triumphal unity to existential terror happened in less than two weeks.

“I think, for a while, there was some degree of harmony in the conservative press,” he observed, pointing to the potential of Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential nominee bringing consensus to the movement prior to Super Tuesday. “If you're debating policy, then it looks like everybody’s pretty much on the same page, because whatever people think of Trump, they also don’t like socialism to a great degree.”

But over the next two weeks, that future shattered with the one-two punch of Joe Biden trouncing every candidate during the next 22 primaries, placing Sanders’s campaign on death watch, and the sudden, complete shutdown of Italy over coronavirus fears, leading to Trump’s decision to shut down travel between much of Europe and the U.S. And now much of the nation is shutting down to save itself from the rapidly spreading outbreak.

While they applauded Trump’s earlier decision to ban travel from China, they still could not overlook the lack of testing and the CDC’s inability to mount a strong prevention campaign against the virus, and some criticized Trump’s initial messaging.

“Trump was comparing flu statistics to coronavirus statistics,” said Chamberlain. “Well, that’s the same mistake that people make when they say, ‘Why do you care more about terrorism? Terrorism kills so many fewer people in car accidents every year.’ The answer is, ‘Because if something goes really wrong in terrorism, they could do unbelievably dramatic damage.’ Same logic here.”

There was a consensus among Trump’s supporters that the crisis was precipitated by the two things that Trump had long railed against: open borders and the over-reliance on Chinese manufacturing. With the coronavirus, argued Chamberlain, Trump was proven right: Lax border security had allowed the virus to spread, and the shutdown of Chinese factories, particularly the ones that manufactured medical supplies and medicine, hobbled America’s ability to fight it.

“If Trump wants to pursue his normal, original nationalist agenda, there's nothing about the coronavirus crisis that would preclude him from doing so. If anything, it is evident that his agenda is the right one to pursue.”

While coronavirus presented a custom-built argument for economic nationalism, it was not the argument that Trump initially made — something that did not escape Mandel, who was flabbergasted that Trump did not spin himself as a “prophet” and instead tried to downplay it. “When the president had a crisis that hit that would have, theoretically, been designed perfectly for the nationalist argument, he didn't reach for it. So maybe he doesn't really believe it.”

Trump’s Friday afternoon speech in the Rose Garden, in which Trump announced a national emergency and displayed several private corporations to aid the CDC’s response, heartened his supporters, who applauded the fact that there was, at least, a conservative-friendly plan to combat the virus: a website for people seeking information about COVID-19, a public-private partnership with several corporations to fight the disease and, most importantly, the declaration of a national emergency, freeing up billions in federal funding. (The website, however, was not quite what Trump had initially sold: What was initially early discussions about a Bay Area pilot program for health care workers run by a Google-affiliated startup was inflated to a Google website with 1,700 employees that could help people self-screen for COVID-19 symptoms.)

To be sure, the health of the economy is indeed one factor in Trump’s re-election — a bar, Kassem pointed out, that the Trump campaign set for itself by touting the strength of the economy for the past three years as proof positive of his leadership. But most would forgive him if he didn’t restore the Dow to its recent soaring heights, as long as the markets were stable.

Fournier pointed to Trump’s post-address market rebound as proof that Trump was truly in control. “Today it’s a good day in America. Declaring a national emergency, releasing those funds, working with these other companies — this is the holistic solution,” he said.

Mandel doubted that Trump would lose the percentage of his base that would be with him no matter what during the coronavirus pandemic, but cautioned that Trump could not rely on press conferences and bolstering the economy forever.

“There’s the public health thing, and then there’s the economy part of it, and everybody should really be caring about the public health thing the most, but even he needs to presumably get some credit if the economy doesn’t tank,” he said. “And if it looks like he tried to save the economy at the expense of the public health aspect of it — if voters think that’s what he did, and also he failed at both — then yeah, you can imagine that it’s absolutely a real threat to his reelection. And again, he doesn't have Bernie to lean back on.”

Truth A Casualty of War

Could this be the reason

Tuesday also marks the sixth anniversary of the worst terror attacks on U.S soil, giving the administration an opportunity to link present-day al-Qaida extremists in Iraq with Sept. 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

For this

The idea that the Bush administration participated in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks is not limited to fringe Web sites and conspiracy theorists, according to a poll commissioned by a Web site that promotes alternative explanations for the events of Sept. 11. The poll, conducted by Zogby International for 911Truth.org and released last week, found that 31 percent of Americans do not accept the official explanation for Sept. 11 -- that "19 Arab fundamentalists executed a surprise attack which caught U.S. intelligence and military forces off guard." Among that 31 percent, around 26 percent agreed that the American government "knew the attacks were coming but consciously let them proceed for various political, military, and economic motives." Almost 5 percent believed that U.S. officials "actively planned or assisted some aspects of the attack."

Given the White House lies equating their long planned assault on Iraq as their post 9/11 response, equating Saddam with bin Laden, lies about WMD, etc. etc. Ended up being an excuse to leave their war on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to head off to Baghdad. The result was that gave Al Qaeda clones another front to fight them on.

Given that why wouldn't you believe in a conspiracy. After all there was one, just not the one that 9/11 Truth would have us believe.

America has a long history of Conspiracy theories in politics.

See:

Ron Paul

Saddam and the CIA

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New Hampshire Polling Puts Paul Fourth

This is the Real Clear Politics conglomerate poll of New Hampshire polling. So let's ask ourselves if Paul is beating Thompson in all polls and in a virtual dead heat with Giuliani why is the media ignoring him? And it's not just Fox News, its all the media pundits, sans Jay Leno. And after today when he comes in fourth again, as he did in Iowa, will they still continue to ignore him?

New Hampshire Republican Primary Tuesday, January 8 | Delegates at Stake: 24

Polling Data Poll Date McCain Romney Huckabee Giuliani Paul Thompson RCP Average 01/04 - 01/06 33.5 28.7 11.4 8.7 7.4 2.7 CNN/WMUR/UNH 01/05 - 01/06 31 26 13 10 10 1 Suffolk/WHDH 01/05 - 01/06 27 30 9 10 8 2 Marist 01/05 - 01/06 35 31 13 5 8 4 Rasmussen 01/05 - 01/06 32 31 11 10 8 3 Franklin Pierce 01/04 - 01/06 38 29 9 8 7 2 USA Today/Gallup 01/04 - 01/06 34 30 13 8 8 3 Strategic Vision (R) 01/04 - 01/06 35 27 13 8 7 5 Reuters/CSpan/Zogby 01/04 - 01/06 34 29 10 9 6 3 American Res. Group 01/04 - 01/06 35 27 12 10 7 2 FOX News 01/04 - 01/06 34 27 11 9 5 2

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Florida's Ron DeSantis is on the cusp of raising more than any governor — ever

Ben Werschkul

·Washington Correspondent

Sat, September 17, 2022 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis broadcast his national ambitions this week by taking credit for a flight that sent undocumented immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, making him the latest conservative lawmaker to protest the rise in illegal immigration by shipping border crossers to a liberal state.

The governor's stunt may have broken the law, and spurred locals to assist the migrants. It’s nonetheless likely to strengthen his position as former president Donald Trump’s most formidable rival in 2024 among Republican primary voters. DeSantis has attracted national attention for championing his state's so-called don't say gay law and for downplaying the risks of COVID-19.

But it's his fundraising prowess that perhaps cements his standing as the primary Trump alternative. After years of diligently gathering checks, the Florida governor is now on the cusp of a major milestone. He is set to soon take the mantle of having raised the most money of any candidate for governor — ever.

That’s according to data from OpenSecrets.org that goes back decades.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks after the primary election for the midterms during a rally in Tampa in August. (REUTERS/Octavio Jones)

“The DeSantis story is more about a politician who's using his state campaign to be a test site for a potential presidential run," Sarah Bryner, the director of research and strategy at OpenSecrets, told Yahoo Finance on Friday.

DeSantis has structured his fundraising in a new way, directing donors both to his campaign committee and his political action committee. The PAC has been successful, Bryner notes, because it has no contribution limits.

The biggest checkbooks on Team DeSantis

Plenty of wealthy donors have taken full advantage of that quirk in campaign finance laws.

