New York, the sole state whose election statutes effectively blocked the LP, and all other third parties from qualifying for the ballot in 2024, is expanding the blockade to deny the major party opposition from being accurately represented in races for US Congress. Lee Zeldin’s campaign for Governor in 2022 unexpectedly produced 4 upset GOP wins in Long Island, which contributed to Republicans gaining a slight majority in the US House. Democratic overlords have been trying to claw back those seats ever since, any way they can. From Politico: 

Gov. Kathy Hochul openly embraced the full-fledged gerrymandering of congressional districts in New York to favor Democrats on Monday, marking a significant shift in her push to combat similar pro-Republican changes in states like Texas.

Her escalation in the political arms race to redraw the boundaries of congressional maps comes at a dramatic moment. Hochul was flanked by a delegation of six Texas lawmakers who fled their home state to block Republicans there from pushing through their own gerrymander.

“I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,” Hochul said at a Capitol press briefing. “With all due respect to the good government groups, politics is a political process.”

The redistricting skirmish in New York is one front in a much larger battle nationwide. Aside from Texas and New York, California, Ohio and Missouri are also considering similar changes to gain a political advantage ahead of next year’s midterm elections, which will determine which party controls the House and how President Donald Trump will implement his agenda… Read More 

The former LP Vice Presidential candidate on government abuse, hyper spending, and how to fight it locally as well as federally:

For those who ever paid attention to its deeply anti-war, anti-militarism lyrics, the just departed rock and roll legend (and surprisingly and pro-family man) Ozzy Osborne screams them out here, live. Will anybody in the Mideast or Ukraine hear them? Ozzy, Rest In Peace:

The LPNY Outreach Director provides LP activists the latest lowdown on activity designed to get the party on the ballot in NY come 2026:

The in-person State Committee meeting coming up in October will also be
our nominating convention! We will be nominating our candidates for
Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General and Comptroller. Stay
tuned for details.Consider attending the Hudson Valley Libertarian Gala in Newburgh this
September, hosted by the Orange, Dutchess, Ulster, Putnam, and Colombia
County affiliates! Delicious food and a great lineup of speakers and
entertainment await; sign up at
https://secure.anedot.com/dutchess-county-libertarian-party/hudsonvalleylibertariangala2025!

Please pass this information along to your membership.

That’s all for now! Remember, I am here to assist you and your county
affiliate. Please reach out if you need anything.

Clinton Donnelly on a massive surveillance move the IRS will impose upon crypto activity, on all third party exchanges come 2026:

Join the Libertarian Party of Queens County (LPQC) for its “Fundraising and Early Candidate Search Planning Meeting” on August 9 at noon, at our Astoria location, Stamatis Greek and Mediterranean Restaurant at 29-09 23rd Avenue (menu details at stamatisrestaurant.site/). This session will elaborate on goals and concepts reviewed at the July meeting towards achieving a successful petition drive in 2026 to acquire ballot status for Queens and statewide LPNY candidates. Both mail and event functions will be considered and developed at the luncheon.

Prospective candidates for office next year are also invited to attend to provide an overview of their backgrounds and resources. Area fundraisers and event planners (TBA) have also been approached to appear to go over the logistics of preparing functions to be held in fall 2025 and winter 2026 to raise enough to support local petition and membership efforts over the next 12 months. We hope you can also share your own ideas or other contributions to bring more liberty to Queens in this discussion!  Details and Directions

Some pointers on the Surveillance State, and how to resist to retain a semblance of your privacy, and beyond that, your personal liberty:

…So, what can we do to keep the government from having an idea where we are and what we are doing? To start with, we need to understand that the government has multiple means of tracking us, not just one or two. That means we’re going to have to defeat them all, if we expect to protect ourselves from electronic spying.

Here are a few places to start.

Use a Burner Phone

The easiest way for the government to track any of us is through our smartphone. We really don’t have a handle on everything that our phones are doing in the background, while we’re not looking.

Yet there’s nearly constant communication between our phones and the local cell phone tower.

It’s clear that the communications we have through our phones is readily available to the NSA and others.

You can even pay online services to do a little spying on family members, seeing their text messages, who they’ve talked to, what they’ve looked at online and where they’ve been. If you and I can do this, then you can be sure the government can do more.

Shut Off GPS Tracking

One of the most common ways our phones help the government keep track of us is through the phone’s GPS. Google and Apple keep track of our every move through that part of the phone.

If you go to Google Maps and click on your timeline in the menu, it will show you everywhere you’ve been, for the last several years.

This feature alone could put you in danger if you just happen to be in the same place that a crime was committed. While that alone wouldn’t be enough to convict you; it would be enough to make you a suspect.

And that’s just one example of how the GPs could be used against you. What if they want to track you down because it has been reported that you said something against the government; they’d have no trouble tracking you down.

Clean Out Internet Browsing Activity and Cookies

One of the big ways that companies use the internet to keep tabs on us is through our browsing history and the cookies downloaded to our computers by the various websites we visit.

A lot can be learned about who we are and what we do by looking at that. That’s why major corporations invest so much in data mining, looking for people to buy their products…Read the Rest

Scott Horton here, and Dave Smith (below) of the Libertarian Institute, on the obvious two-tier justice system exposed by the Epstein scandal:

From an article musing on libertarian vs liberal meaning in a time of cultural wokeness:

Anti-woke provocateur James Lindsay has set his sights on libertarians… Since the left and right are both playing the same identity politics game, the only real alternative to this bipartisan “wokeness” would be an individualism which rejects collectivism, zero sum thinking, and the machinations of one group over another to “get them” before they “get us.” Or, in a word, libertarianism. One would therefore expect Lindsay to find in libertarianism the best and most consistent application of the classical liberal tradition of individualism, cosmopolitanism, and the rejection of aggressive violence. Unfortunately, that has not been the case…

The economist Arnold Kling noted that the left, the right, and libertarians see the world through three different dichotomies. The right interpret most political issues through a civilization/barbarism dichotomy, the left through an oppressor/oppressed one, and libertarians through a liberty/coercion lens. If you spend a few moments comparing these different axes, you’ll notice that the libertarian dichotomy shares with the left a concern that those who have power will harm those who don’t. On the contrary, the right sees the powerful in a positive light–as the gatekeepers and enforcers of civilization as they define it–so they are necessarily suspicious of those who lack it and oppose it, often seeing them as the barbarians at the gates. For libertarians, true barbarity is defined by aggression instead of by divergence from conservative cultural norms.

If the left and libertarians share that concern over and against the right, what makes us different? The difference lies largely in our definitions: what is oppression, what is coercion? The left tends to define oppression very broadly (e.g. ending an entitlement is violence but extortion through taxes isn’t) and therefore are far more open to violence as a means to right perceived social wrongs. Through a left-wing lens, oppression is wide and explains much of the human experience. On the contrary, libertarians define violence in its more strict, obvious sense–as uninvited force against the person or property of another…More

First it was risking World War III by bombing Iran over phantom WMDs, then it was the “let’s spend trillions more now, to reduce debt later” Big Beautiful Bill, and now it’s “no more talk about the Epstein files, shut up.” Sigh, meet the new boss… Many MAGA supporters are saddened, confused or angry about DJT’s recent moves, which in the Epstein case appears to have veered away from prosecuting the victimizers of underage girls who were used for sex trafficking, and suddenly shifted into a “move along, nothing to see here” mode. So did the minors traffic themselves?  Whatever happened to accountability, transparency, and justice? Libertarians seek a nation based on these things without initiating force or fraud, but a coverup of the truth is a form of fraud, full stop. Did Trump cut a deal with the swamp to shut up about the issue, in exchange for getting more control of the political establishment? Could that explain why he’s “winning” so much, this time around? Criminal Justice Reform advocate Robert Gouveia goes over all the flip flops of Trump officials over the Epstein case (see also this summary of the mess):

From the LNC tweet on X:

The acquittal of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs on the racketeering and sex trafficking main charges recalls to mind this roundtable by Reason months ago. Are there civil libertarian issues with the federal government whipping up such charges against people for having sordid personal sex lives? Why isn’t this simply a matter for local law enforcement, not the feds? Is transporting prostitutes really a crime, if all the travelers were adults, who were not coerced? Was Diddy himself a fed, and had to be discredited? Was this done to protect his associates, i.e. other powerful players, who didn’t go to trial? As with Epstein, how did the government expect to win a case to prove he ran a criminal enterprise or “racket,” without bringing any of his clients, or racketeers to the witness stand?:

Let’s be clear—2025 Democratic nominee for NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is mostly (and openly) socialist. But as the two videos below indicate, the explosive popularity of his campaign appears to represent an emergent populism that is a kind of “blue MAGA” on the left. Add to that his libertarian-friendly positions on decriminalizing drugs and prostitution or “sex work,” while defending the rights of Palestinians, and it seems he is a new kind of anti-establishment Democrat who directly engages younger people on many issues they care about (even if he proposes the wrong solutions). This has drawn him some surprising praise, if not outright support, from across the spectrum:

Another step normalizing legal (at least medical) marijuana access for veterans, according to Marijuana Moment:

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved amendments to a spending bill that would authorize U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) doctors to issue medical marijuana recommendations to military veterans and support psychedelics research and access.

Two days after the House Rules Committee made the cannabis and psychedelics amendments in order for floor consideration, the full chamber agreed to attach them to the Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies (MilConVA) appropriations legislation on Wednesday.

One of the accepted proposals from Reps. Brian Mast (R-FL) and Dave Joyce (R-OH)—who are both co-chairs of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus—would increase veterans’ access to state medical marijuana programs and eliminate a current VA directive barring the department’s doctors from issuing cannabis recommendations… More

Wrapping up with Iran, Judge Napolitano and Col. MacGregor note the disconnect between the US Empire’s pom-pom waiving arrogance or militarist triumphalism, versus a realist assessment of the geo-strategic circumstances, from the Mideast to Taiwan. In fact, it was Russia who called off Iran from continuing to fight, and Putin’s alliance with Iran is still intact (as shown by the Mullah’s post-ceasefire meeting with him). The US $100 million bombing of the nuclear facilities likely hit mostly empty tunnels. Up to one third of Tel Aviv is in ruins, while Israel was a week away from being out of missiles. This, and strong antiwar sentiment erupting from half of Trump’s MAGA base caused him to pull the plug on the conflict before matters escalated beyond the control of even his ego. In other words, MAGA appears to have helped produce the ceasefire: