Elizabeth Warren was just trying to get a book banned when she wrote to Amazon and leaned on the CEO to remove a book that didn’t support the government’s Covid narrative.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday denied a preliminary injunction requested by presidential candidate and Covid policy critic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Joseph Mercola, who with their publisher have filed a lawsuit accusing Sen. Warren of using her position as a senior senator to tell the chief executive officer of Amazon.com to suppress Kennedy’s book, “The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports and the New Normal.”
The 2021 book denounces FDA-approved vaccines as ineffective and possibly harmful. The book urges people to take control of their health, and to use vitamins and alternative treatments — protocols that the U.S. government has rejected.
Kennedy Jr. and Mercola said that Sen. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, violated their constitutional rights of free speech and the First Amendment.
The Ninth Court upheld a Washington judge’s earlier ruling that said Kennedy and Mercola failed to to raise a serious First Amendment issue and did not show that the letter crossed “the constitutional line between persuasion and coercion.”
The request for a preliminary injunction demanded that Sen. Warren remove the letter from her website, issue a public retraction, and refrain from sending similar letters in the future.
“Senator Warren’s letter disparaged the book by claiming that the book perpetuated dangerous falsehoods that had led to countless deaths. It also directly impugned the professional integrity of one of the authors,” the Ninth Circuit wrote. Presumably, they were talking about Dr. Mercola, a Florida alternative medicine proponent, osteopathic physician, and Internet supplement business owner who is the lead author of the book and whose business could be harmed by Warren using the power of her bully pulpit to badmouth him.
“The plaintiffs have shown that these remarks, which Senator Warren broadcast to the public by posting the letter on her website, damaged their reputations. Reputational harm stemming from an unrestricted government action is a sufficiently concrete injury for standing purposes,” the judges said.
But then, the ruling says that Warren was just trying to be persuasive and did not cross the constitutional line. Further, she had no unilateral power to penalize the authors or Amazon, if it did not comply with her demands. And even though the letter could be seen as a threat, the court said there was no evidence that Amazon reconfigured its algorithms to steer people away from the book.
In her letter to Amazon, Warren wrote, “This pattern and practice of misbehavior suggests that Amazon is either unwilling or unable to modify its business practices to prevent the spread of falsehoods or the sale of inappropriate products.”
Yet, several weeks later, Amazon notified the publisher that it would not advertise the book — though the court said there was no evidence Amazon had actually advertised it in the past. Publisher Chelsea Green, Kennedy, Jr., and Mercola then sued Warren for trying to intimidate Amazon into suppressing their free speech.
Complicating the matter is that Kennedy is running for president as a Democrat challenging Joe Biden. He is an environmental lawyer by trade and has been an outspoken critic of the federal government’s response to Covid.
Today, Alaska’s Attorney General Treg Taylor announced that consumers in Alaska who fell prey to Intuit, TurboTax’s owner, and were charged for tax services that were supposed to be free as part of the IRS Free File Program, will start receiving checks from a $141 million multi-state settlement finished in May of 2022. Nationwide, around 4.4 million consumers will be receiving checks in the mail.
In the previous year, Attorney General Taylor participated in the settlement with TurboTax to resolve allegations that Alaskans were deceived into paying for services that should have been free for them. As part of the settlement, Rust Consulting, a settlement administrator, will be mailing restitution checks to 15,568 Alaskans for a total of approximately $477,000, or about $29 apiece on average. The checks will be sent to Alaskans who used certain TurboTax products in 2016, 2017, or 2018, and the amount of each check will depend on the number of years for which each person qualifies.
Attorney General Taylor said that addressing the deception and ensuring impacted Alaskans receive restitution checks was crucial, as tax season is already a stressful time. He added, “Having trustworthy tools to work with will be one less thing our residents have to worry about.” The agreement has been signed by all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Consumers who are eligible for payment will receive notification by email from the settlement fund administrator, Rust Consulting.
These consumers will automatically receive a check in the mail without having to file a claim. Checks are expected to be mailed out starting next week. For more information regarding the settlement coverage and the settlement fund, visit www.AGTurboTaxSettlement.com.
Intuit has also agreed to reform its business practices, including:
Refraining from making misrepresentations in connection with promoting or offering any online tax preparation products
Enhancing disclosures in its advertising and marketing of free products
Designing its products to better inform users whether they will be eligible to file their taxes for free; and
Refraining from requiring consumers to start their tax filing over if they exit one of Intuit’s paid products to use a free product instead.
Intuit withdrew from the IRS Free File program in July 2021.
It takes a lot to make national news out here in Montana. We don’t have any big cities, and we are far from America’s population centers and even further from the corridors of power.
Yet in the past week, transgender-identified Montana State House Member “Zooey Zephyr,” who attracted some notice upon his initial election in 2022, has exploded to national prominence after accusing members of the Montana State House GOP supermajority, who passed legislation to block genital mutilation and cross-sex hormonal treatment of children, of “having blood on their hands” when they were praying.
It was a clear and obvious breach of House rules during a floor debate and Zephyr refused to apologize for violating them.
After the House Speaker refused to call on him again until he apologized, dozens of radical activists, spurred in part by Zephyr, then disrupted the Montana Legislature (which has an enormous workload and meets for just three months every two years). Almost overnight, Zephyr was interviewed by numerous national media outlets and became a political celebrity, with far more Twitter followers than either of Montana’s congressmen.
But who really is “Zooey Zephyr”?
Both Montana and national media seem incurious, and even a fairly thorough Internet search revealed only snippets of Zephyr’s earlier life (residences in Washington and Montana, a background in wrestling, and competitive video games).
But a more exhaustive search revealed a more disquieting story, one that shows a disturbed young man with a troubled past and a series of relationships with dubious characters.
Much of this information about Zephyr was pieced together from posts on Kiwi Farms, a trollish but at times sophisticated online message board that is strongly opposed to gender ideology and delights in both juvenile insults and what once would have been recognized as investigative journalism.
Zephyr was born Zachary Raasch in Billings, MT and grew up there and in Washington state, where he was a champion high school wrestler.
The media has been so negligent in their vetting of Zephyr that, as far as I am aware, this is the first time his birth name has been publicly revealed in an article. “
Zooey Zephyr,” currently in the state and national headlines, did not even exist until 2019, when, after several months of taking female hormones, Raasch publicly transitioned.
He had surgical vaginoplasty in 2022 (indeed he was not in Missoula on election night when he was elected to the Montana House, but was flying to New York for post-operative care of the permanent wound where his natural genitals used to be).
He seems to have had a number of marketing jobs in Seattle before moving to Missoula, getting involved in the activist community and working at the University of Montana.
According to Raasch, his parents (who were conservative Christians) “disowned” him when he decided to transition. Raasch was originally motivated to run for the stateLegislature in response to the attempts to ban “transgender girls” from girls and women’s sports.
This enraged Raasch who claims, contrary to both common sense and scientific evidence, that men who transition to female do not have an advantage in sports, a proposition increasingly rejected even by politically correct athletic bodies.
Raasch is intelligent and extremely interested in transhumanism (the melding of man and machine through “technological enhancement” of the human body)—the subject of an abandoned master’s thesis at the University of Montana, and a subject relevant to his decision to radically modify his own body.
He was also a video gaming champion in a game called Super Smash Brothers; some pre-transition performances of his tournament videogaming can be seen online. In 2020, a huge scandal erupted in the Super Smash Brothers community involving mass sexual harassment and abuse of minors during in-person gaming meetups. Raasch publicly expressed regret that he may have put children at risk in taking them to these events.
It may be just a coincidence that serious child sexual abuse broke out in a community with which Raasch was heavily involved, or it is possible that he been a perpetrator or a victim of such abuse, but we don’t know, as none of the puff piece legacy media has bothered to investigate Raasch’s background.
What can be said is that childhood experiences of abuse, such as those that were going on around him, are often precursors to those involved developing non-standard sexual identities.
Raasch is also a noted fan of Manga and anime, a hobby enjoyed by many perfectly healthy people, but also a favorite of transgender individuals, such as Chris Tyson, an important member of Mr. Beast, the world’s most popular YouTube channel, who announced a love of anime involving sexualized children in the years before he came out as trans.
Raasch has posted disturbing sexualized anime images such as the one below that as of this writing—still on his official Twitter account.
He shows all the classic signs of an autogynephilic—a man who (often spurred by pornography or fetish) becomes sexually aroused by the idea of themselves as a woman. This existence of this condition and its popularity among certain kinds of transgender-identifying men was first observed by Dr. Ray Blanchard and then popularized by Northwestern University psychologist and transgender scholar J. Michael Bailey in his pathbreaking 2003 book “The Man who Would Be Queen.”