A key donor is Citadel CEO Ken Griffin. The hedge funder has backed DeSantis for years, giving $5 million for his current campaign on top of contributing $5.75 million in 2018.

Griffin declined to list DeSantis as his favorite candidate during a May appearance at the Milken Institute Global Conference. However, he conceded that DeSantis “has done a lot of things right” when it comes to preparing for 2024.

Griffin also said at that appearance that he didn’t appreciate the governor's recent campaign against the The Walt Disney Company (DIS) over his opposition to the state's anti-gay law. “It can be portrayed or feel or look like retaliation,” Griffin said.

Citadel CEO Ken Griffin speaks at the 2022 Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California in May. (REUTERS/Mike Blake)

According to the latest data, DeSantis has raised over $174 million since he took office. That's much more than he is likely to need to hold his seat, where he enjoys a polling edge against Democratic rival, Charlie Crist. While this money is ostensibly being raised for the upcoming governor's race, it's clearly aimed at 2024 — and whatever DeSantis doesn't spend can be saved for the future.

The biggest contributor on record is Robert Bigelow. The owner of the Budget Suites hotel chain has written exactly one check so far this election cycle: $10 million to the DeSantis PAC. Bigelow has bestowed his fortune on a range of unlikely causes, from UFO-hunting to "consciousness studies" to inflatable space habitats, according to Forbes.

Another mega-donor is Richard Uihlein and his wife, who have chipped in $1.2 million. Uihlein, worth an estimated $3.9 billion, gave Trump money during the 2020 contest, according to Federal Election Commission data, but hasn't given to the former president since then. Still, he's backed an array of Trump-aligned candidates such as Herschel Walker in Georgia and Blake Masters in Arizona this year.

Plenty of other big names grace the DeSantis donor database. Notable financial figures include Charles B. Johnson of Franklin Resources ($594,919 since 2019); Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus ($500,000), hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones ($400,000), and more.

Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus during a ribbon cutting ceremony in 2005. (Barry Williams/Getty Images)

DeSantis has already set the fundraising record among non-self-financing governors and willI likely soon surpass the totals achieved by Meg Whitman in California and Jay Pritzker in Illinois in recent years. Those two billionaires spent millions of their own money on their respective campaigns

DeSantis and Trump ‘building their war chests’

The Florida governor has also gotten notice, but not yet any money, from another key GOP bankroller. Billionaire Peter Thiel, the key Trump donor in 2016 who sat out the 2020 presidential race, said at a recent conservatism conference that DeSantis is “probably the best of the governors in terms of offering a real alternative to California,” Insider reports.

Neither Trump nor DeSantis has yet declared plans to run for president in 2024, though Bryner notes they're both building their campaign war chests and may end up competing for donors in 2023.

Then-President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis participate in a "COVID-19 Response and Storm Preparedness" event in Belleair, Florida in 2020. (REUTERS/Tom Brenner)

Trump is handily beating DeSantis in nearly every poll, which can be far from a reliable indicator this far ahead of an election. The former president has maintained his usual bravado in the face of the possible challenge.

Asked about potential competition from DeSantis, Trump told Yahoo Finance in an interview last year: “I'd beat him like I would beat everyone else.”

Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

Ted Cruz Tells Sean Hannity Transporting Migrants Is Illegal – but Advocates for It Anyway (Video)



Katie Campione
Sat, September 17, 2022

Texas Senator Ted Cruz argued during a Friday appearance on Fox News that transporting migrants across state lines could be illegal — yet still praised the recent actions of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis of sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and advocated for more similar moves.

Cruz, who is a lawyer and graduate of Harvard Law School, was asked by Fox News host Sean Hannity on Friday to weigh in on the situation “from a legal standpoint.”

“Let’s say I went down to the border and I brought a big truck with me, and I picked up a bunch of illegal immigrants, and I started transporting them across the country,” Hannity said. “Would I or would I not likely be arrested for human trafficking and would it be illegal to do that for me, if I did that?”



Cruz was clear in his response: “For you, a citizen, you could easily be arrested. Although, to be honest, Joe Biden’s Justice Department wouldn’t arrest you.”

