This is the Babylon Bee Interview show. In this episode of the Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk to Austin Petersen. Austin Petersen ran for President in the 2016 election with the Libertarian Party and is the founder and chief editor for The Libertarian Republic Website. He is described as a secular dude bro that is Pro life and finds more in common with many Christian Conservatives than those in his own party. Kyle and Ethan test Austin on his Libertarian views, especially in terms of Trump policies, Ferret ownership, and how often he prays to the Libertarian father, Ron Paul. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans. This episode is brought to you by Faithful Counseling. Get 10% off your first month. Topics Discussed Election Day How many times does Austin show reverence toward Ron Paul? Why Petersen voted for Trump Major difference between Dems and Republicans Conservatism is about losing slowly The Two kinds of libertarians Libertarian view on Ferret ownership Are Libertarians Eating babies? Secular argument toward Pro life Creation of incubation chambers Secular journey for Petersen Why Petersen prefers Christian Conservative to Atheists Communists Not speaking up is much worse Libertarian Government future is not good Senator Mike Lee Libertarians take on a social justice warrior perspective Subscriber Portion Problem with Petersen's Wiki page Living in a dumpster behind a quick drip Being a dude bro Most Garbage Libertarian website Why Petersen can't fit in to any political party 10 questions Good Kick fight story
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee interview show.
Welcome to a very special, exciting, unique episode of the Babylon B interview show.
We're going to change it up this time, and we're going to interview somebody that you might be interested in.
I'm Kyle.
I'm Ethan.
And yeah, so we just talked to a libertarian because Kyle's a libertarian.
Yeah, we're talking to Austin.
Yeah, I should give him an identity as a name.
Peterson.
We're talking to Austin Peterson.
Yeah.
He ran for president in 2016.
And I didn't know that.
You may not have known that.
But I will say this: as a guy who didn't know a lot about Austin Peterson in the beginning, he's a funny guy.
And it was a fun conversation.
And he's a sharp guy.
He is sharp.
It's nice when you're because you expect sharp on an interview.
You don't always get funny or witty, right?
You can get both.
So this is an entertaining conversation that's both intelligent and entertaining.
We do need to start screening our guests better, though, because we keep getting these guys that are way smarter than us.
Yeah, and funnier.
And we need them to be on the same.
I mean, they can be a little smarter than us, but they need to be like in that same where we all are using the same words.
Anybody is like at our levels not going to be any bit interest.
Like, they're not going to be a.
Well, not at our level, but I'm saying.
Or able to talk down to us.
Only people only want to hear from blue checks.
That's true.
So Austin Peterson is the founder and chief editor of the Libertarian Republic.
He ran for Senate in Missouri.
He ran in the libertarian presidential primaries and lost to Gary Johnson.
Sad.
He also produced a movie with Kevin Sorbo called Alongside Night.
That sounds like a Skinimax movie or something with that.
Alongside Night.
Alongside Night.
It's probably good because it's got a 2.3 out of 10 on IMDb.
Twitter, AP4Liberty.
The four is the number.
So yeah.
So this is a good chat.
Yeah, it's good.
You should enjoy it.
Check him out, AP4 Liberty on Twitter and The Libertarian Republic.
Here we go.
Boom.
Oh, he's a secular pro-life guy, too.
That's interesting.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
Now we'll go watch.
All right, everybody, we're sitting down here with someone who's really famous, Mr. Peterson.
Canadian psychologist.
Yeah.
He's big on Marxism.
Yeah, or he's sticking it to the Marxists.
That's what you said.
Here it looks younger.
He looks a little different than I expected, but.
So, yeah, we got him on.
How you doing?
Mr. Peterson.
Mr. Peterson.
Seize the means of Production What's up guys How you doing?
What's up, man?
How you doing?
So, how's it going?
You know, you say you're a libertarian, but you've got an American flag behind you, and that's troubling to me.
That's a quilt, it looks like.
You know, that is a national symbol of our slavery.
If you didn't know, the American flag actually flew over a slave nation longer than the Confederate flag did.
Got him.
If only you had a handheld mic so you could drop it.
Liberty, freedom, justice for all.
That's what I believe in, and I always have.
And, you know, the concept of libertarianism never frightened me, although many of the people who call themselves libertarians do.
But, you know, it's, you know, for the libertarians, sometimes it's dare to be stupid, right?
But, you know, it's not a requirement.
It's not mandatory.
Seems like it is.
Have you ever done DMT?
No, but I've had a lot of libertarians ask me if I would do VMG DMT.
No.
Yeah.
Who are some of the dumbest libertarians you've met?
Hmm, man.
I don't know.
You know what's weird is that even Vermin Supreme, you think he's not dumb.
You get close to him, you start talking to him, and all of a sudden he starts talking in a low voice about distribution plans, distributionism.
And I'm kind of like, oh, God.
So, you know, it's some of the ones you think.
Maybe Gary Johnson.
I mean, you don't have to name names.
You can just be like, this guy one time.
Just kidding.
Mushrooms.
I met Vermin Supreme at an underground libertarian drug den.
And I'm not joking.
Kyle does a ton of drugs.
I do not, but I, uh, yeah, he was a very smart guy.
Um, so if you had to pick between, it sounds like a pizza.
If you had to vote for Gary Johnson, Joe Jorgensen, or Hillary Clinton, who would you pick?
Adelaide Stevenson.
He's going to walk out of this like 60 minutes.
I think we didn't hear hoop.
Storm up.
And then he'll release the video before we can.
Oh, man.
Why'd you guys choose to do these on Election Day?
Man, what a dismal day.
I know.
We just do them on Tuesdays.
So Election Day, we were first.
We were here first.
Oh, gotcha.
Yeah, I kind of regretted it.
I was like, oh, shoot, it's Election Day.
I have to write a ton of articles.
And we need an interview.
We don't have any right now.
We were really desperate, so we asked you to come on.
No, it's sad because you check Twitter.
It's like, Austin is the biggest loser.
Hundreds of thousands of people all liking and tweeting at one time all about me.
I finally got all the attention I've wanted but I mean you should feel special We're interviewing you.
We're not interviewing the libertarian candidate for president, Joe Jorgensen.
She was begging.
She was begging.
Can we please come on the show?
No.
Like, no.
We want to talk to Austin.
Like a bat magnet.
Yeah.
Have you ever been bitten by a bat, Austin?
No, I dated one, though.
Oh.
Really?
Is that cool in libertarianism?
It's just a slur for an older lady.
Oh, like that.
Like that old bat.
Got it.
You know what gams are?
Yeah, she had nice gams.
Yes.
That old bat had nice gams.
So how many times a day do you pray facing Ron Paul's house?
Three times for the father, Ron, the son, Rand, and the holy Rothbard.
That's pretty good, man.
Well, it's like we prepared this.
We don't script any of them.
What do you got, Ethan?
Well, so, okay, you're libertarian, but like you are.
You voted for Trump, I saw.
Ah, yes.
That one costs me dearly.
I guess that's the interesting concept here.
Because most libertarians probably aren't, maybe.
I don't know.
I don't know libertarians.
Kyle is the more libertarian guy here.
He hangs out with Vermin Supreme in drug dens.
Right.
I just see him on the internet like other people.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, it's hard to, on a serious note, you know, it's difficult to go back on things that you said.
You know, the typical kind of attitude you get from people is to kind of double, triple, quadruple down on criticisms rather than try and maybe reevaluate some of the statements that they've made.
And I'm the kind of person who, you know, being secular, I'm always looking for a way to play devil's advocate, even on myself.
And I think that I was wrong about some things that I said about Trump.
And he proved me wrong about that.
And then I realized that looking at the policies of President Trump in comparison to the left, that it put to a lie the idea that there was no difference between the two parties.
Coronavirus, the COVID-19 pandemic, showed that there was a major difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties.
You would have rather lived in a red state under a red gift state governor during the pandemic.
And those things all together, combined with President Trump's very liberty-oriented record compared to his predecessors, made me change my mind.
That and when I tried to find myself in a scenario where I could say, okay, I'm going to vote third party this year, I thought, well, it's every reason that I have found was actually a selfish reason.
It was that I didn't want to look bad, right?
I didn't want to be embarrassed amongst my friends or former friends, many of them.
And I also realized that I had to get over my own selfish interests, my own ideological interests, and realize Donald Trump may not want to end the Federal Reserve System today, but nobody really does that has any chance of winning.
And maybe it's time for me to put my narrow ideological interests aside and do what I think is best for the country right now.
And sometimes libertarians struggle with that because it's me, what we want.
You know, if you don't do what I want exactly, then, you know, you're gone.
So, you know, that was not an easy decision for me to make.
But some of the people that I care for very dearly on left and right, who I trust, are voting for Trump.
Somebody on the right of me, who was a Trump, not a Trump fan, you know, said that he's voting for Trump, and it kind of shocked me.
And then when a liberal friend of mine said the same thing, I was like, oh, what is going on here?
So, you know, I had to reevaluate my beliefs as well.
And so I ended up voting for the Cheeto man today.
So, yeah, I'm in a similar vote.
You know, I haven't made the decision to actually go vote for him.
But it's like all the rhetoric from libertarians and the left and concerned Republicans during the 2016 election was like, yeah, Trump's getting elected and we're going to go to nuclear war with China or North Korea within days.
And that's what it felt like.
And it's been very shocking all the pro-liberty policies that he's espoused.
I don't know if he's accidentally stumbling into them or if it's part of some plan on his part or it's just because he's not from Washington, D.C., so he doesn't get the whole imperialistic approach to things.
No, I get that.
I had that same impression.
It's that I can't tell whether he's doing this on purpose or whether he's doing it on an accident.
A lot of people criticize, for example, how he picks the Supreme Court pick, saying this was handed to him from the Heritage Foundation.
But it's kind of like it annoys me because it's kind of like, all right, I remember being a kid in math class and getting the right answer.
And they're like, show me your work.
How did you get to the answer?
And I'm like, oh, I just want to get the right answer.
Just, can I just be happy?
I have the right answer because I've had nothing before.
We've got nothing past, nothing we believed in for years and years, my entire life.
You know, my entire 39 years.
Did I look at a president and go, oh, wow, we're actually getting some limited government stuff across the line?
Okay, you don't have to show me your work.
As a matter of fact, I don't want to see her know it anymore.
Just more freedom bit by bit.
Keep fighting the left.
And fighting the left as the left is right now, as the caricature of a bad guy that they have become, I think, is in itself a win for liberty.
Just being a successful fighter against the left.
You'll see a lot of Republicans don't like Trump because he's very successful in fighting the left.
Conservatism for years has been about losing slowly.
I mean, even during the Buckley years, conservatives said, you know, our job is to stand athwart history and say, stop, and then lose slowly for years and years.
And finally, here's someone who's actually winning fights against the left and advancing the opposite direction.
So I'm like, okay, I'll wear the team jersey for, you know, for as long as this goes on.
You know what I mean?
I figured Trump just like he wants to be able to get to the end of his presidency and be like, ha ha, successful.
I told you so.
I did it.
And his measure of that is the economy is good.
I assume.
Like he just looks at that mainly.
It feels like to me, all the other stuff is like serving as a base.
Good for me.
Good for you.
Good for everybody.
I mean, there's two different.
Somebody tweeted the other day.
There's two kinds of libertarians when it comes to Trump.
There are libertarians who are voting for him because they have investments, 401k, stock, Roth IRA.
And then there are libertarians who are not voting for him who live in their parents' basements, who don't have money or who don't want to invest it in the future.
I know a lot of libertarians like that.
They're perfectly nice people, but it's very easy to remain above politics when you don't have any guns, don't have any money, don't have any property, don't have any land.
And it's like, you know, sometimes libertarians will be like, well, you should have to have, you know, property or whatever to go back to the Constitution to vote.
You have to be able to have property.
I'm like, well, that's like 90% of libertarians.
No libertarian is going to be able to vote if you had to have property.
And too, is like a lot of times libertarians will lecture me, especially the ones who are parts of institutions who are part of this institution, that institution.
And it's like, you're a non-profit.
I work in a lot of times the profits of capitalism don't make any profits from capitalism, right?
They're non-profits.
Non-profit profits.
What's the libertarian position on private ferret ownership?
Illegal.
It's a violation of the non-aggression principle for you to invade my nose with that smell.
I did not consent to smell the ferret.
And they're rotten.
Putrid microwaved honey.
It does.
They smell bad.
I didn't know they smelled bad.
I had a hippie roommate that owned a ferret, and this thing would, he let it run loose in the house, so it just pee everywhere.
It leaves this horrible, like, it's like a putrid honey, microwaved honey smell.
And, but I had this chair I rest in at the end of the day.
And when I rest in this chair, being a larger man, you know, and I think it happens a lot of guys, your pants and your shirt separate and kind of your back area, your apex kind of shows.
The ferret would get into the chair, climb up, and I could feel its nose hitting me at the top of my butt crack and just start biting.
This is like going to do that Richard Gere story where he did the thing with the hamster.
It's as far as it went.
Didn't go deeper.
But one day I locked the ferret in the fireplace one day.
It wasn't lit, but I put a sign and said, next time it will be lit.
He came home and found the ferret lock in this cave in the fireplace.
He's so sick of it.
Sorry, stories, man.
I got stories.
What's the libertarian position on locking a ferret in a fireplace?
You know what?
It's the question of the rights of animals, right?
So Murray Rothbard said the animals have no rights until the day they walk down the street and demand them.
But I had another friend who says that rights should come based on how intelligent you are, but then pigs are super intelligent and they make bacon.
So I don't know.
I think I'm a Rothbardian on that one.
If you can eat it, you know, if it can't fight back, you can eat it.
Like a child.
Babies.
You're pretty much a libertarian, Ethan.
Locking parents in the fireplace.
Babies can't fight back.
It was a warning.
I don't know if I really would have done it, but that would have been interesting to see the way it would wriggle if I didn't light it.
It'd be wild.
And that reminds me.
That's probably something you guys probably want to talk about: the eating the baby thing.
Don't eat babies.
Don't abort the babies.
That was probably something you wanted to talk about.
Babies.
Oh, yeah, that's right on our list here about eating babies.
We had a question.
What's the libertarian position on eating babies?
So good job predicting that one.
Yeah, what's the deal?
I've got a lot of, no, I've got a lot of Republican friends who would be libertarians, except they think libertarians are all pro-choice.
So take it away, Austin.
Yeah, it's tough.
I mean, I'm in an awkward position here because I think, if I'm being straight with you, probably 51% at least, maybe 60%, somewhere between 51 and 60% of libertarians probably are that way.
And I can respect their instinct to be afraid of government intervention into someone's personal life in such a way, while also disagreeing with them because there are a host of other factors involved that I think take precedence over that concept of like, don't touch me or my body, because they refuse to acknowledge that there are two bodies.
And for me, the journey to pro-life libertarianism started with Ron Paul and with Judge Napolitano, both Christian libertarians.
And the judge and I would go over this for hours and hours after shows and talk about it at work about his Catholic argumentations.
And I found those compelling, but they weren't as compelling as when I started to hear secular arguments for pro-life.
People like Christopher Hitchens arguing for the personhood of the unborn.
And even Bill Maher, one time on his show, said, like, you know, at some point, it's wrong to kill it.
And the question is, is it a human being?
And I think you cannot deny that that is a human being.
So therefore, we're talking about two individuals.
The other individual's rights have to be considered.
If you ask any Democrat, even, I think the majority of Democrats don't believe in partial birth, abortion, denied mouth.
There are a lot of Democrats, maybe the majority of Democrats believe, yes, abortion all the way to nine months.
But if you ask any Democrat in Missouri, for example, or somebody who's not in California or New York as like the hard left, they'll say, well, maybe the first three months, if you can take a pill, that's fine.
But after three months or so on, then it really is a question of murder.
So for me, it's, you know, the problem is, is that first three months where, you know, libertarians will disagree on the conception question of life.
And I have not been able to find a good answer for when does life begin.
However, if I don't know, I think the smartest thing to do is to err, make an error.
If you're going to make an error, make an error on the side of life, protect life, because that way, rather than taking the opposite approach, I think you're looking at a civilizational positivist kind of a view.
You're looking at the continuation of civilization and of human civilization and of life.
It should all be pro-life.
And we should look for a way to reduce the number of abortions.
And if you're not, I think you can find a foundational moral argument that is secular that you can arrive at based on triangulation of principles that I think for libertarians, I think unequivocally, equivocally, the answers all line up on the side of life, even if there are some serious considerations that I listen to from my friends on the other side, and there are serious problems that we face.
Like, for example, Venezuela has outlawed abortion unilaterally across the country, and they do have those health problems, right, of people seeking out black market abortions.
So, you know, to be pro-life, I think you're going to have to be more than pro-life.
You're also going to have to be pro-birth, right?
Pro-afterbirth and finding a way to protect those women and to foundationally help them get to a position where they can have that child safely and encourage adoption, too.
Adoption is an important issue that a lot of people don't talk about.
It's harder to adopt than a lot of people realize.
It's more expensive to adopt than people realize.
And when you start actually talking about making adoption easier, there are a lot of people, even on the right, who will say, whoa, we want some speed bumps for sure.
Okay, I understand that.
You don't want to give babies to somebody who's going to go sell it on the free market for heroin.
However, there might be ways to market.
Yeah, exactly.
There might be ways to make adoption easier without giving a baby to anybody who asked for one.
So for me, it's multiple moral and ethical problems.
But if you put all the pluses and minuses together, pro-life wins, I think, by a large margin, even with there being some dangers involved in it.
What do you think of Kanye West's plan to build giant Disneyland-like orphanages?
You hear that on Surah?
You know, something like that might happen.
Disneyland?
Yeah.
Well, here's a small story.
Your listeners might appreciate this, and you guys might appreciate this too.
You know, people are always like, well, the market, free market can never do this.
The free market could never solve this health problem.
The free market could never do this because there's just no incentive.
Well, I know that people won't like these ideas anymore because they are antiquated and we do have state funding for hospitals.
But the first incubators that were built for premature babies were done at the New Jersey Carnival.
And the doctor who came up with the incubation chambers for the premature babies set up a boardwalk display like it was a freak show.
And the people who would come in to look at the babies in these sort of steel chambers, whatever they're, I'm not sure what they were called, they would pay their admission fees to go and see the nurses who were getting paid by the doctor and scientist who created the premature babies incubation chamber.
And all of the money that came from people paying for the sort of circus show at the Atlantic City were there to go see the little babies in their chambers.
And many of them didn't have parents, and many of them were preemie babies who were dropped off.
But many of them were given good homes and good lives because people wanted to go and see the quote-unquote freak show of these tiny premature babies who were living in these little chambers.
And that's how we got the incubation chambers that we have today.
That was the very first sort of foundational creation of chambers for premature babies.
And that was all done for profit as a Catholicist venture.
And it was funded by people coming in to see the premature babies.
People look at that nowadays and they're like, oh, this is terrible.
How could you go and you pay?
How could somebody make money off of doing something like that?
But before we had all the excess of capitalism today, where we just have money flying out of our ears, this was the only way for them to be able to do that.
It wasn't like there was a trillion-dollar check that could go and get printed up and just pushed out to everybody.
Ah, stimulus.
They had to actually work and earn money to do things like that.
They had scant resources.
So that's one example.
But again, it's one of those things that if you share it with the American people, say, oh, that's cute.
No, government tax dollars should pay for this stuff.
So they like the bulk bins at Sprouts, but with babies.
Yes.
Yeah.
Free market babies.
I like it.
So baby Zeus, that's the answer.
Make counseling great again.
That's what I always say.
Yeah.
Because, man, it's really gone downhill lately.
Yeah.
All those atheist counselors, Satanist counselors, demonic counselors.
Yeah.
You don't want that.
So you're looking for a counselor that has read their Bible.
Yeah.
That knows what a Bible is.
Yeah, at least knows.
You can see it on their shelf.
Yeah.
It's like, oh, yeah, Jesus.
I've heard of that guy.
Right.
Things are hard right now.
Quarantine.
You may be locked down.
You might be depressed.
Depression's way up.
I feel sorry for people without families.
I don't think about that.
It's like, you're just like, I got nobody.
Yeah.
Imagine people locked in their houses for months with nobody.
Yeah.
What you might need is some faithful counseling.
Faithful counseling is online professional Christian counseling to deal with depression, stress, anxiety, crises of faith.
Correct.
You can text, you can chat, you can phone, you can video anything.
Because, you know, a lot of us, we have our certain method of communication we prefer.
I hate when people want to talk on the phone to me.
I would text a counselor.
Yeah, I like texting.
I don't know if I want to go show up in person.
But it's affordable.
Faithfulcounseling.com slash Babylon B. Listeners get 10% off your first month.
Yeah.
Do you think counselors use emojis?
Probably lots of smileys.
Yeah.
But they probably wouldn't send a lot of like crying.
Well, maybe they're trying to sympathize.
Like you're like, oh, I'm so sad today.
And they would send the sad.
I would feel good about that.
I feel weird about a counselor using emojis, but it's to each their own.
They probably accommodate what they're doing.
But we're not guaranteeing that they use emojis because we do anything.
We don't know.
But that's not a guarantee that they make.
But you can get started today.
Faithfulcounseling.com/slash Babylon B. Do it now.
Now.
But I'm really curious.
I'm fascinated by secular pro-life people.
Do you consider yourself secular?
Are you secular?
Secular.
Yeah, very, very openly, very, very openly so.
You know, I was raised Southern Baptist, and I read the Bible six times.
And by the sixth time, I was kind of like, okay, been there, done that.
And I thought it was seven times.
Yeah, I wasn't about to do it again.
Because I got bored in church and it was the same stories.
And they would catch me bringing in other books sometimes because I would just read and read and read.
And so finally, I had to read the Bible because they wouldn't let me read anything else.
And, you know, I was raised on the being the literal word of God, literal truth.
And then as I got older, I had trouble finding the evidence that would coordinate with the stories.
And eventually I just sort of fell away from it.
And it wasn't like I was mistreated because I felt like my church family was really good to me.
When I was a young man, my mother passed away.
I was like 14 or 15.
And my church family treated us like gold.
They were there for us.
And even my pastor actually wrote to me years later and said, is it my fault and stuff?
And I was like, no, no.
It was just, it was these moral questions of like, you know, whence cometh evil, right?
The old, you know, Epicurus riddle of like questioning of like the, what's the word, the fallibility question of a higher power.
And so to me, I just feel like it's, it's unknowable, which would make me an agnostic, but I also actively don't believe.
So that makes me an unbeliever, right?
So I feel like in a way I'm free, but I'm also trapped because all of my other non-believer friends, or at least people that I know, are all statist communists.
And I prefer Christians who are conservatives to communists who are atheists.
Because just like Thomas Jefferson said, if it neither picks my pocket or breaks my leg, it doesn't bother me.
You know, Christians and especially Jews.
Jews, I love Jews because Jews will leave you alone.
But the...
We're knowing.
The...
Yes, the Jews are, I love the Jews, but they will mostly leave you alone.
But if you want to be a Christian, people are like, okay, well, if you're not a Christian, you're going to hell.
Well, okay, fine.
But you can't make me do anything, right?
But the government can.
Communism can.
Communism is an authoritarian philosophy.
Whereas Christianity is love thy neighbor as you love thyself, right?
Like the teachings of Jesus.
I find a lot there to be admired.
And I certainly learned a lot from the life and tales and stories of Jesus.
And I think there's something there I will definitely teach my children and ensure that they read the Bible because reading the Bible and understanding it is understanding Western civilization.
It's the backbone.
It's the spine of our civilization.
And even when I would tell stories out on the campaign trail, sometimes people would be confused because I would quote the Bible and use biblical tales to sort of reinforce the concepts of freedom because I think Jesus liked him some freedom too.
And he was a pretty free-spirited guy, if you could say so.
Yeah, well, you're in good company because we prefer conservative atheists to progressive Christians.
That's true.
Oh, man, those are the worst.
Oh, my God.
Jesus was a communist.
You're a Christian.
You're a follower of his, and even I know that ain't right.
Yeah, but it's true.
We found there's these strange alliances reforming where atheists will come on our show.
Not even if they're, they don't have to be conservative or libertarian.
They're just like, I hate leftism, and they'll come on our show.
And progressive Christians will stay away from us because it's, you know, there's this weird alignment happening where we feel more aligned with people who agree with us politically, which is weird for us.
There has been a strange realignment.
I've noticed that as well.
My brother is also secular, and he is more of the left bent, but he has been driven out of his community because he is and is now no longer considered an ally.
He's, you know, he's LGBT.
He's the G.
And if you do not conform to what the T in LGBT says for the community, because the T now dominates the community.
The minority of a minority of a minority now dominates this very large and diverse community.
And the fact that if you disagree with the T part of the LGBT on questions of science, then you're no longer an ally and they run you out of the movement.
So it's kind of what libertarians do.
You're not a real libertarian, right?
You're not a real ally.
But thankfully, if the libertarian movement is an example of that, unfortunately, that's a sign that you're definitely on the road to disaster and to continued loss.
So perhaps the election tonight, that sort of polarization will result in a Donald Trump victory tonight from your lips to God's ears.
You're going to sound really dumb when this comes out if Trump lost.
You know what?
That's the thing is that is the crappy thing about taking a stand is when you actually do come out for what you believe.
It's so much easier to just be like, oh, I'm not really into politics, you know.
But it's tough because when you take a stand, you lose.
It's just like, you know, running for president.
Like when I ran for president in 2016, like I got my face rubbed in the dirt.
Like that's, there's two or three whole days that you have to spend with everybody talking about what a loser you are.
And for the rest of my life, I am a presidential loser.
Ha I still feel kind of cool about it, though, because I did it.
They didn't.
And I've had that experience of a lifetime.
So yeah, you have to take risks, risks to lose, risks to say what you believe.
And there will be consequences to that.
But I think that in the long run, that the consequences of not speaking up are much worse.
Well, you got time.
I mean, you're not even, are you anywhere near 78?
No, no, I'm not.
That's the age we start putting people in.
Yeah, exactly.
You just need to be more seasoned.
You jumped the gun, man.
Maybe you waited until you were 80.
Maybe it was some of his positions on things that we need to test him on.
It was 2016.
People who don't have any clue who I am are like, oh, yeah, we should do it.
They're like, you ran for president?
And I'm like, yeah, you know, it was 2016.
Come on.
Like, if there was ever a year to run for president, 2016 was it.
That's true.
Yeah, it would have been less weird if you had won than what actually happened.
You had the right idea.
Are we going to test him on?
Yeah, so we need to test you on your positions.
Maybe this will help you figure out why you lost.
All right.
Brutal, Ethan.
So we have a little bit of a litmus test.
We already tested him on a private ferret ownership.
Yeah, but we got more.
Do you want to do those or do you want to do the highlighted one?
Okay, so all of them.
Okay.
Well, let's start with yellow.
We have a litmus test for if you're a good person or not.
And so we just need you to affirm or deny each of these statements.
We just thought of these this morning.
You can elaborate a little if you want, but just affirm or deny.
Okay, number one, black lives matter.
If it's capitalized, no.
If it's lowercase, yes.
Black is supposed to always be capitalized now.
Yeah, I'm not down with that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Science is real.
Yes.
Water is life.
This is a very controversial one.
Yes.
Okay.
Love is love.
Yes.
Women's rights are human rights.
The way to see this for it, human ferret love.
No.
No.
Are you saying no to women's rights or humans or human rights?
No.
Yes.
No.
Do you believe any humans are illegal?
No.
Kindness is never wasted.
Can kindness ever be wasted?
Very wrong.
Wrong.
All right.
And here's the big one.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Literally it.
No.
No.
Like if a spider gets it.
Sometimes the injustice happens, but that doesn't mean it happens everywhere.
Or it's not really.
It's not a threat everywhere.
Injustice is happening in places around the world.
That doesn't necessarily mean that there's a threat to justice here.
Are you sitting in one of those expensive gaming chairs right now?
This is my gamer chair that helps me makes me better at video games.
The advertisement said if I bought this chair, that would be better at games.
So I got this, and now I'm like a full-blown colonel on Call of Duty Warzone.
And so, yes, this is my epic gamer chair.
Awesome.
Do you do any video game streaming, any Twitch?
I did, but it's kind of like it's one of those scenarios where it's like, I have to compete with like kids who make millions of dollars and are way like better than I am at these games, and they can see better than me.
So I don't even try and compete.
I did like a little bit of like history sort of like educational game kind of thing, which of course was about as popular as you can imagine something like that would be.
So I just kind of gave it up and I just do it for my own fun.
We missed an important one.
How do you pronounce GIF?
Choosy programmers choose GIF.
You going with JIF?
What?
Yeah, because that's over.
Correct.
Created the work.
I was on board with you until the gif.
All right.
Well, interview's over.
Yeah.
Thanks for coming on.
Is there a future for the Libertarian Party or should they merge with the Republicans?
What's the future for the old LP?
On the current path, there's no future for the Libertarian Party.
I think the best chance for people who believe in limited government and more personal freedom is through the Republican Party.
And the reason why is because that is what we have seen in the past.
Rand Paul, Thomas Massey, Mike Lee.
I'll even give Ted Cruz some credit because even though Ted Cruz, a lot of libertarians will criticize him on maybe his vote on surveillance things, right?
Or war issues of foreign policy.
Yeah, they'll say he's not one of us.
I know enough Ted Cruz people that I think his movement as a whole is largely libertarian.
And so I would count Ted Cruz as sort of one of us, but we're going to give him a wedgie every once in a while and tell him to lighten up and stop it with the theatrics.
Because Ted Cruz, he does differ with us on a few issues, but he's kind of on the edges with us.
But Senator Mike Lee, I mean, he doesn't get enough credit.
Libertarians kind of ignore him because he's so boring.
But I mean, he is full-blown libertarian.
There was only one time I think I ever disagreed with him on a vote about something, and it was about online gaming, gaming.
And, you know, he lives out in Utah and he's a Mormon.
So, you know, you get a free pass for me every once in a while.
You know, my concern is just that libertarians seem to kind of want to take the path of Justin Amash.
And rather than work with people that are similar to us that we disagree with on some very important things, you know, it's kind of a take-your-ball and go-home approach.
And you could accuse me of the same thing with the Libertarian Party, but I'll just say that having been in the Libertarian Party for a while, people like myself are not welcome.
And if people who are, you know, don't scare the muggles, that's not a good sign because I am a true libertarian, but I'm also not going to terrify your grandmother or your mother.
So there's this kind of conflict where it's like, and Murray Rothbard even talked about this in the settings where there's a desire on the part of Libertarian Party people to be counterculture.
If libertarianism goes mainstream, then they won't be able to control it.
And libertarians, ironically, want to, Libertarian Party members, want to control libertarianism and sort of like be the king of their poop kingdoms and pile up all their poop on top of their head and say, ah, yes, I have no friends, but I am the king.
Is that a known analogy?
Or do you poop kingdom?
I like that.
You know, the Republicans, you know, they're like, yeah, it's trash, but come on in.
You know what I mean?
Like, have a, you know what I mean?
Like, take a take a bite of that sandwich over there.
You want some, you want a flower bag?
Okay, take a terrible beer.
Okay.
But at least they invite you over.
They'll sit down.
They won't make you wear a mask.
They won't lecture you.
You know, you'll like sometimes I feel like I was going back to church when I was at Libertarian Party meetings.
And if you didn't say, you know, you're hail Marys and your hail Rothbards and drink Bloody Marys, well, then, you know, you weren't part of the club.
And it's like, okay, you're not one of us.
They were always looking for heretics.
It reminded me a lot of the Inquisition.
The Libertarian Inquisition was out in full force at all times.
It also reminded me of cancel culture.
And the things that really just turned me off about the Libertarian Party is that it's one thing to say that platforms like Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or whatever have a right to have anyone that they want on their platform, have any kind of speech on their own platform because it's a free market and they own those private companies.
It's one thing to say that.
It's another thing to delight in it.
It's another thing to revel in it.
It's another thing to encourage this cancel culture.
And so the Libertarian Party members, I think, largely take that social justice warrior tack versus a culture of freedom because there is the freedom under the law and there is the culture of freedom.
And you should support a culture of freedom as well.
Let Alex Jones talk about the lizard people all he wants.
Let the crazy white nationalists like Richard Spencer go out and talk about how they're voting for Joe Biden all they want.
Let the fools out themselves.
Let all of the idiots say everything that they want to say whenever they want to say it so that we can all determine what is, you know, who's, you know, who's who and what's what, rather than do what we have done, which is, you know, cancel culture driving people underground.
You know, if Donald Trump wins today, it's because people were too afraid to answer, you know, a poll saying that they were going to vote for him because people like Robert Reich has said that they're going to put people like us in camps.
So, you know, maybe they didn't say that they were going to do it because, you know, a lot of people are just not like people like us.
You know, like they just want to, they want to be able to provide for their families and they want to be able to, you know, to live their lives free of politics.
And you know what?
That is an American freedom.
You should be able to be free of politics and escape it if you want.
And it's unfortunate that too many people think that they have to interject what their belief system they have to be beaming it into your brain at all times.
They cannot let people alone, which is ironic because libertarians are all about leaving people alone.
And yet these libertarians just will not leave people alone.
You must be like us.
You must think like us.
It does get frustrating sometimes.
But, you know, you got to break out of the pro-rank programming and act a little different, you know, act a little weird amongst the weirdos and hopefully lead a few onto greener pastures.
And, you know, I've raised a lot of young baby libertarians up to be very successful activists.
And so, you know, for me, the victory wasn't to become president of the United States in 2016.
The victory was to say, wow, I'm going to get the libertarians to be a little bit more professional and I'm going to get the Ted Cruz people to see that there is a libertarian who is pro-life and who's not crazy so that the people will stop hating libertarians so much and then libertarians will stop hating themselves so much.
And I think that that kind of rising tide lifts all doats thing, right?
So unfortunately, because of what happened in 2016, a lot of people, I think, did turn their backs on libertarianism.
And I kind of blame Gary Johnson, but more so the naked fat dancing guy for a lot of the young and unironically embracing images of I'd rather have fascism than naked fat dancing guys, you know?
So yeah.
So like the supreme absolute best libertarian candidate would be like naked dancing person with boot on head bit by bat.
Correct.
Yes.
And you'd be all fat or not fat.
Right.
Coronavirus.
Do you agree that DMT?
Do you agree that it is not enough to be passively not racist and we must be actively anti-racist?
No.
And the reason why is because it becomes a rabbit hole kind of a scenario where it's like you are constantly required to agitate for something rather than to just not engage.
And also, my problem with that statement is that to me, it shows how ignorant so many libertarians are in that they haven't read the communist manifesto.
They haven't read the literature of their opponents.
This is a really weird story.
I'll just tell it to you real briefly.
I went on a bachelor party retreat one weekend.
And when I got there, it was this house out in the woods.
And it was apparently a, they called it an orphanage, right?
A home for wayward kids.
But when we got there and set up for the Bachelor Party and stuff, I started reading all this literature.
And it turns out that it was a communist propaganda indoctrination center.
They would take kids who were orphans and who didn't have kids and give them a place to live and teach them the ways of social justice.
And one of the pamphlets that was there was about anti-racism and the long line of academic literature based around the concept of anti-racism.
And this is what leftist academics have been working on for a few decades now: this concept of you must be anti-racist.
And anti-racism, as defined in those communist pamphlets I've read, was anti-capitalist and anti-white.
It was the concept of original sin for white people that didn't exist for any of the other races.
Whereas Christianity is everybody has fallen, original sin for all humans.
Anti-racism is original sin, but just for white people.
And so to me, the problem with that statement is that when libertarians use that, it's fine.
Like, yeah, racism is bad.
We don't want people to be racism.
And yeah, we should fight against racism morally by speaking out against it.
But it showed to me that libertarians are not reading what our enemies are writing and what they say, because I feel like if you actually were to share some of that literature, most libertarians would be like, ooh, well, that's not what I believe, right?
The whole anti-racism thing sounds like you have to fight bad racism with good racism.
Correct.
That's yes.
There's actual academic literature about that.
You know, libertarians, libertarians can say all they want.
Well, that's not how I define it.
And I'm like, okay, well, it's sort of like when libertarians will say, well, that's not what the word liberal really means.
I'm like, okay, well, you know, that may be true, but it doesn't matter.
It didn't matter because the American people thought you meant liberal.
They thought you meant, you know, socialists.
They thought you meant, you know, authoritarian status.
They thought you meant Hillary Clinton, not classical liberal, not Frederick Bastiat, not, you know, the founding fathers.
That's just, that's a shame, right?
I'd like to take the word liberal back.
You know, I wish anti-racist just meant I'm against racism, but that's not what those words mean anymore.
So this bachelor party, you're like on Airbnb.
This place is like, yeah, we got an extra room.
It's real nice.
Then you go there and it's like at a communist orphanage indoctrination camp going on.
Yeah, it's the weirdest thing ever.
It's active.
Yeah, it was a halfway house and they even got government funds because they were doing nonprofit work.
These youngsters were there, these young, impressionable kids.