For the last year or so, Raasch has been dating Anthony “Erin” Reed, one of the most prominent transgender activists in America. Reed has a disturbing background himself, and one again that has been almost completely ignored by the national media in which he has frequently appeared.
Once married with a child, he got divorced and came out as transgender, eventually, like Raasch, opting for hormones and surgery.
Reed’s family was (unsurprisingly) unhappy about his decision to transition complaining that his family would not use his “pronouns” or his fake name. He is divorced enough from reality that he expressed anger that his ex-wife “Told me that I can’t have the name ‘mom’ because she gave birth.” He later expressed frustration because his ex-wife was fighting him for custody after he came out as trans.
In his spare time Reed maintains an “informed consent” map of the many clinics in America where you can get cross-sex hormones just on your own say-so without any previous therapy or confirmed gender dysphoria required. Sadly, four such clinics exist even in Montana.
Prior to Reed, Raasch’s previous “girlfriend” @stardustdog was a trans-identified man and a “furry” — someone who enjoys dressing up as anthropomorphic animal characters, often with an explicit sexual component. Needless to say, the picture I have painted above is not a picture of a healthy man with values that most Montanans share. Nor is it the picture of a healthy woman.
Neiher Raasch nor his boyfriend Anthony believe that parents should have any right to know if a child is transitioning at school, and Anthony is on record saying that those dating a trans person do not have the right to know that the trans person is trans because “trans women are women.”
Most heterosexual men, I daresay, would beg to differ.
Finally, it is notable that Raasch’s own tantrum on the Montana House floor directly contradicts the professional advice of a host of organziations that Raasch supports including GLAAD, the National LGBTQ Task Force, the Trevor Project, and the Transgender Law Center. These organizations stress that you should not “say that a specific anti-LGBT law or policy will “cause” suicide.. . . Linking suicide directly to external factors like. . . Anti-LGBT laws can normalize suicide by suggesting that it is a natural reaction to such experiences or laws.”
Just so.
If there is anyone with blood on his hands, it is Raasch, not those legislators who are attempting to protect Montana’s kids.
Montana Republicans don’t want transgender-identified Montanans (especially children) to die — we want them to live, not to be seduced by gender ideology and social contagion into sterilizing themselves, mutilating their bodies with permanent wounds, and stuffing themselves with hormones entirely foreign to their natural condition.
And we know this doesn’t just happen to bad people or the children of bad parents. As with any social contagion, good young people and people from caring families can fall prey to it. That’s why we’re spending so much time and energy fighting back against radical gender ideology.
Raasch himself — and the rest of the transgender-identified Montanans — are the victims of this ideology. But through the false media martyrdom that he always desired, the victim has also become a perpetrator.
Jeremy Carl (@jeremycarl4 on Twitter) is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. He lives with his family in the foothills of the Bridger Mountains near Bozeman, Montana. This column first appeared in Montana Talks. Carl is available for speaking engagements in Alaska, where he has been an invited speaker in recent years.
Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said the quiet part out loud this week. As the executive of our public lands agency, she does not believe that Americans need jobs because there are already so many jobs available. It’s better to lock up land, and lock down mining because who wants those jobs, when there are so many others?
Before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Haaland told Sen. Josh Hawley, “Senator, I know that there’s like 1.9 jobs for every American in the country right now. So, I know there’s a lot of jobs,” which was her explanation for canceling cobalt mining permits for Twin Metals Minnesota, an underground mine proposed for the northeastern part of the state. America won’t need those jobs, she was saying.
Let’s unpack the Haaland job fantasy.
First, the secretary doesn’t get the jobs numbers even close to correct. There are not 1.9 jobs for every American. That would be an absurd level of available jobs, along the order of 629 million open positions.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports there are 9.6 million job openings and roughly 6 million unemployed people in America.
The job openings rate was 5.8 percent in March, down by 1 percentage point since December, according to the bureau.
Sen. Hawley wasn’t buying what Haaland was selling. During the past 20 years, Hawley responded, over 3 million jobs have been lost to China, and they are coming from blue-collar towns across America. “And you’re telling me we have too many jobs in this country. Are you serious?”
Facts, stubborn as they are, are not the secretary’s strong suit.