The senator added that the law “is clear” on the matter, before peculiarly accusing President Biden of being “the biggest human trafficker on the face of the planet.”

Earlier this week, Florida Governor DeSantis took responsibility for two planes from San Antonio, Texas, that were full of migrants, which touched down in Martha’s Vineyard. The move has drawn heavy criticism from late-night hosts like Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert, as well as legal experts and celebrities.

Also Read:
Joy Reid Compares Ron DeSantis’ Immigrant Flights to 1960s Segregationists’ ‘Reverse Freedom Rides’ North and West (Video)

This isn’t the first time a Republican lawmaker has done so. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been busing migrants to Washington, D.C. for months.

According to legal experts who spoke with The Washington Post, the law isn’t quite as clear as Cruz makes it out to be. If the migrants willingly chose to be transported to these cities, then it can’t necessarily be likened to human trafficking.

Border patrol officials are able to transport migrants, noted Bridgette Carr, a law professor at the University of Michigan. She added: “I would be curious if that immunity extends beyond federal officials, since immigration is generally a power the feds regulate exclusively.”

Also Read:
Ron DeSantis Roasted Over Martha’s Vineyard Debacle: ‘The Hypocrisy Is Real’

THE OTHER ANARCHIST MURRAY

Rothbard, Milei And The New Right In Argentina – OpEd

 

Argentina's Javier Milei. Photo Credit: Mehr News Agency

 October 22, 2023  

By MISES

By Fernando Chiocca

Since I recognized almost twenty years ago that no person or institution has the right to initiate aggression, now is the first time I can tell a normie what my political stance is without them having no clue what I am talking about. Now I can say that I am an anarchocapitalist without causing much surprise, as a large part of the public now has some idea of what this term means.

This is thanks to the fascinating electoral success of Javier Milei, an anarchocapitalist who has a chance of becoming the next president of Argentina in tomorrow’s presidential election. Milei has five mastiff dogs that he calls “four-legged children” and named one of them Murray, in honor of the economist Murray Rothbard, a great inspiration of his. Rothbard, a dean of the Austrian school of economics, is also the father of modern libertarianism, which he called anarchocapitalism. We anarchocapitalists are aware that any form of state is criminal, and any and all services it provides can and must be provided by the free market. Rothbard provided the ethical and economic justifications for anarchocapitalism, refuting all myths used to legitimize the existence of the state.

Nevertheless, in addition to providing the framework of anarchocapitalism, Rothbard also laid out a strategydescribing how only someone like Milei could break down the barriers of respectable (social democratic) political discourse imposed on us by the Marxist Left and reemerge a libertarian Right political force. Rothbard refers to the old American Right, which in the first half of the twentieth century was opposed to the socialist programs implemented in the US and its foreign wars and was “for a restoration of the liberty of the old republic, of a government strictly limited to the defense of the rights of private property.” It was not a revolutionary Right. In fact, the revolution had already happened with the New Deal, and the revolution had been a socialist one. In the same way, Peronism was a socialist revolution that in eighty years transformed Argentina, which was a free country and one of the richest in the world, into a poor country. This means that a conservative stance serves to preserve socialism, while socialism continues to advance when socialists are in power. Therefore, as libertarian novelist Garet Garrett said, “The revolution was, and therefore nothing less than a counterrevolution is needed to take the country back. Behold then, not a ‘conservative,’ but a radical Right.” Agustín Laje, author, political scientist, and ally of Milei who has strived to understand and explain the new global Right, agrees:

This New Right has a revolutionary ethos, as opposed to a left that is beginning to embrace a conservative ethos. I know this might sound odd, but in what sense do I say it? If we take “conservative” as that which wants to preserve a status quo, the left is the one who today want to preserve a status quo in Argentina, while the right is trying to destroy this status quo.

Rothbard notes that while Marxists made it clear that their strategy would center on the proletariat as the group that would bring about social change, the Right got to decide “who are the major bad guys, the unwashed masses or the power elite?” He concluded that the fight should be against the ruling elite, because the masses, however untrustworthy they may be, are too busy trying to raise their families and living their lives and don’t have much time to devote to politics. Meanwhile “the bureaucrats, politicians, and special-interest groups dependent on political rule . . . make money out of politics, and so they are intensely interested and lobby and are active 24 hours a day.” Rothbard adds a distinction pointed out by John C. Calhoun, who observed that society is divided between two classes: those paying taxes and those receiving taxes. Milei focused his speech on this real class struggle, inciting the masses against their exploiters in the power elite, which he appropriately calls the political caste.

