Spike Cohen and Joe Jorgensen debate the Libertarian Party's virtual campaign, with Cohen detailing his neocon-to-anarchist transition and accusing the U.S. government of sponsoring genocide in Yemen. They dissect corporate media distractions and define systemic racism as inherent intent behind policies like the war on drugs, contrasting Cohen's view with Jorgensen's skepticism regarding explicit racist purposes. The pair analyze the Garrett Foster incident and road-blocking protests through the lens of self-defense versus coercion, ultimately agreeing that police must protect property rights while leaving peaceful demonstrators alone. This exchange highlights their divergent strategies for dismantling state power to resolve culture wars and systemic injustice. [Automatically generated summary]
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We need to roll back the state.
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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 Cash Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am very happy to have our guest for today's show, who is Spike Cohen.
He is the Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate, of course, running along with Joe Jorgensen.
And we're very happy to have you on the show.
Thank you for taking the time out of this campaign season, which I'd imagine is a little bit different in COVID times than a traditional campaign, but a virtual campaign of sorts.
Well, it's interesting because up until, oh, by the way, thanks for having me on your show.
Of course.
Also, it's very interesting.
Up until about really right before the convention, it was essentially a virtual campaign.
We were just, I was just, I told people I was a professional schmuck in front of a webcam.
I spent, you know, anywhere from six to eight hours a day doing interviews, and that was really it.
Then I'd go and, you know, do whatever else I was doing, you know, content creation, meeting with campaign team members and stuff like that, but all online, all through Zoom and through, you know, appearances on Facebook and YouTube and so forth.
Since the convention has happened, I've been in other states more than I've been home.
So we did the convention, came back for a few days.
I just went to Chicago, really through all the, all through Illinois, Chicago, Peoria, and so forth.
Then went to Columbus, Ohio, and am back here for, I got back two days ago.
Tomorrow I'm flying out to Pennsylvania and Maryland, coming back here for a few days, probably going to Alabama, and then after that, doing a multi-state two or three week tour.
So it's interesting that in many ways it has been an online, online campaign up until now.
It's not, I mean, I'm still doing the online stuff, but I'm doing online stuff on location, traveling around the country.
So it's definitely been a fast-paced campaign, I'll put it that way.
Sure, sure.
It was a particularly interesting campaign this time around.
It really was.
As I said, I said to Joe when I had her on the show, and I think, I think she took it the wrong way, but I said, I thought it was like amazing how you stole this nomination.
And then she was like, well, I earned it.
And I was like, no, I mean stole like, you know, in a game of basketball or something, like you got to steal, like you earned it.
But I'm just saying it was, you know, with like Amosh and the, excuse me, the forgetting the judge's name.
Oh, that's bad.
Oh, Jim Gray and Judge Jimberger and Vermin and everyone.
It was a very contentious race, absolutely.
Yeah.
And then for Joe to come out on top was really kind of remarkable.
Now, I, which I think there's probably a decent percentage of my audience who are kind of in a similar situation to me that I really didn't know that much about you till toward the end of the VP race.
And a lot of people who I really like were telling me, you got to check out this fight Cohen guy, like he's the real deal.
So for people who aren't as familiar with you or who are just getting familiar with you now during the campaign season, what you know, the kind of typical questions that we always ask libertarians, what type of libertarian are you?
Al-Qaeda Blowback Beliefs00:09:56
Like, how would you describe your, you know, on the scale of minarchist to ANCAP or kind of utilitarian to, you know, natural rights?
Or what type of libertarian are you?
And how did you become a libertarian?
So I'm an anarchist.
I would say that my preference is more towards an ANCAP society.
I've also, as I've been an anarchist as long as I have, I've come to the realization and the conclusion that if we are to make the state go away, absent the state, I don't think that I am smart enough to think that I am going to create a way of organizing that all seven and a half billion people on earth are going to want to voluntarily organize exactly that way.
So where I personally believe that something closer to what ANCAPs are proposing is probably the most efficient and best way to voluntarily organize a society.
I am fine with people voluntarily choosing to organize in different ways with the idea that we can all learn from each other along the way.
I think that the most important thing right now is ending the ever creeping growth of a tyrannical and oppressive and infringing government and move towards where we can actually start having those kinds of conversations more so than getting in arguments about that right now.
How did I get here?
So I was actually a neocon back in the yeah, yeah, I know the worst kind of conservative, right?
So I went straight from neocon.
So I'm a small business, just for people who don't know my background, I'm a small business owner.
I started a web design company in my teens back in 1999.
In 2000 or 2001 on 9-11, I was a pretty successful 19-year-old who thought I knew everything.
9-11 happened, completely horrified me.
I bought completely into the government media narrative that the terrorists attacked us because they hated us for our freedom and wanted to spread a worldwide Islamic caliphate around the world.
And we needed to use the force of good, which was the U.S. military, to spread freedom around the world and bomb as many people as it took to spread our peaceful ways.
It sounds stupid saying it now, but I unironically believed this for a few years.
And there were some incredibly annoying people like Ron Paul and Matt Kibbe and others who kind of operated in conservative circles and said, no, this ain't it.
This isn't going to work.
That's not why they attacked us.
It was blowback for decades of actions in their region.
And, you know, what would you do if the Chinese did this to us?
And all of those things that I now say.
And back then I was like, you hate America.
You just want the Muslims to win.
And, you know, we need to spread peace for us and our greatest ally in the region, Israel.
The whole thing.
And every year, everything that they said kept happening.
Everything they said was going to happen happened.
They said it was a waste of time.
We weren't going to be greeted as liberators.
That was true.
They said that a bunch of people were going to come back and flag drape caskets and with PTSD and that nothing good was going to happen as a result of it.
That was true.
And eventually I realized around, I don't know, 05 or 06 that I was just mad that they were right.
I didn't even really think I was right anymore.
And that was an incredible moment of cognitive dissonance.
And I reconciled that and started looking more into libertarianism and more into, honestly, constitutionalism as well, and kind of looking at my frame of reference for why I thought government should even be doing this.
And that kind of took me on a journey away from being a neocon and towards being more of a, I guess, paleocon constitutionalist minarchist until eventually my final form, as it were, as a anarchist.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, I had a similar journey.
I mean, I was more on the left, just without being super political, you know, but I was kind of the left-leaning guy.
I was, you know, I'm a Jewish kid from Brooklyn with a single motherfucker.
Just by default kind of.
Yeah, that's like what you are, you know.
But after 9-11, I mean, I was really sold on the, okay, let's go get these bastards.
I mean, they did that to us.
And it took a while to really have it connect that that impulse that I had, that was like, oh, let's go get those bastards.
They did this to us, was the same exact impulse that those bastards who were getting us had.
And there really is something, it is a bitter pill to swallow.
But once you kind of see things that way, it kind of, you know, it clicks.
The question that hit me, it was a two-part question.
And it's one that I ask neocons now, and it makes them equally angry as when I first heard it.
One, if the terrorists are so terrible, why did our government arm them and train them and help fund them and help give them intelligence and sponsor them all along the way?
And then two, why would we trust an organization that funds the very people that they say are our greatest threats to protect us from those great threats that they keep creating?
And I never had a good answer to that.
Even when I thought that this would work, even when I thought that the new American century was the way forward and all that, you know, neocon nonsense from Rumsfeld and so forth, I never had a good answer for that.
And it pissed me off really, really bad.
And I watch it today when I ask neocons and people that believe that we should be using the military as basically the world police and that the terrorists are going to destroy us if we aren't destabilizing entire regions of the planet.
I ask them those questions and I've never gotten a good answer back other than just a lot of really, I guess, R-E-E, re basically, is the essential response that I get back from that.
What drives me crazy about it is when people will argue the blowback, will argue against the idea of blowback.
And okay, like I understand that at times, even though it's a pretty solid argument to me, people won't grant you the argument that because we've killed so many people over there, it really works up hatred for us to want to come kill us over here.
I mean, that seems to be very, you know what I mean?
Like the most basic human understanding of anything.
Like if people kill your family, you tend to hate them and they're not going to be able to do them back.
Exactly.
The same way we would feel.
But even for like the kind of right-wingers who reject neocons, which at this point is the majority, I think.
Right, yeah, no.
Yeah.
Neoconservatism is all but dead at this point.
Well, intellectually.
Yeah.
But they still hold powerful positions, which is infuriating, but they have lost the argument.
Yeah, from a cultural conversation standpoint, the conversation now is largely the populist left versus the populist right.
Yes.
And libertarians have a very small voice.
And arguably neocons have an even smaller voice because at this point, they aren't even arguing.
They're just running the show and hoping no one notices.
Well, that's right.
Yeah.
Well, they argue in their little corners still.
You can still find Commentary Magazine or, you know, there'll be like some Max Boot, you know, piece on, but nobody buys it.
Nobody really except the media class and the political class.
But even if you can't, like, even if you take this kind of argument that I see the populist right-wingers take a lot, which is like, well, it's not, you know what?
This is a horrible culture.
It's a horrible religion.
They're inherently violent.
You know, it's like this is just going to be the case regardless of anything.
So even if you buy that argument, I go, okay, look, there are two groups that we've had problems with.
That's pretty much it.
It's Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
And they both kind of originated from the same group.
But these are the...
Wahhabism, right?
But specifically, because there's other Wahhabis that don't cause problems in the West.
But specifically, it's Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
And both of them were funded and armed by the West.
And in the case of Al-Qaeda, trained by the West on specifically how to lure an empire into your battlefield and defeat them from there.
Right.
For the Soviets.
Even if you reject all the other stuff, which I think is fairly common sense, you can't convince me this is not a case of blowback.
I mean, ISIS would not have risen up if we hadn't had the Saudis, the CIA, Turkey, Israel arming and funding them for the intended purpose of throwing overthrowing Bashar al-Assad.
Well, and right now we have the U.S. government funding the Saudi government and al-Qaeda in their war against the people of Yemen.
Not even at this point, the military of Yemen, the civilians of Yemen.
They are bombing schools.
They're bombing hospitals.
They're bombing grocery stores.
They're bombing factories.
They're bombing farms.
They're bombing bridges and boats and trains.
They're bombing civilian infrastructure so that the people of Yemen starve to death or die of completely treatable illnesses.
What is it?
Over a quarter of a million dead and civilians dead and over 80,000 children dead.
It's not only genocide, it's treason because you have the government sponsoring al-Qaeda, which is treason.
That's against the law.
We're told if you or I said, you know what?
Let's go help Al-Qaeda with something.
We're going to go to jail for a very long time.
Depending on what we did, we might even get executed.
But the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence services do it every single day with our stolen money.
And they go, well, you know, it's a very complex region.
No, you're sponsoring genocide with the very people that you're telling us that we have to spend a trillion dollars a year fighting against.
Yeah.
And it's funny because the word treason gets thrown around pretty loosely and inaccurately.
You know, Trump meeting with Putin was treason.
And then Trump will say, you know, the deep state spying on the president was treason.
It's treason.
Well, I mean, like, I certainly think the deep state spying on Donald Trump was wrong and in some ways un-American or whatever you want to say, but it's actually not the definition of treason.
But funding al-Qaeda is quite literally treason with a capital T.
Corporate Media Manipulation00:04:39
That is actually what the word means very specifically.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Look, obviously, you know, you brought up the situation in Yemen.
You know, I listen to a lot of really smart people who really know their stuff on Yemen, like particularly the people at antiwar.com and the Libertarian Institute.
And I mean, from what I've heard from a lot of these people is that we don't even have a good gauge on what the numbers are.
And it's going to be much, much worse than what's being reported.
Oh, that's confirmed.
That's just confirmed.
It's quite possible it's going to be worse than W's war in Iraq when this is all over.
And I got to say, it's something that's infuriating, particularly to me about the left in America, who are supposed to kind of be the like bleeding heart, compassionate, thinking about those who are being oppressed and stuff like that.
And they hate the term nationalism.
I mean, they hate anyone who identifies as a nationalist.
Yet this genocide just goes completely under their radar.
I mean, it's like there's more attention given to like microaggressions or like Aunt Jemima syrup bottles than there are to this ongoing genocide.
And perhaps part of that's a failure of us to not get this out in the public more.
And part of it's that they just really don't know about it.
But it's amazing, even the ones who kind of do know about like Obama's drone wars or like things like this, it just doesn't seem to generate the outrage that you would expect it to.
The mainstream left and right in this country are governed and controlled and conditioned by corporate media.
And they actually set up this Ropa Dope.
I call it the Republicrat Ropo-Dope.
You have the politicians in the Republican and Democrat parties who pretend to be at constant war with each other when we look, you know, after in the midst of them pretending to be at war with each other, they're working together to pass legislation that Donald Trump happily signs and then enforces into law.
You know, I say Donald Trump said he was going to drain the swamp.
He's become the king of the swamp creatures.
And really it is.
It's what happens when you are a Republic.
You say whatever you need to to your base, to your voter base to get nominated and then hopefully elected.
And then when you get into office, you just do whatever either side would have done anyway.
But they have to create this constant theater of opposition.
And it lends out to people actually fighting each other in the streets while the politicians that they prefer are working together hand in hand to screw us all over.
But that also works its way to corporate media.
Corporate media has a vested interest in keeping this gravy train set up that allows well-heeled, politically connected billionaire cronies to use the politicians that they bought and paid to be in office to continue using the force of the violent, the monopoly on violence that is the state, that is the federal government to keep the rest of us down and keep us in posed that we can't actually threaten their market share, for lack of a better word.
And what it comes down to is in this example, they use corporate media to keep us fighting on the dumbest things.
Now, some of them are important things.
Most of them are not very, or at least they're not as important as, for example, a genocide or the fact that we have an out-of-control, militarized, unaccountable police state that throws millions of people in cages for victimless commerce and uses them as chattel slaves to the benefit of billionaire for-profit free prison labor contractors who make so much money that they're traded on the stock market.
Bathroom Identity Wars00:06:54
That matters more to me than if Quaker Oates wants to remove Aunt Jemima from a bottle, that's fine.
It's their brand.
It's their product.
They can do whatever they want.
I have zero interest in arguing for or against that when these other things are happening.
So I think it's a perfect example of how corporate media plays people against each other so that they don't take a step back for a second and go, oh, they're all in on it and they're screwing us together.
Yeah, it's really, it's hilarious in a dark, tragic way.
But when you step back and see that like, you know, you have this, this really a crumbling empire, just drowning in debt, an economy that every nook and corner is regulated, this prison industrial complex and these foreign wars, every last one of them is a disaster.
And then you have these fierce arguments at home over transgender bathrooms.
Just like, what is going on?
Which the way that you deal with that is you allow the owner of that bathroom to make the decision.
In North Carolina, which is this, I live in South Carolina.
So I saw this debate heat up.
So you had, I forget how it played out, but you had a state that said, I may be doing this in reverse, but I think this is correct.
There was a city in the state who said that all bathrooms had to accept transgender people based on their preferred, what their gender identity was, as opposed to what their assigned gender or what it says on their birth certificate or whatever.
And then the state in response said, no, everyone has to go into bathrooms based on their, you know, what they were, what, what their assigned, you know, sex or gender was at birth.
And it may have been the reverse.
It may have been the city that said that and then the state that said, no, everyone has to accept.
And I thought, isn't it my bathroom?
Like, why can't I just, I mean, meanwhile, my bathroom at home is unisex, but why wouldn't you just let the owner of that bathroom?
If people want to have a cultural argument over whether or not to allow, you know, people based on their assigned gender or their or their their their gender identity, that their preferred gender identity, that's fine.
That's a, that's a conversation.
But remove the state from it.
Why is the state involved in this in the first place?
Let, if, if Walmart wants to say anyone can use the bathroom based on their gender identity and Target or whoever or what, you know, whatever store wants to do this way, then why would you not allow people to make those decisions and then choose to associate based on that?
Now you're having a cultural argument as opposed to people trying to fight to impose their will on each other through forced association of the state.
Yeah, I completely agree.
And I think that it's not a coincidence that as the state has grown larger and larger and larger, the culture war has grown with it because the state is a war.
It's a war over power.
And there's so many, it's really unbelievable how much like, you know, if two people are out and one's got like a, you know, Hillary Clinton 2016 and the other one's got like a Make America Great Again hat, they like hate each other.
But those same two people, if you took that hat off, would just, you know, pass each other at the supermarket and be like, excuse me.
Oh, no, you're fine.
Go ahead.
You know, and just like go about peacefully coexist.
You see this, you know, it's like if there's a church, you know, up the road, like there's a Catholic church up the road from me.
And no one, you know, it's like, well, Catholics go there and that's what they like.
Now, if there were, if the government came in and said, we're building a building here and it's going to be a Catholic church, of course, everybody who's a Protestant or a Jew or a Muslim would be like, well, that's outrageous.
Why the hell should I be forced to pay for this Catholic church?
And so everyone has to fight over it.
But when it's done in the market, we largely just go, okay, well, that's what they're doing.
If you don't want to go there, don't go there and go over there.
And it works fine.
I remember there were a lot of people that were upset about, or they were, I guess upset's the best word, that there was, and I forget where it was, maybe it was Seattle or something like that, but there was like this, they were going to try to make a restaurant as like a workers' co-op where no one made more than anyone else.
And I believe I believe that it ended up not working for a myriad of reasons.
And there were people that are like, can you believe they're doing this?
I'm like, good, let them try.
Like, I don't care.
Now, if they try to impose that as this is how all businesses have to be run, now we have no problem.
The more government gets involved in our day-to-day lives, the more the state is centrally planning every aspect of our lives, now people that you disagree with on things become your adversary.
And that's intentional, Dave.
We all disagree on things.
None of us agree 100%.
So necessarily, when you make it so that now your opinion is weaponized via your vote for proxy violence against others, it's not just I want to live this way, but I want to vote that the way I want to live should be the way everyone else has to live.
Now you have a war.
Now you have an actual battle happening.
And because we can't all agree 100% on everything, it now has us constantly fighting against each other.
And that was the intention because the state, the people in charge, the Republics, absolutely want us constantly fighting over everything so we don't take a step back and realize that it doesn't matter what we're fighting over.
It doesn't matter who we vote for, whether it's Republican or Democrat.
They're just going to come in and do whatever they want anyway.
You know what they usually do?
You got, let's say you have the left and you have the right.
And the left says, I want to force people on the right to do X.
And people on the right go, I want to force people on the left to do Y.
And in a stunning show of bipartisanship, the Democrats and Republicans say, okay, we'll force everyone to do X and Y.
And that's how this works.
That's how the state grows.
It grows with us fighting at each other, fighting and constantly finding every possible reason to fight instead of stepping back and realizing we're all on the same side by default by the fact that we're all being victimized by the state and by the Republicans and their cronies and Democrats and you know that we certainly have more in common with each other than we do with our rulers.
And there are, you know, there's no question, I think, as you said before at the beginning about being an ANCAP and realizing that you're not going to come up with the way everyone wants to organize themselves.
Look, obviously they are going to live life in Portland a little bit differently than they're going to live life in like some city in Alabama or something like that.
You know, and that's just 100 miles away, exactly.
Oh, I mean, it's, it's, you know, I'm born and raised in New York City.
And I mean, go, if you just go a couple hours upstate, I mean, it's a completely different culture than New York City, but that's fine.
They don't have to like hate each other.
I mean, they may have, you know, their feelings about each other.
The people upstate might be like, oh, these city folks.
And the city people might be like, oh, these country bumpkins, but they're not like at war with each other.
They can peacefully coexist.
It's, you know, you don't, you know, so anyway, yeah, I'm preaching to the choir on that.
So what would you say you, you and Joe Jorgensen, do you have like what you'd say like your top issues are that you're campaigning on?
I saw, I was giving you guys props.
I thought the anti-war commercial that you guys put out was excellent.
I really, really liked that.
Ending Federal Education Control00:03:10
The war is over commercial, yes.
And I like, by the way, shout out to Stephen Messina, who made a sort of unofficial anti-Republican Democrat ad using some clips from you and I think Michael Malice.
Yes.
And by the way, part of the reason I'm going to shout out to Steven Messina is he's a huge fan of both of ours and he's a dear friend of mine.
So he's going to love this part.
Shout out to Stephen.
But yeah, no, that ad was a big part of what our priorities are.
So our priority is essentially harm reduction.
We don't think that in even two terms, we can just undo the entire, you know, the entire, as we call it in the Libertarian Party, the cult of the omnipotent state.
But what we can do is we can greatly scale back and eliminate its worst excesses and abuses against the people.
And so those things are ending the wars, bringing the troops home, getting the government out of policing, getting the federal government out of policing.
The federal government and policing has led to an increasingly militarized, unaccountable police state whose main functions are revenue collection and enforcing wars against victimless commerce, the war on drugs, the war on sex work and so forth.
That is largely what they exist for.
Ending these things like civil asset forfeiture, ending things like warrantless surveillance and wiretapping, ending things like no-knock raids.
All of this stuff, even though some of these things happen at the state and local levels, they're all happening with the sponsorship and the impremature of the federal government.
So we end these things at the federal level.
Getting government out of healthcare, which will reduce the cost of healthcare anywhere from 75 to 90%, depending on who you ask.
Getting government out of education.
Education, 50 years now, the federal government has been involved in education.
They've spent nearly $2 trillion.
The literacy rate has dropped during that time.
The number of students per teacher has gone up.
And of course, the number of administrators per teacher has gone up exponentially by, I think, two or three orders of magnitude.
So instead, or two orders of magnitude.
So what we do instead, get the power out of take the power out of the hands of the government and its cronies and the bureaucratic state they've created, put it back in the hands of the teachers and the parents where it always belonged.
And really, that's just the theme.
Get as much power out of the hands of the federal government as possible, putting it back in the hands of the people where it belongs.
Getting rid of the ATF.
The government has absolutely, there's no reason for the federal or even state and local governments to be telling you how you can defend yourself and your loved ones and your community.
That's up to you.
Getting rid of the Fed and the IRS, which getting rid of the Fed, and I don't want to talk about preaching to the choir, I don't have to tell you everything that does.
It solves inflation, it solves the empire, it solves the cronyism because there's no more federal troth of endless Federal Reserve notes that are printed out.
Putting the question of currency, the issuance of currency in the hands of the free market so that now they have a vested interest in providing you with sound currency that actually maybe even gains value over time or at the very least doesn't lose value.
These are our focuses.
Our focus is on getting government out of the things that it should have never been involved in in the first place at the federal level.
If government is to exist, its only legitimate purpose should be to protect the affirm and protect the lives and rights and property of the people that it presumes jurisdiction over.
Defining Systemic Racism00:17:01
Okay.
Amen.
I mean, I just, I love that.
It gets me hot listening to that.
It's just beautiful.
Okay.
So what I want to, I think that's an unbelievable message.
And I love that you guys have that.
I love that, not to for no reason take shots at them, but I love that you have that message in this campaign rather than the Johnson Weld message, which I know that you've been mocking from time to time quite efficiently.
And I have a lot more Bill Weld than Gary Johnson.
I don't agree with Gary Johnson.
I like Gary Johnson, but I like Gary Johnson.
I think Bill Weld at this point, I don't like to talk poorly about people.
Okay, fair.
I couldn't agree.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Listen, I want to ask you about TweetGate because you know I'm going to have to bring this up.
I'm joking around when I say that.
The tweet that Joe Jorgensen put out that got, are you not?
Which one are we talking about?
You're not sure what tweet I'm referring to?
Yeah, go ahead and tell me.
Okay.
So Joe Jorgensen tweeted a couple weeks ago that, see if I can get this verbatim.
It's not enough to be passively non-racist.
We must be actively anti-racist.
Hashtag Black Lives Matter.
Now, I know that a lot of people were upset by this.
I was one of them who was very critical of this tweet.
I saw that you kind of doubled down on it.
I just want to get your take on this.
Do you understand why a lot of people were bothered by that?
I think out of context, I could see why people thought that we were saying, you know, everyone has to be against racism, which I mean, ideally, we should be against racism.
That's just, that's my opinion.
I think most of us would agree that being against racism is a good thing.
With that said, the context of that quote was actually part of her acceptance speech at the convention in Orlando, and it was actually tweeted either during or just after that.
It was on the same day that that happened.
The context of that is that the Libertarian Party and libertarian policies are inherently actively anti-racist.
And here's what I mean by that.
When you remove the power of the state, then racism and bigotry are just jerks with terrible ideas.
So if you remove the ability of racists in power to use a militarized, out-of-control, accountable, unaccountable police state against communities of color and other marginalized communities, then now they're just a prick, right?
So that's what we mean by actively anti-racist.
Now, the Libertarian Party platform has a plank where it talks about bigotry and racism, and it says that we condemn these things as irrational and repugnant.
Here's what we mean by that.
Ron Paul, I think like 10 years ago now, is a while ago now, he was asked about accusations that he was racist.
And he said, basically, I can't be racist.
I'm a libertarian.
We are against all forms of collectivism.
In my mind, him saying that libertarianism is inherently anti-racist is essentially what we were saying.
As libertarians, as people who are against all forms of malignant, forced, coerced collectivism, including racism, we are being actively anti-racist.
We aren't telling people it's against the law for you to be racist.
We are dismantling racism and we are saying that our ideology on the belief of self-ownership and personal autonomy inherently eschews ideas like racism.
Yeah, okay.
So I don't have a problem with any of that.
I guess the issue comes in when you say something like, you know, when you put something out in a tweet where you don't have that context involved, which is the nature of Twitter.
But it is also an important platform.
And you have to be able to communicate in a way where your message is clear.
And when you say the problem to me with saying you can't just be passively not racist, you must be actively anti-racist is that that, what you just described, is not what the popular understanding of those terms mean.
So racist nowadays really varies depending on who you're talking about.
I mean, if you define racism as the state initiating violence against people of color, or, you know, then that's one thing.
No, I'll let you finish because, yeah, go ahead.
Okay.
So, but in America in 2020, saying, I don't see color is considered racist.
Saying, I'm not racist, I have lots of black friends, that by many people is considered a racist statement.
And to say that we can't, you can't just be not a racist person and be a pretty good person.
You have to actively be calling people out for their racist behavior.
It seems to me to indicate something like, if your grandfather tells an off-color joke over Thanksgiving, you better say something about that.
If you see anybody doing anything discriminatory, you better say something about that, which doesn't seem very libertarian to me.
Yeah, and we, and to be clear, we weren't saying you need to call out any behavior that you deem to be racist.
Now, I will also say I refuse to allow people to redefine terms to be something that clearly isn't what it is.
So, for example, your examples of saying like, I don't see color, even though I find it to be at least a little bit of a tin-eared statement because it's not true most of the time, but that's not inherently racist.
And also, I wasn't saying that racism is just the state using power.
I'm not someone saying racism is only bigotry plus power.
I'm saying that racism, as clearly and classically defined for, at this point, close to a century, is the inherent belief that your race is superior to others and that there are inherent deficiencies of other races and that therefore we should treat them poorly as a result of that.
That's it's sort of a broad 30,000-foot term of racism.
Okay.
If someone is a racist and they don't have power, then they're just a prick.
And if we get rid of that power, and again, I will say the Libertarian Party platform is inherently and actively anti-racist.
It doesn't mean that libertarianism means that if your uncle tells a bad joke, you have to say something to them.
Now, I personally would say something to them, but you don't, that doesn't mean you have to or else you're not a libertarian anymore.