Second, Haaland revealed herself as a relic of the past, incapable of looking toward the future. She cannot see what is coming around the bend toward our country like a freight train, because she is wedded to a romanticized notion about what America should be, with high plains, headdresses, and hunting for deer and antelope.
Haaland is on a mission to reshape the Department of Interior to the days before Manifest Destiny, with all its good, bad, and ugly, shaped the nation. She is trying to return to what will never be.
With a push from the Biden Administration, Haaland is preparing to adopt new regulations that make conservation the No. 1 priority for the Department of Interior, which owns 246,393,048 acres, with 99.99 percent of that land in the West. There go the jobs.
With Haaland’s narrow view of the world, she cannot see that jobs are on the brink of disappearing across every sector, when, in fact, artificial intelligence is here and has taken the driver’s seat.
This week, for example, IBM’s CEO said it won’t fill nearly 8,000 open jobs because the positions will be shifted over to artificial intelligence in the next five years. Hiring humans for office functions such as human resources and compliance is not a good investment for Big Blue, when those humans will have to be laid off so soon.
That 8,000 represents 2% of the entire IBM workforce, one of the largest employers in the world, who are being replaced by AI. And this phenomenon is just getting started. Those workers will join hundreds of thousands of workers who are being released into the wild in the same general time frame, as AI only gets better at replacing people.
Last week DropBox reported it will lay off 16% of its workforce, switching those jobs over to AI.
Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs reported that AI will soon wipe out as many as 300 million jobs.
Meanwhile, the Minnesota Duluth Complex is one of the world’s largest undeveloped mineral deposits for cobalt, copper, and nickel, all needed in massive quantities for the electric future the Biden Administration is designing.
The project is less than 20% of what an open pit mine would be, and mining operations would be between 400 and 4,500 feet below the surface. It’s in an area set aside for mining.
When Haaland signed the order to deny permits needed, she shifted thousands of more jobs to China, where forced labor will do the work.
Her order says the mining embargo is needed to protect “fragile and vital social and natural resources” as well as the “traditional cultural values” and “subsistence-based lifestyles” of Native American tribes.
These qualities are ill-defined and have shifting goalposts. What is a fragile social resource as it pertains to an underground mine? Which tribes are actually living subsistence lifestyles in northeastern Minnesota?
Here’s what is not poorly defined: Unemployment among American Indians in Minnesota is over 13%, which is 10% higher than the national unemployment rate.
The Haaland traditional lifestyle initiative is to continue the government inducement of intergenerational poverty, reservation ghettoization, and cradle-to-grave dependence on entitlement checks.
That’s not subsistence, that’s not a lifestyle, and there is no dignity in keeping Indians down on the reservation, unable to find work, purchase a home, or enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Workers at two Spenard Building Supply manufacturing sites voted to remove the Pacific Northwest Regional Counsel of Carpenters union by an overwhelming majority of 17-6. The vote affects about two dozen workers at the Birchwood and Eklutna plants.
A petition filed by Scot Breuer with the National Labor Relations Board Region 19 led to this successful vote.
Breuer, with assistance from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, filed the petition with the NLRB on March 31, supported by many of his coworkers. Under federal labor law, workers can trigger a decertification vote with the support of 30% or more of workers in a unionized workplace.
On April 12, the NLRB issued an election notice to all parties involved that stipulated an election date for ended May 2, votes counted
Spenard Building Supply employees made their position on the union clear when over two-thirds of the workers voted to remove the union from their workplace. Barring objections by union officials seeking to overturn the vote, the workers will be officially free of the union in one week.
NLRB data shows a unionized private sector worker is far more likely to be involved in a decertification effort as their nonunion counterpart is to be involved in a unionization campaign. The Spenard Building Supply election is one such example of workers leaving union control.
NLRB data show a 20% increase in decertification petitions in 2022 over the previous year.
The NLRB’s union decertification process is historically prone to union-created roadblocks. National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation-backed NLRB reforms from 2020 made it somewhat easier for workers to remove unwanted unions, such as the “Election Protection Rule” that prevents union bosses from filing “blocking charges” meant to delay or stop decertification elections entirely.
Prior to these reforms, workers often had their decertification votes delayed by unproven union blocking charges, giving union bosses the power to trap workers in union ranks they oppose nearly indefinitely. Under the reforms most votes take place promptly, with union blocking claims adjudicated later, after the votes have been counted.