Given this, Rothbard raises this question: “If the ruling elite is taxing, looting, and exploiting the public, why does the public put up with this for a single moment? Why does it take them so long to withdraw their consent?” The masses are kept in this lethargic state of voluntary submission as the political caste co-opts “the intellectual and media elites, who are able to bamboozle the masses into consenting to their rule.” To resolve this dilemma, Rothbard identifies two wrong strategies and recommends the right one.

The first wrong is the so-called Hayekian strategy, which consists of converting the main philosophers to the correct ideas that would then convert academics, journalists, and politicians until the masses were converted to support freedom. Besides taking a lot of time, the crucial flaw in this strategy is that the media and academics do not place truth above their personal interests; therefore, this strategy is doomed.

The second improper strategy is the so-called Fabian strategy, used successfully by the socialists of the Fabian Society. It consists of creating think tanks to try to influence the centers of power. The fatal error is that what works to increase the state does not work to reduce it. Obviously, ruling elites will welcome socialist ideas that will increase their power and reject libertarian ideas that will diminish it. That said, Rothbard explains what the winning strategy is:

And so the proper strategy for the right wing must be what we can call “right-wing populism”: exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational, rousing and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often-shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as well. And in this era where the intellectual and media elites are all establishment liberal-conservatives, all in a deep sense one variety or another of social democrat, all bitterly hostile to a genuine Right, we need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly. We need a leadership that can reach the masses and cut through the crippling and distorting hermeneutical fog spread by the media elites.

That’s what Milei did. A distinctive feature of the Argentine mainstream media are TV and radio shows with long and heated debates. A loophole existed in the system, and Milei began to be invited to these shows. Being a scholar of the Austrian school of economics and a wholehearted libertarian, Milei commented with propriety on all subjects and passionately defended freedom. Unlike the followers of the Hayekian strategy who treat the pernicious and criminal leftist ideas and their proponents—which cause so much harm and poverty to the people—with respect and politeness, Milei understood that we are at war and was frequently furious, cursing and shouting, reflecting all the resentment of the explored masses. (Thousands of hours of videos of Milei’s appearances on Argentine TV can be found on YouTube.)

Combining ardor and wisdom with a striking media personality, soon Milei was the economist with the most television time and became a national celebrity. In addition to being aligned with the right-wing discourse of fighting crime and defending traditional values, his libertarian speech—saying things like “tax is theft,” “politicians are parasites and we don’t need them for anything,” “the central bank is one of the biggest thieves in the history of humanity,” “your welfare is taken through a gun pointed to the head of others”—managed to directly reach the masses who woke up to the truth about the extortion they suffer from political profiteers.

During the Ron Paul revolutions of 2008 and 2012, Ron Paul was able to gain some attention from the mainstream media through his participation in the GOP presidential debates. He managed to open the eyes of multitudes of Americans to libertarian truths. However, Dr. Paul did not achieve national celebrity status, and the gates of mainstream media and the bipartisan political system soon closed to him, unlike what happened with Milei.

Milei began his political career by being elected congressman in 2021 and managed to make his presidential candidacy viable in 2023, winning the preelections in August. In the presidential debates, Argentina is seeing a libertarian imploding socialist myths, giving answers that a Walter Block would give.

For example, in the debate on October 1, when asked if wage differentials between men and women were the result of patriarchal discrimination, Milei responded that salary inequality disappears if the types of profession are taken into account and that if this disparity really existed, the exploitative capitalists who seek profits at all costs would hire only women, but this does not happen. The Rothbardian strategy of libertarian populism worked, as he said it would, and Argentina is about to have the world’s first anarchocapitalist president.

About the author: Fernando Fiori Chiocca is an anti-intellectual intellectual. From São Paulo, Brazil, he is the founder and editor of Rothbard Institute.

Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute