Nick Sarwark and James Smith dissect the Libertarian Party's Oxford debate victory, analyzing Gary Johnson's 2016 failure against media hostility versus policy purity. They clash over Bill Weld's pro-war legacy compared to major party figures, debate whether racism disqualifies candidates more than war support, and scrutinize the party's stance on white nationalism following Charlottesville. The conversation covers the Loving v. Virginia ruling, immigration estimates ranging from 12 to 30 million, and accusations of virtue signaling regarding Tom Woods, ultimately questioning if ideological rigidity or pragmatic voter appeal better serves third-party survival. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Soho Forum Debate Recap00:06:21
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gas Digital Network.
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Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Tears your host, James Smith.
What is up, everybody?
There we go.
Second time's the charm.
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
It's a Wednesday one-on-one episode that I'm very much looking forward to.
Of course, last night I debated the chairman of the LP party, Nick Sarwak, and I guess LP Party is unnecessary to say.
The libertarian party.
The ATM machine.
Exactly.
There we go.
And today he was good enough to come into the show.
So thank you very much for coming.
Thanks for coming and doing the debate last night.
I had a good time.
I think you did as well.
I did.
I enjoyed it.
I felt good.
I don't like losing, but there's ways that I felt good about it.
Sure.
Well, I mean, look, it was an interesting room, and it was an interesting split at the end.
So what did it?
I don't have the numbers right in front of me.
It started, I believe, with 40% on my side.
You had 14.
14.
And it ended with me having 60 and I had 31.
Yeah.
So I more than doubled.
So I feel good about my performance.
Well, yeah, like as a percentage change, I did better.
Well, if you started with 1% and went to 3%, you'd be like, oh my God, exactly.
What happened here?
Now you're learning how the Libertarian Party does math.
Okay, I see this.
Wow.
So Gary Johnson is president by this logic.
He tripled, right?
Like he tripled the previous record over the last four decades.
It's not nothing.
Well, it's certainly not nothing.
But a lot of what we discussed last night is what exactly that really is.
And I don't want to completely spoil the debate because they are going to put it yet.
No, they take like a week or two before they put these things out.
For this one particularly, though, I got a lot of people, I'm sure you did too, who were like, who's streaming this?
Yeah, where's the live stream?
Why isn't it not watched?
It'll come out when it comes out.
One of the things I was very happy about last night, aside from the nuts and bolts of our debate, and why I really appreciate you doing the debate, is that what happened, for people who don't know, most people who listen to the show are familiar with the Soho Forum, great debate series run by libertarian boss Gene Epstein.
So they had booked Andrew Yang to come debate UBI.
And this was like a big deal.
It was one of the debates that was like the most talked about.
And Andrew Yang pulled out.
He's the only person who's ever pulled out of the Soho Forum.
Is it because his campaign was like they gave some very generic excuse, like scheduling type issues or something, but it was booked out, you know, like six months in advance or something like that.
So, you know, look, whatever it happens, my suspicion is that he found out who he was going to be debating.
Didn't want to be.
It's the, I'm blanking on his name right now, but he's the Irish libertarian guy who wrote a book on UBI.
Oh, okay.
And he is just.
Real smart.
I mean, not the guy you'd want to debate on the UBI.
But that's what makes a good debate.
Well, yes, exactly.
The worst thing that can happen to an idea is that it be inartfully defended, right?
That you have somebody who doesn't know what they're doing just screwing it up.
You want to have the best ideas on both sides if you want to educate your audience.
If that's the goal.
Right.
Then, you know, I think that's what I'm saying.
Well, certainly if what you're looking for is the truth, you'd want to get as good a, you know, as intelligent a person for both sides of the issue as possible.
Anyway, the point I was just making is that what was good about what was very good for the Soho Forum about this debate was it was a debate that had a lot of interest.
It was the fastest sellout they had ever had.
So it was cool that we came in and got a makeup, you know, in there.
So it felt like Gene didn't really feel the pain.
And apparently we sold out earlier than they had sold out in the past, too.
Yes.
Like our debate sold out.
It was a solid week and a half in advance.
Yes, it was the fastest sellout they had had until the Horton thing that they have to move.
They got Bill Crystal coming into debate Scott Horton, which of course that sold out like the first day or something like that.
I am neither Bill Crystal nor Scott Horton.
And frankly, neither are you.
Well, that's for sure.
That's for sure.
And I aspire to be one of them.
I will let you figure out which one that is.
You got to be careful about saying things like, all I'm going to say is that I want to be one of them.
Because it's funny.
People can sometimes misinterpret those kind of statements.
Okay, I'll give another hint.
I'll give it one more hint.
Not the blood-soaked war criminal, the other one.
I guess he's not technically a war criminal, but the cheerleader for war criminals.
So anyway, I really did enjoy it.
I've never done an Oxford-style debate before.
You and me both.
Yeah, so it's an interesting thing, right?
If you've never done it before, it's different than anything else.
So I've done a lot of debate.
I did 17 when I ran for mayor of Phoenix.
I've done in my third term as chair, so I've done that at least three times.
Oxford style is different because it's very rigid in format.
And there's rules, right?
There's rules to the game that if you're not familiar with them, it's a little uncomfortable.
Yeah.
No, I mean, it was definitely a learning experience for me.
I mean, the first big challenge that I thought that the first big hurdle was that I kind of started thinking about what I wanted to say.
And I realized pretty close to the debate that my opening statement, I had about 35 minutes.
And I was like, oh, wow, I've got to cut that down.
That's tough if it's 15.
Yeah.
So I was like, this is real.
I have to let a lot of stuff go.
And then the real challenging part is then you have a five-minute rebuttal to your 15-minute opening.
So you got five minutes to rebut 15 minutes.
And you kind of feel like, but I need 15 minutes to get away from the 10.
And then you sort of launch the Q ⁇ A and then you've got the closing.
And one of the things, you know, some of my friends were saying, do you have your opening statement written?
I was like, well, I got notes, but the nature of Oxford style is the proponent sets the frame.
Waking Up the Movement00:04:18
Yeah.
So I said, I've got notes, but until I know there's so many words in that proposition, until I know how you're defining them, I don't know what to say.
Well, right.
Because I have to wait for you to set the frame and then work within it.
It was a very broad proposition.
Right.
So I've seen propositions at the Soho Forum that are super narrow.
You know, like things like, while Social Security may not be good for the economy, it does not directly add to the deficit.
You know, like things that are like, okay, so you know exactly, you can pretty much write your opening remark, even if you're taking the negative in that debate.
In this debate, you don't really know exactly where I'm going to go with it.
And likewise, I felt that way for the rest of the debate.
I really wasn't exactly sure what your argument was going to be.
Also, because the debate is broad.
So I wasn't sure exactly where you were going to go with that.
Although it was within the realm of what I thought.
Well, and one of the challenges, and this is not just a challenge within our debate, it's a challenge within the Libertarian Party and the broader libertarian movement is there are the people that want to wake people up and there are the people that want to engage in politics, which is not necessarily about waking people up.
And when you want to do different things, the right answer for how to do it is going to be different.
That's the reason that sometimes we can't resolve these questions because it's about what our values are and what our goals are.
And so the right answer for waking people up is, you know, the ghost of Murray Rothbard, but the right answer for winning a ton of votes is Gary Johnson.
Yeah, well, but the thing is this, at least this is how I feel.
Maybe not the ghost of Murray Rothbard.
Well, I'm okay with that.
We do zombie Murray Rothbard.
Yeah, if Murray Rothbard was a ghost, I feel like he'd be.
Or he could be like Murray Rothbard's head.
Yeah, well, someday we might have that.
And he'd be a badass contrarian ghost, that's for sure.
But I think that what, look, if you take, say, before the 2016 campaign, it would almost, you'd look at the Ron Paul campaign and say, it'd be very easy to say, actually, there's really no conflict here between waking people up or getting votes.
The truth is that the guy who got the most votes was the guy who woke the most people up.
And in fact, that was Ron Paul.
He was doing both of them.
Now, Gary Johnson did get more votes than Ron Paul did.
And, you know, it's a little bit apples and oranges because you're comparing primaries to a general election.
Gary Johnson still has a significant lead on Ron Paul in general election votes.
Well, yes, that's a good point.
But I'm just saying it's apples and oranges because you're competing in the primary rather than a general.
But the other thing, and of course, this was somewhat discussed last night, is that what really led to Gary Johnson getting all of these votes?
And it seems, again, this is one of the things where it's almost impossible to prove for sure.
Right, it's counterfactual.
But it seems that, but not even counterfactual, I'm talking about what happened.
The thing is that you don't know exactly what's in everybody's mind when they vote.
But it does seem like, you know, you had these two candidates that were more despised.
I think the polling data shows them more despised than any two candidates who have ever run.
And then Gary Johnson is the third option there.
I think there's a lot of people who probably don't know anything about that.
I mean, George W. Bush was not a popular man.
But not as unpopular as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
But the Republicans had some serious problems with Barack Hussein, Obama.
Sure.
But I mean, if you're going to, hold on, if I'm talking about despised candidates and you're going to bring Barack Obama, the most charismatic human being on the planet into this, Barack Obama was never, never had the negatives Hillary Clinton had.
Well, no, no, not like, no.
I mean, the problem with Hillary Clinton, like her real problem is she's married to a charismatic politician.
There's another Clinton who's real good at that stuff, and so it creates too much contrast.
Like if that husband wasn't super charismatic, she wouldn't look as bad as a candidate.
You know that there are two Clintons that are in politics and one of them is really good at it and one of them can only win a carpet bagging seat in New York.
Hold on.
I agree with you that that accentuated her just terribleness.
Votes vs Principles00:03:41
But I don't know.
Here, Brian, real quick, just go to YouTube and type in Hillary Clinton.
Why am I not 50 points ahead?
Okay.
And you tell me that's a bit of a problem.
You really need to.
It's not even just the entitlement.
Just play this clip real quick.
I don't think you needed Bill Clinton next to her to make this look just horrifically unlikable.
And I'm not talking about even any of her god-awful policies, which are real problems.
I think that's a Romney clip that came from his fundraiser, where it just makes him look so out of touch.
It was bad.
The Romney clip was bad.
Do you have this, Brian?
All right.
It's not even that.
It's never going to happen.
But it's, it's, I mean, she was just, whew, was she not good at the political thing?
And obviously Donald Trump was.
Look, the point is that 2016 was a different type of election.
And if we're just putting a third party up there who's just the other option, what does that really get us?
Well, so it gets us a lot, you know, and obviously every day after the debate, you always come up with all the lines you should have said.
And my line that I should have said was it's apparent from our discussion that running candidates with views like Gary Johnson and Bill Weld will not get me Dave Smith's votes.
But I will get 2.5 million extra votes from the rest of America, and I'm okay with that trade-off.
That trade-off works for me as chairman of a political party.
Yeah, okay.
Well, how about this?
And this is, maybe this will get into some other stuff because this is, I think, the heart of the issue between me and you is that I don't really understand you.
