Joshua Smith critiques LP Chair Nick Sarwak for prioritizing growth over principles, citing Sarwak's controversial willingness to support figures like Dick Cheney and his dismissal of communists. Smith argues the party lost momentum after 2016 due to activist churn and alienates icons like Tom Woods and Hans Hermann Hoppe. He advocates replacing Sarwak at the Austin convention with an anti-war, media-focused nominee to challenge the two-party duopoly, noting that 60% of voters are dissatisfied. Ultimately, Smith urges listeners to become dues-paying delegates, asserting that one-third of his audience could seize control of the Libertarian Party to spread liberty's message against the deep state. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Challenging The Status Quo00:15:18
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
Hey guys, today's show is brought to you by the SOHO Forum.
You can go get all the information at thesohoforum.org.
I love this organization.
Of course, it's run by the great Gene Epstein.
It's a local debate series that deals with issues that libertarians care about.
This is the debate series where I debated the LP chairman, Nick Sarwak, and won in dominant fashion.
And the next debate coming up is something I'm very, very excited for.
The resolution is socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom, equality, and prosperity.
Taking the affirmative will be Richard Wolf, who is one of the most prominent socialist voices in the world.
And taking the negative will be, of course, the great Gene Epstein.
I can't wait for this.
I'm going to be there.
I'm going to open up with some stand-up comedy before the debate starts.
So it's going to be a lot of fun.
If you want information for it, go to thesohoforum.org.
There are still a few tickets available because they moved this one to a bigger venue.
It's going to be at the Kimmel Center.
But anyway, thesohoforum.org for all the information.
It's an unbelievable time.
I go to every single one of these.
I'm always hanging out, having a drink before and after.
So if you want to come out and bullshit with me for a few minutes, watch a great debate, hang with some other great libertarians.
And in this case, I think there's going to be a lot of socialists as well.
So, you know, just make sure you protect your private property.
Go to thesohoforum.org.
This is going to be a good one.
All right, let's start the show.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
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.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem, another installment of our Wednesday one-on-one series.
I'm very excited for this podcast, as are lots of people who have been hectoring me on the social media to get this gentleman on the show.
And he's somebody who I've been looking forward to talking to.
And really, I have felt personally passionate following, passionate following this young man has.
He is, of course, Joshua Smith, and he is running to be the next chair of the Libertarian Party in 2020.
He also ran to be chair of the party last time around in 2016.
He is the Mises caucus endorsed candidate to be chair of the Libertarian Party.
Joshua Smith, how are you, sir?
I'm doing just fine.
Thank you so much for having me on, Dave.
Very good.
Happy to have you.
Happy to have you on, man.
So you have, you've been in the Libertarian Party for how long now?
This time around, I joined right around 2016.
You know, I was looking at Trump and Hillary and going, this is craziness, this madness.
I can't be a part of this.
And so I ended up essentially campaigning for Gary Johnson when I lived in Southern Washington.
And at that time, Bill Weld hadn't made his remarks that kind of were upsetting.
But so I joined the Libertarian Party in Washington in 2016.
Okay, so joined in 2016.
And how did you link up with the Mises caucus guys, Michael Heiss and them?
So I've been a Mises fan for a long time.
You know, the Institute and Jeff Deist and Tom Woods.
And I mean, Murray Rothbard's really what made me a libertarian.
I mean, it opened the window that I couldn't close, you know.
And so as soon as I saw that was founded, I was actually in the process of running for chair in 2018 is when I ran for chair.
leadership every two years.
And so I actually, I joined their group, their secret group.
And I, I mean, I was posting every single day and they're like, hey, hey, what's going on?
What are you guys doing?
Can you help me out?
I was, you know, I had, I tagged my page in there a million times.
And finally, me and Michael sat down and had a talk and realized we had a lot in common and we had, we shared many goals with for the Libertarian Party.
And they ended up endorsing me and helping me out.
And I mean, that was the biggest push for my candidacy in 2018.
Absolutely.
Yes, my mistake about that.
Of course, it was 2018.
And it was an interesting race.
This, of course, was before a lot of us joined the Libertarian Party.
So it was like right before I joined, Tom Woods joined, Jason Stapleton and all these guys.
And even before this kind of influx of the new people, you got a lot of energy behind you.
You didn't end up winning the chair, obviously.
But I think, what did you take, like a quarter of the vote or something like that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right around a quarter.
It was like 23.5% or something like that for, you know, for a blue collar guy that nobody really knew the year prior.
I think I did pretty well.
No, I mean, absolutely.
What was the, what made you want to be chair of the party and what makes you want to run for it again?
Sure.
So in 2018, it was kind of a no one else was stepping up.
A lot of us were really upset with the current leadership.
The constant flame wars on Twitter obviously were not helpful to our party.
It was pushing away more libertarians than it was bringing in.
And I wanted this party to be a viable party and a party that can actually fight the two-party system.
And so I, you know, I had founded this publication called Think Liberty that's pretty big now.
I'm not really too involved in it now.
And I decided to put out an intent to run statement because all the big libertarians that I had called refused to run for chair against Nick.
And I never thought it would get that big, you know, and I ended up traveling to 26 states and like 20 state conventions.
And it was just, it was wild.
But yeah, it was just really, I wanted to challenge the status quo of the party, right?
We kind of seen this establishment, Libertarian Party growing.
And so I was like the anti-establishment candidate and I just saw things being done wrong.
And this year, you know, I have a lot more meat to talk about.
I've had a lot more successes.
I did end up on the LNC as an at-large representative anyways.
And so now I have some successes to point to.
I can show that we've been bringing membership in left and right.
We can show that because of the Mises caucus causes, we have people like Dave Smith and Tom Woods and Jason Stapleton that are getting interested in the party.
And there's thousands and thousands and thousands of small libertarians all over the country that are mad at our leadership and won't join.
And so I wanted to be that alternative.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, look, I debated Nick Zarwalk at the Soho Forum and then I had him on the podcast.
And I'll say, I don't, I don't see any need for change.
I think that guy's doing a great job and he should he should continue to be the chair.
There may be a couple of things that I had some issues with.
It is strange to me that, you know, I've talked to, you know, I like basically when I debated Nick, and I mean, I guess he never said this, but he basic, I mean, I'm not inferring too much.
He basically said that principles weren't that important to him.
I mean, he, he was like, he kind of mocked me for having purity tests.
He said he would vote for Dick Cheney or he would even maybe support Adolf Hitler if he ran on the Libertarian Party.
He, you know, like basically was saying, well, it doesn't matter.
We just have to grow the party.
We just have to get votes.
And then you over here, you have Dave who's all, you know, talking about these principles and the non-aggression principle and all of these things.
But when I joined the Libertarian Party, I mean, the first thing they prompt you with is the non-aggression principle.
That's the only thing you have to agree with in order to join the party.
And they claim to be the party of principle.
So there seems, it's not like I'm just inserting this or you're just inserting this.
There seems to be a disconnect between what the party is claiming to be and what their leadership is actually representing.
Sure.
Absolutely.
And it's the absolute truth.
And that's the split on the LNC as well, too.
You know, there's seven of us that really, really care about principle and think that putting principle at the front of everything we do is going to is going to actually grow our party and make our candidates better and bring us more membership and more fundraising.
And that's what this party was built to be was that principled alternative to those duopoly.
I mean, Murray Rothbard, for crying out loud, is one of the founders of the Libertarian Party.
You know, it's, it's insane to think that we can walk around and bring a bunch of people that don't hold our values to the party and that the party is going to stay the party of principle.
It's just insane to me.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I was really blown away by some of the things Nick said, particularly when I had him on the podcast.
Even though I was already pretty, you know, annoyed at the guy, I was really like kind of shocked by some of the admissions he made.
And one, you know, there's you, you've been a guy from what I've followed of your career who's been certainly, I don't, I don't think I'm mischaracterizing this to say you've been willing to fight.
And not in a physical sense, but that you've been willing to fight for your principles.
And you've found yourself in a lot of different battles with kind of both sides.
So you've been battling with the establishment side.
That's kind of the major fight.
But then you've also been out there fighting with these libertarian socialists in the party.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
So last year, I mean, a lot of people will characterize my entire run as me being, you know, the antithesis to the libertarian socialist caucus, but they're the tiny little caucus and they don't really hold any power at all across the country in any of our affiliates, except for maybe one state affiliate somewhere.
But yeah, I mean, socialist is a bad word to me.
It is, you know, and I've had since then, I've had a lot of conversations with some of their members.
And there are some who are like, look, I just want my own little commune.
I don't want to force this on anybody else.
I'm like, then go be a voluntarist.
That's fine.
I don't have any problem with that.
And so I held to the fact last year that my entire gripe with them was I don't want to seat at our table for anybody who is interested in using violent authoritarianism of any flavor.
I told Augustus Invictus the same thing three years ago.
Look, if you're going to call for actual nationalism or whatever it is that you're trying to do, I see that as an authoritarian ideology and I'm not going to stand for it.
And so, and in fact, I did challenge him to a charity MMA fight back then.
So one violent, anyways.
No, and that's, that was my big gripe.
You know, if you guys are calling for voluntarism, I have no problem working with you.
But if you're calling for using state force to take people's private property and you're calling for state force to, you know, enact your ideology on other people, then you're not a voluntarist and you shouldn't be sitting at our table.
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I certainly get your point.
And I think it's just the truth that the libertarian socialists don't have, you know, a lot of influence within the party and there's not too many of them.
But at the same time, it does seem to me that it's like, I mean, if you can't even make clear that you don't have a place for communists in the party, I mean, how are you ever going to keep this thing a party of principle?
You know what I mean?
It's like this is the, and, and what Nick Sarwak said to me that really, I mean, there were like three or four things that he said that I absolutely couldn't believe.
But one of the things he said is he said, well, communists are just misguided, but racists are really evil.
And I was like, wow, I wonder what communists would have to do before you could consider them evil.
Like, was the 20th century not enough to go, you know, this might be a little bit worse than just misguided.
Like the hundreds of millions dead.
That, you know, I mean, like, how about an intentional genocide through starvation?
Would that be just misguided or would that maybe meet the threshold of evil?
So anyway, I just thought because when I watched in preparation for when I debated Sarwak, I watched the debate that you were a part of.
And there was that one guy up there who had like the Karl Marx t-shirt on.
And it was like...
Yeah.
I mean, now he was getting booed pretty much everything he said, but what was it?
Property is theft, I believe is one of them.
Yeah, that's their big thing.
That's their big thing.
And since then, he actually, we have finally driven him completely out of the party.
He wouldn't join the DSA, thankfully, where he belongs.
So very good.
Probably theft.
What a weird, what a weird, like, it's actually, you have three words and it's a self-contradictory statement, right?
Because how do you have theft if you don't have property?
I mean, like, what, what is stealing if it doesn't belong to somebody else?
Right.
And I think that some of those people, they don't really, they're kind of like a group think mentality and they don't really think out their philosophy very well.
He actually has stated several times that he doesn't read philosophy.
So I don't know.
He said, I think there's actually a screenshot floating around of him where he said that he gets the bulk of his philosophy from shit posts and Facebook.
So it makes a lot of sense.
You know what?
I actually just, I respect the guy more now.
At least that's what he comes with it like that.
He's like, yeah, dude, I don't waste my time with these gay ass books.
I got memes I get my philosophy from.
All right.
And if that's the case, then fine.
So what do you think going into the next race for a show?
So how about this?
When did you decide that you were going to run for the chair again?
Oh, I was back and forth on it all year.
And then several people that I respect greatly came to me and said, look, you ran a pretty successful campaign last year, enough to get some really great people in the party.
I think we can build a big enough delegation to get you a win.
And we don't see, again, nobody else is stepping up really.
I think there's one other gentleman named Todd Hageopian who was announced since I've announced, who's, you guys might know him as the libertarian in chief on Facebook, but I've actually put in the work with this party and people came to me and said, hey, we've seen what you're doing.
Can you run again?
And I decided to do that probably in July, I think, right around the beginning of July.
And that's when I announced as well.
Okay.
So, yeah, I think I have seen that guy's Twitter handle, but I'm not super familiar with him.
What do you think the dynamics, obviously, as you mentioned, you have this at large position now?
You've established yourself.
I mean, you're new, you're new relatively to the party, certainly compared to Nick Sarwak.
And you were very new last time you ran.
So what do you think is going to be different going forward in the next time?
Well, I have obviously a lot more successes to point to.
I'm one of the biggest fundraisers on the LNC right now.
I've also, if you see my, so every time I, I have a dedicated link for signing up new members.
And so every time that a new member signs up through my link, it sends the LNC an email that shows that we have a new member that came in through my link.
And my emails are just stacked full of those emails.
I mean, just over and over and over again.
I can show that, you know, what I'm doing is working, that I am able to inspire people, that putting principles first does inspire people to become a part of our cause.
And especially the anti-war sentiment, you know, that's, it should be at the front of every single thing that we do all the time.
A Path Forward For Change00:03:57
And right now, the LNC, you know, the chair doesn't seem to care about those things.
And I'm having more success than he is just in that in general.
But I've also chaired the affiliate support committee and we've been pretty successful at getting people more active around the country.
And, you know, I worked with the state party and I've worked with candidates all over the country.
And so, I mean, I have a lot more successes to point to.
I can show that what I, what I talked about in 2018 works.
And hopefully people will want to see that on a grander scale.
Yeah, it does seem to me like I, you know, I have no problem.
And I said this about Nick Sarwak.
I have no problem if the chairman of the Libertarian Party wanted to say, look, I'm a big tent guy.
And so you might like, I might feel a certain way.
Like, I don't want people like Bill Weld in the party.
I don't want libertarian socialists in the party.
That's my personal feeling.
But if the chair was to say, hey, that's not my job.
I'm a big tent guy.
I have no problem with anyone who wants to come in coming in.
You know, I'd say, fair enough.
Maybe that's the role of what a chair should say.
But when he's fine with all those guys coming in and then attacks Tom Woods, Ron Paul, Lou Rockwell, Hans Hermann Hoppe, like all these great libertarians, that was to me like kind of the thing that was like, well, so what are you doing here?
Like, how could that possibly be the plan?
And so I guess what like my main thing of why I think somebody besides Nick Sarwak should be the chair is just why would anyone want a chair of the LP to be at war with the Ron Paul movement?
This seems like such basic politics 101.
You had a big libertarian moment in America in 2008, 2012.
You're the libertarian party.
Wouldn't you want to welcome those guys in to your movement?
What's the justification for that?
There is none.
It's a hypocritical thinking.
And I've said it since I ran last year that, you know, we want to bring, especially the Mises caucus, we want to bring the Ron Paul revolution home where it belongs.
So the Libertarian Party, the GOP no longer serves those interests.
I mean, they were having Ron Paul delegates arrested in 2008 outside of caucuses.
I mean, it was just the GOP is not a home for our principles anymore.
It's just not.
And there's some great guys in the GOP that are that are fighting to change it, but the Libertarian Party wouldn't take much to change, you know, and that's that's the God's honest truth.
There's 15,000 national members.
You know, if every small libertarian across the country came to the party, it'd be ours.
And that's just plain and simple.
That's how that's how it would work.
And it'd be the largest libertarian outlet in the country.
And so I don't know why anybody would do that.
I mean, we all kind of speculate.
You know, at this point, it feels like Nick knows that his time is coming.
And if he can get more Mises people to leave the party, then he doesn't have to worry about us taking over and being the strongest voice.
And so it almost feels like a scorched earth policy that he's pushing.
Do you feel like, is it just me?
Because I am an admitted narcissist.
So I see everything through the lens of what I did and how it changes the world.
But it seems to me, I'm half kidding, but it seems to me that since my interactions with Nicholas Sarwak, since the debate and the podcast he was on, it seems like he's leaning into it more.
Like he's going like, well, I can't fight my way out of this.
So now I'm just going to lean in.
And he's like criticizing Trump when he says he's going to pull troops out of Syria.
And he's going right like, it seems like maybe that's what you just said is the answer that he's just like, well, look, this is my only path forward is to just demoralize the people who hate me so much to not even showing up to make them be rid of the, you know, like, I don't even want to be a part of the Libertarian Party.
But am I crazy in noticing that?
Or does it seem like he's kind of leaning into this character?
No, he absolutely is.
And that's, you know, we've all been talking about it.
And that's exactly what it feels like is, look, Nick is going to be very, very, very upset if you show up to Austin in May and vote him out.
Very mad.
He's going to be very mad about it, especially if you show up to Austin and vote for his arch nemesis and Joshua Smith.
The Rise Of Heshy Socks00:02:13
I mean, that's just plain and simple.
That's where that's where we're at right now.
And I believe that he believes if he can lean into these things, he can keep enough people from coming to Austin in May as delegates to vote out, you know, vote him out and vote on whatever platforms and bylaws, proposals, and more importantly, our presidential and vice presidential nominees.
I mean, that's what the delegates get to do in Austin and May.
And Nick's had control over that for the last six years.
And he doesn't, you know, he either wants to win again and keep control, or he wants to put in whoever he's been grooming to run in May in 2020.
And so he would be very upset if you showed up as a delegate and tried to vote him out.
Very mad.
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Do you think I know that, you know, I wonder sometimes, and I wonder for you too.
Why Political Solutions Fail00:09:30
I mean, like, why, like, like, as you said before, that you kind of got into running for this because it's like you're trying to convince other people to do it and no one's doing it.
And so you're like, all right, I guess it falls to me to be the guy to do this.
I certainly understand why people don't want to do it.
I mean, it's not really being the chair.
It's not a glamorous position.
It's a lot of work.
It's not like a job you're going to make a lot of money from.
It's actually not paid at all.
Right.
So you're, you're literally quite literally losing money to do this job.
So I wonder sometimes, like, why does Nick want to be chairman of the LP?
And then, you know, he, he tried to make that run to be mayor of Phoenix.
So maybe that's what's in his mind is that he could like move into some other, you know, a position after that.
But I do wonder, you know, about his motivation and why, why do you want to do it?
Like, is it just, as you were saying before, just someone else has to be chair here and we got to, you know, to kind of get this movement going again?
Well, I think I've, I think I've laid out a solid blueprint over the last two years of how we can be more successful.
But more importantly than that, and we talked about this when I was on Tom Woods' show, is that the majority of Americans in this country, when they hear the word libertarian, the first thing they think about is the Libertarian Party.
Plain and simple.
They don't think about Spooner and Rothbard and Hoppe and Tom and they don't know those people.
What they think about is Libertarian Libertarian Party.
And so philosophically, we need to be principled so that when people come to us to look at us, they see that we are the only anti-war party.
We are the only party that adheres to the NAP and wants to make policy or relinquish power with the NAP in mind.
And so if we don't have a chair who's doing that, then the Libertarian, people get to say whatever they want about the Libertarians.
They get to make up our ideology for us.
And that's not okay with me.
And I don't see another chair candidate who's running to change that.
Yeah.
No, well, I certainly agree with you on that.
And I agree with you on putting anti-war people forward.
I mean, I tried to really focus on this in the Soho Forum debate.
It just seems like such an obvious, like if you're against state action, you know, and what's the worst, most violent thing that the state does is obviously war.
We're in the midst of the longest wars in American history.
They're wildly unpopular.
Every single president who wins has to pretend to be anti-war in order to win.
And then in 2016, we actually ran a ticket that you could very easily argue did not have the anti-war credentials that Donald Trump had.
I mean, sir, Donald Trump didn't have a political history, but he was like, I'm against all these wars.
And then here you got Bill Weld over there on the other ticket who's had a career of supporting these wars.
So even if he wanted to say, well, I'm against him, it's like, well, you've been supporting him forever.
And he was a lobbyist for a weapons company and all this.
So there was no even reason to be like, no, no, no, I'm the real anti-war voice here.
And if we're not going to do that, it just seems like, what's the point?
I mean, this is a waste of time.
Yeah, this should be the easiest one to go after people for.
And if nothing else, like, I mean, so many people, like I'm one of them, but I was brought into libertarianism first sold by the anti-war message because that seems so obvious.
And then they were like, oh, there's this whole other philosophy attached to why we became anti-war.
And you're like, okay, well, let me look into that.
Let me read about that.
And to me, that seems like the easiest way to grab people.
But, you know, maybe one of the weakest points that I had in my debate was that I didn't, and Starwalk did try to push me on this, but I didn't have a great alternative in mind, you know, when he said who should be the nominee.
And there weren't, in my opinion, that many great options in 2016.
And I don't know, is there anybody who you would like to see run for the presidential ticket?
Or has anyone who's already declared kind of caught your interest?
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm friends with Adam Kokesh, so I like Kokesh a lot.
I think, you know, look, and I've said this on other interviews too.
The presidential nominee is essentially there to do a 50-state media tour.
That's what they're doing.
They're doing a national media tour.
We're under no illusion that we're going to win the presidency in 2020.
So we need somebody that's going to be good in the media and can go out and purvey our principles to the public.
And so, you know, I think we have several good candidates.
I think Dan Berman's really well spoken, even if he wears that silly yellow hat sometimes.
I think Kim Russ's great.
And I heard, you know, through the grapevine that maybe Jacob Hornberger might run and that would be awesome as well.
So I think we have, you know, some good people out there that we can get in the media.
The only problem is, you know, the party's super preoccupied with what kind of visibility they have and how much money do they have.
And it's like, look, let's get somebody on a media tour that's going to go out there and tell the public what we stand for and that we should end all these wars and we should stop locking people up for drugs.
But really give them policy issues that are going to resonate with them because almost everybody in the two old parties, the public, they don't agree with war anymore.
There's 61% of the population in 2016 that didn't vote for a president at all because they're just done.
They're just jaded.
And I think it was you that said it or Tom that said it.
Every time they go to the ballot box to vote, they get Dick Cheney or they get John McCain.
No, that was Tom Wood's rule of politics that no matter who you vote for, you get John McCain.
It really is.
It's unbelievable.
It's really an unbelievable thing to watch where you have, say, just the most recent example where you have a field, right?
The Republican field at the beginning, and you've got Jeb Bush running.
You've got Marco Rubio running.
You had Lindsey Graham running.
I mean, if you want a neocon foreign policy, here are your guys.
You can vote for them.
And Donald Trump goes, this neocon foreign policy is crazy.
So everyone votes for Donald Trump.
And then you have John Bolton as his national security advisor.
And you're like, so no matter who you vote for, John Bolton is going to be deciding what happens on the world stage.
and Mike Pompeo.
I mean, these are all guys that easily could have been in Jeb Bush's or Lindsey Graham's campaign.
The guys didn't get 1% of the vote between them, and they still get their cabinet in there.
It really does make you think that this whole, the whole idea of a political solution, and I don't mean that in terms of using politics to spread a message, but to actually think that it's going to be electing a good Republican or something like that just seems highly unlikely.
Yeah, it's the absolute truth.
And I mean, it's just crazy to me that, you know, a lot of people still put their faith in the GOP and the Democratic Party.
But the good thing about having a third party that's actually viable and the reason why even the people in the two old parties should accept a third party and help to get us on the ballot is because now you have libertarians with a shark fin swimming in the water, keeping your politicians honest, right?
Because these people, let's be honest, they're in politics.
They're in these positions because they get paid.
It's their livelihood.
It's what they do.
You know, they spent generations in these seats and now they have some wacky libertarian that's like, I'm going to end all the wars tomorrow.
And they're swimming around the water for that seat.
And now those politicians have to govern like they campaign or they lose their seats, right?
And so it's beneficial to everyone to have a viable third party, even the people who believe in the two old parties, because now your candidates have to stay more honest.
Yeah.
No, I think there's definitely something to that.
But I really think the most important thing that you mentioned earlier is that it's like, and this is what I really tried to drive home in that debate is that the only thing that really matters is changing people's minds and waking people up, which can be done.
Like we know that that can be done.
Now, probably it can't be done for 100% of the population, maybe not even 50 or 40 or 30, but there is a chunk of the population who can be woken up.
I mean, so many have been already.
Pretty much every libertarian has the experience of I once wasn't a libertarian and then I was introduced to these ideas and I am now.
So that can happen.
And we certainly, there's no reason to think we've hit the max.
You know what I mean?
Like so many people haven't been presented with these ideas.
So let's make sure we keep doing that.
And the real, you know, like the heart of the conflict between me and Nick Sarwak was I'm like, look, if you're saying we're not going to challenge any of your preconceived notions, we're not going to radically change the way you view the world.
You can keep all of that.
Just check a box for us.
Then what is that vote worth?
What is the vote worth if we don't actually change some people's minds?
So I would love to see, I think Jacob Hornberger would be excellent.
I like Adam Kokesh a lot too.
I've been a fan of his for a long time.
I'd like to see someone who we can at least take a shot with because to me, a Gary Johnson-Bill Weld ticket, it was like, this is a guarantee that we lose.
And when I say lose, I don't mean the presidency.
We're losing that no matter what.
But just getting a few more votes, if that even is the case, it does nothing.
It just seems to me like it does nothing for us.
Well, I'm watching your debate with Nick.
I've watched it several times.
It was great.
I think you did a great job.
But he really stresses the importance of votes.
And yes, we got a record vote total for our presidential candidate.
And our membership rose to about 20,000 people, right?
Which was still 10,000 less than we had in 2000 when Harry Brown was our candidate.
But the fact of the matter is, is that now in the last, well, six months ago, we were at 13,000 members.
We had lost over 7,000 members since that presidential election.
Record Membership Growth00:03:03
They didn't stick around.
There was no activist continuity.
They came to the party for Gary Johnson.
They left when they found out what we were about.
Plain and simple.
And we have to have that continuity if we want to continue to bring great candidates in that are going to send our message out.
And so the votes are great.
Yeah.
So I know.
The votes are great.
Yeah, I actually didn't know that it had gone up to 20 and then back down to 13.
No, I sent you like 100 messages telling you to call me, Dave.
Yeah, no, I know.
I meant to get on the phone with you beforehand that It didn't end up happening, but I do.
That is an interesting piece of information.
And it's, it's, you know, it does speak right to the heart of things where Ron Paul did something where he would convert people who became lifelong libertarians.
And that is obviously going to be more valuable to you if you realize this is going to be a bit of a struggle.
It's probably not going to all happen next year.
That you actually need people who are really convinced and converted and are going to stick around for a while and not just be kind of dipping their toe into the Libertarian Party.
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Splitting The Republican Party00:14:09
I wonder in the spirit of that, what you just said, one of the things that I was thinking about that I think is plays really strongly to your advantage going into the 2020 race for the LP chair is that there were some things that were said, because as I mentioned, I watched the debate between you and Nick last time.
There were some things that were said that really did not age well for Nick Sarwak.
So one of his big moments of the debate, I shouldn't even say one of it, was the big moment of the debate was when he kind of chastised you about Bill Weld.
And he said, look, Bill Weld came over to the Libertarian Party.
He's helping the party.
He's not going anywhere.
This guy is going to be with the liberal.
We've made a libertarian out of Bill Weld.
He didn't make the party more establishment.
We made Bill Weld more libertarian.
And now you have Bill Weld has bailed on the party.
He went right back to the Republicans.
And he's out there saying things like, We need to return to the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, criticizing Donald Trump when he's saying he's going to end these wars.
And then it's easy to say, well, Donald Trump isn't actually ending these wars.
Fair enough, but maybe part of that's because he gets criticized every time he talks about doing it by people like Bill Weld.
Bill Weld also came out and not so subtly said the president should be killed.
I mean, he basically said he should be tried for treason and given the death penalty.
This has got to be something that plays into your favor if you get back on a debate stage with Nick Sarwalk.
You'd hope so.
And it will if we get the right delegates to show up to national.
I mean, it will, absolutely.
And at the time, look, that debate was my first live debate I'd ever been in, Dave.
I was terrified.
My hands were shaking.
And they asked me, you have a question.
Go ahead and ask your question.
I'm like, Nick.
And I just deer in the headlights.
And someone in the crowd yelled.
What do you think about Bill Weld?
And I was like, yeah, Nick, what do you think about Bill Weld?
And I was just like, oh, my God, why would I do that?
And now I watch that clip and I'm like, that was beautiful.
It's perfect.
Exactly what he said.
Bill Weld has become more libertarian.
He hasn't made the libertarian more establishment, but then he left.
And now he's calling for red flag laws and state monopoly on resources and nuclear power.
And, oh, God, what else?
I mean, just everything, just rejoining the climate, the Paris Accord.
And I mean, just he's, he's so far from what we should be talking about as libertarians, it's not even funny.
And so now that clip, yeah, it didn't age well.
And there's some other things he said in the debate that didn't age great either.
But it all depends on who shows up.
Like I've said a million times, this party belongs to whoever shows up at the end of the day.
And it's the truth because there's 15,000 national members.
We get a thousand delegates to the national convention in 2020.
And you had the opportunity to show up and vote Nick out and vote for the presidential candidate of your choice, you know, and you have the chance to join up with the Mises caucus and become part of that change.
And so, you know, it really just, it belongs to whoever shows up.
We can keep people like Bill Weld from running for president or vice president if we just show up to one convention every four years.
Yeah.
And even just to solidify that point even further, it's not as if Bill Weld had an easy time getting elected or not elected, but getting the nomination to begin with.
The party is already fairly split on some of these guys.
And so it really wouldn't take much to push it in the pure libertarian direction.
Like that's right.
Like, didn't Bill Weld barely get the nomination in 2016?
Yeah.
And well, and Gary, so Gary got the nomination pretty handily.
And then he pressed the delegates to please vote for Bill Weld because he wanted Bill Weld's money and viability because, you know, two ex-governors is better than one or whatever.
And I mean, another vice presidential candidate stepped down and endorsed him.
I mean, it was, it was a big push.
There was a, you know, there's stories about delegates setting with other states that those people didn't even know.
And it was just, I mean, the whole thing was just a big mess for people in 2016.
And yeah, it wasn't easy for him to get it.
In fact, I think he only beat Larry Sharp by a very small margin, a couple of votes, maybe.
And Larry came out of nowhere.
No one knew who Larry was before that.
And so, yeah, it wasn't easy.
And I think we have a big enough numbers now that we're going to make sure we get a principled candidates up there that are going to travel the country and do a media tour.
Yeah, I mean, and that's, that really is, to me, all you could ask for.
I mean, that's, that's what the whole thing should be about.
And look, as you said before, and you are right, whether people like it or not, everybody, I've talked about this a lot on the show before, but everybody is, everybody who's politically aware or has a philosophy or is interested in these things, you find yourself, particularly in 2019, you find yourself in a bubble, in a bubble of some sorts.
We exist in our libertarian bubble.
We might interact with other people who aren't, but then you know, it's like Fox News is in their bubble.
CNN is in their bubble.
There's Democratic socialists who are in their bubble.
Everybody get because you go to your places for a lot of information.
And it's easy to lose sight of what is outside of your bubble.
And so it is obvious to us like who Ron Paul was and who Rand Paul is.
But I cannot tell you how many people I know who confuse the two of them.
Like, don't even know which one was which.
You know, they'll be like, oh, I know in 2008, Dave was a big Rand Paul guy.
And I'll be like, oh, Ron Paul.
And they're like, oh, right, right.
Which one's that?
That's the father.
And the point you were making, a lot of people just don't know the difference between being a libertarian and the libertarian party.
They just think of the libertarian party.
Like, yeah, that's what you are.
That's that thing.
People haven't really spent the time to think, what's the difference between a philosophy and a political party?
Like, what do you mean you're a Republican, but you don't like the Republican Party?
That's what a Republican is.
And that's the same way they think of libertarians.
But now, that may not be correct, but that's the reality of people's perception.
And so you really got to have somebody who's going to attempt to go, hey, there's a whole different way you could be looking at this thing.
And that's what was sorely missed in 2016.
Yeah, and it's absolutely the truth.
It's, we, we are the only political party that has is centered around a political actual philosophy as well.
You know, we're the only ones.
You know, it's not just our platform.
There was a whole ideology, a whole philosophy that built this political outlet.
And so if we go away from that, we lose who we are, period.
You know, full stop.
Yeah, no, I completely agree.
What do you think?
Do you pay a lot of attention to politics in general?
Like, do you, do you pay attention to the presidential race on the Democrat and Republican side?
I mean, yeah, I mean, I've been watching the debates between Bill Weld and Joe Walsh.
And I watched the Democratic debates and I kind of just, I'm like, man, we should really turn this into a drinking game.
It's pretty bad.
But yeah, I mean, I follow it a little bit, but I'm, you know, I'm more concerned.
I'm wrapped up in our candidates and working for the party and all that stuff.
And so it's hard for me to watch the other parties, but I have to have some kind of knowledge of what they're doing so that I can talk about them on Twitter.
Well, it does, right, right.
Well, it does seem like there is going to be a big opportunity.
And this is really why I care about the Libertarian Party and the direction that it goes in is that it just, it seems to me that there's going to be a big opportunity.
Like I was a guy who I basically, I remember back in 2008, people would ask Ron Paul why he wasn't running on the Libertarian Party.
You know, they'd be like, well, you're not really a Republican.
You're really a Libertarian.
So why are you running in the Republican Party?
Why don't you run third party?
And he had run in 1988 on the Libertarian Party.
So it was a fair enough question.
Like, why are you running here?
And what Ron Paul would say is he's like, look, they've changed all the rules to basically make it harder for a third party.
I've been a Republican.
So I'd rather just run here.
And I thought I basically just dismissed the idea of a third party because I went, you know what?
Ron Paul made more of a difference as a Republican than he ever did as a third party.
So yeah, that's it.
You got to go within the two major parties.
And it wasn't until 2016 that I started to re-question that because what happened more or less was Rand Paul's campaign tanked and failed.
And then Donald Trump took over.
And you're like, okay, well, Donald Trump is the Republican now.
He's going to be the Republican nominee again in 2020.
So there's no libertarian running on the Republican ticket.
You know, like that's just not happening.
And then all of a sudden, you had a situation where, wait a minute, you had the two most hated candidates ever and then a third party with the name libertarian who's got ballot access on all 50 states, who's getting hour-long, you know, town hall events on CNN.
And you went, well, look, it just seems kind of obvious.
This is now the best, you know, platform to spread the message of liberty, at least through the political process.
So maybe I should start paying attention to this.
And then just watching them blow that opportunity, you know, really hurt.
And I just, the reason I actually care about it is because you can see the handwriting on the wall that obviously they're going to have this opportunity again.
I mean, it's going to be Donald Trump again.
He's going.
I mean, if it's not Donald Trump, it's going to be, you know, because he got impeached.
That's the only way that he's not the candidate.
And if Donald Trump gets impeached, that in itself presents a huge opportunity to talk about the deep state and what's going on with the political process and how broken it is.
And then it'll be Mike Pence, who's like terrible.
And then it's going to be a Democrat who I can, I don't know who it's going to be, but they will be terrible.
I can guarantee that.
And then we have this huge opportunity again.
It's not going to be Tulsi Gabbard, that's for sure.
It's going to end up being a Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or, I mean, that's, you know, Hillary apparently is filed.
So there's a possibility she jumped.
That's what I heard.
It's a rumor that I heard.
I haven't actually looked at the FEC filings yet.
I only look at the libertarian ones all the time.
But yeah, we know it's going to be establishment versus Trump.
We know that.
And it is a huge opportunity.
It was a huge opportunity.
It's a huge opportunity for us every election cycle because 60% of the population doesn't vote, you know, and there's a reason why.
It's because they're tired of the bullshit, too old party politics.
That's what they're tired of.
But if we don't give them a viable solution, they're not going to come over and hang out.
They're just not going to do it.
You know, they're already done with the two parties.
Yeah.
And you can certainly understand why.
I mean, there's a, you know, there's, there's good reason to be done with both of those parties.
And it does, right?
Like, so by, so you mentioned Tulsi Gabbard.
There's been a lot of talk amongst libertarians, a lot of debate about how people ought to feel about Tulsi Gabbard.
What are your thoughts on her?
I think her anti-war stances are great.
And I think that anybody who can move the Democrats in a more anti-war direction, that's great.
But everything else she's really bad on, you know, pretty much.
She's a socialist gun grabber at the end of the day.
And I'm not interested in throwing my support behind any of those types of people.
Yeah.
No, well, look, I certainly agree with that.
I do.
I agree with both parts of that.
I mean, I think her, if you can push the Democrats in an anti-war direction, then you are serving a noble service.
But yeah, there's too many other issues that are pretty disqualifying.
What do you think?
One of the other people who's been floated out a lot that it seems like the establishment of the Libertarian Party seemed to really have a boner for the idea of Justin Amash coming over and running on the Libertarian Party.
Do you think he's going to?
And what are your thoughts about that?
No, absolutely not.
He's going to run for reelection as an independent.
And then I could see him maybe running for U.S. Senate as a libertarian.
But I doubt heavily.
I don't doubt.
I know he's not going to come and run for president of the Libertarian Party.
He would have already put his name out there and said he's going to do it.
He was very, very serious when he talked about, you know, nonpartisan and being an independent and not being a part of a party when he wrote his whole letter about it.
And, you know, I think mostly I agree with Justin Amash on a lot of things and I'd love to have him in the party.
I don't think that he would have a warm welcoming running for president right now from the delegates.
I think the delegates are really jaded and burned by Bill Weld and Gary coming over from the Republicans and burning them.
I mean, that's what happened, you know, that he promised to be a libertarian for life.
He brought all these donors and money and then took off as soon as he didn't get the nomination.
And so, or as soon as he didn't win his presidency and it looked like he wouldn't be getting the nomination in 2020, he took off.
So there's a lot of people that are hurt and jaded and burned by that.
And they're not going to be as receptive to a Republican leaving the Republican Party to come and run as the Libertarian nominee right away.
They seem to really, it seems like those guys really love him, like the Nick Sarwalks of the world and like the Reason magazine types.
They're really big Justin Amaj fans.
And you don't see that same type of love for Rand Paul or Mike Lee or Thomas Massey.
I mean, they'll deal with those guys, but they seem to really love Justin Amash.
And I think it's because he came out in favor of impeaching Trump and is very, yeah, and is very anti-Trump and came out saying Trump did obstruct justice.
And it seems like, like, I have this theory.
I haven't exactly figured it out yet, but I think that people who are blue-pilled.
are very susceptible to Trump derangement syndrome.
Because if you're blue-pilled, then you just see Donald Trump and there's this guy who's just so crass and different and kind of like will speak in an authoritarian way sometimes.
And you'll be like, oh my God, that's horrible.
We can't have that.
But if you're red-pilled, you're kind of like, yeah, they're all authoritarians.
The whole nature of the state is brutal.
Blue-Pilled Libertarian Support00:14:37
So this is just a guy who's saying it.
I mean, like, who cares?
But it is interesting to see those guys who there really seems to be like with Nick Sarwak, with some of the more mainstream libertarians, people, a real Trump derangement syndrome where they're like, Trump is just the worst president ever.
And you're like, ah, I don't know.
I mean, he's bad, but, you know, compare his track record to Obama.
It's at the absolute worst, a pick'em.
At the best, it's like, well, he didn't destroy three more countries.
He's just kind of continued destroying the ones he is.
I don't know.
Do you see that?
Like, do you, do you notice that amongst the libertarian establishment?
Oh, sure.
Especially Nick.
I mean, Nick's a huge fan.
He talks about the impeachment all the time.
I mean, that's just his thing.
I haven't personally read the Mueller report, so I don't even, I couldn't even tell you.
But I praise when politicians do good things and I talk shit about them when they do bad things.
I mean, that's where it is.
They all suck.
They all suck.
You know what I mean?
And that's just the truth of the matter.
I mean, Obama sucked.
Trump sucked.
The Bush has sucked.
Clinton sucked.
And that's my whole life.
You know, none of them have done great things.
No, I agree with you.
And that I try to keep that, like to be consistent on that.
Like I try to, but the weird thing is that so like Nick after, you know, we had a little Twitter exchange.
I try to not go back and forth with him anymore because I just feel like I've said everything that needs to be said.
You know, this is like pointless at this point.
But he said at one point where I said, I forget what it was.
I think I probably gave some praise to Trump when he said he was going to pull troops out of somewhere or I said that this CIA, you know, like trying to take out a president isn't the right, you know, way to go about things or not a good system to have.
And he was like, carry that water.
And it's like, why is it that if I, so it, like, for example, when Obama did good things and he did a limited amount of good things, but there were some things that I thought that were really good that Obama did.
I thought the Iran deal was really good.
I got a lot of heat when I said that on Fox News.
A lot of people gave me a lot of shit for saying I think the Iran deal is good, but I don't give a shit.
It was all the deal was, was to take the bullshit neocon pretext for war off the table.
That's all the deal was.
Exactly.
And it was, it was just, it was all, it was all a farce.
The whole Iran deal was all nonsense.
It was we're giving them money and they're giving up their nuclear weapons program.
Except the money was theirs.
We didn't have the money and they never had a nuclear weapons program.
So we were giving up something we never had.
They were giving up something they never had.
It was all a fake deal, but it was intentionally designed to take the pretext for war off of the table.
So that was good.
I praised Obama when he opened up trade relations with Cuba.
I thought that was a really great move, you know?
But I don't think Nick Sarwak would say I'm carrying water if I were to praise Obama for those things.
You know what I'm saying?
And then I bash him for all the bad things and I bash Trump for all the bad things all the time.
His spending, his budget is terrible.
The war in Yemen is terrible.
But it's like there's this weird disconnect where I do think that libertarians have to deal with this in somewhat of a skillful way where we have to say, hey, you know what?
Donald Trump does suck, but this is kind of par for the course.
Like the things that suck about him the most are the same things that any other president would have been doing.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean, the immigration debate is, it's the same.
It's the same thing that Obama and Biden were doing.
Absolutely.
It's the same immigration policy.
Literally hasn't changed.
Almost at all.
Like there's more, there's, I guess there's more ICE detentions, but they're deporting the same amount of people, right?
Literally the same amount of people.
They're just carrying over the policies of the president before.
The wars are the same.
Nothing's getting rolled back.
So yeah, I don't understand.
Those carrying water posts always make me laugh, man.
I got on there one time when he did that to you and I posted on there.
I was like, why don't you come carry some water for some libertarian candidates?
How about that?
Yeah.
Come on.
The rest are working.
But as, you know, what you just said, what you just touched on, I think is actually the best message for a libertarian going into 2020, which is that it's like, look, nothing that really matters has changed.
It's all just rhetoric and the response to the rhetoric.
None of it is real substance.
The wars are all waging on.
The budget is still out of control.
The monetary policy is still out of control.
The prison industrial complex still exists.
Go down the issue and I'll show you way more where it's the same than where it's changed.
And what does that tell you about this whole statist system?
Like the fact that you went from Barack Obama to Donald Trump personally and in terms of the way they ran and the way that they speak and who they are as people, they could not be any further apart.
They could not be any different.
And yet either one of them in there, you have basically the same policies.
Doesn't that kind of show you that this whole system is unworkable?
And if you actually want change, which I think like 90% of the voters want change in some vague way, well, this is the only game in town now.
It's libertarians.
That's what you have to look to.
You know, don't you think that ought to be the message that we rally around?
Yeah, well, and messaging is just super important in general.
And I said this, I think I said this on Pete Raymond's podcast, but there's two things that bring people to the ballot box and Obama nailed them both, hope and change.
That's what bring people down to the ballot box.
Yeah.
Plain and simple.
They want hope and they want change.
And if you can actually offer that and show that that's how you're going to govern as well, I think we can't lose.
Yeah.
No, okay.
Well, we're in absolute agreement there.
So let me ask you, let's say you go out and you beat Nick Sarwak and you're the chair of the LP.
What do you hope to accomplish in that position?
What's your plan for going forward?
What will having a great Mises caucus approved true libertarian chair of the party?
What'll that do for the party?
Well, it's obviously going to change the messaging right away.
There's just, we have to.
We can't keep having these Twitter flame wars with real libertarians around the country and expect them to come and join our causes when you're the chair of the party.
So the messaging has got to, it's got to get tightened up.
We got to start putting that anti-war sentiment first.
You know, I think that the majority of the United States agrees that the wars are, we're done with them.
We shouldn't be a part of them anymore.
And so I think being the only party that's that's voicing that daily is going to be really good.
But I also want to create an aggressive media policy.
I think that we have been pussyfooting around the media for too long.
They have no vested interest in us.
We know that.
We aim to end a lot of the graft that they feed off of.
So I want to create a regional media team and have a media guy in each region that's ready to go for anything.
If it's Kennedy or the judge or some local news station, just always ready to go, always trying to get us new media opportunities, get in front of the media and convey our message.
And so, and that, and then fundraising and membership have to be important to the party as well.
We can't operate as a national political party without money.
We have to turn the lights off and go home.
And membership gives us new activists and new candidates and people who, you know, are going to become media people are going to become campaign managers are going to become candidates and presidential candidates and senate candidates and congressional candidates.
And we have to lay the foundation and build an infrastructure that makes them comfortable with running as a libertarian.
And so those are the three things that I'm going to be focusing on right away.
And hopefully, you know, that changes our outcomes.
So what do you, are you like officially a member of the Mises caucus or they just nominate, they just endorse you for this?
Or like, how does that work?
So I am a member.
I'm a, I'm a contributing member.
You can contribute anything for five bucks a month on up.
That really helps us with all of our issues and stuff that we work on.
So, but I'm also the candidate committee chair.
So we help candidates.
We help.
Right now we're focused on local candidates.
We're just able to give over $6,000 to eight candidates across the country for their local races, you know, city council and mayoral races.
And I'm the one that's tasked with going out and finding the candidates that we're going to support and doing the candidate questionnaires and interviews and making sure that they agree with what we're trying to accomplish.
And then we help them.
And so that's a really good spot for me because I am in the party and I am in party leadership at all three levels.
So I know candidates all over the country that are running.
And so, I mean, I've been with them since the beginning.
I was their endorsed candidate in 2018 as well.
And they've helped me with a lot and I've helped them with a lot.
And I think Michael Heiss is just a real, a real guy and a half and he's doing a lot of work.
And I mean, the guy doesn't sleep.
So, and the board's a great board.
It's good people.
They got good.
They have a good message.
They want to bring those Austro-libertarian principles back to the party and have them focus on Austrian economics and the anti-war sentiment.
And so we just agree on everything, you know, and I've been there since the beginning.
And what is, you mentioned earlier that you're, that you're friends with Adam Kokesh, and he, to me, was always the guy who kind of represented to some degree, the kind of more pure strand within the Libertarian Party.
Like he was the real anarcho-capitalist Austrian kind of, you know, of that whole end.
What's the relationship between the Mises caucus and him?
We get along with Adam really well.
And, you know, Adam, Adam is supportive of our causes and we're supportive of his activism.
I mean, there's just, there's no doubt about it.
We can go hand in hand in those areas.
I don't know about as far as his presidential run where they all stand.
We don't really focus on federal elections as the caucus right now, but I'm sure that we will choose a horse in the race going into the into the 2020 national convention in Austin because we're going to we're going to be a big voting block there.
There's just it's absolutely undeniable that that's going to happen.
And so I don't know.
We'll see.
We'll see.
But as far as my personal relationship with Adam, I've spent time on the road with Adam during my campaign last year.
Every single convention, we were at about the same conventions.
And he's just, he's been a really nice guy to me and we've gotten along and he's helped me a lot with philosophy as well over the years.
And he's actually one of the reasons I found the Libertarian Party in 2010 to begin with was watching his videos and his activism.
So it's a good relationship.
It's good.
He certainly, especially around that time, his videos and social media presence and stuff, he did a lot to spread the message.
And yeah, so that's good to hear.
I wanted to ask you, because a lot of people, I get this stuff, like one of the most common comments that I get from my listeners when I talk about the Libertarian Party, when I said I was going to have you on or when I was debating Sarwalk Is about the idea that the Libertarian Party has been infiltrated, is controlled opposition, you know, all of these things.
And you said earlier in the podcast, you know, like we, none of us really know what Nick Sarwalk's motivations are.
Do you give any credence to this idea that there's like, you know, CIA infiltration of the party or that there's controlled opposition there?
Like, do you have any thoughts on that?
Or do you just, is it one of the things there's just no way to know?
No, I'm sure there is.
And in fact, talking to one of the old founders, D. Frank Robinson, he said, look, for every 20 people you meet in the Libertarian Party, there's a possibility that one of them is a plant from one of the other two parties or some, you know, government bureaucracy of some sort.
And I believe it.
I do.
I absolutely do because we're a threat.
We're a threat to the state.
You know, if we were to ever grow uncontrollably and add all these members that I want to add and start getting our candidates elected at a federal level, they're in trouble.
And they know that.
They know that.
And so absolutely, there's just no doubt about it.
And they, you know, as far as what Nick is, you know, there's a lot of rumors going around, but who knows?
And I'm on the L and C with him.
And a lot of our big gripes is that we don't know his motivations.
We don't know what his plans are.
And, you know, that's not a good thing for a chair that has a board that's relying on him to run the organization.
Yeah, it just doesn't, you know, it's hard.
It's one of the things I said to him when he was on the podcast.
I was like, I do not understand you.
I don't understand where you're coming from.
It just doesn't make any sense to me.
And like, I'm not going to jump from that to some conclusion, but it doesn't make sense why you would want to alienate all of the people who spread liberty the most effectively.
And that's, that seems to have been his goal from the beginning.
It's like, why would that be your goal?
Okay, it's, it's easy enough to just go, yeah, I think Dave's a little bit too radical.
You know, I don't agree with him on everything, but, you know, he, he does a good job spreading the message.
Like if someone said that to me, it's not like I'm going to go, oh, you're my enemy now.
I go, oh, okay, you know, I'm not for everybody.
I, I get along with pretty much everybody I know in the liberty movement, in the broader libertarian world.
I get along like very, very well with Kennedy.
I love her.
Like we're good friends.
I get along with Nick Gillespie and Matt Welsh and all those guys.
Like we, I, I like all of them.
I don't see what the problem is.
You know, it's like, okay, we disagree on some stuff, but whatever.
I'm more radical than you.
That's fine.
But why would you not want me on board?
Why would you not want Tom Woods on board?
And why would you not want Ron Paul on board?
I mean, do you know what Ron Paul's endorsement of an LP candidate would be?
That would be huge.
It would be a humongous shot in the arm for them.
Like, why would you not want that?
And then it's, you know, I see these articles like, well, he's CIA affiliated in this stuff.
And I'm like, huh, it would explain.
Have you seen that article?
The one about his involvement with Straffer?
Yeah.
Is that the one you're talking about?
Yeah, that's the one I was referring.
What did you think about that?
I mean, his explanation was a little weird to me, but that's where we're at.
What was your explanation?
That his brother-in-law got him a magazine subscription to some political magazine that they put out.
And that's why his name and address were on the logs that Wikileaks let out.
And I don't know.
It just seems weird that your brother-in-law would give you a birthday gift of some Politico magazine from a government agency, but whatever, whatever.
Yeah.
So there was, so, so explain this to people who don't know.
So there was a, there was a Wikileaks release that had his name and address in it.
So Wikileaks released Straffer is this big.
Wikileaks And Strange Gifts00:03:06
It was like, I don't even know how to explain what they do, but essentially like they were in bed with all these different defense people and Northrop Grumman and all these people.
They had all these addresses of people that had been affiliated and were considered high-level like government people that, you know, worked with government agencies or whatever.
And Nick's name and address were part of that WikiLeak dump from Straffer.
And so, you know, people started going crazy.
I think the Free Thought Project wrote a whole article on it.
You can look it up.
And if you just Google Free Thought Projects, Straffer, Nick Sarwark, you can read all about it.
But he said that his brother-in-law got him a subscription to some magazine they put out and then he never renewed it after a year.
And that was all it was.
But the way Wiki's leaks made it sound is that all the names they had on there were like high-level assets, period.
And so it was a little strange.
And it kind of just, you know, some of the people in this party don't really pay attention to what happens online and all this, you know, any of the interviews and stuff that we do.
They don't really pay attention.
So they don't care.
And, you know, I think that you should look into it and make up your own mind.
It does, it does seem to me like if you were one of these, you know, three-lettered governmental secret deep state organizations, wouldn't you want to have some control over the Libertarian Party?
I mean, wouldn't that just be like one of the first things you would do?
You'd be like, well, let's make sure we kind of can steer this ship because there is this one, you know, I mean, think about it.
There's one party.
It's the third biggest party in the country.
Okay.
There's a big gap between the two and that third, no, no doubt, but it's the, it's the next one out there.
It's the alternative, you know, to these two big parties.
And their whole thing is challenging state power.
You might be like, huh, let's, let's make sure that they're all on message.
You know, it seems like that's what I would do if I was one of them, if I was one of the bad guys.
But anyway, I mean, it's kind of worth thinking about.
Yeah, well, here's my whole thing is so last year when I was running for state chair of California, there was this page.
I'm not even going to name the page or the person, but there was this guy that reached out to me from a Facebook page that he created.
Not a huge page, had about 1,200 followers or something.
And he kept telling me that he supported me and he was trying to start a conversation with me and act like we were friends and all this stuff.
And I was like, oh, cool.
Yeah.
I was giving him all kinds of information about my run and this and that.
And a buddy of mine came to me and he was all through Signal and he wanted to be super quiet about it.
But he's like, I found out all this information on this guy that's now he's gone public and he's like dissing me publicly, telling people not to vote for me and that I'm just like Austin Peterson and I'm this and that and this and that.
And I'm like, wow, that was a weird switch.
So he finds out this guy actually works for the police in Southern California, is some kind of intelligence guy for the military.
So, I mean, there are people out there that are trying to get information on higher level people in the movement to keep tabs on you.
And that was, that was just for a guy like me who's never even really won anything.
Decriminalizing Low-Level Robbery00:08:36
Right.
You know, but I had, I was, I noticed I was starting to grow this following.
I was starting to get more people inspired and involved.
And then all of a sudden out of Woodwork, I found out about this guy and he's since completely disappeared.
So, and that's, that's a true story.
And I, I mean, I, I, I can 100% give proof of that to anybody who needed to hear it.
So wow, this is starting to freak me out.
Hey, Nick Sarwak, if you're listening, I think you're really great.
I totally support you and all of your people.
But that wasn't Nick, you know, I don't know, but, you know, Nick says he's a generational libertarian that's been around forever and ever and his parents were libertarians.
And so, you know, yeah, that's freaking me out even more.
That's just more evidence.
That's not generational libertarians.
Parents are libertarians.
This whole story sounds like bullshit.
It's not checking out.
So what are your, just, just in the time that we have left, like, I'm curious, like, just personally, aside from, you know, your, your run to be chair, what are, what are, like, the issues that you care about the most?
Like, obviously, we, you've talked about the wars.
We're both, you know, very anti-war, you know, pro-peace.
What, uh, what, what other issues like really kind of motivate you that you think are the most important in the national landscape?
Well, obviously the drug, the war on drugs, I think it's, it's silly.
Was wasted billions and billions of dollars on a, on a war that drugs is winning at the end of the day.
That's, it's just the truth.
Drugs are winning and people are afraid to get help.
You know, I grew up in a place where a lot of people become drug addicts and I've lost a lot of friends to drugs and they were scared to get help.
I mean, just plain and simple, they were scared to get help because they were afraid they would be in trouble and they would get arrested.
And it's like they great people who had never heard a fly, you know, but needed some help.
And so that's, that's a big issue to me.
The Fed, obviously the Federal Reserve, and I'm sure you and I could do a whole segment about that.
I'm not, I'm not like great at monetary stuff, but I do understand that the Fed is a harmful agency that has no oversight whatsoever and can print money out of thin air.
And that's just not good for me.
And those are kind of my real big issues.
There's a lot of other stuff.
Locally, I focus on zoning issues.
I think creates a lot of our homelessness and issues here.
And our homeless policies here in California are ridiculous.
You know, we keep talking about how we want to help the homeless and do this and do that.
But then we have all these zoning restrictions and the government will step in and stop charities from being helpful and shut them down so that they can keep taking money from these other charities that have a 60% overhead.
And so I focus a lot on local issues here, but nationally, the war is just definitely.
Those are my biggest issues.
I came from the military.
I don't know.
We didn't talk about that, but I was in the Middle East in the Persian Gulf during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
And my ship was the, yeah, my ship was the biggest part of the shock and awe campaign, if you remember that during the second Iraq war.
And that was really what jaded me on the military industrial complex was I was a part of it.
I saw it firsthand.
And so that's always going to be my biggest issue.
If we could end all the wars tomorrow and then no other government ever changed, I'd be okay with it.
Yeah, well, no, I get what you're saying.
I mean, still not be thrilled with other things not changing.
But yeah, I mean, if there's one government program you'd want to end, that would be the one.
But it's interesting you brought up the homeless problem because this is something that really, it is, it's, it's shocking to me that it doesn't get more national coverage.
I mean, I've seen Tucker Carlson spend a lot of time covering it.
