Michael Heise and James Smith dissect the Libertarian Party's internal strife, contrasting the Mises Caucus's 4,200-member "micro culture" with the broader party's lack of cohesion. They critique establishment figures like Bill Weld for compromising principles and address controversies surrounding Nick Sarwale and Maj Ture, rejecting identity politics as a tool for narrative control. Highlighting local wins like decriminalizing marijuana in Norristown and psychedelics in Denver, they advocate for Jacob Hornberger's presidential run to restore hardcore libertarianism against federal mandates, arguing that true liberty requires resisting cultural conformity rather than seeking power. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Holiday CBD Sponsorship00:01:41
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Uniting the Libertarian Movement00:15:35
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.
Thanks for watching or listening.
And we got a great one for you today.
Joining us is the founder of the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus, otherwise known as the Libertarian Wing of the Libertarian Party.
Michael Heist, what's going on, brother?
I'm good, man.
Thanks for having me on.
And before we get started, I want to give a little shout out here to Robbie the Fire Bernstein because he's really giving me the delegated authority to front this thing.
Yes, that's right.
And there's a lot of people out here who think that I run the show.
And Robbie's out here killing it behind the scenes like a total shadow job.
So, you know, we really pulled off like the massage in the LP thing well.
So that's awesome.
Yes, it's been tough for Rob and the royal family of the Mises Caucus ever since the pedophilia ring got exposed.
They've been taking a step back and staying out of the spotlight.
But yes, Robbie the Fire Bernstein, who's been off this week, he'll be back in next week.
He's enjoying a Jewish Thanksgiving like a good king, like the king of the caulks should.
So what's going on with you, man?
What's new?
You guys have had quite a couple of years of existence in the Mises Caucus, huh?
Yeah, it's been a hell of a roller coaster, man.
This thing started out as an idea that was really centered around replacing the chair and trying to get some energy and like the Ron Paul revolution back in the LP.
And now it seems like it's really taken root and there's a lot of energy.
There's a lot of momentum, a lot of achievements.
And we're indisputably the big recruiters to the Libertarian Party now.
So no one can take that from us.
And I know it scares the hell out of a lot of people.
So that tickles me a little bit.
Well, you said when you first came on my show, which was a couple years ago now, and you said that your goal was to bring the libertarian movement into the libertarian party.
And you are the guy who, you know, I certainly credit for convincing me to come in, Tom, Scott Horton now, Jason Stapleton, all these guys.
I mean, this is a direct result of the work you've done.
So you've already really done, I mean, more than anyone to bring the libertarian movement into the Libertarian Party.
It's pretty cool what you've accomplished.
Well, one way that I've always liked to put it is that we have to clear out the base so that we could use it to fight the war against the state.
And the LP is the base.
So this is really just step one.
You know, the greater fight against the state is going to be where the risks really are at and everything else.
So I'm looking forward to that.
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
This is still step one.
And I assume that you are excited to hear Hornberger announce that he's going to be running for president.
I know I follow your Facebook page and a lot of people in the Mises caucus are real excited to get behind Hornberger for 2020.
Yeah, we were pushing that for a while.
I mean, we had a couple other people that we had our eyes on.
But yeah, once I found out that he had some interest and I met him at Ron Paulovin a few months ago, we had a nice long discussion and I knew that that's where we were going to be putting our support.
So yeah, definitely excited to see him and excited for all the liberty movement vets that he's going to bring to the table and re-engage.
That's what we really need because the party has lost so much support from its own people over the years that it's tough.
I mean, there's only 15,000 people.
And I've said this on Scott Horton's show.
There might be more Scientologists in this country than registered libertarians, which is just not a very good look for the greatest ideas ever.
So we got to do better representing.
So a lot of, I know a lot of people, I just had Scott Horton on and we did a whole show earlier this week about how excited we are about Jacob Hornberger running.
And by the way, for people who have asked me, I've been emailing back and forth with him just today.
So we're going to try to get him on the show next week.
But one of the reasons, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was for those people who are excited and are worked up now, what is the best thing, if you're somebody who listens to this podcast, you're like, I'm in, I want to reignite the Liberty Movement.
What's the best thing they can do to try to support the LPMC, to try to support Jacob Hornberger?
I mean, obviously, you know, becoming a member of the Libertarian Party.
But even aside from that, what can they do to help?
Well, first of all, welcome to the revolution.
And so in a general sense, what you want to do is show up to your state party convention, let them know that you want to run to get elected as a delegate and then get nominated as a delegate.
Now, that's the very broad general answer.
What that's going to look like is a little bit different in each state.
So really what you want to do is you want to become a member of your state Libertarian Party.
There's 50 state libertarian parties and you want to become a member of that right now because some of them have requirements where you have to be a member of the party for 30 days or 60 days.
Some of them are even 90 days.
And so you want to meet that requirement.
Some states require that you register as a libertarian, although that's a minority of them.
So go ahead and do that unless you really, really, really want to vote in your primaries.
So do those.
And then the other important thing is that this being a presidential year, it's going to be a little bit more competitive to get a delegate slot than it is in an off year.
So there's a certain element of people with senior already or people with more merits to their name, getting those spots.
So what you want to do is also to check to see if there's a county level libertarian party near you.
And if there is, reach out and start attending their meetings.
Start attending your state Libertarian Party meetings.
You know, check out their events and see what all they have going on.
In short, you want to network.
You want to network and you want to start getting to work for them so that there is some trust built there and you're not just some random off the street that they're going to be wary of.
Right, right.
That makes sense.
And as Scott Horton was saying, it's going to be, it sounds kind of like technical, but you're going to end up meeting a lot of really cool people and having fun.
And, you know, this is the work that needs to be done.
I know you and a lot of your people have been doing a lot of this work for years now, laying the groundwork.
So guys, let's do it.
We want to see Jacob Hornberger as the nominee.
We want to have the Revolution 2.0 commence.
This is what you got to do.
It starts by joining your state party, getting out there and figuring out a way to make yourself a delegate and bring as many people as you can along with you.
Yeah, and we have resources to help you too.
I mean, we have organizers in the majority of states, we, the LPMC.
So, you know, you can go to our website, go to our Meet the Team page and find out who your state level organizer is.
Reach out to them, find them on Facebook.
We have the delegates checklist.
So that gives you like a comprehensive guide of everything that you're going to need to do to be eligible to be a delegate.
And then there's also the beginner's guide to the LP.
So you're going to have to go through the hell of learning the basics of Robert's Rules of Orders, which really sucks.
I'm sorry, but it's necessary.
Just so you know what's going on and you're going to know what's going on on the floor once you do get to the convention, because ultimately the convention, yeah, we choose the presidential nominee, but we also choose the chair.
We also vote on any changes to the bylaws.
We vote on any changes to the platform.
So there's a lot that's available to you as a delegate.
And on top of that, it's also just a big party.
You're going to meet people who you've interacted with online and you're getting to meet for the first time.
So it's going to be a good time no matter what happens and you're going to be energized for that business because of that.
Yeah.
And I'll tell you, just personally, I know some of like the best times that I've had in my life were like going on the Contra Cruise, going to Pork Fest, going to these different events.
It's something really cool for, like you said, the people you know on Facebook.
And let's face it, if you're a libertarian, you see the world in a different way than a lot of the people in your life, a lot of the people that you work with and your family, a lot of your friends.
And it's kind of cool to be around.
Don't worry, we're cat friendly on the show.
It's kind of cool to be around some other people who kind of get it and see things the same way you do.
Unlike everybody else, we don't actually get to live in a bubble.
And it's a little bit cool to go just pop your head into that for a little bit and be around other good people who see things the same way you do.
I know you've had, you know, just by running the Mises Caucus, you've gotten to, you know, like hang out with some really great people who see things the same way we do.
And that's always a very rewarding experience.
Yeah, I mean, I can't stress the importance of going to events in general enough.
It's just, it's energizing because if all you do is interact online, you get this sense that everything is hopeless and that, you know, we're completely disorganized and nobody agrees with each other and we're getting our asses kicked politically and philosophically and socialism is coming and it just gets to be all gloom and doom.
And that's not the case.
