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Vitalik Buterin holding Zuzu, the puppy rescued by people of Zuzalu. Photo: Michelle Lai

Dont try finding Zuzalu on a map; it doesnt exist anymore. It was a pop-up city conceived by the tech entrepreneur Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, and a group of like-minded people to facilitate co-living and collaboration in fields like crypto, network states, AI, and longevity. It was also, in substantial part, funded by Vitalik.

Zuzalu, located on the Adriatic coast of Montenegro, began its short history on March 25 and wound down on May 25. It was a complex and memorable phenomenon, and Im wrapping my mind around a larger article in the works.

Usually, I dont eat breakfast due to my intermittent fasting regimen, but in Zuzalu, breakfast, served at a particular local restaurant, was the healthiest meal of the day. Also, it was free (kudos to Vitalik, and more on that later). Most importantly, it was the place to meet new people.

This was also where, on one of my last days in Zuzalu, I sat down with Vitalik himself for a talk. Not the best setting for an interview, considering the steady hum of voices and utensils clanging in the background, but it was the only gap in Vitaliks busy schedule.

Vitalik is 29, slender and mild-mannered, with a soft, pensive smile. When he talks, his train of thought moves fast, fueled by intelligence and curiosity. He seems to be genuinely interested in how the world works and just as genuinely disinterested in his own status something that was characteristic of Zuzalu as a whole.

Like any Zuzalu breakfast chat, ours was a bit all over the place, and we eventually ended up discussing the possibility of an AI-driven apocalypse (everyones favorite topic there). Apologies to the longevity purists reading this. However, we started with Zuzalu itself.

Zuzalu intentionally does not mean anything in any language.

The idea came about six months ago. I was already thinking about many different topics at the same time. I reviewed Balajis book last year, so I was thinking about network states, but also about crypto, real-world applications of Ethereum, other zero-knowledge proofs, and so on.

I am also a fan of the longevity space, I read Aubreys book when I was a teenager, and I know how important this is. The idea came together, as an experiment, to try doing things in all those areas at the same time.

I thought wed take 200 people, some from the Ethereum space, some from longevity, some philosophers, people just interested in building societies, and so on, bring them together for two months, and see what happens. The rationale behind the size is that its a large enough leap from the things people do already.

We have big conferences, but they only last a week, and we have hacker houses, but those only have ten people. So, lets do something with two hundred people that would last for two months. Its a big enough jump to create something new, but its still manageable. Its not something crazy like going from 0 to 5,000.

I knew a couple of locals here in Montenegro, having been introduced to the country last year. The government has been very open to becoming more crypto-friendly. On my first visit, they gave me citizenship, something that no other country has done. They did a lot, and I just happened to know people here who are very good at logistics and organization. From there, people started joining in. The team and the organization started growing very quickly.

I think it worked. Many people reported how much they enjoyed the experience, how happy they were, how this gave them a feeling of community and family. Maybe things are different now, but when I did a poll a month ago, a third of the people here were digital nomads. One of the problems digital nomads always face is loneliness. You dont have company, youre going to unfamiliar places, it can be hard. Some of those people enjoy the digital nomad experience, they like to travel like that, but others are doing it out of necessity.

Yes, and also from places like China. So, that part was a success. On many other things, there were some successes and some things we can learn from. The big idea was that 200 people is already an economy of scale. It enables you to do things collectively that take too much effort to do as a person.

For instance, if you want food thats different from what most other people eat, usually you have to go get it yourself. You go to a restaurant, and even if you order a salad or fish, you dont know what oil they use, and so on. Here, because we represent so many people, we talked to this restaurant, and we told them what menu to use for breakfast. Its not perfect, but we tried to follow Bryan Johnsons Blueprint menu as much as we could, although many ingredients were very hard to get. But its still much better than the average breakfast [at this point, Im nodding with my mouth full].

For some things beyond that, at least for the first half of Zuzalu, there werent enough champions to push many of the ideas, but that has improved a lot recently. People are forming clubs for exercise, such as the cold plunge club, hiking, and others.