However, the Biden Administration is trying to roll back these protections and make it harder for workers to decertify a union.
“We are extremely pleased to help these Alaskan workers exercise their right to remove a union they want nothing to do with. With over two-thirds of the votes being cast in favor of removing the union, this case is a clear example as to workers’ growing dissatisfaction with compulsory unionism,” said Mark Mix, President of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
On the insides of the bathroom stalls in the Soldotna Public Library, city librarians have posted some “helpful tips” for books, in a place where children can see them without a parent observing or interpreting: They can find books on rape, abuse, depression, sex, alternative lifestyles, and suicide, and more in either the juvenile or adult nonfiction sections of the library. The Dewey Decimal section numbers are included in the recommendations.
The list doesn’t include where to find books on historical fiction, how-to, or adventure nonfiction, but where to find books that perhaps people don’t want to ask librarians about.
It’s a tip noted in a 2017 edition of School Library Journal, where one librarian published a report about how she used “Bathroom Book Blurbs” to entice students into reading books.
“In every stall and above every urinal, I’ve placed a Bathroom Book Blurb. People read anything when using the restroom—so why not advertise books?” Jamie Leroy wrote in her article about the technique for enticing kids to read certain books.
“When I started my Bathroom Book Blurbs, I saw immediate results. The next day, students asked for the ‘book they saw in the bathroom.’ Kids who’d never come to the library were showing up. I had to buy more copies to meet the demand,” said LeRoy, who was a librarian at Northwest High School in Justin, Texas that year.
Soldotna librarians have taken the Bathroom Book Blurbs to a whole new level, encouraging the reading of social and moral topics that some parents might find sensitive — if they knew what was behind that bathroom door.
The poster is one example of librarians who do not see themselves as neutral agents, but as radical change agents for society and ideological and social entrepreneurs. A 2021 academic paper explores this concept, and how librarians can advance the United Nations’ “sustainability agenda” and “Sustainable Development Goals”:
“Recently, visions of librarians as radical positive change agents (Lankes 2016) have influenced and shaped this debate, raising new questions about neutrality or ‘post-neutrality,’ professional agency and personal and political ideologies. However, what does it mean to be a radical positive change agent? To expand our understanding of the librarian as a radical positive change agent, this paper introduces the concepts of activism and social entrepreneurship. By highlighting similarities and differences between the concepts of the change agent, the activist and the social entrepreneur, this paper aims to inform future discussions about the proactive role of librarians working for change. The current focus on how librarians should act as agents for change in relation to the UN sustainability agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) serves as an example throughout. The paper concludes by posing questions for further discussions of how the concepts of the change agent, the activist and the social entrepreneur might expand our understanding of the proactive librarian and how they might translate to the practice of librarianship in the era of ‘post-neutrality.'”
The paper goes on to explain that “Today, there seems to be widespread recognition that librarians should be proactive change agents and drivers of change” and should “initiate the change that is urgently needed facing global challenges like climate change, poverty, hunger, gender equality etc.”
Think of them as a tribal form of Ten Commandments being used to give out good-behavior rewards in a public school. Is it appropriate?
This week, a trial got underway in a civil suit against the Ketchikan School District and Ketchikan Charter School, relating to posters on the walls of schools that were titled “Southeast Traditional Tribal Values” that plaintiffs say has religious content, and that students are rewarded for following those values.
The phrase that is being litigated is among 14 traditional values listed, including pride in family and clan, and being stewards of the air, land, and sea. The item in question is “Reverence for Our Creator.” At Ketchikan Charter School, the school was using a tribal value of the week or month, and students were encouraged to follow all of the tribal values as these are the values that would make a good student. The school never actually used that specific value to reward students, because that value had become controversial.
Pushing “Reverence for Our Creator” on students through rewards is a violation of the U.S. Constitution and Alaska Constitution, parents Justin Breese and Rebecca King say, since the charter school is giving out behavioral rewards based on following this value.
Six witnesses testified on day one of the trial, including King and the principal of the charter school. The courtroom was packed and the phone lines to listen in on the proceedings were jammed.
The school district argued that the posters simply promote cultural understanding and that Breese and King should have first reached out to tribal members.