You know, there's really a lot of people out there who are dedicated, who are motivated and want to see changes.
And connecting with them really helps you to alleviate some of that depression of the status paradigm.
And the other thing is that there's really nowhere to go but up.
You know, I've said this for a long time now is that there's a lot of younger libertarians.
You know, I'm only 30 years old.
I've been in this for like 12 years.
And the young people now, the 18, 20, 21, 22-year-old kids now, you know, they never even experienced what an actual strong, healthy, passionate, growing movement that scares the hell out of the establishment looks like.
Me and you do, you know, because we were a part of the Ron Paul revolution and we understood what that magic felt like.
There's a lot of people who think that, you know, maybe the Gary Johnson campaign was the best that we have to offer.
And that's just not true.
That's just not true.
So there's a lot of people who have tapped out of the movement or have tapped out of the party, but they're still there and they can be gotten there.
And even anarchists who are apolitical, they can be gotten involved.
It's all about starting a positive feedback loop the way that Ron did that gets people off their ass and gets them having faith in what we believe in.
And I think over time, we've really lost a lot of that faith.
And I think it's just getting back to that and having faith that we can do something, having faith that what we believe in really does work.
It really does work out for the best for humanity.
And really coming from a place of that in your core, we'll start to see that positive feedback loop re-emerge.
But the thing this time is, is if you get a positive feedback loop under the guise of an organization as opposed to a singular campaign, it never has to end.
They can't cut the head off of an organization the way that they can, you know, the Ron Paul revolution.
So that's, I think, what it's really all about in the under the surface terms.
No, I think you're absolutely right.
And to those people who saw, you know, the Gary Johnson campaign in 2016, and there was, to me, it seems like, I mean, you just look at the Gary Johnson campaign and it's not that, it doesn't take that, you know, great of an imagination to just wonder, well, what if it had been a candidate who had gotten an endorsement from Ron Paul, had gotten support of like passionate support from people like you and the people at the Mises caucus, myself, Tom Woods.
Like, what if all these guys were really passionately behind Gary Johnson?
How much cooler that moment could have been?
And I think that's what we have with Jacob Hornberger leading the charge, that it's going to be, it's going to be somebody.
And there's no reason, it's not like Jacob Hornberger is some guy who the establishment libertarians shouldn't be able to get on board with too.
This really is somebody who can kind of unite everyone together.
I also think that it's, you know, he's the perfect guy in a lot of ways because it's not as if anyone, you know, there's been this weird attempt.
And I've seen this since you started the Libertarian Mises Caucus.
Of course, I've seen it happen with me and with the Mises Institute and Ron Paul and Tom Woods and all these guys, where we're kind of painted as these like right-wing libertarians, which I don't even like object to that term.
I don't, you know, I kind of feel like Jeff Dice said this when he was on my show.
He was like, they call me a right-wing libertarian.
He was like, okay, I'll take that.
Like, I don't really care.
Fine.
But it's not as if when people wanted to put down Ron Paul, like the Reason Magazine crowd or the Libertarian Party establishment, they would look to these things like, what would it be?
You know, newsletters from 30 years ago or something.
They had to go so deep because nothing in the Ron Paul campaign was about right-wing libertarianism is going to take over.
It was just the message of liberty.
It was like something that easily the left and the right libertarians could come together on.
And I think that's the same thing with Hornberger.
I mean, he's a guy who's like very against immigration crackdowns.
He's a guy who's really anti-war, really anti-drug war.
You know, it's funny.
I remember seeing them try to insinuate that you guys were like alt-right adjacent or whatever with the LPMC guys.
And then I see you out there like championing, decriminalizing mushrooms.
And it's like, yeah, this glove doesn't seem to fit.
It just doesn't seem to fit.
Yeah, I mean, a part of it is, you know, you and I both know that the 40-year split between the Cato crowd and the Mises crowd and the Cato branding, let's say, has kind of dominated the LP in recent years.
And so I think a lot of that split is being projected onto us because we happen to have chosen the name, the Mises costs, you know?
But it really comes from a place in my view of very, very bitter envy.
You know, these people, I think, are very envious of the fact that Ron Paul is the greatest outreach mechanism that's ever happened.
And he happens to be personally conservative and personally religious and traditionalist and all these types of things.
But yeah, I mean, the rhetoric even around us is changing.
You know, they used to get away with that at the beginning because we were an upstart.
You know, we kind of came out of nowhere and we came swinging for the top right off the bat.
Nobody expected us to become a political action committee to raise money to support local level candidates, to get involved in issue coalitions on both sides and to do all this stuff to build county.
You know, we have members who are building county level affiliates.
They're becoming board members of their state parties.
They're, you know, they're ascending to leadership positions.
Like I said, we're the big recruiters of the party and that's not up for debate anymore.
Building Party Credibility00:08:22
And that's not just people.
That's money.
That's membership fees.
You know, there's a lot that we're bringing to the table.
So there's a certain point now where we have the credibility to where even if you don't like us, you're kind of forced to respect us.
And that has an effect of separating the weak from the chaff.
The people who, again, if you don't like us, but you have the interests of the party and the movement at heart, you can respect us versus the people who are just like insane SJWs who have nothing good to say about us no matter what we do, no matter what we say, it's never going to be good enough for them.
And people are starting to get sick of those people because most people do want to see results.
Most people do want to see the work being done.
And we're doing it.
And we're doing it to a level that no other group in the party is doing.
And so people have to respect that.
Yeah, no, I agree.
And of course, there is a real problem in the Libertarian Party with social justice warriors or whatever you want to call them.
And I was reminded of this.
Well, I mean, look, I noticed it pretty clearly when I had Nick Sarwalk on my podcast.
Not so much in the Soho Forum debate, but when I had him on the street, where you really, you know, you really see that you're like, wow, you are more concerned with perceived racism than with state aggression.
You're more concerned with the optics of like, you know, oh my God, we can't be perceived as racist.
And also, by the way, just seems kind of unaware by the fact that for as many people out there that are like, oh my God, they're going to, you know, you're going to be perceived as racist.
There's also a whole lot of people out there who are sick and tired of everything being called racist.
And like there's 80% of these people.
Yeah, like the vast majority of people don't subscribe to this bullshit.
But I was reminded again of that recently with the whole situation with your boy Maj Ture, who I'm very fond of as well.
And I think has been like a really great ambassador and spokesman for us.
And the people who were like so outraged over, you know, like what, like a 2014 comment where he called someone gay or something like that, like a tweet from like six years ago.
And you're like, do you really, I remember me and you were talking on the phone about this.
And it's like, man, if you don't have the courage to stand up to social justice warriors, like you were talking about step one and step two, step two being taking on the state.
How are you going to deal with taking on the deep state if you can't take on a social justice warrior?
And that has to do with the culture of the party.
I think, and I've been talking about for a while, where I think the culture of the party is not ready for success.
We became successful.
What does that mean?
So let's say, I don't know, Hornburger goes wildly viral.
We get 5% and we get into the debates and then we have this new libertarian revolution and the LP reaches heights that it's never done.
And then overnight, it's like an actual force in national politics.
Well, what would that actually look like?
And especially what would it look like if the party is coming from a principled position of standing against everything that the status quo stands for?
It's going to look like bribes.
It's going to look like threats.
It's going to look like intimidation.
It's going to look like blackmail.
It's going to look like a total shitstorm of horribleness when we actually poke that bear.
And I'm afraid that there's a lot of people that if it ever got to that level, they would be out the door.
I don't think they, I think there's so much of a club atmosphere that we've forgotten the seriousness of what we're doing and the seriousness of what would ever happen if we became successful.
And that's something I always keep in mind because I do expect for it to reach those heights eventually.
And I do expect to draw that reaction.
I mean, you saw it, the closest that we've gotten was, again, it always comes back to this, the Ron Paul revolution.
What did they do?
They blacked him out.
There was this year conspiracy between the media and the GOP.
They blacked him out.
They only really mentioned him to say that he was crazy or racist or whatever.
And it was obvious that they were afraid of him.
And there was all that backlash, people getting their bones broken at state conventions, being intimidated, being not allowed to say his name into the mic, having clipboards placed in front of their mouths so they couldn't say his name at the mic.
Like it was absolutely insane.
And if we ever got, again, an organization to that level, I can't even imagine what the backlash would be.
And that's the thing is we need that kind of toughness that a Maj brings to the table.
We need that fortitude because this is a cold war.
It's not just a war of ideas and it's not just a war of psychologies.
Essentially what we're doing is we are cutting through the unreality that has been created around us from the thought controllers and the media controllers and the education controllers.
And these people control society.
And they control what is basically agreed upon to be reality.
And most people believe in that reality.
It's like the Matrix.
We're cutting through that.
That's going to come at a cost once we really do it to a large degree.
Yeah, no, I mean, I completely agree with you.
And I think that, you know, my guess is that people who are concerned with being called racist are really not going to be able to handle that type of heat if that day or when that day comes.
We're dealing with people that'll napalm your kids.
And it's funny, but it's not funny.
It's serious.
These people do it all the time, you know, and they justify it and they argue for it and they've kept it going for a hundred years.
Like they're not good people.
You know, we're not dealing with powder puffs who are just going to be like, okay, you're right.
The nap.
I can't believe I've never thought of that idea.
Here's the keys.
That's not going to happen.
That's not going to happen.
It's going to get nasty.
It's going to get real nasty.
And we need soldiers for that situation, not people who are going to fold if you say the wrong word.
We got to be a little bit tougher than that.
We've got to really understand what's going on in the world around us better than that.
Yeah.
So speaking of Maj, what's the latest with him?
Have you spoken to him recently?
Do you think he is going to stick in the party or is he going to leave?
What do you think?
I mean, he has said that he's leaving and I mean, he hasn't really talked much about it since then.
I mean, he's been out doing his own thing.
And I think he's been out exemplifying the points that I was making.
The points that I were making is that, so at one point, he had officially said, like, if the keynote speech is taken from me, I'm going to leave the party.
And so to me, the point that I was making is that for people to continue to push to have the keynote.
Removed from him at that point gives a certain intentionality to to that push.
You want him out of the party, you know it, and that's what came to pass.
And now he's out there doing college tours getting 30 40, 50 people a pop at each one.
He's out there going to prisons.
He's out there mixing it up with people who have a bigger platform than than the LP has had, and these are all things that are going to grow for him and are growing for him with or without the LP.
So I just think it's a it's a damn shame that uh essentially, the people in the convention oversight committee fell for a character assassination campaign.
I mean, there was actually a concerted effort to dig up information on him uh, to give to the, the convention committee, in order to get them to stop supporting him, him having that keynote speech.
And then the information that was given was just absolutely ridiculous.
Like we're talking like a joke video with him and Hotep, Jesus and a couple other dudes, you know, looking in the camera calling themselves black white supremacists, and and maj basically said that he was gonna fuck this dude up that apparently put information about his daughter online, you know, and well that's, that's a threat, that's a nap violation, you know like it's just absolutely absurd.
And to throw out that platform for these things is is just again, it's indicative of of the culture and the attitude that really needs change in the party.
Custom-Fitted Shirt Sponsor00:02:13
It's it's, it's too much like a book club.
And not to say that we shouldn't be reading books.
Obviously, you know we we've got that in spades, but we've got to have some more toughness to us.
Yeah well, the people who are treated like a book club haven't even read enough books.
I would at least respect them if they were like, really well read, but it seems like the people in your club do a lot more of the reading anyway.
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So, okay, so another guy who's been getting a lot of attention, who I had on this show as well, was Joshua Smith.
Radical Libertarian Beliefs00:16:05
I know the Mises caucus has endorsed him as for chair of the Libertarian National Committee.
How's Josh doing?
And what do you see happening in his race?
He's doing fantastic.
I mean, as it stands right now, he can't lose as it stands right now.
I mean, it's him and the person who founded the socialist caucus, the rent is theft guy.
And this other dude named Todd Hagopian, you might have seen him on Twitter as the libertarian in chief.
He's got a decent following on Twitter, but at the same, and he's got some business acumen.
He's actually got some good things to say.
But at the same time, he hasn't exactly been involved with the state party or the Libertarian Party.
And he seems to be relatively new to libertarianism.
And so he doesn't really have the traction.
He doesn't really have the trust.
And that's a theme that you're going to hear me talk about a lot is trust.
I think trust is a very, very important commodity.
And he just doesn't have that yet.
So as it stands right now, Josh can't lose.
And I think that has scared the hell out of people because they do not want that.
They do not want the leadership of the party to go back to a radical position or a radically principled position.
You know, they want to continue to play politics.
And not that we aren't engaged in politics.
Obviously, we are, but there's a certain character to how that's run.
And, you know, do you get votes by changing people's minds and you get votes by shattering people's paradigms and actually changing hearts?
Or do you get it by telling people what you think they want to hear so that they'll vote for you and never join and never do anything?
And they just look at the world the same way, but you got to vote.
And so yeah, they are scared because it's been Gary Johnson, Gary Johnson, Bob Barr.
We're at over 12 years of this.
But the fortunate thing is I think the appetite for that sort of thing has really, really shifted.
And I think it was already shifting.
And I think that the Mises caucus came in and really hammered that home and put the nail in that coffin.
I mean, one of the things I'm really proud of, because I don't know if I told you this, but one of the catalyzing events that helped me to say, okay, I have to go for this is I had a literal nightmare one night where Bill Weld got to the debate stage.
He was the nominee and he got to the debate stage and was speaking to the American public at large and saying, you know, Bill Weld, this is the first impression of libertarianism.
And I woke up like in a cold sweat and I'm like, oh my God, this can't happen.
Because it would be the death of the word.
And we already lost a word in liberal.
We can't have that happen again.
But our rise was added to a generally anti-weld sentiment in the party.
And I think I'm not saying that Weld left the party shaking his fist like, God damn, Macy's caucus.
But I think we added to a trend that pushed him out.
And that's something I'm really proud of.
So it seems to me that there's a demographic shift happening in the party and an attitude shift.
And I'm proud to say that it looks like it's happening because of us because we are the big recruiters in the party.
No, I mean, no question that you guys are a huge part of it.
And it's really hard.
You know, all the people who would make excuses for Weld.
And this is like what, you know, again, to go back to my, you know, encounters with Nick Sarwak, where he would say these things like, well, you know, the time in the Libertarian Party really made Bill Weld more libertarian and it made him more anti-war.
And I would say, I would say, I pressed Nick on this.
I say, when exactly did he become anti-war?
Because, you know, he was like, obviously, he's a pro-George W. Bush guy, supported the Bush doctrine, supported Hillary Clinton, supported Dennis, John Kasich at the beginning of 2016.
So he's clearly like all with the war party.
And then he goes, well, no, it wasn't until he was out on the campaign with Gary Johnson.
So it's like right at the end when he's vying for the libertarian, you know, nomination or vice presidential nomination.
That's when he becomes anti-war.
And then I saw him just yesterday retweeting Bill Crystal.
And it's like, no, he was never that.
It's so obvious.
He was never that.
He's still, he wrote an op-ed recently criticizing Trump for breaking up the bipartisan consensus foreign policy, which basically since the year 2003 has been war for forever wars.
So it's like, really, it seems pretty obvious.
This guy was like a pro.
The crazy thing is even by the more milquetoast libertarians, even by their own stated beliefs, that should be way more radical and way more disqualifying than anything that you're standing for or I'm standing for.
And that was always a political point by Nick.
That was never actually a point based in reality.
That was a point, a political point to try to bludgeon people in the head who.
So the chair raise last year got really, really, really ugly, like really ugly, which is like way uglier than it should get for a volunteer position for a party of 15,000 people.
Yeah.
Like I'm talking people harassing Josh's kids' mother, his mother, his ex-girlfriends, making up rape charges at state conventions, nonetheless, where he's surrounded by friends.
You know, like, and so that whole point was to make a point of like, well, instead of tearing other people down, you know, I'm going to point out the good things to make it look like he's somebody who pushes people out of the party and I don't push people out of the party.
I'm a good guy.
And so it was always a political point.
And anybody who has spent any amount of time looking at what Weld has been campaigning on as a Republican again, you know, it's obvious that that was never real.
But the good thing, the silver lining about it is that there was a lot of people who said, oh, you know, I'll never join, you know, small L Liberty Republican types who are like, I would never join the LPA.
You run candidates like Bill Weld.
It's like, well, now you run candidates like Bill Weld.
So you might as well show up now.
Well, that's right.
And it also, which I got to say, I almost appreciate the fact that Bill Weld is out there doing this because, I mean, it's completely irrelevant and useless.
Nobody cares about Bill Weld running as a Republican nominee for president.
But it goes to vindicate a lot of people like me and you and what we were saying about this guy.
Look, it's not like, you know, even when you say like, as you said before, you said a lot of the people in the party get scared off by radicalism.
And I understand that.
But the term radical is really just a matter of perspective.
I mean, I identify as a radical.
I have no problem with the term.
But truthfully speaking, everyone, no matter what your view is, you really would like to be a centrist.
Like even if you're like a communist or something like that, you would like to be living under communism.
And then you're basically just supporting the status quo.
You just want the status quo to be closer to what you view.
What me and you are advocating for is people be principled.
But even whether you're a minarchist or an anarchist, whether you're a Reason magazine, a Cato Institute or a Mises Institute, any of those things, everything that you guys, let's just say we lived in somewhat of a free society with somewhat of a limited government, and then somebody decided they're going to run on the policy of, I think we should go remake the governments of seven different countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa, slaughter hundreds of thousands of people and spend trillions of dollars on the effort.
You'd be like, hey, that sounds pretty radical to me.
I mean, like, that's a pretty radical proposal.
It just happens to be the people who control power are the ones advocating it.
And we're just saying, let's not put people who are sympathetic to that as our standard bearers.
Like, that doesn't seem, that seems reasonable to me more than radical.
Well, the sad thing is, is that when you're a frog sitting in boiling water, room temperature water seems radical.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Like normalcy, normalcy seems radical because when you're in a toxic environment for a long time, that becomes the norm, you know, and that's that becomes what dictates your views.
And that's, that's the situation that we're in now.
Right.
No, no, you're absolutely right.
And that's very well said.
And that's, that's the problem, I think, with a lot of those guys.
And I understand, I really do understand the fear of turning people off.
I've had that before in my days.
Like I've been like, oh, I'm almost worried to take this position.
And then it's like, you know, a lot of people might be alienated by it.
You know, and you always want, whether you're in a political party, you want more votes.
You want more members.
If you're doing a podcast like me, you want more people listening to you.
But the truth is that you have to, at some point, if you're going to stand for anything, be willing to say, well, hey, this is the whole worldview that we have.
And this is actually what's crazy, not what we're advocating for here.
And I just, I would think that libertarians would get that, but they don't.
That's the natural result of standing for anything.
You know what I mean?
I would think and hope that by standing by our principles that we alienate authoritarians.
And at the point, you know what I mean?
Like anytime you take a stand for anything, you're going to alienate at least the equal opposite.
So then it's about, well, who's down to listen and can I work with?
So if it's somebody, if you're dealing with somebody who has been voting Republican and loves Trump and loved Bush or whatever, then you're probably not going to get that.
And you have to identify your target audience.
For me, my target audience, like I, this is another thing I've talked about is the LP itself should be engaged in outreach.
It should be engaged in trying to outreach to people who are not already libertarians.
That's not necessarily our job as the Mises caucus, though.
My job, our job as the Mises caucus is to engage in what I call inreach, because I think the number one people that we ought to be outreaching to is libertarians.
You know, there's millions of libertarians and there's 15,000 Libertarian Party members.
Why is that?
Nobody likes the answers to those questions because it forces us to be critical about the job that we've done and the direction that we've taken.
And it asks, you know, questions.
Basically, you have to listen.
There's a mindset in the party that because we have the name libertarian, that if you identify as a libertarian, you're obligated to be here.
When the reality of it is, it should be something more like a relationship.
Our members are essentially our customer base, and we have to listen to them.
And we have to listen to the body of libertarians that are outside our walls to figure out why the hell they're not coming in.
Well, if you do that, you're going to find out what the problem is really fast.
It's bad leadership, bad candidates at the national level, not a lot of electoral success.
Those are the big things.
naked people on stages, being embarrassed.
You know, most libertarians are embarrassed by the LP and they don't want to hear that.
They don't want to hear that.
They don't want to listen to that because they are happy with the positions that they occupy and they're, they're, you know, they're, they're pillars of sand, basically.
No, you're absolutely right.
You're absolutely right.
And this was one of the most frustrating things in my debate with Nick, where he has the classic entrenched LP mindset, which is that I owe him my vote.
That I was obligated.
Like somehow it was an attack of me that I didn't vote for Gary Johnson and Bill Weld.
Like, hey, we're here.
We're the libertarians.
Why wouldn't you support us?
And I, you know, I say for the same reason I wouldn't vote for a Democrat or a Republican.
Like, why, why shouldn't as a libertarian, I vote for the Democrat?
Oh, because they have too many anti-liberty policies.
Okay.
Well, so did the Libertarian Party last time.
I mean, like, I don't know what to say.
If you're going to put Bill Weld up there, if you're going to put a Warhawk who was a lobbyist for a weapons company, who is like supporting Hillary Clinton.
Yes.
Well, this was the point I made.
And, you know, God bless him.
See, here's the thing.
This is what Nick Sarwak fell into.
And I'll stop talking about him after this.
He's just too easy of a target.
And he just, he's, he represents everything that's wrong with the establishment of the LP.
And he started attacking all the good people.
So he put himself in this position.
So I don't feel bad about it.
But here's what happened with him, right?
It's like the same thing that happened with Gary Johnson.
So when libertarians, we're like the only people.
We're the only group of people politically who feel a need to be consistent with our ideology.
Straight up, if you talk to anybody else, any other group of people, they just don't care about being consistent with their ideology.
The desire to be logically consistent is what ends up making you a libertarian if you're exposed to the ideas.
If you talk to whatever, some leftist will be like, there's no such thing as gender.
Also, I know that I was born in the wrong body and I have the brain of a man and I was born in a woman's body.
And you're like, wait, but those two statements can't both be true.
Like it has to be one or the other.
And they don't even care.
They're like, I don't care.
I don't care that I just contradicted myself.
Most sides are just concerned with power and not consistency.
Libertarians, on the other hand, and people who just lean libertarian, tend to want to be consistent.
So Gary Johnson, when he said the thing about the famous gaffe about forcing Jews to bake Nazi cakes, if you remember the actual moment, what happened.
That wasn't a gaff.
He meant to say that.
Well, yeah, but you might be right about that.
But the truth is, what happened was he didn't want to contradict himself.
So he said it wasn't okay to racially discriminate against your customers.
And then Austin Peterson goes, well, what if your customer is a Nazi and you're a Jewish baker?
And instead of going, yeah, okay, I contradict myself.
He went, no, I want to be consistent.
So I won't control, you know, like I'll stay consistent.
And then the consistency took him to a place that you're like, but this is so ridiculous.
You obviously, you can't be for this.
Nobody could be for forcing a Jew to bake a Nazi cake.
Now, Nick Sarwak did the same thing to me.
He said, you have to vote for the Libertarian Party nominee, no matter who he is.
So I said, okay, what if it was Dick Cheney?
And he said, yeah, I think you'd have to vote for him.
And then I said, what if it's Adolf Hitler?
And he's like, well, I mean, if that's who we put up, I guess that's who we put up.
And you're like, but don't you see where you've taken yourself to now?
Like, anyway, it's just so absurd.
But you made a point and it's true about the other side.
They are concerned about power, but they're also concerned about their in-group and being validated by their in-group.
Because something that we as libertarians have been talking about for a long time is that there's no real difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.
And as far as policy is concerned, that's true.
You know, I mean, there's certain differences, you know, abortion and stuff like this.
But broadly speaking, that is true.
So then the question is, why do they hate each other so much if they're largely the same?
They hate each other so much because they have certain cultures and they have certain worldviews that bind them together.
So on the right, they tend to look at the world through a lens of justice and duty and tradition and stuff like that.
Whereas on the left, they look at it through fairness and equality and equity and concepts like this.