Exactly. If youre one person, you will not be able to have a gym, but as a group, you can make that happen. Biomarker testing that we organized also comes to mind. People enjoy doing things together.

I feel like its trying to be. I think the challenge that all these co-living projects have is that if you make co-living the primary meme, youre going to mostly attract people who want to be very close with other people, who enjoy collective cooking and stuff like this. But for many other people its not a good fit.

Here, its much more moderate in a lot of ways. People have their own apartments. If you want to retreat to your apartment and not talk to other people, you can. You are not obligated to show up for any of the events. You dont have to eat at restaurants three times a day, dont have to talk to people all the time. Our model gives people more choice without pushing them into a lifestyle thats not compatible with them.

Then, theres this interesting thing I have noticed I have one friend here who is an extreme introvert. Normally, he goes off by himself, doesnt really talk to people, and here he just did, he started talking to people more because those were people he wanted to talk to.

On the education side, one of the big weaknesses was that we tried to organize different weeks, for each week to have a theme. There was a synthetic biology week, then public goods, then zero-knowledge proofs, then free cities and network states, now longevity. Some aspects of that work were interesting for people, but theres a reason why college courses are in parallel and not in series. People learn better when its spaced over a long period of time. We didnt do that, and that probably was a mistake.

I would say yes. I think there were two big cross-pollination events here. One is the intersection between longevity and crypto, such as the decentralized science space.

Exactly, it has been happening. It has brought many different people from those groups together. I know that a lot of connections were made between science people and public goods people. I think that a lot of people realized that funding science is a natural fit for some of the work that public goods people have been doing.

The second cross-pollination event happened between the longevity people and people building new cities. There are people from Prospera here, from VitaDAO, and now, they are working much more closely together than ever before.

This is probably a fair question. It is true that longevity as a field has been around for many years, and we still dont have the magic pill for immortality or anything close to that. There are very fundamental reasons why thats true for longevity, while AI is seeing much more progress. I think we just know a lot less about the body, as its an incredibly complicated machine.

The way I see this question is that if you look at the difference between the first computer and what we have now, the difference is huge. By the standards of the 1950s, todays computers feel like magic. Theres a common phrase that people always overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term, and I personally expect the longevity field to have a similar kind of progress. There are a few decades that might look useless from the outside, but theyre laying the foundations, and then the gains become faster than most people expect.

Its not just my intersection. I feel like a lot of people got into those things at the same time. Theres definitely a pretty significant cluster of the crypto space thats also interested in longevity, especially older Ethereum people.

You could say that. One of the big criticisms of the longevity space is this idea that youre extending life, but is the life youre extending worth living? Its the misconception that were basically trying to keep 80-year-olds barely alive. Im trying to show that this is not the case, that the longevity space is specifically about repairing damage before it develops into a pathology.

But then people see someone like Bryan Johnson. He is a multimillionaire who literally puts his life into being as healthy as possible. He takes this extremely customized menu, a huge number of supplements, spends his entire days doing exercises and so on. People look at that and they think, first, that it is only accessible to rich people, and, second, this is something youd only do if you dont care about actually living your life. Neither of those things are necessarily true.

To me, a part of the motivation was to show people a different model. Its also a personal struggle for me. I cant dedicate my entire life to being healthy. I have Ethereum stuff, I need to travel everywhere, Im a nomad, all my supplies are in a 40-liter backpack, so I have to compromise between a lot of things.

What we tried to show here is that if we do things in groups with economies of scale, it can really help the average person to maintain a reasonable lifestyle routine, including things like exercise and diet.

There are people here who are pretty intense about health stuff as we said, cold plunges, sauna, gym. I know someone who runs for two and a half hours every day. Still, they dont look like theyre willing to sacrifice their life to extend their lifespan.

I totally agree, and thats an argument that not enough people are making. Bryans example creates an impression that you have to go out of your way to stay healthy, but I think the extent to which its true is exaggerated. If you look at Aubrey, he is pretty normie in his personal lifestyle, but the people who make news are usually on the extreme ends of things. I think its good that they exist, and weve learned a lot from Bryan, but someone has to make a different case.

I would say, absolutely. We did a poll about one and a half weeks into the experiment, and one of the questions was, if there was another Zuzalu, would you show up? Zero people voted no.

I think its going to be renewed anyway, with or without us. When we asked who was thinking of making their own Zuzalu, about 15 people raised their hands. Its going to happen, and the question is, what role are we taking in this experiment?

Scaling is a big challenge. Theres a difference between doing this for two hundred people and doing something that includes thousands or tens of thousands of people. Once you have this number of people, its not one village anymore, you will have interactions between villages, you will have conflicts.

Theres also the question of, whats the long-term goal of this. If you want to create a biotech-friendly network state, you cant jump locations every two months. The equipment is not going to move, and you cant convince a new country to install favorable regulations every two months. Convincing even one is hard.

On the other hand, if your goal is to, say, create a new type of university, then moving every two months would be great. Giving people new experiences would make learning even more enjoyable.

So, different groups have different needs. Figuring out what makes sense for people is a learning process. Thats true for cities too. You have big cities and small cities, cities focused around particular industries, university towns, natural resources gathering cities, trade towns. All these look different. For any new category of institutions that are based on co-living in person, you will have to account for this diversity.

Overall, it feels like the basic format has been validated; it turned out to be something that a lot of people like and enjoy more than their usual life. People are willing to spend a lot of time here rather than in big cities. In the future, with better choice of location, with better preparation, this can be much cheaper than big cities, more enjoyable and more useful professionally for many people. So, many things were proven, but there was also probably a huge number of small mistakes.

I think theres some chance that the arguments that AI doomers make are correct, but that chance is far from 100%. I think its good to worry about those things. Im happy that people are taking the problem of AI alignment seriously. Its a small amount of work that could make a big difference, so its obviously worth doing.

Its harder for me to be convinced that taking that step is a good idea because it has its own risks. The very first question is How do you even enforce it? We have all those different countries that are going to have their own ideas. If some countries try to enforce a slowdown when others do not want to go along, that could itself lead to serious conflicts.

Also, slowing down AI obviously slows down longevity research. Many people think longevity is fundamentally hard, and we will need strong AI to make this problem solvable.

Its easier for me to be convinced that we need some medium level of more carefulness and slowing down of some specific things than to be convinced of more drastic attempts to slow AI progress greatly or stop it outright.

I agree with that, and thats a big part of why I do take them seriously. They have powerful arguments, and many people who argue against the doomers have only very basic counterarguments that the doomers already thought of and responded to ten years ago. Im definitely not going to just dismiss their arguments. If people do suggest pragmatic ways to either slow down AI research or put a lot of resources into solving this problem, Ill be very open to that.

I guess its hard for me to accept either of the extreme positions either that were clearly going to be totally fine, or that theres a greater than 50% chance well all die because theres just so many unknowns. For example, five years ago when the best AI was AlphaZero, I dont think it was even within many peoples space of possibilities that were going to switch away from goal-directed reinforcement learning and toward this really weird paradigm of managing to solve thousands of problems by, like, predicting text on the internet. So, I expect similar things that are outside of our current imagination to happen another few times before we get to the singularity.

If I had to predict a concrete place the AI doomer story is wrong, if it had to be wrong, I would say its in the idea of a fast take-off: that AI capabilities will pile on so fast that we wont be able to adapt to problems as they come. We may well have a surprisingly long period of approximately human-level AI. But then again, these are only speculations, and you should not take me for a specialist.

I think yes, but also kind of chaotic. Many people have not been exposed to deep AI issues at all, and then Nate [Soares, head of MIRI] is coming in with those very deep radical arguments on why AI is going to destroy the world. Theres this big disconnect between what one side believes and the other side believes, something you cant resolve in a three-day conference.

I think Nate would say that this is the entire problem theyre trying to solve.

As I understand his argument, its basically that even if we make a definition that works really well from our point of view, and if we had it trained on ten million examples, and it makes sense to us, the AI will be much more computationally powerful than we are, and it will find some really weird way to satisfy its model of those values in a way that totally goes against what the original intention was. Just how tractable or intractable that problem is, is one of the things that are very hard for me to judge, because its so abstract.

Yes, I think theres a big chance that the alignment will turn out to be much simpler than we expected, and the time period during which a combination of human and AI will continue to be smarter than AI alone will be much longer than we expected.

I also think theres a big chance that there are no easy strategies for destroying the entire world. The few counterexamples like biolabs can be dealt with individually instead of dealing with them on the AI side. Theres also some chance that humans are much closer to the ceiling of what kind of intelligence is possible to have from AI.

Still, I think there are many different totally unknown things that could happen, and our prediction power is limited. People generally did not predict that we would go that fast from a more goal-directed AI like AlphaZero to a less goal-directed AI like ChatGPT. It shows you how easy it is to have all kinds of surprises.

I also dont want all that Im saying here to be misinterpreted as my definite statement when in reality, my thoughts on this are going in all kinds of different directions and I could easily disagree with myself a year from now.

Id say probably. I dont know how such a merger would look like though.

[Long pause] Im curious about it.

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Vitalik Buterin Exclusive Interview: Longevity, AI and More - Lifespan.io News

In 2001, the libertarian anti-tax activist Grover Norquist gave a memorable interview on NPR about his intentions. He said, I dont want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. Everything about the line was designed to provoke: the selection of a bookish and easily horrified audience, the unapologetic violence of drag and drown, the porcelain specificity of bathtub.

As propaganda, it worked magnificently. When I arrived in Washington, two years later, as a novice political reporter, the image still reverberated; to many it seemed a helpfully blunt depiction of what conservatives in power must really want. Republicans were preparing to privatize Social Security andMedicare, the President had campaigned on expanding school choice, and, everywhere you looked, public services were being reimagined as for-profit ones. Norquist himselfan intense, gleeful, ideologicalfigure with the requisite libertarian beardhad managed to get more than two hundred members of Congress to sign a pledge never to raise taxes, for any reason at all. The Republicans of the George W. Bush era were generally smooth operators, having moved from a boom-time economy to the seat of an empire, confident, at every step, that they had the support of a popular majority. Their broader vision could be a little tricky for reporters to decode. Maybe Norquist was the one guy among them too weird to keep the plans for the revolution a secret.

But, as the Bush Administration unfolded, it became harder to see the Republicans as true believers. Government just didnt seem to be shrinking. On the contrary, all around us in Washingtonin the majestic agency buildings along the Mall and in the rooftop bars crowded with management consultants flown in to aid in outsourcing, and especially in the vast, mirrored, gated complexes along the highway to Dulles, from which the war on terror was being cordinated and suppliedthe government was very obviously growing.

However much the Republicans had wanted to downsize government, they turned out to want other things morelike operating an overseas empire and maintaining a winning political coalition. Bushs proposal for privatizing Medicare was watered down until, in 2003, it became an expensive drug benefit for seniors, evidently meant to help him win relection. After beating John Kerry, in 2004, Bush announced that Social Security reform would be one of his Administrations top priorities (Ive earned capital in this election, and Im going to spend it), but within just a few months that plan had run aground, too. House Republicans saw how terribly the policy was polling and lost their nerve. Meanwhile, more drones and private military contractors and Meals Ready-to-Eat flowed to Iraq and Afghanistan and points beyond. New programs offset cuts to old ones. Norquist was going to need a bigger bathtub.

Self-identified libertarians have always been tiny in numbera handful of economists, political activists, technologists, and true believers. But, in the decades after Ronald Reagan was elected President, they came to exert enormous political influence, in part because their prescription of prosperity through deregulation appeared to be working, and in part because they provided conservatism with a long-term agenda and a vision of a better future. To the usual right-wing mixture of social traditionalism and hierarchical nationalism, the libertarians had added an especially American sort of optimism: if the government would only step back and allow the market to organize society, we would truly flourish. When Bill Clinton pronounced the era of big government over, in his 1996 State of the Union address, it operated as an ideological concession: Democrats would not aggressively defend the welfare state; they would accept that an era of small government had already begun. It almost seemedas in the famous bathtub drowning scene in the movie Les Diaboliquesas if the Democrats and the Republicans had joined together in an effort to dispatch a shared problem.

Had you written a history of the libertarian movement fifteen years ago, it would have been a tale of improbable success. A small cadre of intellectually intense oddballs who inhabited a Manhattanish atmosphere of late-night living-room debates and barbed book reviews had somehow managed to impose their beliefs on a political party, then the country. A sympathetic historian might have emphasized the mass appeal of the ideals of free minds and free markets (as the libertarian writer Brian Doherty did in his comprehensive, still definitive work Radicals for Capitalism, published in 2007), and a skeptical one might have focussed on the convenient way that the ideology advanced the business interests of billionaire backers such as the Koch brothers. But the story would have concerned a thriving idea.

The situation is no longer so simple. At first, the Republican backlash against Bushs heresies (the expensive prescription-drug benefit, the lack of progress against the national debt) cohered into the Tea Party andonce the G.O.P. establishment made its peace with the movementinto Paul Ryans stint as Speaker, with its scolding fixation on debt reduction. But that period scarcely outlasted Ryans Speakership. It was brought to an end by Barack Obamas crafty (and somewhat under-celebrated) relection campaign, in 2012, in which he effectively cast Romney-Ryan libertarianism as a stalking horse for plutocracy, rather than a leg up for small business, as Republicans claimed.

Doctrinal libertarianism hasnt disappeared from the political scene: its easy enough to find right-of-center politicians insisting that government is too big. But, between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, libertarianism has given way to culture war as the rights dominant mode. To some libertariansand liberals friendly to the causethis is a development to lament, because it has stripped the American right of much of its idealism. Documenting the history of the libertarian movement now requires writing in the shadow of Trump, as two new books do. Together, they suggest that, since the end of the Cold War, libertarianism has remade American politics twicefirst through its success and then through its failure.

In The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism (Princeton), Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi argue that things didnt have to turn out this way. Zwolinski, a philosopher at the University of San Diego, and Tomasi, a political theorist at Brown, are both committed libertarians who are appalled at the movements turn toward a harder-edged conservatism. (They are prominent figures in a faction called bleeding-heart libertarianism.) Their book is a deep plunge into the archives, in search of a primordial libertarianism that preceded the Cold War. They contend that the profound skepticism toward government and the political absolutism that characterize libertarians have animated movements across the political spectrum, and have, in the past, sometimes led adherents in progressive directions rather than conservative ones. (In the call to defund the police, for instance, the authors identify a healthy skepticism of too much centralized government.) As they see it, libertarianism once had a left-of-center valenceand could still reclaimit.

If this sounds a little optimistic, it does make for an interesting historical account. The first thinker to self-identify as libertarian, the authors point out, was the French anarcho-communist Joseph Djacque, who argued that private property and the state were simply two different ways in which social relationships could become infused with hierarchy and repression. Better to abolish both. The social Darwinist Herbert Spencer denounced imperialisms deeds of blood and rapine; the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Lysander Spooner condemned slavery as an instance of the governments usurping natural rights. In the history of resistance to the modern state, Zwolinski and Tomasi see libertarians everywhere. This approach can sometimes come off as a land grab; my eyebrows went up when they claimed the abolitionist John Brown as a libertarian hero. Then again, Brown was a fiercely anti-government radical who sought to seize a federal armory to provision slaves for an uprising, so maybe its not much of a stretch.

All this genealogy can seem a little notional, but certain suggestive rhythms recur: Zwolinski and Tomasi show how many thinkers return to personal liberty and the right to private property as bedrocks. That isnt only an American grammarit comes from Locke and Mill, and, as The Individualists stresses, from some French sources, toobut its the one in which the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are written. Why do so many Americans own guns? Probably in part because gun ownership is protected in the Constitution. Such choices by the Founders dont make America a libertarian country, but they do insure that libertarians will be around for as long as the Constitution is.

Zwolinski and Tomasi emphasize the contingencies in libertarianisms history, but the most consequential contingency was the Cold War, which closely followed the publication, in 1944, of a core libertarian text, Friedrich Hayeks The Road to Serfdom. An austere Austrian economist who taught at the London School of Economics, Hayek had become alarmed that so many left-of-center English thinkers were convinced that economic central planning ought to outlast the Second World War, becoming a permanent feature of government. Back in Vienna, Hayek and his mentors had studied central planning, and he believed that the English were being hopelessly nave. His economic insight was that, when it came to information, no government planner, no matter how many studies he commissioned, could hope to match the markets efficiency in determining what people wanted. How much bread was needed, how many tires? Best to let the market work it out. The price system, Hayek wrote, enables entrepreneurs, by watching the movement of comparatively few prices, as an engineer watches the hands of a few dials, to adjust their activities to those of their fellows. He coupled this insight with a warning: Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.

The Road to Serfdom, a text that relied on Austro-Hungarian historical experience to make a point about wartime English policy, was initially rejected by American publishers. But once it saw print, and won a rave in the Times, Hayek became a phenomenon. Anxious and unprepared, he was pushed by his publisher onto the stage at Town Hall, in New York City, to address an eager audience of American industrialists who were sick to death of Roosevelt. An abridged version was published by the Readers Digest in the spring of 1945, and was then made available as a five-cent reprint through the Book-of-the-Month Club, which distributed more than half a million copies.

And heres what one of the worlds greatest songs sounds like when I sing it.

Cartoon by Jon Adams

Hayeks work more or less invented libertarianism in twentieth-century America. As the Cold War wore on, his warnings about the perils of central planning gained urgency. Small libertarian think tanks, newspapers, and philanthropies appeared across the country through the nineteen-fifties.

Hayeks mentor, Ludwig von Mises, arrived in America and began teaching a seminar in Austrian economics, at N.Y.U., underwritten by a businessmans fund. The movement was insular, fractious, New Yorkish. On West Eighty-eighth Street, a late-night salon convened in the apartment of Murray Rothbard, a student of von Misess who had become the chief propagandist of libertarianisms extreme wing. (Robert Nozick, who became libertarianisms most important philosopher, dropped by.) In Murray Hill, Ayn Rand held post-midnight sessions with her own circle, which, at different times, included Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson, who would become a leading domestic-policy adviser to Presidents Nixon and Reagan. Even to ideological allies, the Rand circlein which everyone seemed to be in psychotherapy with the novelists lover, Nathaniel Brandenappeared to be a cult. What if, as so often happens, one didnt like, even couldnt stand, these people? Rothbard asked.

Libertarian thinkers, on the page, tend to be prickly, disputatious, and drawn to absolutes, which is why they make for good copy. Those traits were deepened by an isolation from real power; they lorded over some small-circulation journals and a couple of budding think tanks, but that was basically it. Von Mises, among the crankiest of the originals, was once summoned to a small conference in Switzerland with a handful of libertarian grandeesthe few other people on earth who actually agreed with himand stormed out because they didnt agree with him enough. Youre all a bunch of socialists, he said. When Milton Friedman, the most urbane of the libertarian greats, published a pamphlet, in 1946, denouncing rent control, Rand fumed that he didnt go far enough: Not one word about the inalienable right of landlords and property owners.

Read the rest here:
The Long Afterlife of Libertarianism - The New Yorker

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