Washington Rep. Holding Rallies to Create 51st--Libertarian-- State
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/matt-shea-washington-state-liberty-744850/
I’m on the ground at the “Liberty or Death” rally — a protest of 100 or so people aiming to draw attention to a package of state gun-control measures under consideration, ones this crowd sees as a clear sign of government tyranny.
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Shea, 44, tells the crowd that, as a “student of history,” he knows how the common theme of both Marxism and tyranny is “always to disarm the people.” They nod along. He mentions his military service (he served in both Iraq and Bosnia), but stays away from his expensive education at nearby Gonzaga University.
“All right, I’m gonna get a little fiery,” he says, a lilt under his words.
He directs his gaze toward a few reporters and yells, “I’m tired of the media! And I’m tired of those on the left saying God-given inalienable rights don’t seem to matter.”
“Let’s hold ’em accountable!” a guy from the crowd yells.
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But Shea — a four-term elected official now running for a fifth — rarely sees any blowback for the things he says or for the fact that in his nine years in office he has allied with some of the most high-profile conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists in the American West: from Cliven Bundy and his sons to a neo-Confederate Idaho preacher to the head of the Oath Keepers, an extremist group that believes “the United States is collaborating with a one-world tyrannical conspiracy called the New World Order.”
Long before President Trump deemed the press the “enemy of the people,” Matt Shea was refusing to speak with the media and airing his concern over conspiracy theories like FEMA camps with InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Shea also organized the Spokane chapter of the anti-Muslim ACT for America, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. And for the past few summers, Shea has spoken at a secretive religious community run by a man who was a foundational figure in the Christian Identity movement, which, according to the Anti-Defamation League, believes white Europeans to be the lost tribes of Israel and considers Jews to be the offspring of Eve and Satan.
For several years, Shea has proposed the same initiative in the Statehouse: A place named “Liberty” — a 51st state that would sever the rural, arid and deep-red eastern half of Washington from the urban, forested, blue coastal region. A place where God and guns won’t be regulated. A place where Shea says, consequently, there will be more freedom.
It might come as a surprise that a legislator in the famously progressive Northwest could have a career espousing far-right fringe ideas. But that image of the region is partially driven by media coverage, says Cornell Clayton, director at Washington State University’s Thomas S. Foley Institute of Public Policy and Public Service. “Within the state there’s what we call the Cascade Curtain. Everything on the west side of the state votes blue, and the east side of the state tends to vote red,” Clayton says.
People have been talking about hacking off the eastern part of Washington — from the Cascades to Idaho — since at least 1915. But recently, creating a bastion of God-fearing, gun-toting, canned-food eating whiteness where conservatives can survive the End Times has been embraced by survivalists and dubbed the American Redoubt — an idea that’s gained enough interested parties to demand an actual corner of the real estate market. Though Shea’s Liberty idea hasn’t gained much traction in the Statehouse, it’s red meat for anti-government extremists at a time when some Americans really are viewing this area of the country as the last remaining holdout for the type of America they think can be great again.
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One source I spoke to, who grew up at Marble and asked to remain anonymous due to fears about safety, said the group has taken a particularly apocalyptic turn recently: “Their whole thing is, ‘The world is evil and the government is evil.’ [They want] to get back to Puritan America.”
And establishing Liberty, the source says, is central to their plans: “They have a Constitution. They have a song they have their kids sing now.… They are 100 percent on board and they think it’s going to happen soon.”
Another source, who attended the festival this year, had a pocket-size recorder and sent me audio of Shea’s speeches. This year, he really only talked about one idea: Liberty.
Shea told the crowd that KXLY — a TV station in Spokane — did a survey about the 51st state of Liberty. “They shut it down because 73 percent of the people out of 8,000 people that had weighed in were in support,” he said.
“It was a Facebook live poll,” a news director there tells me. Not exactly scientific polling.
At the end of his speech, Shea showed the flag he’s selling for the proposed state: An osprey, with wings outstretched, flying toward the viewer, broken shackles in its talons symbolizing Liberty’s liberation from Seattle.
Rolling Stone has a Left-Centre bias but High factual reporting rating.
Article is right about the Cascade Curtain and it's the same in Oregon. Once you get past the mountains and into the East, it's solid red all the way down.
99% of the time someone calls themselves a history buff I recoil because I know they're going to spout a bunch of horrible shit.
It's wild that a guy who holds views like this has such a strong backing and power.
Yikes.
Id say we should let them give them a piece of some desert to either die or prove a very important point
I don't think it's too much to worry about. Eastern Washington and oregon are the least densely populated parts of both states and a libertarian state really wouldn't be much to worry about anyways. It'd quickly decay to crap and they'd regret their decision. Not that it'd actually happen though.
we have people dying in poverty because they can't get a job to cover their health insurance and their state hasn't expanded medicaid so they can't get coverage either yet being killed in a hypathetical communist uprising is their number 1 concern.
fuck actual libertarians, they're the antithesis of the kind of citizenry the founding fathers envisioned, they'd gladly go back to a monarchy as long as they were promised they could be the nobles and do whatever they want, and to an extent that's what they've been doing by buying legislatures and getting states to outlaw progressive governing tools like income tax
Libertarians are fucking lunatics, every time I see some libertarian post somehow float its way to the top of the sewer pipe on reddit it's like witnessing actual insanity in text form.
To be honest, I'm all for more states, more so we can meet the mathematical prophecy:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/242634/ca72da34-c81d-47be-8e4e-f3b07fcfbeda/image.png
It also could be cool to get all the mental libertarians out of the other states. I just hope it's really small and set underground or something.
a state full of white supremacists is a state with 2 senators and at least 1 house member, a governor and capable of recieving federal aid and support.
good thought to pack them all in a box, but an ethnostate in the US would not stay contained, that's kind of why the fight against slavery expansion in the west was so critical.
I didn't think libertarians were supposed to be anything like white nationalists though? I thought the whole point was an extremely capitalist model with extreme social freedoms?
Yes well the latter happens to be an ideological Trojan Horse used by the former. As such, the two groups kind of mixed very heavily.
blind capitalism is how you get the levittowns and segregated neighborhoods
"History buff" is sadly often code for "I jerk off and think about Rome (but not even an accurate version of it)."
wat? Hardline libertarians are crazy but they are not white supremacists. Different brand of nut.
I think that's sometimes true, yeah, but I do love history and think I put things in perspective. I assume you're thinking about how people like Stefan Molyneux use Ancient Rome as a pretext to be anti-immigration, etc.?
Yes. I'm not saying no one likes history, here, many of my close friends got degrees in it. But a whole bunch of alt-right dunces love to wank over militaristic societies like Sparta
I like to tell people who think Sparta was some patriarchal haven that women actually held a shit-load of power in Sparta compared to women in most of Greece. Women tended to be more financially powerful due to inheritance laws and such.
I just want to show them all this painting and applaud them for endeavoring to live their lives this way:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Le%C3%B3nidas_en_las_Term%C3%B3pilas%2C_por_Jacques-Louis_David.jpg/1200px-Le%C3%B3nidas_en_las_Term%C3%B3pilas%2C_por_Jacques-Louis_David.jpg
There's similar stuff in California, there was just a proposal struck from the ballot by the state supreme court that wanted to split the state into three.
holy shit lol this is Spokane? I grew up there, mostly
It's not a great place. Really fairly poor. Lots of working class folks, and while it's the most liberal area on the east side of Washington that's not saying much when everything around it is anything but. I grew up partially in Stevens County too, and looking back on my memories there some of it is "holy shit" worthy, cus some wildly conservative things were just my everyday reality. They consistently vote against the things Washington is well-known for support: marijuana legalization, civil rights for LGBTQ+ people, net neutrality to some degree, gun control, police officer de-escalation training and bodycams, etc. There's a LOT of bitterness about how Seattle (King county, really, since that's a more accurate label than just the city itself) controls most of the states legislation. This is unsurprising, and I'm mostly just surprised that they took this long to make it into the news hahaha
Yup! Eastern WA is damn near empty.
https://external-preview.redd.it/yHeySoDvGvcVQ4hIwRse0c68zkRUAu5mYtE2d1lqB_c.jpg?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=e3e8a14ed46670e132ce020e578b55440dcadc3c
Genius who made the map left out a scale on the map, but it's the best one I could find unfortunately:
Darkest Green - 0 | Next - 0.1-5 | Next - 5.1-10 | Next - 10.1-25 |Next - 25.1-50 |Next - 50.1-100 | Next - 100.1-250 | Next - 250.1-500 | Next - 500.1-1500 | Dakrest Red - 1500+
So most of those dark green regions that make up the state are vastly unpopulated: and even in the mid-green regions you see in central washington and northeastern Washington (areas like Stevens county) are still going to be really not very dense at all. And there should've been another level of density to capture Seattle imo, cus Spokane (the red splotch to the east) really isn't that densely populated (500k people over a bigger area vs King County's 2.189 million people)
illinois is in the same boat, the state is practically the citystate of chicago, but there's not really a great answer to it as the people of chicago don't deserve to have less representation just for living there.
Great. Just what this nation needed. An entire state full of people who want to privatize everything while bitching about the price of bottled water.
How did my brother describe it the other day? Something along the lines of...
Libertarianism: the philosophy espoused by nineteen-year-olds who scoff at the idea of people working together for something!
The main reason for why these folks are snapping right now is because of the asinine law that Washington has on the ballot this year.
Washington Initiative 1639, basically finds any weapon that's semi-auto to be an "Assault Weapon", makes it a felony to not-own a safe as a gunowner, and adds a $25.00 fee on top of the current bullshit you gotta pay for FFL transfer to fund the same exact fucking thing. It also is near shitposting worthy with how you cannot purchase a firearm ages 18 ~ 21, if you for whatever reason don't own property.
The New Yorker - L.P.D. : Libertarian Police Department
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.
I would not trust eastern Washington with actually running a proper libertarian government. From what I've seen, a lot of people in rural areas tend to skew libertarian in the way they self-identify, but upon further questioning they end up being a party line republican or democrat, with maybe some exceptions made for gun laws or gay marriage. Based on what paindoc routinely complains about regarding Spokane, I can't see rural Washington being much different.
It's kind of disgusting how the party has become a convenient mask for white nationalists because the ideology those people support is almost the antithesis of libertarianism. Most people love to claim to be interested in freedom until, god forbid, they get inconvenienced.
puget sound area should split from the rest of washington
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