We as libertarians don't have that.
We're generally aligned on policy, but we're not aligned in culture.
We're not aligned in our worldview necessarily because we're pulling people from all over the place.
So that makes it very hard for us to become cohesive.
That's why the Ron Paul thing was so amazing.
Now, my opinion on how to get around that is, and I think we're, I think we as an LPMC have already proven this true.
There's a lot of people who hate the idea of caucuses because it turns into like battles, you know, like we're fighting the Prague and then we were fighting the socialists last year.
And to a certain extent, that's true.
Cultural Diversity vs Conformity00:06:33
But I think what it allows people to do is we're essentially a micro culture within the party.
You know, like we're people who have broadly speaking, the same ideas and the same road to hoe.
And then you got a group called like outright libertarians.
They've been around for a while.
They're essentially the LGBTQ wing of the party that really specializes in those issues.
Well, that's great because those should be the people that reach out to that group of people and that demographic and speak their language from a place of credibility and trust and all that.
We should be reaching out to the Misesians, the Mises Institute fans and all that.
The radical caucus should be reaching out to the anarchists.
And I think, again, I think we've proven this true because we have a community.
I mean, our Facebook has 4,200 people in it.
There's not another, I mean, you're not going to find a single libertarian group that has numbers like that that's out there becoming leadership, building counties, supporting candidates and all the things that we do.
So I think we're already a positive test case for that.
No, yeah, no, absolutely.
I think you're right about it.
But it gets to a deeper, but this gets to a deeper conversation.
And I think the Maj thing kind of ties into it that we're not having of whether or not we're a thick or thin party.
And what does diversity look like really?
You know, does diversity look like diversity of skin color and then conformity of thought and action?
Or is it we accept that people, you know, somebody who grew up selling drugs in North Philly might be a little bit different than somebody from San Francisco in terms of their attitude and how they view the world and how they interact with the world.
And that's a conversation that we haven't had yet.
And I don't think we're prepared to have, but it needs to happen.
No, I couldn't agree with you more.
And look, if you're talking about the idea of, you know, paying lip service to diversity, but in practice, it turns out being like a uniform culture with no diversity of thought at all.
I mean, this is exactly what the modern campus culture in America is today.
They're very, very happy to brag about how they have different shades of people at their school.
And yet you'd be hard pressed to find anybody who doesn't regurgitate the exact same talking points and have the exact same view.
And by the way, none of it is representing a true minority culture.
It's not as if like what happened, like they decided they wanted diversity in college campuses.
And so college campuses are really starting to have the same attitudes that you find in the hood in fucking East New York or something like that.
You go to college campuses and it's the exact same white culture, just with more brown faces.
And then they're proud of that.
And I think you're right.
I think a lot of this was exposed with the Maj situation.
I also thought that like, you know, it's this whole like, you know, the thing about him being accused of homophobia just really drove me crazy where it's like, you know, that gets to the heart of what we're talking about.
But yeah, you go.
Yeah, well, well, it really does.
But, you know, like, like me and you were saying before, it's like, if you don't have the courage to speak about these like slightly unpopular truths, how are we actually going to roll back the warfare state?
Like, you know, like, like you said, like the ultimate enemy here are killers of babies.
That's who we're actually trying to, like, that's the point here is we're trying to actually save those babies' lives and take the power away from the people who would kill them.
Okay, well, if we can't just stand up and say, say things like, okay, first of all, if you say something that's insensitive about gay people, that doesn't mean you have a phobia of gay people.
This is a dumb, lefty word that was made up that doesn't actually mean anything.
Phobia and hatred aren't the same thing.
And also, just saying something that's not politically correct and hatred aren't the same thing.
The truth is that in the community of most straight men, okay, being called gay ain't a compliment.
Most straight men don't see two dudes making out and go, I have no reaction to that whatsoever.
Most of them are kind of like, ugh, that's the reality of the situation.
If we don't have the courage to just, I'm not even saying that's a good thing.
I'm just saying that exists.
Like that is real life.
It's kind of an implicit thing that we all understand when we understand that somebody has a sexual preference at all.
Like if you were to have a friend who is gay and then you were to like keep cutting or like pushing and poking at him about, oh, well, you should like straight sex, they probably wouldn't like that.
You know what I mean?
Like they probably wouldn't like that at all.
Gay people like gay sex better and they and that kind of implies that kind of implies that they find heterosexual sex to be less gratifying or whatever and vice versa.
I mean, it's nothing that Maj ever said advocated the state to be used against gay people, advocated that gay people be discriminated against, disliked, not included, anything like that.
All it was was hollow insults that you hear at any construction site or I mean male-dominated workplace, frankly, like of like, he called this dude a cockblower.
Okay, most straight people don't like the idea of blowing cock.
You know, and that doesn't mean that they hate it, you know, but and that doesn't mean that they hate people that do.
But it's just something that it's, I don't know if preference is the right word, but you get, you get where I'm coming from.
Yeah, and he also wasn't literally saying this dude is a cockblower.
It's an insulting term.
Like that's what he's saying.
Like, yes, he's saying, oh, here's something that most of us, like, most people consider gross.
You're kind of gross.
Like, it's an insult.
Every dude understands this.
I hate the idea of pretending that we don't.
Right, right.
And it's become a bully pulpit is what it is.
It's become something to, you know, push people around with and basically drive that conformity.
You know, we want diversity.
We want diversity of how things look, but we want conformity of thought, speech, and action.
And if you don't, if you step out of the lines, then you're, you know, you're phobic, you're a hater, all this stuff when it's really not, you know, and on top of another problem with the whole thing is I think something gets lost in translation, generally speaking, and this is for everybody on social media.
Identity Politics and Racism00:10:11
You know, if there's a lot of people who think I'm this huge asshole because I'm very direct, you know what I mean?
I'm very direct.
But then if you met me, you would know that I'm pretty lighthearted.
I'm still direct, but I'm pretty lighthearted.
pretty jokish, you know, and I've had a lot of people who have gone from like, you know, I, I'm really glad I met you because you're completely different than I thought, you know, and so if you have a bias, if you have a certain way that you look at somebody, well, then you're going to find that, you know, social media has created a generation of people that don't read.
They read into things, you know, and find what they want and basically form a narrative that they want to perceive.
Yeah, no, I completely agree with you.
And I think you're spot on with all that stuff.
And it just, you know, it seems like to me, there's almost like there's two parts of it to me.
Like, number one, I just want, you know, I think back to what got me into the libertarian world.
And it was, you know, the courage of Ron Paul.
I mean, I was, I was, you know, convinced by the ideas later, but there's people really forget how courageous it was of Ron Paul to stand up in the George W. Bush years when the attitude from the Republican White House was, you're either with us or you're with the terrorists.
If you, if you, you know, they used to say things like this all the time, like you were saying, a lot of the younger people, they don't, they don't remember these days.
They weren't around for them.
But it was like, if you challenge the troops, you're with the terrorists.
And this was, and Ron Paul came out straight up and said, in many cases, our troops are the terrorists.
And in many cases, the terrorists are responding to how they've been terrorized and people around them.
And this is why they're able to recruit.
And there was a lot of courage to it.
And I just think that right now, especially with how much the left has gone off the rails in the last five, six years, particularly in the last three years, it's like you have to be willing to stand up to this stuff and not just parrot their talking points.
When you do that, we've already lost.
And the other set, the second part of it is that, and this is what, like when I was at Porkfest, I was talking about, I was telling like the libertarians there, because a lot of them were asking me about like, you know, kind of like the alt-right and right-wing populism and these things that became kind of the new thing as libertarian, the liberty movement kind of died down a bit and people went in that direction.
And I said, I was like, look, you have to have the balls to firmly stand up against the social justice left.
Because if you don't, then you're ceding that territory to whoever's willing to do it.
And if the person who's willing to stand up to the left is also preaching some dumb shit like an ethnostate, well, that's the only one who's willing to stand up to this craziness.
And then they seem to be the reasonable one in the room.
So people like us who aren't preaching any type of state violence have to be willing to stand up and be like, look, man, this is craziness.
This is crazy.
There is a difference between men and women, biologically speaking.
This is crazy to not acknowledge that.
It's crazy to pretend that.
And this is what drove me so crazy about Sarwak and all these other guys who are out there looking for like, you know, like racism as this big evil.
And it's like, okay, you're a libertarian and you're concerned with racism.
How about like Asian admissions to college?
Like there's some racism for you.
You know what I'm saying?
Like how about affirmative action?
There's some racism for you, but you don't want to talk about that.
I'm happy to talk about any policy that you feel like is fucking over the black community.
That's why I've been adamantly anti-war on drugs, adamantly anti-welfare state for years now, because I do think it does like tremendous damage to lots of different communities, but particularly to the black community.
But it's like, if you're just talking about what's in someone's heart, like, oh my God, you don't like, like, Maj, you don't advocate any laws against gay people, but we're concerned that in your heart, you may feel, like you said, reading into things.
It's like, come on, man, get out of here.
This is nonsense.
Yeah, we don't all have to agree about the same thing.
We don't, or here's, here's, here's, or not even that.
Here's what I think it really is probably a right way to word it for today's world.
We don't all have to have the same narrative, you know, because that's what it really is.
We're not having debates anymore.
It's narrative control and counter narrative control clashing and it's all posturing.
You know what I mean?
It's not real.
These people don't actually care about these things.
It's just about creating a situation that you can make a club out of to beat your enemies over the head with.
And it's very self-defeating.
And if we succumb to that, then we're going to fall into this situation where we don't even have the juice to meaningfully push back against the state.
No, you're absolutely right.
And that's why ultimately, what I do want to happen here is just like, ideally, it'd be like, let's just forget about all of these issues.
Let's fucking try to bring the left libertarians and the right libertarians together and focus on what we all should agree with, which is the most important issues of the day, which is scaling back this uncontrolled, this out-of-control, you know, monster that is the United States of America's federal government.
Yeah.
And I'll end on this point.
And if I may, I want to shift over to some of the things because there's a lot of your audience that probably doesn't know what all we've achieved since the last time I've been on there.
So I want to touch on that.
But to address the current point, the reaction that we're describing right now is so predictable that we actually baked it into our platform, the LPMC's platform, understanding that once we made the LPMC, that people were going to come after us and say, you're racist, you're this or that.
So what we did is we explicitly put a plank in our platform that states that we are unapologetically against identity politics.
Now, this breaks into another conversation, which is, you know, what is identity politics technically, you know, because is it identity politics to say that, well, you know, black people are getting arrested at a higher rate for their percentage of the population than everybody else?
No, that's a fact.
But what it is identity politics is basically forming political affiliations on the basis of race.
You know, so, oh, there's an inequality, there's an inequality or disparity in the outcome of something, so therefore racist.
That's identity politics.
But the funny, so but the point that we did that for is that basically you can have any lifestyle you want and you're welcome in the Mises caucus as long as you're down with Austrian economics, you're down with decentralization, you know, and you're down for the mission.
We don't care if you're you're a trans SJW.
We don't care if you're this or that.
You know, if you're a straight white cis scum or whatever, like we just care that you're down with what we're trying to do.
And we have that diversity.
We have people who are much more on the left cultural spectrum.
We have people who are more, you know, more traditional than I am.
And it all works out, you know, and the conversations actually tend to be debates instead of fights.
And so I think we really do have like a for how to navigate these things in the broader libertarian party.
Yeah, no, I think that's great.
And that's, that's the way to do it.
And it's like crazy that like libertarians should be able to get along on these issues because we're all basically, like you said, we're all united by the same belief.
That's like, yeah, you can have whatever cultural preferences or social preferences you want to.
I also do think, though, that for the truth is that we're going to have to, libertarians are going to have to accept that if you have a voluntary society, if you have anything resembling a free society, that a lot of people are going to have in-group preferences, both black and white, and that's fine, as long as they're not initiating violence against anybody else.
They can have the preferences they want.
And then there'll be a lot of people who don't have those preferences and kind of live in different communities.
And that's fine too.
But people do love their religion, their families, you know what I mean?
Like their heritage and things like that.
And that's just going to be part of the human condition.
And the only thing that's ever.
Are you suggesting that blood and soil still matters to people?
I hope you're not.
But I sure am.
Well, listen, Jeff Dice didn't tell no lies, man.
He was absolutely right.
Listen, I know he triggered a lot of people, but it was really just using that phrase.
And here's the thing, right?
It's like they all did the same thing that social justice warriors always do: they go, oh, you said the wrong word.
You said the wrong phrase.
But nobody, I never heard any single person actually take on the argument that he was making, which is that given the choice of freedom, look, you have to acknowledge this, right?
If you're a libertarian.
And this is something that libertarians have to acknowledge.
And it's what Marxists ultimately could never acknowledge, right?
So here's on top of like the economic calculation problem and the like incentive problems and all the other like like technical issues with communism.
What Karl Marx predicted was that the workers of the world were going to band together, understand that class struggle was the real struggle of humanity.
They were going to unite and fight a war against the capitalists.
Like the workers in Germany and the workers in Russia would get together and realize, hey, we're all workers and they're the rulers.
So we're going to fight against them.
And what happened in the next, you know, 80 years after Karl Marx wrote all this stuff, after the Communist Manifesto in Das Capital, what happened?
There were two world wars.
All of the workers rallied around their own nation states and slaughtered each other to the profit of all these fucking capitalists.
Like they just went to war for them unwittingly.
And the truth is, if you realize that people are willing to fight and die for their family, their town, their people, their traditions, their culture, then realize, okay, we don't want states to manipulate people into fighting for all these things, right?
Online Gambling Bonus Offer00:02:46
That's a good place to start.
But also, people probably aren't going to give those things up entirely.
And if people are free, they're probably going to choose their religion, their culture, their family, all of these things.
And libertarians have to be willing to accept that and let people have that.
If you're trying, the only thing that can ever rob that from people is a powerful state.
And that sure is fucking going to work for libertarians.
Well, these are the factors that organize society in the absence of a state.
You know what I mean?
These are the factors that lead people to associate or disassociate accordingly in the absence of a state.
I mean, I've never seen anybody self-immolate for illegal weed.
Right.
Yeah.
You're absolutely right.
I mean, it is a good point.
The drug war needs to be ended, but what we're speaking to is what moves people on a deep level.
You know, and it's not as simple as the right ideology.
You know, there's something deeper that people default to.
And it seems to happen across cultures and across time.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
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All right.
So let's shift to what you were getting to before.
You wanted to talk about the stuff the Mises Caucus has been doing since last we spoke.
So catch my listeners.
Yeah, I would have been credible to your audience.
Decriminalization Across Cities00:14:58
You know, I don't want to just.
But yeah, so like I said, we are now the, well, we have been, but we are by far the largest caucus in the entire party.
You know, we have 4,300 people in our Facebook group.
We have about 1,600 people in our email list.
We have about 10,000 likes on our page.
And what we've done is we have organized, well, got recruited organizers around the country.
And we have a list of activities for them to draw from to get done.
And that is on lpmisescaucus.com.
If you go to a page called Our Actions that lists a whole bunch of sample legislation at the local, state, and pie-in-the-sky federal level stuff that's not going to happen, but we support nonetheless.
And we've been getting a lot of wins on this, you know, and we've been building county-level affiliates across the country that didn't otherwise exist.
And that might not sound like it's very important, but it is because the people who organize a county-level LP are going to kind of color what that party looks like and what it sounds like and the kind of people that they recruit, you know, and then they become friends of ours.
And that's all of a sudden that many more people that we have, you know, helping us and pushing forward our vision.
So how that has manifested is, well, I'll start with what's happened here recently at home is I live in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
It's a very progressive town.
It's about 40 minutes north of Philly.
37,000 people, something like that.
70% plus of the voting demographic is Democrat.
The entire city council is Democrat.
I mean, we're talking, these people passed a resolution.
So that's non-binding.
But point is they passed a resolution to make Norristown all clean energy by 2050.
So it's like completely progressive.
So what I did here is I started going to the city council meetings and introducing myself to the city council members, introducing myself to the chief of police who shows up.