I really don't.
I don't mean that as an insult.
I don't get what your goal is here because if you're saying, so not getting me, it's like, yeah, sure, one vote versus two million votes.
But what I don't understand is how the chairman of the LP would not want me.
Listen, forget my vote.
Forget my vote.
Who I am, feel however you feel about me.
You know, you talked last night in the debate a lot about how a lot of libertarians only talk to other libertarians.
A lot of libertarians don't get outside of the bubble and really like speak to the issues of.
But you talk to people who agree with us.
That is true for lots of people in the liberty movement, not me.
Not even kind of true for me.
I'm a guy who goes on, I've been on Joe Rogan's podcast four times since 2016.
That's still on my list of maybes.
Like I'm not going to be able to do it.
Oh, you might be willing to do the biggest podcast in the world.
There's some baggage that comes with Joe Rogan, and there's some people that have done that podcast, and it's gone real bad for them.
Yeah.
Right.
Like it's a high-risk environment.
Okay, well, how is it?
It's never gone bad for me.
I think he's a great guy, and I've had a great time on the show.
I'm just making the point that you get up in front of 8 million people there.
Later this week, I'll be doing my yearly State of the Union with Ari Shafir, talking to hundreds of thousands of people.
I talk to 100,000 people a show on this show here.
I talk to hundreds of thousands of people on Legion of Skanks every week.
Some of them don't agree with my politics.
Some do.
But I'm a guy, forget my vote.
I'm a guy who's brought lots of people who were not libertarians or even introduced to the ideas into the liberty movement and lots of them into the LP.
Right.
So yeah, you might be like, well, I'll trade off you for some other people.
If these are people who are just kind of voting and then going away, I actually think you should want me a lot more than lots of them.
So what it comes down to is every new political consultant, every new campaign manager tells their candidate, you know what we're going to do?
The Hard Campaign Trail00:02:56
We're going to get all the people that don't vote to vote, and that's totally going to have you win.
We're going to get all the people that don't vote to vote.
But the habit of not voting, the apathy, the looking down your nose and being like, it's not worth it.
I'm not going to change anything, whatever, that whole thing, that's hard to overcome.
And every candidate that's tried to do that, they lose.
That's why it's so amazing when like a Jesse Ventura becomes governor in Minnesota, because he did the thing that everyone's dreamed of doing that no one's ever been able to do and no one's done since.
What Donald Trump did was pretty incredible, whether you like him or not.
It was incredible.
He did.
Got a lot of people who voted for Obama to vote for him.
Well, and so there are, there are different values of voters, right?
So the non-voter or the occasional voter, it's not usually worth catering to them because it's unpredictable whether or not you have the special sauce to get them off the fence because everybody's got their own reason for apathy, right?
So you can't craft a campaign.
If I craft a campaign that gets you off your couch, you know, where you vote for the LP candidate in 2020, I am going to be sending a message that may not resonate with those other 3 million people, right?
Like it's possible.
You have to go running a political campaign is hard because you have to go broad.
You have to be resonant.
And what the old parties want, what the Republicans and Democrats want is for the candidates to be the most hated.
They want you to be very afraid of the other one, right?
Like you have to be literally wetting yourself because you're so afraid.
You know, you saw the tears on election night, right?
Where the Clinton voters were like just emotionally destroyed because they had been told for the entire election, this was going to be the end of America.
Right.
And the Trump voters were told the same thing about Clinton.
Turns out they were both right.
They want you to, well, exactly.
They happen to be both correct.
They want you galvanized against the other, but the thing that they want more than anything else is they want to keep the people who are apathetic at home because it simplifies their job.
If they have a smaller pool of voters to deal with, it's easier to strategize.
The last thing they want is for you to say, I'm not choosing between whether Coke or Pepsi is going to give me diabetes faster.
I'm just going to drink beer because I like beer.
They don't want you to step outside the box and vote gold.
It's the scariest thing to them.
Like the NFL doesn't care if you're a Giants fan or a Redskins fan.
They really don't care.
They prefer you to be passionate about the Giants or the Redskins.
If you start watching hockey, they lose their mind.
Right.
Why Vote Libertarian00:03:35
The Libertarian Party is hockey.
It's not as popular.
But wouldn't not vote.
Would it be the same thing in that situation?
Why would what would?
Just not voting.
Just not participating in the situation.
No, because not participating is too cloudy a signal.
You don't know whether or not somebody didn't vote because they were disgusted, because they're lazy, because they forgot, because they had to work, because they were traveling, because they wanted to play Xbox.
You don't know.
If you vote libertarian, they know that you took the time to go down and do the voting thing or send in the ballot and you specifically denied their frame of you have to pick which one is more awful and you went another direction.
Do you think libertarians have an obligation to vote for the Libertarian Party?
I don't mean like a legal obligation, but like, do you think that that's basically your so me not voting for Gary Johnson?
I don't think that that upsets you.
It does.
Now, this is something that we did touch on a little bit of a.
Because your vote counts for two things.
What if the Libertarian Party ran a proponent of slavery?
Like, is it a problem?
Is it just because they're on the LP that I have to vote for them?
Or is there some line where there's some degree of principle that they have to have?
Somebody explained this to me once, and it stuck with me.
When you vote for a Libertarian or a Republican or a Democrat, your vote counts twice, two times.
Once for that candidate in that race.
But the second one is it's a signal of the strength of the party.
And to the extent that it's a ballot access race, which is a big problem the libertarians have that Republicans and Democrats don't have to deal with because they wrote the rules to not have to deal with them, is did you vote for Larry Sharp?
Yes.
In 1880?
I did vote for Larry Sharp.
So your voting for Larry Sharp is the reason we can have Devin Balkan for New York City public advocate.
Larry got enough votes to make the Libertarian Party a recognized party in New York.
I understand all this, but this isn't.
So that's why you have the obligation, even if it's...
But this isn't the question that I'm asking you.
I get what can be gained from a party from getting a vote.
I'm saying, if the Libertarian Party ran somebody who's not a Libertarian, okay?
If they ran, I'm just, you know, just a hypothetical.
If they ran somebody who was like Bob Barr.
Yes, or worse or worse than Bob Barr.
Okay, worse than Bob Barr.
Dick Cheney is worse than Bob Barr.
If Dick Cheney.
Let's say Dick Cheney gets nominated.
Should I vote for Dick Cheney on the Libertarian Party?
Do I have an obligation to vote for Dick Cheney?
I would say so.
Yes.
As a party member, because what you do is you salvage that election, right?
Like, I'm not saying you should work for Dick Cheney.
I'm not saying you should give him any money.
I'm not saying I should vote for Dick Cheney.
You should vote for the Libertarian candidate because it has a knock-on effect on the election.
Adolf Hitler runs as the Libertarian candidate.
I should vote for Adolf Hitler.
Hillary Clinton.
I mean, if we really want to get scary.
Yeah, right.
No, but I mean, I'm not sure.
So you're actually telling me if Adolf Hitler ran as the Libertarian Party candidate, I should vote for Adolf Hitler just because the party says libertarian.
I'm telling you that if you vote for Adolf Hitler as the Libertarian Party candidate in this bizarre world in which we live, apparently, this weird space of your head.
Okay, if Cheney, you said Dick Cheney, whoever you want it to be.
Whoever.
If you vote for them and add to their vote total, it benefits the party for the next good candidate, the local candidate, the guy that you really want to have on the ballot.
The Purity Test Trap00:15:29
You need it to be on the ballot.
But if you just put up such a bad candidate, I don't know that I have that much faith that there's going to be a good candidate the next time.
Maybe you don't.
I mean, isn't this a great argument to be a Democrat or a Republican?
Is the idea that you have to choose the lesser of two evils?
It's part of the reason that it's been so hard to break through that frame, right?
Like, stay, keep being a football fan is hard to shake.
And switching to hockey is a difficult thing.
They get you attached.
You develop identity with your team.
And there's a goodness to that and a badness to it, right?
Like, I think you should balance.
What I, my, well, I agree.
I think you should balance.
So let me just say what I think is that I agree that there's a balance.
And if there are, if there are good libertarian candidates running, I have no problem voting for them like I did with Larry Sharp.
Right.
I joined the LP when the Mises caucus got created or shortly after because I was like, oh, hey, this is great.
They're working toward putting up good candidates.
Okay, let's do something.
I see the value in political action.
I'm not one of those anarchists who's like, you know, voting is consent to the system or something.
I don't agree with that at all.
However, I would never vote for, you know, Dick Cheney, Adolf Hitler, as some really bad guy because there has to be a minimum somewhere within reason.
You don't have to agree with me on everything.
Ron Paul, I didn't agree with on everything, but he was so good on all the most important issues.
So if, so to me, you have to meet a certain threshold with the candidate of not having terrible views.
And I have a very, I think, now I did misspeak the other day at the debate, and you called me for this where I said, I don't have a purity test, but these are the things.
But you have to have these two things.
What I meant to say is I don't have some crazy purity test.
My purity test isn't like, oh my God, you have to be perfect on every issue.
You have to be a libertarian.
And Bill Weld was not a libertarian.
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Nobody's purity test is crazy to them.
So if your purity test is guns and you're a gun guy, you think that makes the most sense in the world.
But the lady that asked the question at the debate, who like that's her one problem with the Libertarian Party, thinks you're nuts for having that be the thing.
That's that crazy one of the people.
You're right.
Crazy is all a matter of perspective.
Well, but so this is within reason.
And this is why I'm telling you that your position of not voting for Johnson in 16 was wrong.
And the reason it was wrong is this.
There are 20, 30, I should find the number of planks in the Libertarian Party platform, but it's the shortest platform of any political party.
Like we are tight and concise.
Gary Johnson agreed with let's score down, just for argument's sake, 80% of the libertarian polarity platform.
And then maybe 20%, he's just saying stuff that doesn't match, right?
Like they talked about no fly, no buy, which was not where the party is.
Like they're off-platform on 20% of the thing.
Yeah, but again.
But you are not going to get any other option that's going to have 80% of what you as a libertarian believe.
So yeah, I think you should suck up the 20%.
What if it casts 1%?
If it's 1%, they're not getting the nomination.
No, But I'm just saying, should I vote for someone who has 1% of what I believe?
Probably not.
Everyone has a threshold.
You agree, there's a threshold somewhere.
There's got to be somewhere.
It's internal to everybody.
Here's why I think the 80% is wrong.
Because what the other 20% is.
You might think it's more important.
Right.
Well, it might be something disqualifying.
Yes, it's what I think.
Obviously, that's what I'm saying.
Everything I say here can be under the umbrella of what I think.
And I get it.
But I'm saying that 20% might be something that is so horrible that it's a deal breaker.
If Dick Cheney was with me, let's say Dick Cheney was a much better libertarian than he is.
But he was like, look, I'm committed to this torture.
I'm committed to the war in Iraq.
But everything else is nothing else.
Everything else I'm libertarian on.
Hold on, let me just finish that.
Everything else I'm libertarian on.
I'm still not voting for Dick Cheney because a war that costs $2 trillion, that kills a million people, instituting torture is so bad that it wouldn't matter if he was great on everything else.
It doesn't matter if he's great on guns or any other issue.
So my point is just that, yes, you're right with Gary Johnson.
The no-fly, no-buy thing is a pretty big deal.
You're now saying that the federal government can strip you of a constitutionally protected right because they put you on a list.
It sucked.
That's a realism.
It's a stupid position.
And you know what the party did?
We put out a press release recapitulating the party's stance on guns.
So everybody was real clear about what the party believed.
And that's all you can do as a party, right?
The party has a platform.
We have a stance is that the consensus of a supermajority of the party is these are the things we believe as a party.
But we have candidates who run who don't believe all the things.
Every candidate is going to not believe all the things.
Sure.
Ron Paul.
Ron Paul was totally off-platform in 1988 on abortion.
Absolutely 100% opposed to the party platform.
And the way that you work that as a political party, the nature of political parties is Ron didn't talk about it much.
When he did talk about it, he said, this is my position.
The party's position is different.
And some voters, some libertarians wouldn't cast a ballot for him.
They would do like you would and say, that's 20%.
That's too important for me.
It's disqualifying.
And they sit on their hands.
They stay home.
They do whatever.
What I'm saying is we should work to minimize the number of things that we consider disqualifying.
It's part of being an adult.
You tolerate some stuff with people because people are flawed creatures made of crooked timber.
And if you can stomach it, you should vote for the libertarian because it benefits the broader cause.
And then maybe what you do is your money and your time and the people that you have as guests on your podcast are the Devin Balkans or the Larry Sharps, like the guys you like.
Because there's always so many candidates running.
Put your effort.
I guess positive, not negative.
Here's obviously where I'm going with all of this was really that, look, I have a million problems with Gary Johnson, but more of them, truthfully speaking.
That's a lot.
Well, maybe not a million.
I like Gary Johnson.
He is a nice man.
I've met him several times.
He's very nice.
I actually feel somewhat bad that I publicly trash him so much.
He was a little bit skeptical on the Twitter.
Yeah, well, I actually, it made me feel bad.
It made me feel bad when he tweeted to that.
I felt bad when I trashed him before.
I don't do it just for the sake of doing it and having fun.
I do it because I think this is what's going to help the movement that I care about.
So I think it's an important conversation.
And you know, he got into presidential politics.
Got to be a big boy and take your lumps.
It actually hurt me when I saw him so broken by the end of the presidential race.
And this is not an easy game.
I have some respect for him.
I actually think he was a pretty good governor.
I would have been happy if he had won that Senate seat because, you know, hey, it's probably better than the next senator we got.
And I thought there might be a shot he could win that.
I was surprised.
He got into it.
It was how poorly he did it.
He got in too late.
And I also think his brand was very damaging.
And that Republican dude, like too much ego.
And I had the same problem.
Here's what happened.
And I had a Republican who was running who didn't have the gravitas or whatever.
And I tried to encourage people to talk to him about like, just get out of the way because otherwise there's two Democratic Council members running.
Right.
But he's not.
But it's a different situation.
Gary Johnson was the governor of the state and he was the third, you know, he was a guy who got millions of votes as president.
What happened with Gary Johnson, and I know you know this, but what happened with Gary Johnson was at first, the mainstream media so despised Donald Trump that when there was a libertarian running who was a former governor and they had two Republicans who were governors who were both re-elected, they went, whoa, we're going to give them a lot of airtime because this could hurt Donald Trump.
And then the polling started coming in that they were taking more votes away from Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump.
And all of a sudden, this media that was being kind of nice to Gary Johnson decided to turn him and he wasn't prepared for it.
No.
He went on to Morning Joe that day and he didn't realize.
He was like, oh, I'm on Morning Joe to tell you what I think and have a conversation.
I was like, no, Gary, they're here to end you.
They're here to end you.
It was completely unfair what Bonico did to him.
It was not only was it unfair the way he asked the Aleppo question, his response to it was such a dick move that he wouldn't have done to anybody.
If we're talking about something else, completely off topic.
And I go, so what do you think about Aleppo?
And you go, what's Aleppo?
I'd be like, Aleppo, Syria.
You know, the humanitarian crisis.
And that's what you would say.
You wouldn't go, are you serious?
And now it's on Gary Johnson that he then, my problem, my point that I'm making is more of the problem with Gary Johnson was the reaction to it than actually saying what is Aleppo.
Gary Johnson could have very easily, right after that, gone, what is Aleppo?
Oh, yeah, Aleppo, Syria.
Okay.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I didn't know what Aleppo was.
So you didn't know what Aleppo was before you read it in some stupid newspaper this morning anyway.
Here's what happened in Syria.
Blah, I know what's going on in Syria.
It would have been a non-story.
So this is the thing that people don't get.
And this is where I get frustrated where people make fun of Gary or they criticize Gary is, remember I said $12 million was what the 2016 ticket raised?
There was $50 million dedicated only to making people not vote third party from the Democratic side.
Sure.
Like the Clinton people were scared of that.
You know, nobody watches Fox.
Nobody watches MSNBC.
Like percentage-wise.
Fox News?
Percentage-wise of the media market, tiny, tiny percentages watch.
But what happens is a lot of the news media marketing?
No, just of the, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No one really watches, only partisans from each side.
But what does happen is everything that's on MSNBC in the morning gets routed over to Brooklyn, where the Clinton headquarters was, chop, chop, chopped, edited, shot out by the end of the day.
Sure.
Like that Aleppo moment was online within two hours, packaged, sponsored ads, shoved into your face to be like, this guy that you thought was cool, he's ridiculous.
You don't want him.
He's a bad dude.
Well, I got to say, though, he kept handing them more moments like that that really helped that narrative.
If that's the narrative on you.
And I got to say, it really, it kind of hurts when the, like, just like the Mitt Romney moment that you brought up before when Mitt Romney goes, you know, these 47% of people don't even pay taxes.
Part of the reason why that was so devastating was because it played into the preconceived criticism that Mitt Romney is this out-of-touch, rich, elite guy.
And so it's devastating when you play into, here's the proof, right?
He is what we were already saying he is.
Now, what is the critique of libertarians in general?
It's like, ah, there's intellectual lightweights who just want to smoke pot.
That was already what Gary Johnson had to battle against.
And to so many people, he proved them right because kind of that is kind of what he was.
He was a guy who was outmatched, who wasn't prepared for the moment.
Regardless of that.
If it was me, I would not have let him go on MSNBC again.
Like once you do that, but they kept putting the ticket back on those outlets.
Like if your guy is getting jumped, like I talk to reporters all the time, and there's off the record and there's on the record.
And the way I look at it is a reporter can only cross me once because you do it once, you don't get interviews again.
That's it.
Right.
And they've never have because that's how this game works.
I was on MSNBC in the morning during the 2016 convention after James Weeks did his thing and they wanted to like make fun of the party and be like, look at this.
And I was like, look, you know, some guy came to our convention, tried to turn it into a joke.
We kicked him out of the room.
Later this month, the Republican Party is going to take a joke and make him the nominee for president.
I think the Libertarian Party is doing just fine.
The interview quickly wrapped up, never invited me back.
Because if you go in and you have a spine and you know how to handle the media, you're not doing what they want you to do.
When they figured out that there are buttons that they could push on Gary, every interview, they push the button.
And if you're a campaign manager, like I don't, I don't know the calculus.
Like I hate to second guess people that aren't me because they're in the arena, they're doing the work.
I would think the calculus isn't so good.
Like the exposure isn't worth the risk if you know they're going to jump you every time.
It's not just about knowing them.
It's also about knowing your candidate.
Right.
What his strengths and weaknesses are.
If Gary Johnson was my candidate, I would tell him not to go back on MSNBC.
But that being said, Ron Paul went on MSNBC quite a bit, got many hostile interviews.
And I mean, I'm sure, you know, we could all look at one thing and go, oh, he could have said this here, could have said that.
Well, he's good with media.
He's good with media.
He kicked ass.
And he didn't do it by running away from the, he would just say straight up, they'd be like, so you wouldn't have voted for the civil rights bill.
And I'd go, no.
Right.
Sorry.
He goes, yeah, you know, 90% of it was good, but that other 10% is an infringement.
It's not constitutional.
And I, it's the Constitution's the law of the land.
What's funny is Ron handled it well and Rand handled it poorly.
Yeah.
Like, and what it comes down to is when I was first learning to practice law and do trial work, I got training from more senior attorneys about how to do trials and how to cross-examine witnesses and everything.
And what I was told at the beginning is, this is my style.
Your style may be different.
Don't try and copy my style because jurors can tell if you're not being yourself, right?
Like, I'm not a comedian.
I'm not, you know, in the debate, you're like, stop being a lawyer.
You can't.
If you've been through law school and you've practiced law, you never lose that way of thinking.
And if you try to do it, you look fake.
And there's nothing worse in politics or life than seeming fake to people.
You know, for all the criticisms.
But that's the criticism of a lawyer.
I'm not fake.
I'm really who I am.
You may not understand me.
A lot of people may misinterpret me, some in good faith, some in bad faith, but I am who I am.
All right.
Well, I want to figure out a little bit more about who you are.
Lawyers and War Sticks00:10:31
Because as I said, I don't understand you.
But I did want to ask, since we were talking Johnson Weld, I wanted to ask your thoughts on Bill Weld, who is currently laughably running for president on the Republican, under the Republican Party.
Do you think Bill Weld is a libertarian?
Yes.
Okay.
Does Bill Weld identify as a libertarian?
Yes.
I haven't heard him.
So does Glenn Beck still.
Although he changes.
Do you think Glenn Beck's a libertarian?
I do.
Okay.
I have a very broad definition of libertarian.
If you want a more free society, if you want peaceful people to be able to pursue happiness however they choose, as long as they're not hurting other people and taking their stuff, and you agree with you.
I agree with Bill Weld believes.
And you agree with us on a large amount of issues, I will accept that you haven't grown into being good on everything.
Yeah, but you also wanted me to vote for Adolf Hitler.
I mean, here's the thing.
As party chairman, you have to understand my role is a little different from everybody else.
I am like a pastor at a church, right?
So I've got this whole list of ways that you should live your life to be consonant with the church, but it's not good for the church or for the parishioners' growth for me to constantly be doing fire and brimstone and you're a terrible sinner because you go small weed or you cheap eat on your wife or whatever.
That's interesting.
It's more carrots than sticks.
Occasional sticks, but I'm a big carrot guy.
Right.
Okay, see, this is what confuses me about you.
So I kind of generally tend to agree that should be the role of the chairman of the LP.
And I mean, sure, you want to be a preacher.
You want to let people in, but maybe not Satan worshipers.
So like, to me, it's kind of like someone like Bill Weld.
You know, if you're a lobbyist for Raytheon and you're pro-war and you support neocons, you support Hillary Clinton's foreign policy, eh, that's a little bit too much.
He's not redeemable.
You don't believe in the people.
No, I don't believe in redemption.
He absolutely is redeemable.
He absolutely is redeemable, but he doesn't want to be redeemed.
He does.
He's moved.
So I'll give you an example.
A very clear example.
When did he move?
When did he become anti-war?
It was during the campaign.
In 2016, right when he was buying for the libertarian nomination.
It was actually that year, that month he figured out this Iraq war was a disaster.
No, it was during the campaign.
It was spending the time with Gary.
Spending the time with Gary moved him on foreign policy.
So is he running as an anti-war candidate now?
As a Republican?
Yeah.
Is he, really?
Yeah, yeah.
Has he said anything about the wars?
Yeah.
I've seen five different interviews with him brought up in mainstream media.
He hasn't mentioned him once.
I mean, I'll be able to do that.
I did research for this debate.
I'll be.
Not once.
You know, and doesn't seem to be a priority.
It probably isn't.
No, but let me just say this.
This is the thing.
I do believe in redemption.
He's not beyond redemption.
If you've supported mass murder for the last 20 years of your professional life, and then you realize, oh my God, I've supported mass murder for the last 20 years of my professional life and you want to be redeemed, mention that.
Mention that in one of your interviews.
Okay.
Walter Jones, that guy redeemed himself before.
Walter Jones was a good guy.
What did he do?
He brought it up every time there was a microphone in front of his face.
He voted against every subsequent war after that, and he sent letters to all of the military families who he had sent over to this war and apologized for them and begged God for his forgiveness.
That's what someone who represents.
That's what someone who repents does.
Did Ron apologize for Afghanistan?
Yeah.
Yeah, actually, he did.
He actually did.
He said if there's one vote, he regrets it was that one.
And what Ron Paul supported was actually a just war.
What Ron Paul supported?
No, listen, what Afghanistan turned into wasn't, but Ron Paul supported after we were attacked, going to get the people who attacked us in Afghanistan.
And he voted against every other war in his lifetime.
So now here's what I don't get about you, okay?
The carrot and stick thing.
You always seem to have a stick for Ron Paul.
The guy who voted against every no, you just said you have more carrots than sticks.
I've got a stick for you.
You don't have sticks for Bill Weld.
So this is what I don't get.
Why would the chairman of the LP not say, hey, I want to grow this liberty movement.
Let me make sure the LP is a place where we could bring in Ron Paul, Ron Paul supporters, Tom Woods, the Mises Institute, guys like me.
Why does it seem like you have so many sticks for us, but you're all carrots for people who support wars?
I'm not carrots for people who support wars.
I'm going to fight that frame.
Okay.
There is a foreign policy Overton window, right?
And you know, and I know that Scott Horton and Tom Woods and Ron Paul are well outside that window, right?
They're pushing on it, but they're well outside the norm of foreign policy.
What, the norm of the people or the war hawk ruling elite?
The norm of everybody.
I mean, the wars aren't that unpopular.
That's the problem.
With the American people, they're not that unpopular.
They're not.
Okay.
If it was more unpopular, candidates would run on it.
People.
Wait, have you been watching the presidential election since the year 2000?
2000, George W. Bush ran on, we're not going to use the military for nation building.
We will not fight wars to police the world.
2008, Barack Obama ran anti-war.
He won, got more votes than anybody in history.
Have any of them ended the wars?
No, that's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying you just said they don't run on it.
They run on it because this is a popular message.
The anti-war candidate has won consistently for the last hundred years.
Even FDR was promising to keep a lie.
Yes, they lie.
Well, why are they lying?
Because it actually isn't outside the mainstream.
One of the reasons why Donald Trump won was the war issue.
Yeah, he said he was going to be anti-war.
Yes, he's hired John Bolton.
Yeah, I completely agree with you, of course.
And I talk about this on the podcast all the time.
But there's interesting information there.
It actually turns out that the anti-war thing is very popular.
So here's what I'm going to tell you: it's not much of a differentiator that you're generally with the foreign policy establishment in this country because Bush, Obama, Clinton, Trump, all of them, same foreign policy.
No differentiation.
I mean, there's no slight differentiation, right?
So they're still in the war party.
Bill Weld is somehow uniquely evil because he follows in the same straightness as every other.
I didn't say he was unique.
Well, not unique, but like that it's disqualifying to just be normal.
But you don't think, well, it's not normal.
But you don't think it's normal.
Yes.
All politicians.
Yes, libertarians all support normal politicians.
Yes.
And libertarians are anti-war.
And the party is anti-war.
And we're the only political.
How anti-war is it?
If you nominate pro-war leaders, how anti-war are you really?
But here's what I'm saying.
Is Bill Weld as anti-war as Ron Paul?
Probably not.
It's not a priority for Bill Weld.
Don't you think that's a little bit of an understatement?
Maybe.
Is he not as anti-war as?
Yeah, he was a lobbyist for Rathion.
He's not as anti-war as Ron Paul.
Is Bill Weld more anti-war than George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, all of them?
I don't know.
He is.
I don't know.
But he's more anti-war than all of them.
I don't think you're right.
More anti-war.
Donald Trump, I think, is more anti-war than Bill Weld.
There's no facts to support your argument, but maybe he said some things.
And he's a giant liar who lies all the time.
Yeah, no, I agree.
So I don't believe him.
Listen, I think that Donald Trump is a- What has he done to get us out of any war?
Donald Trump.
I'm listening.
Let me tell you.
Donald Trump should be impeached and tried for war crimes and convicted and put away for the rest of his life for what he's done, particularly in Yemen, as well as several other theaters.
Okay.
That's not what I'm not debating you on that.
Bill Weld decided to kind of be like, you know, I guess I kind of agree with Gary Johnson that these interventions do more harm than good when he was running for the libertarian nominee of vice president.
That's what he decided.
Earlier that very year, he endorsed John Kasich.
He didn't endorse Rand Paul.
He didn't even endorse Ted Cruz or Donald Trump.
He didn't have any interest in the anti-war thing.
He was a pro-George W. Bush guy.
He loved Hillary Clinton, except for her economic policies.
So I am pretty confident that if Bill Weld got in there, he would do the exact same thing everybody else does.
In fact, he didn't talk nearly as much of an anti-war game as Trump, Obama, or even George W. Bush did in the year 2000.
Not nearly.
So my point to you is Donald Trump, yes, Donald Trump has been completely either compromised, fooled, whatever, or he's just a complete liar.
But it does seem like Donald Trump is always kind of going out there and saying, I want to end this war.
And then the entire media pounces on him.
Then his entire foreign policy establishment pounces on him.
Then he goes, yeah, I'm not going to end that war.
Then he pulls back the peace talks in Afghanistan.
He pulls back the talks of withdrawing troops from Syria.
I have no confidence that Bill Weld wouldn't do exactly the same thing.
In fact, I'd bet everything I got that Bill Weld would go in the exact same direction if he was president.
Can I loop back around to the question you didn't answer?
What has Donald Trump done to end any war anywhere?
No, I mean.
In the last three years, he's been president for three years.
He's pulled exactly what I just said.
That's what I.
So nothing.
Yeah, essentially.
Absolutely nothing.
Nothing.
He's talked about ending them, and then when everyone pounces on him, he bails fucking.
You already said everybody talks about it.
What has he done?
No, no, no, no.
What I said is that everybody runs on it.
Right.
They talk about it.
The difference between that and what Donald Trump's doing.
What's the difference between talking about it and being a liar while you're in a campaign and talking about it and being a liar when you're president?
There is no difference.
Well, the difference is that you're president when you're doing it.
You're not campaigning.
And so what?
No, I'm not.
There's still no difference in the world.
Right.
No, I agree with you.
That's why I said he should be tried for war crimes.
I'm not defending Donald Trump or saying he's not a war criminal.
You said he was more anti-war than Bill Weld.
I said yes.
And that's not true.
That is a false statement.
Well, okay, yes, he's been president and Bill Weld hasn't and never will be president.
So yes, in a sense, he's conducted more wars than Bill Weld will ever because he'll never have the opportunity to.
But no, I mean, Donald Trump was, in his rhetoric, way more anti-war than Bill Weld is.
And so if even that guy will be pro-war, why would I think that a Clinton supporter, a Bush supporter would be anti-war if they were in there?
Do you think Bill Weld would say that we should go murder the families of people who are on the other side?
Well, I thought rhetoric doesn't matter.
I thought you were saying that.
No, I'm just saying.
Do you think Bill Weld would ever say something like that?
No, no.
But Donald Trump did.
Right.
Donald Trump has encouraged soldiers to commit war crimes.
I don't think George W. Bush would ever say something like that.
No.
Donald Trump is a good person.
He's a special man.
Do you think Donald Trump is more of a warhawk than George W. Bush?
The Alt-Right Pipeline Myth00:16:13
Absolutely.
Okay.
And what do you base that on?
Because he's involved in more wars.
George W. Bush got us into a war after 9-11.
Donald Trump.
He also got us into two.
Well, yeah.
Donald Trump is helping the Saudis bomb children.
Yes, Donald Trump is worse than George W. Bush.
Well, listen, what's the point of that?
Which is why he should be impeached.
I agree.
Post-haste.
Well, I agree with that.
So we're agreeing on that.
So how about what I was saying about the because, look, this is why a lot of my audience knows who you are.
This is how I know who you are.
Is that we got into quite a bit of a, you know, well, whatever.
We got into like a Twitter thing, a couple years ago now, I guess, when this first started.
Done a lot of people.
Why do you decide to kind of make enemies out of people in the liberty movement, whether it's Tom Woods or the Mises Institute?
Why are you so antagonistic toward the Mises caucus?
All these guys.
I don't get it.
I really don't understand.
Like, if we can forgive you.
Did you not watch my Stapleton interview after Charlottesville?
Yes.
I didn't understand what you were saying.
Okay.
Well, I don't know.
Did you think that went good?
I mean, I thought I explained my position.
Going good, you have to remember, I do a lot of, I do some friendly interviews, but I do more hostile than friendly.
So going good is I'm not misquoted.
People understand what I'm saying.
It's not that they agree with me.
It's people know what I mean and they either agree or they don't agree, but I'm not misunderstood.
And so that's my goal is to not be misunderstood.
So I'll make it very clear what was happening post-Charlottesville.
There was and is this worry of infiltration of alt-right white nationalists into the Libertarian Party and the Libertarian Movement.
And the problem.
Wait, I thought the fear was that there's a pipeline from libertarianism.
That's the name of the article.
I'm just what I've heard.
I'm not quoting a specific article.
I'm not quoting a specific article.
I'm just saying I thought that was the fear.
I thought that the libertarians are being infiltrated by that there's a pipeline.
Yeah.
But the pipeline is coming back.
That the alt-right is coming into libertarianism is the fear.
So I wish that was happening, but okay.
So the problem with the alt-right coming into libertarianism, the problem with people in Charlottesville chanting with Tiki torches, thinking they're libertarians.
None of them think they're libertarians.
Yes.
Many of them think they're libertarians.
Okay.
Who thinks they're libertarians in Charlottesville?
A lot of them thought they were libertarians.
Chris Cantwell, for example.
Chris Cantwell left the libertarian movement.
He said he's no longer a libertarian.
After Charlottesville.
No, before Charlottesville.
I know Christopher Cantwell.
I talked to him before Charlottesville.
He had left the Free State Project, left the Libertarian Party.
He was like, no, he's a white nationalist now.
Okay.
So that's the pipeline concern, right?
Yes, but you're playing it like it's the other way.
If you have a pipeline concern, which by the way, I think it's kind of bullshit, but the idea is that there's a libertarian to alt-right pipeline.
I've never heard anyone argue there's an alt-right to libertarian pipeline.
My concern is not so much pipelines, right?
My concerns are you ever throw any parties?
You had a party?
Sure.
So if somebody comes to your party and they're rude or they don't shower or they're spilling drinks on people, other people won't come to your party because you let that person be there.
So Bill Weld's in my party.
So the issue is that if you let people come in to your coalition who offend other people, it's the bastiat, seen and unseen, right?
What you see is who's coming in and who's supporting you.
What you don't see are the people who look at those people in there and go, that's not the right party for me.
I'm out.
And they never come in.
So you don't see them, right?
You don't lose them.
They just don't come in.
White nationalism is a danger for any political party or movement.
It is part of the reason the Republicans are in so much trouble in the era of Donald Trump, because he has welcomed those people in and other people have left.
That's why he has three primary opponents.
Well, I mean, it's interesting that you define Gary Johnson as being successful because he got three, four million votes or whatever he got.
And yet you're saying Donald Trump screwed himself.
What did he get?
Donald Trump didn't screw himself.
Donald Trump, Donald Trump is doing fine for Donald Trump, and Donald Trump always has been.
That's been his MO.
Anyone who lives in New York knows.
Donald Trump does fine.
Everyone that's ever worked for or with him gets screwed, including he is destroying the Republican Party, which is the one good thing I can say about Donald Trump.
I'm glad he's breaking.
You think Donald Trump's 2016 campaign destroyed the Republican Party?
Okay.
Look at the 2018.
I thought we were using.
Okay, but 2018.
So that's when he let the white nationalists.
It was in 2016.
Because of how he won 2016 and who he brought in coalition, because of the Stephen Millers of the world.
He lost the midterm elections by a smaller margin than the average president in modern times has lost the whistle past the graveyard if you want to.
I don't.
No, I'm just saying there's no evidence to support what you're saying.
That's really my point.
No, there's no.
I mean, yes, he lost the House and kept the Senate.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't think it's that clear that it's the white national.
Listen, what does it mean to be a Republican?
Republican?
None of this, I still don't understand.
What does it mean to be a Republican?
Being a Republican or a Democrat is pretty much just a team identity sport, but you're not getting to my point.
I asked you about Tom Woods, the Mises Institute, and the Mises caucus, and you're talking about Charlottesville and then this pipeline.
So what's the connection here?
I don't get it.
After Charlottesville, somebody, and I don't even know who started it, started an open letter.
And it was a group of libertarians from across the spectrum, from super hard left, you know, progressive people like Chartier and Long to hard right, almost, you know, pretty conservative, like heritage people, Cato people, some of the Mises people.
Like it was across the board.
And what they said was in that letter, we don't agree on everything or even most things.
We're all libertarians.
It's a very broad spectrum.
What we agree on is there is no place for racism or white nationalism in libertarianism.
No flavor of libertarianism allows that.
And the problem I had was that Dysten Woods refused, actively refused.
They're like, we don't want to say that.
We won't be forced to say that.
Whatever it is.
Oh, wait, hold on.
So did they say they don't want to say that they're not fascists or did they say they don't want to sign this stupid letter?
They said they won't say it.
They won't sign it.
They won't sign it.
Yeah, because those are two pretty big differences.
Yeah, they won't sign it.
Right.
But what I'm saying is there's a broad group of people from across the libertarian spectrum who all sign on to this letter and it doesn't cost them anything.
Like it's like voting.
Except for, you know, they're like, you know.
What's it cost them?
What's the cost?
I don't know.
Does it hurt you to say I'm not a racist?
So let me say, the cost of signing a letter.
I don't know, your integrity?
What integrity is lost by saying racists don't libertarians?
If I asked you to sign a pledge to just make it clear that you're not a child pedophile or that you're not terrible.
I'm not a pedophile.
I just said it.
Right.
You want me to sign that on a paper?
I'm not a pedophile.
I'll do that too.
It costs nobody.
Do you find that like pretty weak?
Nope.
If you asked me to sign that, I would go, get that out of my face.
I'm not doing something because you tell me to.
I'm not your trained dog.
You're not.
Okay.
You don't have to do anything.
Right.
But what you are not immune from is criticism for refusing to do something that everybody else seems really able to do and you can't do it.
Well, I'm not arguing.
Someone's arguing no one's not able.
No, it doesn't.
It means nothing.
Okay.
No one's arguing you're not able to sign the piece of paper.
Right.
Listen, again, Nick, I don't know why it's a counter to anything I'm saying to say that's my opinion.
Again, once again, everything that I say can be for it's under the umbrella of this is what I think.
This is my opinion.
Then what you just said is your opinion.
Anyway, so right.
I don't know why anybody would think that the idea, it's just such pathetic virtue signaling to be like, we're all going to sign this letter that says we're against fascism, something that's really not fascism, racism.
Oh, okay.
So something right.
Racism.
Okay.
White nationalists are not welcome in libertarianism.
That's what it said.
Right.
Okay.
You can't say that.
You don't think they're redeemable?
Only Warhawks?
I think white nationalism.
They're not allowed in.
So you're telling me if there's a white national, if there's somebody who's a racist, which I mean, I assume by that meaning they don't like other groups of, they don't like other racial groups or something like that, you don't want to bring them into a philosophy that believes in peace?
Nope.
They're not redeemable.
Only the Warhawks are.
When they abandon their racism, they're redeemable.
Oh, okay.
And what's the standard for that?
I don't know.
Like, what do you mean?
What's the standard for that?
Bill Weld, you seem to let off the hook pretty quickly for advocating mass murder.
He never advocated mass murder.
Of course he did.
When did he advocate?
He openly supported the war in Iraq.
As did everybody, including pretty much everybody other than Ron Paul.
Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders.
I had to double-check because it's Iraq and not Afghanistan.
Ron Paul, Dennis Kucenich, Bernie Sanders.
No, you had to double-check because you're wrong about it.
Ron Paul did not support the war.
Bernie Sanders didn't support the war.
Dennis Kucenich didn't support.
So you got three.
Ralph Nader didn't support the war.
Everybody could support it.
Yes, everybody voted.
Ralph Nader wasn't a member of Congress.
Okay.
Three out of 535.
Yeah, I don't know.
Actually, the votes, there were more people than that who didn't vote for the war, but whatever.
Call it 20, whatever.
Oh, okay, so what?
So you make an excuse for that.
So the war, it's like, oh, he didn't, yeah, he advocated for mass murder, but a lot of people were advocating for mass murder at the time.
Racism.
That's a mass murder.
Racism is the real problem, you say.
It is after somebody murders somebody in Charlottesville, yeah.
That's a problem.
I know more people.
Did you know more people died in Charlottesville than in Iraq?
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
Because it's not true.
That's right.
That's right.
Yes.
Like, one person died in that crazy scene at Charlottesville.
It's terrible.
Nobody supported them.
Tom Woods didn't support them.
Why do they have to say?
I didn't say Tom Woods did support him.
Right, but he wouldn't sign a pledge that you didn't support.
Not a pledge, an open letter that says you guys aren't welcome.
He won't say that.
Yeah.
Will you say it?
No.
Okay.
What do you have to say?
White nationalists are not welcome in the libertarian movement.
Listen, I think there has to some degree, you could argue, been, if you want to call it a pipeline from libertarianism to the alt-right.
I think there's also been a pipeline from libertarianism to like some left libertarian quasi-socialist thing.
There was a pipeline from libertarianism to Bernie Sanders supporters.
There was a pipeline from libertarianism to what you might call political apathy, just not voting for anybody.
There's really been, in radical movements, you have pipelines that go all over the place.
And if I could bring any of them back to libertarianism, I would love to do that.
Love to do that.
I do believe they're redeemable.
Much like I said Bill Weld is redeemable.
He's just got to do a little bit more.
And these people who never actually murdered anybody, never actually were violent toward anyone or advocated violence, but just said some nasty things, absolutely I'd like them to come back.
Why not?
I don't.
Why is race?
I don't want them.
Right.
So race.
You do?
I don't.
That's where you're.
No, you just want the Warhawks.
You don't want the racists.
You just don't want the Warhawks.
I don't want.
No, I get it.
Mr. Libertarian Chairman, you can get past supporting a war, but you can't get past saying something mean about another race.
Not saying something mean.
The problem with racism, the problem with racism within a political party is not who is in, it's who refuses to come in.
This is how Donald Trump has destroyed the Republican Party.
There are people who used to be okay with sometimes voting Republican or considering voting Republican, that that has changed them.
And the Republican Party's been sowing these seeds for a long time.
Has the Democratic Party been sowing seeds of racism?
Or is it like some left-wing racism?
It's powerplus.
But I will tell you.
How about the anti-white racism of the Democrats?
The Medicare for All stuff that has become doctrine right now and the gun control stuff, it disqualifies the Democratic Party for a lot of independent voters who like to have guns.
Right.
Okay, but you're transpawful what I'm asking.
I'm asking about racism.
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Okay.
Okay.
Racism.
Have you ever heard what Joe Biden said about white people?
Have you heard what some of the Democrats have said about white people?
Do you feel the same about anti-white racism?
What's anti-white racism?
What does that mean?
Tell me what you mean by that.
Tell me, what is the statement you are asking me to comment on?
So you have like a left-wing perspective.
What racism is a statement?
It's power plus privilege or something like that.
What is the statement you want me to comment on?
I'm saying if saying, if you're, whatever you mean by racism, saying bad things, disliking other groups of people, do you see any anti-white racism coming out of the left?
Have you seen any of that?
What is anti- Tell me what you are asking me to comment on?
Racism is a pretty broad term.
The same thing you mean, but directed at white people.
Give me an example.
I mean, if you want to pull up quotes from Joe Biden, he's basically said that it's the...
What has he said?
Here, Brian, can you pull up Joe Biden, white people, white common law?
And see if you can pull up this quote that we got from Joe Biden.
Just so I'm not sure.
It's going to be like the YouTube thing.
It's never going to happen.
Yeah, usually we're a little bit quicker on it.
Here, pull it up so I can see.
Yeah, that one right there that you're on.
Oh, it's long.
You know, okay, fine.
Forget it.
Forget it.
No, but what did he say?
Oh, he said that something about like how it's the history of the white man's tradition is always like how evil it's been and how white people bear this responsibility.
I don't have the exact quote.
Do you not know what I'm talking about?
The kind of anti-white prejudice that comes out of the left?
You're unaware of that?
I don't know what you're talking about.
Okay.
And that's why I keep asking you to give me the quote to comment on because I don't want to answer a question about what I may think in my head.
I want to answer a question based on the example you give me.
So I gave you the example of Charlottesville.
I give you the example of the open letter.
I'm using some of the things that you're talking about.
What do you mean by racism?
When you say you don't want racists, what do you mean by racists?
I mean, the Libertarian Party platform is very clear.
We reject racism.
What do you as irrational and repugnant?
Well, bigotry is irrational by its nature.
What do you mean by racism?
What I mean by racism?
Thinking that people of another race are less than human.
That they have human.
They have some lower level of rights or privileges or humanity.
Racism in Individualist Philosophy00:05:06
Like, I believe in the stuff in the Declaration of Independence.
All men are created equal with the same rights, right?
What is this quote?
That's the Joe Biden comment.
In the 1900s, many women were dying at the hands of their husbands because they were chattel, like the cattle or the sheep, that the court of common law decided they had to do something about the extent of the debts.
No man has a right to chastise his woman with a rod.
I don't know what that is.
This is English jurisprudence culture.
A white man's culture.
It's got to change.
It's got to change.
Right, they're talking about.
So, okay, hold on.
Right, Cash.
So let's say they go, let's say somebody said, they go, you know, did you know that 150 years ago in Africa, what they used to do to women, this horrible thing, that's the black man's culture.
That's black culture, and it's got to change.
You wouldn't hear that as a racist statement.
Holy shit, Nick.
I'm so full of it.
I'm trying to figure out what you're saying.
You wouldn't think, you're trying to figure out change white to black, and you're telling me you wouldn't think that's a racist statement to go, that's black culture.
What they did 150 years ago.
That's black culture.
I think it's got to be.
Ascribing a culture to a race is racist.
So that's racist.
Okay, so that was racist.
Yeah.
Okay.
Fair enough.
Judging people not as individuals.
See, here's the problem.
The problem is you have to be an individual.
We reject this idea of collectivism.
That's the libertarian thing.
It's an individualist philosophy.
And so when you say all people of X race are X or Y, like they are not as smart.
They are not able to hold these jobs.
They're not smart enough to do these things.
They have a culture that screws with everything, whatever.
When you're making a judgment of people based on the amount of melanin in their skin.
And you're not a libertarian.
It's not a libertarian position.
Right.
I didn't say you're not a libertarian.
So you could still be a libertarian and be racist.
Theoretically.
Yeah.
I mean, theoretically, anybody who does what you don't want the government to restrict other people's rights, at some level, that's philosophically libertarian.
Right.
The libertarian party wants nothing to do with those people.
Right.
Nothing.
Okay.
Absolutely none.
So racism is you're out because they're too toxic to recruiting anyone else.
But supporting a war is okay.
If you hold a view that's held by the majority of society, then it's okay.
You being in the party is unlikely to keep anyone else from joining.
Okay, so it's not about principle.
It's about politics.
It's a political party.
Right, but it's not, I'm saying, but there's no principle in the political party.
There is a principle.
The principle is individualism.
No, because here's the problem.
It is not a libertarian stance to judge people as it is.
It's about politics.
Here's the thing.
If you're going to say it's about politics, it's like, okay, and it's about winning, and it's about getting votes and getting more people.
This is politics, right?
It's about getting votes.
Well, here's what I mean.
It's about not driving people.
Here's the problem.
Right, right.
So getting more votes, not driving people away.
Who wants to be in a party with racists?
Well, let me just say what I'm saying.
Right, exactly.
So it's about getting more votes, not driving people away.
This is politics, okay?
Okay.
Right.
Well, there are these two parties that kick your ass every goddamn time.
Sure.
So why wouldn't I just go be one of them?
Go ahead.
If it's not about principle, why would anyone go with you?
Because that is about principle.
We have a prisoner.
I thought it was politics.
You just told me it was politics.
Okay, so here's the principle.
You're saying racist, you're a libertarian.
You could be a libertarian theoretically, but we don't want you in there.
Statist, come on in.
Not a problem.
What is a statist?
What do you mean by statist?
Well, the example I was using before, I mean, technically, there's lots of statists out there, but the example I was using before would be, you know, like people supporting wars.
People supporting wars, okay.
Right.
Like any war?
Afghanistan?
Immoral wars.
Okay.
So you have an argument about what's moral.
Right.
Yeah, that's the whole thing.
All war is immoral?
Like, are we talking Quaker level of no war?
Are we talking no offensive war?
No, I would just describe to a just war theory.
So the problem with just war theory generally is lots of people can make lots of good arguments why lots of wars are just, right?
Like to give you an example, give you just like a help here.
Joseph Kony used to be a big deal.
I don't actually even know what happened to him.
Like that kind of fell off the map, like other things do.
There were a lot of people that said it would be a just war for the United States to go and intervene because this guy is raping and murdering and killing people.
Is that a just war or not?
Well, no, I don't think so for lots of people.
But you understand that there's an argument.
Sure, yes, there's an argument to be able to do that.
And if you think that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, if you think that, probably because some people either lied or shifted, spun the evidence, Gulf of Tonkin style.
But if you believe that as a premise, is that a just war?
No, I would say no.
I agree with you on that.
Okay, right.
But a lot of the country doesn't.
A lot of the country thinks we're the only ones that are allowed to have GMDs.
Look, man, you're just, it's like you're doing all of these mental gymnastics to dodge the point.
You will make a million excuses for somebody who supported a war, what you're doing right now.
White Privilege and Just Wars00:07:32
But you just, but if they're racist, then whatever that means, whatever you deem to be racist.
Of course, you don't have any.
You said what it means.
You don't have to pretend you don't understand words.
No, well, it's a very broad term.
You just pretended you didn't understand it when I was talking about the anti-white racism of the left.
Right.
When you judge people by the color of their skin, we don't judge the group.
We're not racist.
We're not calling out the anti-white hatred on the left, which is prevalent.
I mean, you're saying that if you judge all white people as white people, as like white people have a problem or white people are bad or white people are this or white people are that, that is racist.
You want them out of the Libertarian Party.
If you're going to just say like all white people.
Anyone who talks about white privilege, get out of the white paper.
White privilege is a different thing.
White privilege isn't racism.
White privilege is recognizing that if you or I walk down the street smoking weed in New York, we're less likely to get hassled by the cops than a black guy.
Is that really?
That's white privilege.
Okay.
And how do you know that that's true?
How do I know personally?
Yeah.
So let me tell you a story.
Oh, an anecdote is how you know?
Yeah.
Okay.
My lived experience.
I'm sharing it with you.
Okay.
I lived in Colorado and I played in a lawyers football league, two-hand touch, right, on Sundays.
And I was late one day.
So I'm driving down the road.
I'm going fast.
Cop pulls out down in a south suburb of Denver.
I have a handgun loaded in my glove compartment.
Cop comes up, license and registration.
I give him that.
I'm like, you know, officer, I have a handgun in my glove compartment.
Said, well, take it out.
I take it out.
I set it on my seat next to me.
It is racked and loaded.
The cop takes my stuff, goes back to his car, comes back to me, says, you know, you should slow down.
I see that you live in the neighborhood.
You know, have a good day.
Don't drive so fast.
Here's a business card if you want to call the cop shop about our interaction with my name and stuff.
Right.
And then I leave.
You have to remember, I spent five years as a public defender, and I had a lot of African-American clients.
And that is not how their interaction goes.
That's never happened.
Either get shot or proned out on the ground.
And some of it has to do with different police departments.
More black people get shot than white people by police.
Relatively more on a per capita basis, right?
But about twice as many white people get shot by the cops.
There are a lot more white people in the country.
Yeah, sure.
That's how numbers work.
Well, not necessarily if there's this white privilege.
So there are things where it is easier for all things being equal, it is easier to go through life as a white person in this country than a black person in this country.
Now, maybe, again, you have to be individualist, right?
Like, so you may have a different.
It seems a little racist.
You might have to get out of the party.
I don't think I do.
Okay.
So, I mean, the idea of white privilege is not a it is related to racism because it goes back to a background level of racial bias in society where white people are nicer to other white people.
It goes back to basic tribalism, right?
Do you think black people have like a tendency to be nice to other black people?
Like, do they maybe refer to themselves as like their brothers and sisters?
Tribalism is tribalism, right?
Like, literally, refer to themselves like brother and sister is a term that they use for other black people.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
As do religious communities.
Like, if you're in a church, they refer to you as brothers.
Sure.
Right.
Because it's the idea of extending a family.
Nothing.
Tribes are like bigger families, right?
So that's a form of collectivism.
It is a form of collectivism.
And it's a pretty natural human instinct.
Yeah.
Would you want like a black person who referred to libertarian libertarianism?
But you just said you want to sign a pledge against collectivism.
No, I said I wanted, I said that I, along with many other libertarians, signed an open letter saying racists are not welcome within the libertarian movement.
Full stop.
The people in Charlottesville that are chanting the little Tiki Torch Brigade.
Do you think that was a big threat to us?
Blood and soil.
Do you think that was a big threat to the country?
Like bigger than the warfare state, bigger than like, say, like socialists on the left?
I mean, how about the people who aren't inside of our country, Dave?
That's the thing.
The warfare state doesn't threaten the inside of our country.
Really?
You don't think so?
You don't bomb another country.
It doesn't bomb Baldwin.
The warfare state does not affect locks people up in our country.
Wait a second, are you out of your mind?
What do you think?
They got all those fancy military gears at the police stations that they're using for that.
They buy them off the DHS.
They buy them off the police.
Right, but that's after they've already used it.
Sure, but the warfare state doesn't affect the domestic population.
Dude, you got war is the health of the state.
I'm aware of that.
Okay.
Don't tell me that.
But don't tell me that foreign policy is more important than criminal justice reform because that's not true.
It is.
It is not.
It absolutely is.
Criminal justice reform is way more important to Americans because Americans are not.
Well, to Americans, you just added a new term in there.
Hold on.
Let me finish my question.
Where do we run our elections?
I do agree with that.
In America.
Yes, that's right.
And where do we do our genocide?
In the Middle East.
Okay.
So anyway, let me finish the point.
The point that we're not bombing Philadelphia.
Right.
Anyway, well, by the way, if someone did bomb Philadelphia or supported bombing Philadelphia, the move bombing.
Right, right, right.
And if someone supported that and they were all about it, let's say they didn't do that.
Let's say they killed 100,000 people in Philadelphia.
You think it'd be okay if someone who supported that was the LP nominee?
Probably.
A couple years later?
Probably not.
I'm not.
So it's only when it's in Iraq.
Then it's okay.
All right.
So it seems like, I don't know, first world privilege to me.
But it is first world privilege.
Right.
Okay.
So I'm glad that.
Let me ask you a question.
Well, let me just.