It means that the policies and the philosophy and the things that we propose as libertarians inherently destroy forced collectivism.
It inherently destroys centrally planned monopolies that are inherently used, that are directly used to harm those who have the least and to harm those who are the most marginalized, including the poor and among them ethnic and religious minorities and people of color as well, as well as gender sexual minorities and all the other communities that are disproportionately more likely to suffer harm at the hands of the state.
So, that's what we're saying.
When we're saying active anti-racism, it's in the same vein as Ron Paul saying libertarianism inherently eschews these types of malignant collectivism like racism.
Okay, well, listen, I don't have a problem with that.
I suppose that it's using terminology that left-wingers tend to use to mean something very, very different.
And then in addition to it, it's the hashtag of Black Lives Matter that I think got some people a little bit concerned, or maybe I would just say bothered by.
I wanted to read what you said and asked you about this because I saw you tweeted being anti-racist means not staying not staying silent when you see racism.
Being anti-racist means actively working to end systemic racism.
It's only ambiguous when you look for deeper meanings that you can object to, even when the actual definition is not objectionable.
Now, I got to say, I did find that statement to be somewhat ambiguous.
Because again, like I said, you're being clear here about what you consider racism.
Although, you know, I don't exactly still know.
Is racism a very broad word?
And I think that's part of the reason why it's used so like racism can cover everything from like absolutely despicable behavior to something that's kind of like, oh, I don't know, that's just that's like I kind of believe in the avenue.
Sensitive or something, but yeah, well, you know, the Avenue Q song, Everyone's a Little Bit Racist.
I mean, I do think that's kind of true.
I don't, I'm actually kind of skeptical of anybody who thinks they don't have any, you know, prejudice within themselves.
Inherent bias.
Yeah.
I mean, there's been studies on that.
Yeah.
And oftentimes the people who are the loudest anti-racists end up being some of the most racist people without intending to, or sometimes with intending to.
So what I would ask is that, look, even when you use this term systemic racism, this is something that I hear from left-wing friends of mine all the time as like a buzzword that's kind of like a get out of argument free, you know, like they can't really deal with the conjugate.
They just say systemic racism.
So what would you say is in America in 2020 an example of systemic racism?
So the history, and you can't answer that without going through the history of systemic racism and how we got here.
So if you look at the history of when, and this actually predates the formation of the United States of America, even during the colonial times, as an increasing number, so you had, especially in the South in the antebellum period and even before that, you had the most of the population, and I live in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which was one of the epicenters of slavery back during that era, even in the early and mid-18th century.
You had essentially most of the population was white landowners who owned slaves.
Over time, you started having mostly Scots-Irish, but from other countries as well, you had white migrants coming to the South and to other areas.
And they were essentially, they came in and realized that this system wasn't for them, that they were incredibly powerful, well-heeled political cronies who owned government.
Surprise, surprise, nothing changes there.
And they were owning an entire race of people.
And therefore, they didn't really have to hire anyone.
And they didn't really, they had a closed market.
And there was no real way for the vast majority of white people who were there who had no power or wealth to be able to get ahead.
And so in order to be able to maintain their power, they came up with ideas like white supremacy.
Now, when we hear white supremacy now, we hear it as a bad thing, you know, this idea that white people are superior and everything else.
Back then, they sold it as settled science.
And they used some very out-of-context biblical quotes to try to claim that people of color were the descendants of Cain and that this was their, you know, the iniquities of the father and that that's why they were having to live this way and that they weren't even really at the same level of humanity as white people.
And they created all this science like eugenics and all this nonsense, stuff that we all know is nonsense now, but they sold it as science.
And what this did was it allowed people who had no power to feel as though they were at least better, you know, they were superior.
And it actually allowed them to then fight for a system that was inherently designed against them almost as much as it was designed against people of color during that time.
And so that is the basis of what, so the entire system of bringing an entire race over, stealing their labor for hundreds of years, then freeing them, but telling them they had to stay on the property that they owned, not letting them participate in the land giveaways that were happening in the Midwest, Jim Crow era, the gun control laws that didn't allow them to protect themselves against the Klan and government, so that every time communities of color did actually try to build themselves up, they were not able to get ahead.
The so-called civil rights era, where they were allowed to vote, but also were herded into ghettos in the cities, while white families were given FHA housing and subsidized suburban housing, and black people were herded into ghettos and slums and not allowed to actually participate in the FHA program, all the way to the war on drugs, which was disproportionately used against them.
We have a series of actions that have been taken that have led to a disproportionate, a continued disproportionate use of force against communities of color and also the constant barrage at the cultural level of telling black people that they are less than,
which leads to even to this day where black people are also somewhat likely to have systemic bias or inherent bias or what they call inherent bias when they do these studies and ask them how they associate people of different colors.
Black people are somewhat more likely to actually associate black people with negative things as well.
And it's because of what they call internalized racism, which is something that, you know, after multiple generations of being told white equals good, white is the standard of good, black is the standard of bad, that actually works its way into at the cultural level.
This is what we're talking about by systemic racism.
Ending things like the war on drugs, the militarized police state, gun control, which is disproportionately used against communities of color every bit as much as the war on drugs is.
Ending these things is a powerful first step towards ending the harm that is happening to all of us, but is especially happening to communities of color.
And I know I'm going on a rant here, but this is an important point.
Well, I understand what you're saying.
Look, I obviously would completely agree that, you know, slavery and Jim Crow and all of that stuff, I mean, these are obvious examples of institutional racism.
I mean, you can't really argue that.
I don't know exactly what, whether it's conclusive what has led to the psychological feelings in the black community.
I think it's probably very complicated.
And a lot of probably, there's probably a lot of policies that have led to disastrous conditions in black communities, and that might lead to negative feelings.
Like, I don't know, but I think it's interesting.
It's a combination of all those things.
Sure, sure.
But if you're running for president in 2020 and you're talking about systemic racism now, it seems like the examples that you're giving are things like the war on drugs, militarized police gun control, things that certainly you can argue disproportionately affect negatively black people.
But is that the same as something being racist?
Let me put it this way, okay?
I used to say this all the time.
I used to say the same thing.
Like the war on drugs is racist because it disproportionately affects people of color.
I stopped saying that.
And the reason why is because if we as libertarians are going to concede that disparate outcomes prove racism.
So if there is a policy and black people are negatively affected, that proves that it is racist.
Isn't it one small step away to say that free markets, if they produce disparate outcomes, are themselves racist?
And we all kind of know that probably in a free market, there's going to be some groups that are doing better than others.
Groups and individuals that will do that.
So by that same logic, wouldn't free markets be systemic racism?
It would be if we were saying that disparate outcomes was the problem.
That's not what we're saying.
We're not saying that it's racist because it led to disparate outcomes.
We're saying that it was disproportionately intentionally used against them and that the foundation of all of those policies were all inherently racist.
Democratic Machine Racism00:15:20
We know from Nixon's policy advisors and LBJ's policy advisors that things like the war on drugs and the great society were inherently created in order to marginalize and harm communities of color and other marginalized communities.