And after a couple meetings, I asked the chief of police, like, hey, man, what's the state of decriminalization here in Norristown?
And I was really surprised to find out that he was in support of decriminalization and basically said that if somebody took up the work to make that happen, that he would support it.
So I took it on and I basically took language from other cities and towns here in Pennsylvania that have decriminalized, found the least restrictive one.
So basically it's a $25 fine now in Lancaster PA was the template that I used and just simply swapped out the language of like, you know, that stated that this was for the city of Lancaster, replaced it with the municipality of Norristown, and then printed up copies, went to the city council meeting, put myself down for time to speak and gave copies of the language to all of the city council members.
And basically, you know, I started off with my libertarian points of why it should be, why it should be decriminalized.
But then I also started giving points that would probably resonate more with them.
You know, like, I mean, you always want to stand for what you believe, but at the same time, you want to try to build the coalition.
So, you know, I threw in some of the social justice elements.
And I also pointed out the fact that here in Pennsylvania, the Democrat Party of Pennsylvania has adopted marijuana legalization as part of its platform.
So really, this should already be happening.
It should even be taking some libertarian dude to randomly come out here and give you a copy of this language for this to happen.
You should already be doing this.
And so I thought I was going to have to hit the streets.
They invited me to a workshop where there's more of a back and forth conversation.
I recruited a guy named Les Stark from an organization here called the Keystone Cannabis Coalition.
He spoke to it in a much more polished fashion than I'm capable of and, you know, resonated with them.
And then within a couple months, boom, there was just a news story last week saying that they voted to advertise the fact that they're going to decriminalize it here.
And you mentioned earlier, we're championing mushrooms.
Yeah, we got involved in an initiative in Denver, Colorado, the first of its kind to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms.
And that's something that I'm really passionate about because the joke I like to say is that a combination of heavy metal, Ron Paul, and mushrooms saved my life when I was like 18 or 19 years old because, you know, I was very, very depressed.
I had a lot going on at home and I was thinking about checking out, to be honest with you.
And basically, metal gave me the outlet for my feelings, you know, and made me feel strong when I didn't otherwise feel that way.
Ron Paul gave me a vision of the kind of person I want to be like that this miserable lot in life that I'm assuming that I assumed at the time was all I have to look forward to isn't how it isn't all that there is to it.
You know, I can be, I can strive to be a courageous and brave man like him.
And then the shrooms basically opened up, like shattered the whole, like I didn't even realize that I was depressed at the time.
I just thought this is who and what I am.
And so the shrooms kind of shattered that and basically gave me a pathway to start from here to Ron, for lack of a better word.
And so yeah, so I'm very passionate about that.
And we got that passed.
We helped get that passed in Denver.
And it was a very slim margin to the point where the day that the vote happened, it was actually reported on across the country as if it had failed.
Well, then overnight, the absentee ballots came in and it passed by less than 2,000 votes.
And we got in on that.
So now we've made friends out of those people.
And we're at a ground level for what is rapidly becoming the psychedelic decriminalization movement across the country.
So this is manifesting in all kinds of ways to where you have groups called like Psychedelic Club and Decriminalize Nature.
Decriminalize nature specifically has their own language that doesn't just decriminalize shrooms, but it decriminalizes all natural psychedelics.
So basically everything but acid.
And that has actually passed in Oakland, California.
I think it's about to pass in Berkeley.
And I just saw an article that there's 100 groups around the country that are trying to get this stuff to pass.
So we're trying to get connected to the effort in Dallas, Texas to connect them with the party, much the same that we did in Denver and get that endorsed, get people on it, maybe throw some money at it, and depending on the viability.
So then there's that.
And then there's also what we're doing in Texas.
So that's the coalition that we're working on with the left right now.
With the right, we're working also in Texas.
We contracted, you should, you know, Jose Nino, right?
Oh, yeah, I've had him on the show.
Yeah, so we contracted him to manage and organize an effort to introduce in five towns in Texas ordinance to protect gun rights at the local level because there's kind of a narrative going on that the Democrats are going to take over the state and they have to protect their gun rights and the political changes don't necessarily match the actual culture on the ground.
So we're utilizing that narrative and he's doing a very good job.
He's juiced in with all the gun groups and that's like his issue, you know?
So we're working with the right on guns and with the left on psychedelics, which is something that just makes me laugh whenever I think about it.
And then in addition to all of that, we are collecting money to our PAC.
So we are now what's called a hybrid pack and we're collecting money for the pack and also financially supporting local level libertarian candidates around the country.
We're only supporting local level because that's where we can and do win.
And that's where, you know, I think the decentralist argument really has the most power.
You know, it's, it's, I mean, I nullified the feds in my town, you know, on weed at least.
Right.
You know, and absolutely.
And so it can be done.
It's just going to take some work.
And, but yeah, there's no other organization in the party that's doing all of this.
I mean, that's in addition to the things I've already mentioned earlier in the show to like building county level affiliates and people becoming leaders in their state and county parties and all of this.
So we're doing a whole shitload of work that is undeniable at this point.
And we're doing it at a level that nobody else in the party is doing.
No, absolutely.
And I think that, you know, the way it can work or the best chance that we have, I think, and this is why the work you're doing is so important is that what you need is somebody, like on the national level, you need people to spread the ideas and recruit more people and change people's paradigms, change people's lifestyle, like the same way that Ron Paul did for me and you and so many other people.
So that's what's so exciting about a guy like Hornberger running for president.
But the local level is where you're actually going to be able to make some change, like the examples you're using.
I mean, these are not small things.
I mean, dude, the fucking those moves to decriminalize marijuana, decriminalize mushrooms, these are going to save people's lives.
I mean, there are people's lives who are ruined by this stuff.
I mean, the sentences that are handed down, particularly for psychedelic drugs, I mean, the sentences are insane.
And with something like mushrooms, where it's literally, I mean, I've never in my life heard of anyone getting addicted to mushrooms.
I'm not sure it's physically possible to get addicted to mushrooms.
This isn't something that is like tearing families apart.
The truth is the only thing that's tearing families apart is locking people up for possession or distribution.
And it really makes a big difference.
The idea, I've said this a lot of times to people, but the idea that we're going to take over the federal government and use the federal government to roll back the federal government is, I would say it's never going to happen.
It's the most unlikely of things to happen.
What's more likely is that we use the presidential politics as a tool, as a bully pulpit to spread the message of truth, convert a whole bunch more people.
But at the local level, you really can have a big impact.
And that's where pretty much all the victories for liberty have been won.
And then, of course, just hoping that the system collapses and we have a peaceful, orderly transition into something like that.
Well, I think the two go hand in hand.
Because think about it.
So what's going to happen?
So let's say the inevitability finally happens, right?
The system collapses or the dollar collapses or the stock bubble triggers the auto bubble, which triggers the housing bubble, which trigger, you know, you get what I'm going for.
What's going to happen?
They're going to, the feds are going to try to create a solution for the problem that they created.
They're going to blame freedom and capitalism and they're going to say that how much smarter they are than you.
And then they're going to point to all the dependents in the cities who are going to most likely be rioting and all this and say, oh my God, you're in favor of this.
This is what you've wrought.
This is what you want.
And the pressure is going to be immense to go along with whatever they say the answer is.
And you already see them.
I'm pretty sure I just saw something recently about the Federal Reserve looking into a digital, an actual real digital currency, like cryptocurrency.
You know, that's going to be the move.
So the only way that I could see us getting out of that is to have brave and principled people at the local and state level who take a stand and say, no, no, we're not going to do it.
We're not going to go along with it.
You did this.
And that's where it's going to be really important to understand central banking and Keynesianism and inflation and all of these things because those are the actual culprits.
And if we don't occupy those positions, it's not going to happen because the states already trade away their sovereignty for federal dollars.
If any state wanted to, they could become a free market haven overnight and shed all of their, you know, and secede and shed all of their federal obligations or federal regulations and trade that for basically a free market haven, but nobody does it because the dollars that the feds give are so alluring, you know, and it enables them to pass the buck on to other people.
So that's ultimately the responsibility that we have inherited by understanding the truth of the situation.
Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right.
And, you know, if the dollar gets weaker and weaker, maybe that power of the federal government will get weaker along with it.