Breese and King did reach out to the district one year ago in April about their concerns. In the district’s response to them in May of 2022, the school’s business manager wrote:
“There is no Southeast Alaska tribal religion, nor specific religious belief in Creationism amongst the Southeast tribes. Therefore, none of the Southeast Traditional Tribal Values are religious statements or tenets. It follows, then, that no intent exists, whether historically or contemporaneously, for the values to be used in a manner other than as cultural knowledge sharing. This has been confirmed by Southeast Alaska tribal leaders, and local and regional cultural experts, elders, and culture bearers.”
The district went on to say, “The posters on display in KGBSD schools identify the listed values as Southeast Traditional Tribal Values developed, adapted, and approved at the 2004 Elders Forum on Traditional Values.”
Breese, commenting on the negotiated development of the traditional values document said, “They were determining the common themes of different tribes — Tsimshian, Haida, Tlingit, and one other. We have never complained about use of the tribal values poster to teach about tribal beliefs and culture. Our complaint was entirely about how school district using it.”
In other words, it would be one thing in a public school to teach the 10 Commandments, but it’s another thing, and acceptable to teach about the 10 Commandments.
“It’s a fine line,” Breese said. “We’re not against teaching about tribal values.”
Those listed values were not, however, handed down to Moses on tablets thousands of years ago, but were negotiated at a conference two decades ago. They evidently reflect spiritual beliefs of various tribes in Southeast Alaska.
Tlingit Haida Central Councilcredits Raven as the Creator: “The Haida legend of ‘The Raven and the First People’ expresses how Raven discovered mankind and is responsible for the present order of our universe. Likewise, the Tlingit legend of ‘Raven and the Creation Story’ tells us how the Raven created the world,” the council writes on its website.
The poster itself has sponsorships listed at the bottom that include state and federal government education agencies, “indicating appropriateness for use in public schools,” the district wrote to Breese and King last year. Those agencies include:
Central Council Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska
Circles of Care SAMHSA Substance Abuse Planning Project
Elderly Nutrition Program
Johnson O’Malley Program
Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative
Alaska Association of School Boards
The Ketchikan trial, which has constitutional implications, took two days, ending Wednesday. The lawsuit can be read at this link:
Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson has hired Tyler Andrews as the human resources director for the Municipality of Anchorage. The previous HR director, Niki Tshibaka resigned in February, citing an “increasingly toxic, hostile, and demoralizing work environment.”
Andrews has over 27 years of human resources, labor relations, management, safety, and communications experience in the private and public sector working for Chugach Electric Association, Alaska Communications Services, City of Ketchikan, and the State of Alaska.
“Tyler’s range of experience in labor relations, human resources, customer service, communications, and safety show his ability to lead the Municipality’s Human Resources Department,” Bronson said.“I look forward to working with him and our great staff in Human Resources to help every current and new employee be successful city wide.”
Andrews has a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and has served as a management member of the Alaska Labor Relations Agency since 2008. His start date will be May 8, and he must be confirmed by the Anchorage Assembly to become permanent.
A bill to prevent the government from prohibiting sales of guns and ammunition during government-declared emergencies has passed the House.
House Bill 61 is a response to situations that occurred throughout the country during the Covid‐19 pandemic, with the various declared emergency provisions that shuttered many businesses.
In at least five states, including Alaska, and the Municipality of Anchorage, firearms retailers were arbitrarily closed by governors and mayors.
When it comes to firearms Alaska is different compared to most other states, the bill sponsor House Speaker Cathy Tilton said. Firearm use for protection and subsistence predates Alaska’s statehood and the application of the Second Amendment.
HB 61 reaffirms Alaskans’ right to survive and protect themselves, along with their rights granted to them through the Second Amendment.
HB 61 stipulates that the state, municipalities, and other instrumentalities of the state may not implement new restrictions to access firearms, ammunition, firearms accessories, or shooting ranges resulting from disaster declarations.
The bill also provides a civil remedy to Alaskans, should any of those entities adopt statutes, ordinances, or policies in violation of the provisions of this bill.
Voting against the Second Amendment rights of Alaskans were Rep. Jennie Armstrong of Anchorage, Rep. Ashley Carrick of Fairbanks, Rep. Alyse Gavin of Anchorage, Rep. Andrew Gray of Anchorage, Rep. Sarah Hannan of Juneau, Rep. Rebecca Himschoot of Sitka, Rep. Donna Mears of Anchorage, Rep. Genevieve Mina of Anchorage, and Rep. Andi Story of Juneau.