So what I'm saying is that, and what we are saying, is that if something was intended with racist purposes, it has led to racist outcomes and continues to have either through inertia or continued racist intent to be disproportionately harming those communities, then it is inherently both systemic and at least founded upon the ideals or concepts of racism.
So in my mind, that is systemic racism.
So the problem is not the disparate outcomes.
It's not disparate outcomes as in this person was more successful than this person.
It's disparate outcomes in terms of a gun was put to this person's head and wasn't put to this person's head.
Yes, no, I agree.
That's the difference is that it's a violation of natural rights.
And I don't really care what proportion of what people are violated.
It's wrong if it happens.
But you're saying that because there was this one claim that one former advisor of Richard Nixon says that the war on drugs was started to, you know, destroy black people, which pretty much everybody else in the Nixon administration has said this is absolutely crazy.
And there's no chance that this is true.
Now, I don't know if that's the case.
Yeah, and that's also not the only quote, but I go ahead.
Fair enough, but I'm just saying I don't know what the case is there.
But so if the war on drugs wasn't started for racist purposes, I mean, look, truthfully speaking, although Richard Nixon started the war on drugs, Richard Nixon didn't really start the war on drugs as we know it.
Reagan really ramped it up.
Bill Clinton really ramped it up.
And when Bill Clinton ramped it up, it was cheered on not only by the black congressional caucus, but also by like almost every local black minister you could think of.
They wanted their streets cleaned up.
They had major crime problems in the late 80s and early 90s in black neighborhoods, and they rooted this on.
Now, I agree with you.
I think it was a disastrous policy.
I think it's horrible.
But it's not clear to me that this was done with racist intent.
I would say that if you look at the basis behind how these things happen, and also I'm not above saying that the Democratic machine is part of systemic racism.
It absolutely is.
It was during Jim Crow.
It was during the fight with the civil rights and so forth.
And it certainly was during the war on drugs as well.
Joe Biden, and we've said this, Joe Biden is one of the architects of systemic racism during his time.
If there is such a thing as systemic racism and there is such a thing as policy happening because of systemic racism, Joe Biden, as the consummate Democrat for the better part of 60 years now, was every bit behind all of that.
What I am saying is that if you look at the entire history moving forward to today of a series of policies that have been knowingly, disproportionately used against communities of color, it is in my mind not a leap to say that that is systemic racism.
If it is systemic and there were at least several actors involved in the case who inherently said that it was because of racist intentions and that we know that the entire basis of it, even prior to the Civil Rights Act, was with racist purposes.
That it is not, we are not losing anything by conceding the idea that this is systemic racism, especially when it allows us to use the nomenclature of an increasingly popular movement that we have no control over to not cede ground to a bunch of authoritarians who are using that movement,
the Black Lives Matter movement, in order to, the people at the top that are wanting to use it within the Democratic Party to basically just get Democrats elected as opposed to actually the policies that most of the people we've spoken to in the Black Lives Matter movement actually want.
I have to give you an analogy on the racial discourse that happens in this country.
Imagine if you and I went to lunch.
Okay, so we're sitting and we're eating lunch together and someone comes in and while we're having lunch and hits me in the head with a baseball bat and shoots you a bunch of times in the chest and runs away.
I'm in the hospital for weeks.
I'm in and out of consciousness.
I have bleeding on the brain.
I'm now out of the hospital and I'm okay, but I still have neurological issues.
I had a major concussion.
I'm never going to be back to 100%, but I'm okay.
You die multiple times on the surgery table.
They are able to save your life, but you have organ damage.
You have difficulty breathing.
You have a hard time getting around.
You're in chronic constant pain.
You're never going to be anything close to 100% again, but you are alive.
You are okay.
So we get together several months later and we're commiserating over what happened.
And I say, it's terrible what happened to us, but I'm glad that we're, I'm glad that we're both, you know, okay.
I'm glad that we both made it.
And you go, oh, I don't know if I'm okay, but I'm glad that we did make it.
I certainly got it worse than you, but we both, I'm glad that we are safe now, that we made it out of that.
And I go, well, wait a second.
You say you got it worse, but I had a concussion.
I was in the hospital for weeks and I was in and out of consciousness.
And I had it pretty bad too.
And you go, wait a second, I almost died multiple times.
My heart stopped multiple times.
I have a hard time breathing.
I had a hard time even just getting here.
If anything, you benefited from the fact that you just got hit with a baseball bat and I got shot multiple times.
And I go, well, maybe if you've been nice to the guy, he would have just hit you with a baseball bat instead of shooting you.
That is the racial discourse in this country right now.
Groups of people who are being harmed by the state to varying degrees arguing over who's getting it worse or who's benefiting instead of simply acknowledging that, yes, it would be much better if I said, if when you said I got it worse, I go, you're right, you got it worse.
Let's go find the guy who did that and make sure he never does it again.
What we are doing within the Black Lives Matter movement and other similar organizations, we are doing what we do when we meet people on the right.
We go to where they are in their spaces and using their nomenclature and from their precepts and we validate their concerns and reflect back to them that they're listening.
And then we demonstrate the policies that we have, libertarian policies, that will fix these problems for everyone.
Yes, disproportionately, it will help them, but it will help all of us.
Because as we know, all of us are being harmed by this to varying degrees.
I would rather do that than go up to an organization that outnumbers us by something like 100 or 1,000 to 1 that will easily drown us out.
And my only ability to talk to them is to go, you know what, this isn't about racism.
It's about the state.
And they look at me and go, oh, yeah, white guy with random opinion.
No, thank you.
Instead of going to where they are and saying, listen, we hear what you're saying and we agree with the precepts, largely of the precepts that you're saying.
And unlike everyone else that's talking to you, we have solutions that'll fix it.
I was at a Black Lives Matter rally in Columbus, Ohio.
I went there.
They asked me if I wanted to speak.
I said I was running for vice president.
They said, do you want to speak?
I said, no, I think I'll just listen to what you have to say.
I don't think there's anything I'm going to say up there that you don't already know.
So, you know, what do you have to say?
So I'm speaking to the organizers.
They're telling me what they want.
They want to end qualified immunity.
They want to end the war on drugs.
They want to end civil asset forfeiture.
They want to end no-knock rates.
They want to end there.
What was the other?
I think that might have been all of it that they were, oh, they want to hold police, end qualified immunity and hold police accountable.
I said, well, I have fantastic news for you because that's what Joe Jorgensen and I are proposing.
That's what we're doing.
And I took them on the journey of how libertarians have been proposing this for decades.
And on the strength of a roughly 20 or 30 minute conversation, that local Black Lives Matter organization endorsed us and the entire Libertarian Party on the spot and has been live streaming and posting all over social media about how they support us.
That is what happens.
If instead I had gone there, heard what they had to say and went, yeah, but if you think about it, it's not really about race.
It's more about the state.
They probably wouldn't have wanted to hear anything moving forward.
Instead, and I didn't water down our message.
I didn't say yes.
And neither were they saying this, but I didn't go, you know, all white people are racist or I didn't say any of that.
What I said was that I understood what they were saying and I heard their concerns and that we agreed with their concerns, that we needed to dismantle these systems of oppression and that we had the libertarian platform that was going to do exactly that.
On the strength of that, we were able to get to get their endorsement on that.
That is the calculus, as it were, behind meeting people, not just on the left, but on the right and everywhere else as well, to actually meet them where they are, agree with their concerns, and show them libertarian solutions.
Like Scott Horton says, we're better than the left on the things the left cares about.
We're better than the right on the things the right cares about.
For that matter, we're better than the center on the things they care about.
So why would we argue with them?
Why would we not instead go where they are in their spaces, agree with their concerns, and demonstrate how our solutions are the only way out of it?
Well, I'm not suggesting you shouldn't go into their spaces.
And I'm certainly not suggesting you shouldn't validate their concerns and make the argument for why libertarian policies were better.
I was more just speaking on what is accurate in the statement, whether it is racism or statism.
And I think accurately speaking, it's statism.
I'm not saying that's the way you have to present the message to them, but it strikes me that you're making the point that saying, you know, tweeting we support Black Lives Matter or tweeting about systemic racism or all of these things is a better strategy to pull people over.
But I got to say, Spike, from all of the response that I've seen on social media, it seems like you're turning way more people off than you are bringing people in.
And I think if you just, look, it's great that you went to a Black Lives Matter rally and that some people agreed with some libertarian positions.
That's wonderful.
I think it's amazing.
Believe me, I want all of those policies that you just listed to become reality.
I want more people to believe in them.
However, the Black Lives Matter movement, and of course, Joe Jorgensen had to put out another tweet, you know, clarifying that she was not supporting the organization, which is, yeah, no, it's, it's the movement.
But the movement also includes mass rioting across the country, an enormous amount of destruction of property, murders, assaults, seizing of other people's property, just defacing churches and buildings left and right.
And it's all done in the name of Black Lives Matter.
And when you just say...
So here's, I have to discuss.
Well, it is.
Well, but there's no, but there's no debate.
I mean, listen, they're spray painting Black Lives Matter.
They're screaming Black Lives Matter as they beat people up.
Now, I'm not saying that the peaceful protesters are wrong because of that.
But if you're just going to say this is the movement, Black Lives Matter, all of this stuff is connected to it.
Yeah, I think the problem is if we allow looters and authoritarians to define the terms and to define the narrative and the argument, we've already lost, especially when they outnumber us.
I think often libertarians, and maybe not just libertarians, but certainly libertarians are doing this.
I think we sometimes go under a false assumption.
I'm not accusing you of this, but I do think this happens, where we think we have some kind of control of what's happening.
These things are happening and these movements are happening and they are growing.
And we can do one of two things in my mind.
We can cede to the authoritarians and the looters and the rioters, or we can seize upon an opportunity of people who largely, and I have been operating in social media and offline in person with people in protests around the country who are largely pushing for accountability of the police and rolling back of some of the worst successes like the war on drugs.
In the same way that if someone says that they agree with something that we support and then they go and spray paint it on a building and smash up or loot a or loot a church or loot a private business, I'm not going to retreat from our beliefs as a result.
No, we should condemn it.
We should absolutely condemn it if we're not.
And we have condemned any kind of damage against businesses.
I did a whole video about what about the looting.
It was actually titled, What About the Looting.
And I started it by condemning the looting.
And then I also talked about how the police are creating the conditions for looting by putting all of their resources on brutalizing peaceful protesters and leaving the rest of the city unpoliced so that looters can run rampant, which they're doing intentionally because then they want to create a popular narrative of the streets are out of control.
We need more police.
Yes, it was literally their only saving grace.
We had three months of right-wingers getting red-pilled on cops, getting pissed off that they were enforcing these mask laws and crackdown and all of this.
They were furious with the police, probably the first time in my life.
Then you have George Floyd getting murdered on camera, just this horrific event.
Everyone goes, man, these cops are out of control.
And now we're at a point where the right-wingers are begging the cops to crack down.
And they're cheering on federal agents coming in and scooping up people in Portland.
And I got to say, as much as I hate the policy, I understand why they're rooting for it because no one at the local level is doing anything to stop it.
But no, it's worse than that.
They are doing things.
They're prosecuting the nation.
They're prosecuting people for defending their property.
And it just, it seems to me that the libertarian party should, look, nobody really is speaking.
Look, black people getting brutalized by the police is horrible.
It's an outrage.
And we've, in the libertarian world, have been speaking about this for years.
But a lot of people are speaking up about that issue.
And that's great.
We should keep speaking up about it too.
But no one seems to be speaking up, at least not too many people, for the people who are being terrorized by these mobs, the people who have been killed, have been assaulted, have their businesses destroyed by these mobs of people.
And I just, I think that's pretty un-libertarian.
Having protests, and I'm not, by the way, referring specifically to this tragic situation in Austin the other day, but having this, we're going to block traffic protests.
This is just going to lead to more violence and more terrible situations.
And like, why should libertarians not be standing up against all of that?
Again, I'm fine with all the policies that you laid out before, but there is obviously this, like, look, let me just say this, and I want to get your thoughts on it.
If there was a big peaceful protest and three groups of people got in fights there, and I tried to say, oh, these protests are out of control because the fighting is crazy.
Okay, I can understand where someone would say, you're mischaracterizing what's going on here.
But you were at a point where major cities across the country have been like are burning.
I mean, like, I go back to New York City, man.
It's like, you can't even recognize this place.
It's insane what the amount of damage has been there.
And I feel like this is a pretty clear libertarian issue that we are against people violating others' property rights and assaults and all of this stuff.
And yet I don't see, and then when the Libertarian Party and their candidates are just tweeting out Black Lives Matter, it just kind of leaves this weird feeling of like, but what about this whole other dark side of it?
Except we're not just doing that.
We are addressing that as well.
I want to go back to something you had said earlier, and then I want to talk about what you just asked.
You had mentioned that we're turning off more people than we're bringing on.
Our metrics show the opposite.
Our metrics show that we're actually bringing in tremendous numbers of people on a message of on a given basis.
I'm seeing almost, I would say, negligible loss of existing likes and follows.
And what I'm seeing is that the growth that we have had is in people that don't have any kind of current association with libertarian groups.
And we've done some deep dives on our data to demonstrate that.
And these are people that are now, you know, they're having Jorgensen Cohen profile frames and they're going into our group and asking us about libertarianism.
And in the same way that a lot of people on the right come in and they go, well, yeah, libertarianism, but don't we need to secure our borders or don't we need to fight the terrorists?
They're coming in and saying, yeah, libertarianism, but what about healthcare?
Property Defense Rights00:15:22
Well, we have answers for that.
But the bottom line is that I would argue from a strategy standpoint that it has been working as intended.
Actually, I was actually surprised by how well it's been working as intended.