I pictured in my head, you know, just these 12 and 13 year olds and they were learning how to hate cops.
There was literature there about how cops were pigs or photographs in there about police officers where there were pigs.
And it was like stuff that you'd see in the Black Panther house from the 1970s or that scene in Forrest Gump.
It was like that.
The way that you guys strapped it, I thought it was like a historical place where it had happened and now they were making it like an Airbnb.
It was active.
That was what was so shocking to me was that it was the summer that we had the Bachelor Party.
But I mean, during the typical school year, it operated a function like a school and an orphanage and a halfway house.
And it was a deliberate indoctrination center by the local social democrats to bring young people in and to indoctrinate them in the ways of Marxism and teaching them to hate cops and to hate white people.
And there were a lot of communist heroes, people from other country.
It was very all about immigrants and bringing in immigration and so that we could have more communists and stuff.
And it was just very disturbing kind of a deal.
I always thought that it would be really cool for somebody to go in there, like pull the James O'Keefe and like find some of that stuff and publicize it, let people know that that's going on because our taxpayer dollars are paying for that.
And I think a lot of people will probably be interested to find out about it.
What's your position on throwing commies out of helicopters?
Well, so I'm against the death penalty ultimately.
You know, if you're in a scenario where you're like, it's war, I think even like Admiral Chester Nimitz argued in the Nuremberg trials for Carl Dernitz, who was the head of the Navy,
the Kriegs Marine during World War II, because there was a scenario where it was the Kriegs Marine sailors or the civilians, and they chose to protect only the sailors and they let the civilians die and all that kind of scenario.
So in a scenario where their life is oppositional to yours, then perhaps you could kill the prisoners of war when you're at war.
But for the most part, I think, yeah, death penalty is bad.
The government killing people is bad.
And as long as you're not a clear and present danger to somebody, then once we've got you in a cage, then we should just kind of keep you there and put you away.
So no communists being thrown from helicopters unless I'm in the helicopter and you're trying to kill me, in which case I will throw you out of that helicopter.
I don't care if you're a communist or not.
Or if the maximum weight for the helicopter has been exceeded by all the passengers, you throw the commie out first.
And you see, like, that is funny that you say that because, you know, I had those lifeboat scenarios or things that I've been talking to libertarians about for quite some time.
For that, you know, the fall of Saigon, a great example.
You know, you're not talking about, you know, communists here.
You're talking about your American allies and people who have helped you.
And you're in a scenario where it's an oppositional scenario.
Your life is versus theirs.
So what does the non-aggression principle have to say about the fall of Saigon?
And, you know, these are problems that basement dwellers, you know, sort of like armchair philosophers, you know, can't contend with because they are very real.
They are very immediate challenges and problems with the libertarian philosophy.
And there are just no easy answers to things like that.
You know, and sometimes I think, you know, in our own bubble in Liberty Land, we kind of forget the real world scenarios that cause people to do things like drop nuclear bombs, right?
So, for example, my libertarian friends think I'm a heretic because I think that the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally justified.
I say morally justified.
And that drives them crazy because they're like, oh, you're killing civilians.
I'm like, yes, but you understand, like, this is an oppositional question of life or death.
We're talking about an existential threat.
If it's a threat, if I have to do this to protect my life, your life, and the lives of my family and friends and people of my country, then I think it's morally justified.
But to them, to a lot of like doctrinaire libertarians who would say, well, the non-aggression principle, you can never ever take innocent life whenever, for whatever reason, I think that they aren't understanding sometimes the oppositional factor in such.
And, you know, then you could even narrow that down to a question of perhaps, you know, if it's the, if a mother is going into birth and the baby is going to, you know, kill the childbirth is going to kill the mother, there might be a scenario where the father or the mother might have to determine who's going to live and who's going to die.
Those are real oppositional challenges to some of the fundamental philosophy of libertarians.
And there are no easy answers to things like that.
People want simple 140-character tweet responses to these major problems.
And I just think that they aren't there.
In that scenario, it'd be nice to know if the baby's going to be a communist or not.
Yeah, because then you might.
Very true.
Yeah.
I tweeted yesterday.
I was like, if my future kids are gay, that's okay, as long as they're not a Democrat.
So Trolley's going down the tracks and it's heading right at Joe Jorgensen.
You're holding the lever and you can change it to go hit Gary Johnson instead.
That's a real oppositional problem that you might face.
What do you do?
I will say with a tear in my eye.
I am so sorry.
And somebody's going to die that day.
I'm going to save the women and children first.
All right.
Well, are we ready for subscriber portion?
Subscriber portion.
Okay.
We're going to move into our exclusive subscriber segment.
See you later, freeloaders.
You can check out, well, we'll talk about it in the beginning, but you can check out Austin Peterson site, Austin Peterson's site, The Libertarian Republic.
Yeah?
Is that where we can find good stuff about you?
Or just look them up on Wikipedia.
I'm sure it's actually.
Yeah, it's very terrible.
It's very bad.
If you guys have read it, it's pretty funny.
My haters wrote it for sure.
Oh, yeah.
I can't wait to hear about this.
Let's go to our subscriber portion.
Let's go.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
What's wrong with your wiki page?
What's the most garbage libertarian blog or news site out there?
That's a great question.
This says that you are described as an eager libertarian dude bro on the make.
Correct.
You're a dude bro?
Like DC Talk or something?
DC Talk.
Yes, DC Talked.
Jesus Freak.
Yes.
What would people think if they found that Jesus freaked out?
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