Although from what I've seen, he doesn't really offer too many solutions or really even identify the problem.
But it is like at the very least, I mean, you go out to, you know, to California, particularly.
I mean, it's a big problem here in New York, but California, it is.
It is, it is mind-blowing.
I mean, when you go out there, in Los Angeles and San Francisco, as you know better than me, there are these, I mean, the homeless problem isn't like there's a lot of homeless people out.
It's like there might be more homeless people than people who have homes in certain areas.
Like there are, it's just like these encampments, like these homeless communities.
And you're like, what is going on here?
And why is it in these areas that are completely progressively controlled?
I mean, controlled by the people who are supposedly all about helping the poor, you find this huge problem of people, you know, addicted to drugs, living on the street, living in their own filth.
It's really just very disturbing.
Yeah.
When Jerry Brown left office here as governor and Gavin Newsom took over, there was like a $72 billion budget in California or something like that, surplus.
And he found that there was like 120,000 people who didn't have access to clean water here.
And so he decided he was going to create this water tax, right?
And that's how they were going to fix this clean water issue.
And it's like, it's like, we got homeless people living in every suburb across the state, like literally with, and we're supposed to be this great progressive state that helps our homeless, but we're creating more homeless people and we're trying to tax the people who are working for things like 100,000 people don't have clean water, but you have a $64 billion budget surplus.
The zoning issues here keep people from being able to build in certain places.
You know, that's kind of become a problem as well.
And so like we can't, they're enacting rent control, but they're trying to keep people from building.
And it's just this whole big mess.
And they just, they're looking for more ways to take money from people, but they're not helping the homeless.
And so it's creating more homeless.
And it's just, if you listen to Newsom or any of these high-level politicians in California speak, they have no idea what they're doing.
You know, it's just one policy after another.
They're jumping around to them like I just was here.
And but looking for more ways to take taxes from people.
They're not helping anybody.
They don't care about the homeless.
They're not these great progressives that they're made out to be.
They're just they're just tax and spend Democrats who are excited to be in office.
Yeah.
You know, our governor Newsome was the was the mayor of San Francisco and he did a terrible job.
I mean, San Francisco is the way it is right now because of Gavin Newsome.
I mean, I've read about these things where people were, you know, like building the, what do they call them, the micro houses or whatever, these like tiny tiny little, yeah, mini houses, these one room little houses that they were like, oh, we're going to build 100,000 of these and let homeless people in there and the government will come and shut it down.
Like, it's like, oh, sorry.
Yeah, you guys can't do that.
And it just, it's just a little taste.
How you got to think about, I mean, it's like how easily this problem could be solved in a free market.
Like there's, look, it's just like such common sense where you're like, okay, there's a whole lot of us who care about this.
Technology has improved.
Building has improved.
There's all these houses built that don't have people occupying them.
We can clearly at least solve this problem, get people not sleeping on the street and sleeping in these houses, right?
And they're like, oh, sorry, that's outside of the zone where you're allowed to do that.
Sorry, you can't do that.
We're going to throw you in jail if you go try to do that.
And you're like, Jesus Christ.
And they'll also throw you in jail if you try to feed them soup at the park.
So, or at least fine you for it.
Is that true?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think they're, I mean, it happened.
And that happens all over the country.
If you try to feed the homeless people, you have the opportunity of being arrested or fined.
So there's also one of the other things that I've read about in California, which also really bothers me as a libertarian, but this is a little bit from the other direction, is that they've really started decriminalizing low-level robbery.
Have you like read about that at all?
How there's like these things where now it's like if you steal like only like $600 or something like that worth of stuff, it's still a misdemeanor rather than a felony.
So as you have this giant state, it's like the biggest state in the world, you know, the federal government of the United States of America, and then the biggest state within that, you know, system, California.
And yet they're still not even protecting basic property rights.
They're still incentivizing people to go rip off some local convenience store.
It's really just a bizarre, like, it's something out of an Orwellian novel.
Sure.
Well, like where I live in Antioch is extremely dangerous place.
Taking Over The Party00:05:06
You have like a very high chance of becoming the victim of a violent crime.
And so like the police focus on a lot of stuff here, but they can't always focus on like small level robberies of like Walmart, you know, where they take a bike or something.
So like, I, I was at a Walmart and just saw a guy just run out with a whole TV like and no one chased him.
You know what I mean?
Don't even chase them because they can't call the cops.
They can't do anything.
And it's true, it is.
It is really an actual thing here in California that that they it's not even that they decriminalize, it's just they can't.
They can't do anything about it anymore.
This is one of the big things that people completely miss about.
Like um, big government is that, as you know, they they start the people who would like argue with an anarchist about, like well, government needs to do, you know, just these three things, just protect property rights and just do this.
It's like yeah, but the more and more they do, they fail more and more at those basic services of government, which is, you know, from my perspective, why you don't even want a government involved with uh, with any of it.
But um, you know that's that's a whole nother uh conversation that we could get lost uh, locked up in.
Okay, so this was a great conversation.
Uh, if people want to support you in in your run for for chair of the LP, what can they do?
Where can they find out more information about you?
How can they help you defeat Nicholas Sarwalk?
So the most important thing is that you guys message me on twitter at Joshua At large to find out how you can become delegates.
The process is not that hard.
You probably got to pay anywhere between five and twenty five dollars to join your state party and then show up at their state convention and say you want to be a delegate and get chosen to be a delegate to Austin in 2020, where you get to show up and vote on our party planks, our party platform, our uh vice presidential and presidential nominee, and every single position on the Libertarian National Committee is up for a vote all of them and so you could even run.
If you felt like you could do a good job on the Libertarian National Committee, you could run for an at-large position.
You could run to become a region rep or a regional arching or the the, the treasurer or the secretary or the vice chair or the chair.
You know those are the important things right now is getting more libertarians signed up with the Libertarian Party.
That will show up and help us take it in the direction that's more principled outside that you know.
You can follow me on uh twitter.
You can follow me if you find me on facebook.
It's Joshua Smith LNC.
At large and uh.
I also need financial help.
Travel into the states.
Um, I have to travel to at least 20 state conventions to speak to delegates and try and get them off the fence, and so if you wanted to help me there, it's paypal.me backslash Joshua Smith, chair 2020.
All right, very good, I will say I will end this with what is my pitch for for the Libertarian Party, and i've i've mentioned this before and I, I really am a libertarian uh, to my core.
Like I don't believe in telling other people what to do.
I have no interest in controlling other people's lives.
Uh besides, my daughter, who's 10 and a half months old, and I tell her exactly what she's she's gonna do when it's nap time.
We're going down for a nap and, by the way, she doesn't even really listen to me half the time it's nap time.
She's just like no, we're staying up for a while and then ultimately, I end up respecting her right to stay up.
Uh, but I really am a libertarian to my core.
I'm not telling anybody what to do.
I'm not telling you you need to go join the LP, you need to become a delegate, you need to support Joshua Smith, you need to do i'm not telling anyone that, but I will say this if one third of this podcast's audience were to become dues paying members Of the Libertarian Party.
It is our party.
That's just a fact.
It's not, there's no debate about that.
That is just the numbers.
That's just a fact.
If one-third of the people listening to this show right now decide to become dues-paying members of the party, decide to go out and pursue, and a small percentage of them pursue being delegates.
We run the third biggest political party with ballot access across every state in this country, and we can get the libertarian message, the message the way we want it to be out there.
Just saying, that's an option.
So we could just go, and Nick Sarwak sucks.
Forget it.
We're not going to do any of this.
Or we could say we're going to join and take this bitch over.
The choice is yours.
I'm not deciding what you want to do, but just putting that out there.
That is your option.
And you can choose to do with that information what you will.
All right.
Joshua Smith, thank you so much, brother.
I really appreciate you coming on the show.
It was a great conversation.
We'll definitely do this again as the race heats up in 2020.
I'd be happy to have you back on.
And thank you for taking the time out.
Very much appreciate it.
Yeah, absolutely, Dave.
I appreciate it as well.
All right, man.
Have a good one.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
We will be back on Friday with a brand new episode.
Do not forget, I'm going to be at the Paley Center November 25th.
Go to paleycenter.org and please get some tickets for that and come out.
I need as many of my people in the audience for this crazy show as possible.
And yeah, see you Friday with a brand new episode.