The fear, of course, is that's when the guns come in.
But I guess there goes the Texas work that you're doing there.
Hopefully there's lots of guns on the ground as well.
So they're too scared to do anything.
Well, we already know that the guns are there.
It's just a matter of if people know where to aim them when the time comes.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
No, that's for sure.
And we're all talking hypothetically for all the feds listening in.
This is just pure fantasy.
But seriously, you know where to aim those guns.
You know where to aim them.
All jokes.
This is a comedy podcast, after all.
Don't forget.
All right, man.
So we got Hornberger running.
Josh Smith for chair of the Libertarian Party.
Is there anybody else I should be keeping an eye on?
Anyone else who you think is doing something real exciting in the party?
Well, I don't want to give all our cards away, but I will say that we as the Mises caucus do have a slate, not a full slate, but a slate of people that we are going to be supporting running for LNC offices within the LP.
So what's at stake here is, like I said earlier, we've had Gary Johnson, Gary Johnson, and Bob Barr, right?
It's been 12 years, three cycles of this continued moderating, moderating, watering down.
We have a chance with Josh and with Hornberger to completely flip the script in one shot.
And right now, like I said, that is coming at a crossroads where we are the big recruiters in the party, which means that we're a significant fundraising force for the party.
And we're the biggest caucus.
We're the most energetic caucus.
We're organizing all of this stuff.
So, you know, I know there's a lot of people who think that the Libertarian Party is irredeemable, but take me up on a challenge to use this as a trial run because there's only 15,000 members.
And if we can't even get our own shit under control, then you can kiss any dreams of fighting the state goodbye.
You know what I mean?
Like, if we can't even coalesce around our own movement and our own party and to push forward a worthy candidate in Hornberger, and I really, I really suggest people go and watch.
Hornberger's been around for a long time.
I mean, before I got on the show with you here, Dave, I was watching a couple of his talks.
He had a keynote talk at the 1996 National Convention.
He had a talk in 2013 that I was watching with Young Americans for Liberty called Libertarianism and, oh my God, why am I drawing a blank?
And civil liberty.
Sorry.
Libertarianism and civil liberties.
I just watched that video recently.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's just, he's so much like Ron, where he's just steadfast and earnestly passionate.
Inspiring Internet Opportunities00:07:12
That's the thing.
It's real passion.
And Josh has that too.
And Josh has a very clear path as it stands right now.
They are scrambling to try to figure out who to run to prevent that from happening.
All the right people in the party hate us.
And you can be a part of that fun too.
And it is fun.
That's the thing.
It's fun.
And that's what we've been missing.
The Gary Johnson campaign, totally miserable.
You know, like fighting with Bernie defectors, fighting with Trump defecting culture warriors, Johnson sticking his tongue out while we're trying to defend him.
Like it was just horrible.
Like it was just it was just horrible.
Yeah.
That was not always the case.
There was a time and a moment where it was absolutely fun, you know what I mean?
And inspiring.
And you didn't have to try to be motivated and you didn't have to try to be engaged.
They did it for you.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And the thing that's really exciting about this to me is that it's like, as you say, if you go Johnson Johnson bar, that takes you back the last three presidential cycles of the Libertarian Party.
And I would say that, you know, look, let's say in the year, was it 2000 when Harry Brown ran.
So if people don't know, I mean, Harry Brown was a great, truly principled, you know, inspiring libertarian candidate.
But it was the year 2000.
The internet was in its infancy compared to today.
This is before the, you know, before 9-11, before the wars, before the Patriot Act, before the NSA, you know, crazy spying out of control, before the 2008 crash.
And, you know, it just, it didn't get a ton of votes.
There were more members of the Libertarian Party back then, but it didn't get a ton of votes.
And I could almost see from an LP point of view where they'd go like, yeah, maybe if we run these more establishment moderate candidates, maybe we'll attract more attention.
But this is after the Ron Paul revolution.
This is a different time.
And since 2012, with Ron Paul running, we haven't had a true principled, hardcore libertarian run in national politics anywhere.
It hasn't happened.
And Hornberger is the first guy since then.
It's the first guy to test the waters and be like, what can we do in this internet age in the post, you know, after Ron Paul kind of mainstreamed libertarianism?
How much damage can we do?
How big a platform can we get?
How much, you know, how many people can we can we wake up?
And, you know, like that's, that's to me a very exciting prospect.
Running Johnson Weld wasn't just a disaster because of, you know, who they are.
It was also just the timing.
It was the fact that it's like people were dying for Rand Paul to be another Ron Paul and he wasn't.
And then people were all on this anti-establishment then.
It was the perfect time to run a real hardcore libertarian and they threw that opportunity away.
But it looks like 2020, we're going to have that opportunity back with Jacob Hornberger.
And we as the Mises caucus have already done the hard work.
We've already created the infrastructure.
We've already laid the groundwork.
We've already taken all the slings and arrows and bullshit from the haters in the party.
You know what I mean?
So like you get to come in at the fun part, you know what I mean?
And please do, you know, like, and it's going to be a party.
I mean, if it's anything like the Ron Paul days, it will be a party.
So, I mean, the time is ripe right now to get involved.
And I can't stress enough that the opportunity that we have right here between Hornberger and Josh in our slate.
It's not just Hornberger.
We have the chance to alter the entire trajectory of the Libertarian Party in one shot when I didn't even expect that to be the case until like 2022.
So, you know, we're going to use more money than you're absolutely right.
And I got to say, I mean, I think that like, I think you guys have essentially already won.
I mean, I really do think that.
I think that the, I remember when Matt Welsh wrote that article about Nick Sarwak winning the chair.
And the article was like, LPMC rebuffed at the chair, you know, election.
And that was kind of their take.
And I do think that the outlook was kind of, you know, along the lines of what you had said before, where it was like, well, here's this thing.
They came along.
They were temporary.
They didn't win.
And that's the end of them.
But what they didn't realize was that was just you guys getting started.
That was just the very beginning.
And of course, in response to that, that's when, you know, like Tom and myself and Jason Stapleton and Mance Rader, Pete Raymond, whatever he's calling himself this week, he came in as well.
But all these really great, you know, like podcasters in the liberty movement started coming in.
More and more attention started coming.
And I'll tell you, I mean, I think that to me, when I saw Nick Sarwak attend that Ron Paul Mises event and he's coming up and trying to take pictures, that was like a sign to me where I was like, hey, we've won.
Like the libertarian movement has beaten the Libertarian Party establishment.
It's our party now.
I was looking the other day on Facebook.
They were holding these polls of presidential candidates.
I mean, Lincoln Chafee was getting like nothing.
Hornberger was crushing Adam Kokash in the poll that they had head to head.
And this is online.
I mean, this is not where Hornberger's strength really has been in his online following.
This is this is, and even there, he's dominating these like little, you know, like unofficial Facebook polls.
This is, this is our party at this point.
It's ours to take back.
So like you said, a lot of the hard work's been done.
The war has kind of been fought and won.
And now it's just a matter of like closing the deal.
And so now's the time.
Join the party, become a delegate, join the LPMC, and let's have some fun, man.
Revolution part two.
Do you have a sign up link yet?
I don't.
Or do I have to push Josh and Tom's?
Just push Josh and Tom's for now.
And I'll create one this week.
So joshsmithlp.com, if you want to sign up to the LP and give him credit.
Tomwoods.com slash LP, if you want to give him credit.
We don't have our own.
If you want to sign up through us, sign up through Josh, joshsmithlp.com.
And then we're lpmisescaucus.com.
And we have all kinds of resources there that I'll give to Dave for the show notes to help you get started.
We have the beginner's guide to the LP.
We have the delegates checklist.
We have the Meet the Team page where you can get connected to your state level organizer.
So make sure to go to takehumanaction.com, sign up for our email list and get engaged because, I mean, the future is ours, basically.
All right.
Well, Michael, it was great talking to you today.
I'm sure we're going to have you on a couple more times throughout this next year to break down what's going on with the Hornberger 2020 campaign as well as a lot of other stuff.
So always great to talk to you, brother.
And thanks, everybody, for listening.
And we'll see you next week on Part of the Problem.