How many people died in Rwanda and how many people died in Bosnia?
I don't have the numbers in front of me.
And which one did we intervene in?
Okay.
So you're saying there was an intervention where 10 times more people died in an African country than died in a European country.
But which one do we go send the military to?
It's not the African country.
Right.
Are you supporting, are you saying we should have intervened?
I'm generally an anti-interventionist.
Right.
What I'm saying is the nature of in a place is the place you live.
The people that are closer to you are more important to you than the people that are far away.
It just seems kind of like a collectivist.
How much do you care about L.A.?
I'm not sure what the question is.
How much?
How do I measure that?
Do you care about what happens in L.A. as much as you care about what happens in the five boroughs?
Sure.
I have a lot of friends who live in L.A.
But you, your kid, your wife, what happens here affects them.
Yes, I care about my kids.
What happens overseas does not affect your kid and your wife.
I disagree with that completely.
Okay.
But not as directly.
But yes, the rise of the military state affects all of us.
Yeah.
Actually, I get robbed to pay for it.
So anyway.
Yes, that's right.
So it does affect me very clearly.
Anyway, just going back to where we were before.
But let's take New York and the vaccination thing, right?
If the state says you have to put this into your kid and you have no option, isn't that a more salient and direct effect on your life than bombing Yemenis or giving cluster munitions to the Saudis to bomb Yemenis?
Like, doesn't that affect you and your life more?
What happens to your kid here in New York?
Yeah, sure, in some sense.
So shouldn't you care more about what happens to your kid than what happens to a kid overseas?
Well, I care about both of them, but no.
State Control vs Foreign Policy00:14:28
I don't agree with that.
Blood at all the same.
Huh?
No, that's not the point at all.
Okay.
If you're saying, like, if you're saying, my, you know, my daughter gets a scraped knee and there's a genocide in Yemen, yes, my daughter getting a scraped knee affects me and my family more than the genocide in Yemen.
That doesn't mean that it's worse than a genocide in Yemen.
No.
So the fact that there's some, you know, anyway, the point I'm getting at here is like the bigger picture is this.
So people, just back to what we were saying before.
So people wouldn't sign this pledge.
It is an open letter.
An open letter.
Whatever.
I'm sorry.
So people wouldn't sign this open letter because they thought that was kind of stupid.
And they were like, look, I'm not going to be told that I have to.
It's demeaning.
I didn't tell anybody they had to do anything.
But your response to them not doing it was what?
It means something.
I interpret that.
I interpret that inaction as an action.
Okay.
Especially if you're going to come out publicly and say, I know about this open letter.
I know what it says.
I know who signed it.
I'm still not going to.
So let me ask you this.
You had in your party that you chair, because I was watching in preparation for our debate that we had last night.
You're watching, you know, I was watching your debate with Joshua Smith and two other people who were on stage for the chair debate.
Funeral and thrasher.
Now, one of them is an open socialist wearing a Karl Marx t-shirt with a hammer and sickle.
He did not think that he didn't win.
No, he did not.
I believe he didn't.
I think he got six votes.
Okay.
In the entire.
Does he need to get out of the party?
Is a hammer and sickle?
He actually is left.
Okay, but would you say someone wearing a hammer and sickle needs to get out of the party?
I don't kick people out of the party.
Unless they're racist.
I tell the racists they're not welcome.
I don't have to kick them out.
Yes, I understand.
There's no expulsion mechanism.
My point is, is racism more offensive to you than the hammer and sickle?
Yes.
Okay.
It's interesting.
Because the hammer and sickle indicates that you don't understand economics.
Racism indicates that you judge another group of people as being less than because the color of the people.
So it's evil.
One's misguided.
One is evil.
One is anti-human, and one of them is stupid and leads to bad things.
Okay.
But it's an economic problem.
So more or less, you're misguided on economics if you believe in communism, but you're evil if you're on the right, you know, on the right-wing racist type thing.
No, if you're racist.
Okay.
That's what I'm saying.
There's no right to do it.
Can I just say this?
Right and left or not.
This is the problem, and this is, well, they are, I believe.
I mean, whether we like it or not, they're as real as the state or politics or any of this stuff.
They're not kind of artificial.
What's the difference between the right and the left?
What is it?
Let me just make the point I'm making.
I would say maybe like the belief in egalitarianism versus understanding that.
So you don't believe in egalitarianism?
No, I'm not an egalitarian.
Now, hold on.
Let me define your...
No, no, no.
Let me just make the point that I was making before.
This view, and I think this is why so many people not only didn't want to sign this letter, but also had a problem with what you were doing.
And I feel like the Libertarian Party does this a lot.
You play on this ground where you're basically, you're playing on the left's playing field in a game that only they can win.
So when you say, when you concede that, you know, the hammer and sickle, left-wing, like basically the left-wing communists, they're just misguided.
You know, they want a better world, but they have the most noble intentions, but they just don't exactly understand what's going on.
Whereas if you have like this, this, you know, neo-fascist right-wing movement, they are evil and they know exactly what they're doing.
I mean, how many people died under the hammer and sickle?
What is it?
75 million, 100 million somewhere in this ballpark?
How many of them have to die before we stop giving them the benefit of the doubt?
We stop saying, why couldn't you just say, why couldn't someone wearing a swastika, you could just say, well, they're misguided.
They believe that this is, you know, going to be a great thing for their people or this is what's going to lift a nation up and lead to a great nation.
Why is that evil?
But the hammer and sickle is misguided.
And I'll tell you why.
No, communists.
It's because they lost the war.
Communism's evil.
Okay, so the hammer and sickle is evil.
I mean, the hammer and sickle is a symbol of communism.
It's bad.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay, but you don't want them out of that.
You just said it was misguided.
Not bad.
Not evil.
It's a big difference.
Misguided and evil are different things.
But he wasn't wearing a hammer and sickle.
He was wearing a, you say it was Karl Marx.
It was Karl Marx and he had a pen with a hammer and sickle on it.
Six votes out of a thousand.
Yeah, my argument is that he won.
My argument isn't that he stayed.
He felt uncomfortable and left.
But this is the same thing.
Like the racists need to.
Feel uncomfortable and leave.
Okay, but I asked you flat out, do they need, do you want them to leave?
And you said no.
And you said the racist.
Right.
He felt uncomfortable and he left.
Okay.
I feel like you're dodging the point that I'm making, but okay.
All right, fine.
No, it's just.
Do you look?
We are coming.
No, we still have a little bit of a double- I want to do the egalitarian thing.
Sure.
You say you're not an egalitarian.
What does that mean to you?
What kind of egalitarianism are you talking about?
Well, I don't believe in equality of any sense, really.
I mean, equality and natural rights, perhaps.
So do you believe that all men are created equal?
No.
Okay.
What does that statement even mean?
That they all have the same rights before the law.
Okay, yeah, that I agree.
Okay.
So everybody should have the same rights before the law.
Sure.
Okay.
So would you say that gay people should have the same right to get married as straight people?
I don't think marriage should have anything to do with the state.
As long as it has something to do with the state, should they have the same rights?
Well, if you're asking what I believe, I believe that marriage is a freedom of speech issue and a freedom of association issue.
You should be able to associate with whoever you want to and call your relationship whatever you want to.
Okay.
You're asking me that's what I'm saying.
If the government is giving privileges to people who are in a certain kind of relationship, should they have to give those privileges out equally or are they not allowed to?
Loving versus Virginia.
Should they be able to say, if you are of different races, you can't get married, but if you are of the same race, you can?
No, I don't.
I think that's all ridiculous.
Yes.
Virginia requiring you to put race down for your marriage license, which there's currently a lawsuit about.
They still require you to pick race from a list in order to get a marriage license.
Okay.
That's a problem.
Well, what is the, I mean, that seems silly and archaic, but what's the actual problem?
They're not enforcing anything.
They're not racist.
But they're not actually doing anything, right?
They're not like saying you can't get married.
Yeah, they won't give you the license.
They won't give you a marriage license.
You will not get the license unless you're not.
It can't be interracial.
It's not a felony to not sign what race you are.
That's not what I'm asking.
I'm saying, will they actually not allow a white and a black person to get married?
No, not once the lovings went, not once the lovings went to the Supreme Court and it got struck down on 14th Amendment grounds.
Okay.
But until then, yes, in a lot of states, you would go to prison for being married to a black woman.
And when was this?
What year?
The 60s?
Okay.
60.
What was Loving?
It's 40th anniversary was just, so it would have been 67?
Okay.
Yeah, something like that.
So I'm not following.
What's your point?
Yeah, I don't think people should go to John.
I'm a libertarian.
Are you a legal egalitarian that believes that every individual should have the same rights before the law as every other individual, regardless of race, ethnicity, anything like that?
Yeah, sure.
Okay.
So you're that kind of egalitarian.
Sure, in that sense.
But you don't believe that everybody is born with the same talents or skills or whatever.
That's not really just a belief.
That's just a fact.
That's facts, right?
Right.
Yeah.
And so the issue that I have with racism is that it is a way of looking at the world where you decide that everybody who's born a certain color is here, and everybody who's born a different color is here.
You know, I've actually anti-individualists.
Can I just say, I've actually, with the whole like rise of the alt-right thing when that was happening, and I was kind of interested in it.
And I was like, what are these people like saying?
This all seems so crazy to me.
And it hurt me that some people who used to be libertarians went in that direction.
And I, you know, made the case many times on the show that I think it's a bad direction to go into for a number of reasons.
Like it's wrong and it's not going to get you anywhere.
Well, it's generally weak.
I mean, you're making excuses for why you have a bad life.
But no one's ever said that.
It's because of the brown people.
But no one's ever actually said to me what you just said.
Like everyone who's born a certain race is here and everyone who's born this race is here.
I don't think anybody is actually.
It's kind of a caricature of what they actually believe to say that.
Nobody's denying that there's black geniuses.
I'm glad that you've lived a sheltered life.
No.
Oh, okay.
I mean, your lived experience is different from mine.
I've seen that.
How have I lived a sheltered life?
In that no one has ever said anything explicitly racist.
Oh, okay.
No, I shouldn't say that's well, that's not what I said at all.
Okay.
That's not what I said at all.
But what I said, okay, yeah, no, maybe I should say, yeah, no, I'm sure you can find an idiot who believes just about anything.
But I don't think the argument that people who you would consider racist are saying that everybody who's black is a certain way or everybody who's white is a certain way.
When you have people who publicly say that what they want is a white country, a white Christian nation, that's what America should be.
That's a racist thing.
That's white nationalism, right?
Those are real people.
They exist in the world.
Do you think if like if Japan has like an immigration policy or if a Japanese person were to say, we want Japan to be a Japanese country that's primarily Japanese, like is that also racist?
Yes.
Okay.
No, I'm just, I'm just curious.
Okay, yeah.
Ethno-nationalism is fundamentally racist.
Is Israel a racist nation as well?
Israel has what is a de facto apartheid state against the Palestinians that they're occupying.
Right.
But wouldn't that be racist?
Those Palestinians have different rights and privileges before the law.
That is a racist policy.
So, but not a racist state?
A state policy.
The state's built around those policies.
Yes.
So the same, but okay, so the state can't be the same way a white ethno-state would be racist.
Israel is racist.
Right.
The same way that the way that America's whole housing development in the post-war era with redlining systemically discriminated against blacks.
Okay, so that was a racist policy.
Sure.
I wasn't like a gotcha question, but no, I'm just asking your opinion.
Those are racist policies.
When you judge people based not on the content of their character, but the color of their skin, it is racist.
I think that's fine, definitely.
When Stephen Miller decides that he wants to restrict immigration and stop taking refugees, and it just coincidentally, it's like, oh, well, it's all the brown people from south of the border, the ones we don't want.
Those are the ones that come from the bad countries, not the good countries like Norway.
What's the difference between Norway and Haiti?
Well, one's other than one's a first world country, one's a third world country.
What's the other difference?
Yeah, but well, you just asked me what's the difference between that.
What's the other one?
But that's a pretty big one.
That is a big one.
No, okay, but yeah, no, I'm just saying you could focus on the racial difference.
Obviously, there's a different racial makeup, but that's not the only difference.
There's a pretty big other one.
There are other ones.
Yeah.
So that's like a pretty big difference.
Would you?
The other one is that Norwegians aren't trying to immigrate here, but the Haitians are.
Okay, if you had a gun to your head and you and your family had to choose to go live like the average person in Norway or the average person in Haiti, I'm pretty sure I know where you'd be.
I'm picking Norway, yeah.
Okay, so what's the difference?
Quality.
Are you a racist quality?
Exactly, yes.
And what does that result in?
But what does that have to do with coming here?
What does that have to do with coming here?
Well, listen, I'm not, I'm not.
Quality of life there.
What does that have to do with coming here?
Well, the quality of life, a lot of that's determined by the culture and the people.
Is it?
Yes.
Okay.
But what makes you think that the people who are leaving the bad culture?
I didn't say I think that.
Okay.
I'm just saying it's to jump to the only difference between them is the race.
This seems like a very leftist tactic that I'm going to be talking about.
What do you think about the Muslim ban?
I think it was stupid.
Okay.
The whole thing was stupid.
But you're not one of those people that's like, it's not a Muslim ban, even though the president is not a bad person.
Well, it's not technically.
Well, he said it was a Muslim ban, and then what was actually proposed was not technically a ban on the bank.
But they've added some non-Muslim countries.
And they also left a lot of Muslim countries off the list.
Which ones?
Saudi Arabia.
Well, that's...
We know why that is.
Right.
We're busy selling them bombs.
But so, no, technically, if you are afraid of the money.
But if you don't ban every gun, it's still a gun control.
Yes, but it's still a gun ban, even if you didn't ban all of them.
Okay, sure.
So this is almost just getting into semantics.
I don't know what to say.
I don't support the policy.
No, the policy I support is stop slaughtering Muslims.
I don't know what this is the thing that's so squirrely that I find frustrating is we have to talk clearly about what we're talking about to see where we're at.
So where I get frustrated is when people want to make something other than it is.
Like you can have the position and we can disagree about it and we can argue about it and have a debate about it, but it's the dancing around like building the wall, right?
Like that's anti-South American immigration, right?
The wall is on the South American border.
It only affects brown people.
That's who it affects.
Okay.
We can argue over whether that's a good policy.
It's a terrible one.
It's crippling to our country.
But there are people who will say that Stephen Miller and his little crew that comes up with these things has no racial animus involved.
They just don't think it's a sustainable amount of immigration.
But then you look at the policies and if they only affect people of a certain color, it's not an illogical conclusion to say that something that primarily affects people of one race and not people of another race is a racist policy.
Yeah, I mean, I guess that would kind of make sense if Norway was on our northern border and there were people flooding in from Norway.
But Canada is.
Right.
And there were people flooding in from Canada at the rate of which they're flooding in from Mexico.
And then we were like, oh, we only want to build a wall there.
But that's not the case.
What's the net Mexican migration over the last 10 years?
Oh, I mean, if you're going to say zero, you're wrong.
No, it's a negative number.
Oh, dude.
More people have left than come.
It's just not true.
It's just not true.
I mean, if you actually look at the numbers of illegal aliens, how many you think there are?
11 million in the country?
Followers, Fans, and Nazis00:04:04
I think it's 30, isn't it?
Yeah.
The number went from 12 to 30.
I don't know what it is.
Is it 12?
It's probably far higher.
Fire higher.
Well, but what's the generally accepted estimate?
It's in the millions.
It literally, I think, in one year went from 12 to 30 million because they just started recording it a new way.
Did it go from 10?
They don't know.
I don't know how many there are.
But let's say it's we know it's over 10.
Oh, yeah, way over 10.
Which means that no deportation will ever work.
Oh, I agree.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, I don't know.
You can't enforce those laws.
I mean, if you wanted to.
Unless you want a police state.
A hardcore beat down the political state.
If you're a white nationalist, ethno-nationalist who wants to deport people into this being a white country, you would have to create a bigger police state than Nazi Germany in order to get it there.
This is why they're dangerous.
Okay, I agree.
I agree that they're dangerous.
But look, we're coming up against the end of time.
So let me ask you this.
So Tom Woods, Jeff Dice, these guys, they didn't want to sign this pledge.
Does that mean that you now don't want them associated in the liberty movement?
You don't want to bring it up.
I welcome Tom into the party when he joined.
Dan Fishman was just on Tom's show.
Dan's welcome.
You're welcome.
Jeff Deist is welcome if he wants to join.
I don't think he does.
I don't know.
I'm not saying that they're not libertarians.
I'm not saying that they're racist.
I've never said that.
I've never called them a Nazi.
No, you just dance around it, though.
No.
What I have said is there is a segment of Tom's audience.
There's a segment of supporters of the Institute who are racists.
They exist.
I've seen them.
They show up in my mentions every so often when we have some discussion.
Yeah.
Who are like, I'm the biggest Tom Woods fan, and also they've got, you know, little Celtic crosses and they're talking about protecting a white race, right?
When they exist, they are fans.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, when you have racist fans, when you have followers, when you have a big follow, you get comments.
Some of them are in the chats, yeah.
Proof no.
So this is a thing that this is a problem that the libertarians have had.
No, no, That's a problem that anyone with a following has.
Frankly, let me tell you something.
This is the truth, okay?
When you crack a certain number of followers, this is how it is.
This is a problem anyone with followings with followers has.
Is it how bad followers are?
This is a problem everybody has.
So it's not a libertarian problem.
It's not anything else.
And that's what I'm saying is the question is: do you let those followers be comfortable or uncomfortable?
Do you go out of their way to not make them uncomfortable?
Would you like give a speech on Adolf Hitler and how backward his economic policies were on the evils of Nazi Germany?
You know what I mean?
Like really let them know.
Because Tom's done all that.
Tom's literally.
No, the economic policies.
Oh, no, no, no.
But not the racial policies.
Oh, no, no, no.
He's done a whole bunch on all that stuff.
What anti-racist stuff has Tom done?
What anti-racist stuff has Tom?
Anti-racist.
Anti-racist.
Specifically calling out, judging people based on their race.
Specifically calling out, say, the alt-right and the stuff that they do.
Judging people on their.
Okay, I mean, to find it, you, oof, man.
You have to.
Because the anti-war stuff I know about.
Let me find this because it's a real challenging thing.
If you had to find Tom Woods calling out the alt-right, you'd have to Google Tom Woods alt-right and listen to the three different podcasts that he did on it, where he specifically said, what is this thing where they're making these flippant jokes and saying these horrible racist things?
It's terrible.
He did an episode with Paul Godfrey on it.
They absolutely called them out.
He's also said on different.
Call Gottfried Richard Spencer's mentor, that guy?
Yeah, the Jewish guy who broke.
Richard Spencer's mentor.
Okay, killed by association.
There you go.
No, the problem that Gottfried had with Spencer is that Spencer said the quiet part loud.
Yeah.
That's Godfrey's problem.
Nope, that's not true.
That's what you're saying his problem is.
He actually talks about what his problems with Richard Spencer are, and they were a whole bunch of different things than what you're talking about.
And one of them was ethno nationalism.
Yes, that would be the quiet part you're not supposed to say loud.
Well, no, that's what you're saying.
That's not what he's saying.
Whatever.
You want to call everybody's a secret Nazi.
Joining the Libertarian Party00:02:37
I know.
Here's the truth, right?
Tom Woods goes out of his way.
He said, I am the least anti-fascist person you know.
What I believe in is the polar opposite of fascism.
And he's explained exactly what's wrong with fascism and what's wrong with racism.
Okay.
He's broken both of the people.
I've heard the racist race.
Maybe you haven't.
He's done it.
You should listen to more.
He's done all of that.
I have never once heard Bill Weld even come close to denouncing war and his support for war with nearly the veracity that Tom has done about all that alt-right shit.
So this is where, this is where the disconnect between you and me is the reaction that you have to racism is what I have to state-sponsored murder.
We have different opinions.
That's right.
Sorry.
We have different beliefs that we hold stronger than others.
All right.
Right.
And that's, I think, the fairest thing to say.
Okay.
All right.
Well, that's not the worst place to end.
I will say this.
I do very much appreciate you coming in and debating last night.
I appreciate you coming in to the podcast now.
And I do hope that we can get some good candidates as the nominee in the Libertarian Party for 2020 because God damn it, the country needs it.
Recruit some people.
The country needs a strong liberty.
You've got a big audience.
Talk some people into it.
I actually am trying my best behind the scenes to get some good people going.
All right.
Thank you, Nick.
I appreciate it.
Everybody, by the way, as I mentioned quickly when we were talking, something I'm going to say.
Last thing.
Oh, go ahead.
I got a plug.
Oh, absolutely.
Go ahead.
LP.org slash join.
Okay.
If you care about these ideas, and even if you don't like me, maybe especially if you don't like me, lp.org.
Become a member of the party.
The party is made up of who shows up.
And if more people don't show up, they're not going to hear us.
I want your voice to be heard.
That's the way to do it.
Listen, I'm a member.
I'm a dues-paying member of the Libertarian Party.
I joined a little over a year ago.
If you go on my YouTube channel, I made a video.
It's titled, I'm Joining the LP Today.
I explain why I'm joining the LP.
I do kind of nudge people in the direction that I think it's a good idea.
I also think it's like, look, the LP, if you want to actually become a dues-paying member, there's not that many of them.
And if you guys want to join in droves, you can have a really big impact on that party, which is the third biggest political party in the country.
So I support that.
Just wanted to mention I will be recording this year's State of the Union podcast with Ari Shafir, which I do every year, and a lot of you guys really love.
So look for that.
We're recording it on Friday.
I'm not sure when he's going to put it out, but in the next couple of weeks.
And our debate will be out in the next couple of weeks on the Reason YouTube channel channel.