Going back to what you're saying, we have condemned and continue to condemn anyone who is harming business owners and harming neighborhoods and harming people's personal private property and things like that.
We are completely against all of that.
We don't think that it's helpful.
What we are also doing is we are acknowledging.
But just saying, it's a little bit more than not helpful, right?
Like it's.
No, we're condemning it as bad.
No, it's wrong.
No, we're, yeah, and I'm saying it's wrong and it's not helping.
Like it's, it's bad and it doesn't help the movement.
But that's so, I mean, no, we've been very clear on that.
We've also put the context of how the police have created the conditions for this.
When you take a peaceful group and you start shooting tear gas at them and pepperballing them and attacking them, they're going to become a lot less peaceful because now they're being attacked.
They showed up to protest police brutality and then they're being brutalized by the police.
There is this group of people.
Okay.
There's then another group of people that this is a secondary concern to theirs.
They would like to get that Lego set they've always wanted, or they'd like to go and break into whatever store they'd like to just burn things down just for the sake of it.
They just want discord for no reason.
They are left to a city that is largely left unprotected by police who took away the private citizens' ability to be able to protect themselves through gun control and then put all of their resources into attacking the people who are armed with signs.
One of the things I'm very happy about.
I agree.
I've been saying the same on the show for a long time.
I think it's absolutely disgusting that the cops have literally, you see them, they sit back and retreat when there's a violent mob and they're they'll push some 90-pound girl on the floor when she's part of a peaceful crowd.
It is intentional.
They are intentionally creating discord in order to have a situation of chaos so they can go, see, this is what happens when you protest us because we're the thin blue line that protects you from anarchy, blah, That's they've done this intentionally.
So in calling out bad actors, we have to call out not just the bad actors who are doing the damage, like the people that are doing the rioting and the looting and the attacks on people's private property, but we also have to attack the bad actors within the state who have created those conditions in the first place.
One of the things that I'm very happy about with an increasing number of, you know, the boog, I'm sorry, the CNN boys showing up to these protests and protecting protesters is that by being there, the police can't now do things like pepper spraying and tear gassing, because it turns out, like we saw with the lockdown protests, like we saw with the like 500 black men who marched on Stone Mountain in Georgia, when you're heavily armed and there's enough of you, police don't want to bring tear gas to a gunfight.
And so they kind of just let it happen and then they let the people go about their business.
And that has been an incredible way of keeping the peace.
When I was in Columbus, some of our Hawaiian shirt friends showed up with their long rifles and I was super happy to see them.
And I made a point of going over and thanking them for helping keep the peace and protecting the protesters that were there.
They showed up.
They started talking with the organizers.
They were helping hand out Black Lives Matter pamphlets that also had boog boy stuff on it to explain how gun control was racist.
Again, they were doing the same thing we were doing.
They were going into the spaces of people who we had a common cause to fight in alliance with and demonstrating that we were on the same side, at least on this issue, and to help try to pull them over into seeing that we're the only ones being consistent on how to get rid of this problem.
Yeah, okay, fair enough.
I do think that, look, I think I'm a big supporter of Second Amendment rights.
I do think if it's done properly, that, yeah, people being armed can keep a situation more peaceful.
I just think if you're going to bring weapons in, there's a little bit more of an onus on you to do things in a safe manner.
Well, that's always not.
Yeah.
And so the last thing that I wanted to ask you about was this, you know, this tragic situation that happened with Garrett Foster, right?
Just the other day.
And it seemed to me, my take more or less was that there's a really tragic situation.
I don't know exactly what happened.
I think we need to wait for an investigation to be done.
I could see, you know, I watched the video and I listened to the police press conference that they had.
I can kind of see a situation where this guy might be guilty of probably not murder in the first degree, but some type of, you know, negligent homicide or manslaughter or something like that.
I think it's also possible that he feared for his life and that it was legitimate self-defense.
It seemed like the LP really kind of jumped in.
And you did as well on the side of Garrett Foster.
Of Garrett, not against the driver on the side of Garrett.
I don't claim to know what the driver's intentions are.
Sure, but if, listen, and I don't know.
I don't claim to know what anyone's intentions were there.
But it was said, you know, the LP Twitter account said he died while pushing his disabled girlfriend across the street.
Seemed to me a little bit misleading when the pictures of him right at the moment he died as with his rifle in his hands confronting a car.
Whether rightfully, yes, okay, but still, whether, you know, in a ready position, whether rightfully or not, that's different than just saying somebody was gunned down while they're pushing their disabled girlfriend across the street.
You said that he died a hero.
I just wonder, is it necessarily the case that this is a good idea to jump into this when a lot of the information is still pretty murky?
The truth is, it does kind of seem to me, like, again, it's a tragedy that is dead, but it seems like not the best idea to go out at night in the road blocking traffic with a rifle in your hands and to approach the car.
Yes.
So they actually weren't blocking traffic.
And we already knew this when I can't speak for what the LP did, but I can tell you when we posted, it was after spending hours, both I and my team, I was in Columbus when this happened.
And I said, before we post anything, let's find out what happened.
And we actually spoke to, we heard from the witnesses and we heard from the from the police report of what was up then up to that point of what the police were saying and what the witnesses were saying and what the videos were showing.
And here's what we knew.
And it has largely been continued to be reinforced with new videos that have come out.
What was basically what was happening was that some protesters, including Garrett and his fiancé, were crossing the street on a on a, they were legally crossing the street for them.
It was set for them to cross.
The driver, after sitting for anywhere from five to 10 seconds at a red light, ran through the red light to turn right and almost rammed into a bunch of protesters.
Now, I don't know.
But making a right turn on a red is a legal move.
And he did stop.
No, so it was not.
He was doing a right on a red when there were already people on the road who had the right of way to walk.
So you would, so legally, and I'm less concerned about the legality.
But legally, if you're already stopped, people are walking across the street and you turn into them.
You've now committed a you've committed a crime.
You're now in the wrong because they had the right away as pedestrians and had the right of way by the crosswalk of saying that they could cross.
But all that to say, so it was five to 10 seconds he stayed, then he pulled in.
I don't know whether that was intentional or whether he got scared or whatever it was.
But in that moment, there wasn't any screaming going on.
It was literally just protesters walking across the street, crossing the street, including Garrett and his fiancé, him pushing her wheelchair.
He pulled in for whatever his motivation was.
And we don't know what that was yet.
Whether he was intentionally trying to ram them or whether he thought that it turned, whatever.
He turned.
Yeah, but I mean, if he is intentionally trying to ram them, I don't see why he slows down, stops the car, and starts hopping.
I mean, it's a car.
He could ram people if you want to.
Because he could potentially be waiting for them to be out in the actual street where he could do it.
But we don't know.
I'm not even claiming to know what that is.
Sure, sure.
Whatever reason he had, which we don't know and may never know, he pulled into them.
As an understandable reaction to having a car almost hit a bunch of people, they started banging on his hood and saying, what the hell are you doing?
Garrett pushes his fiancé to the side, approaches the car at low ready.
The driver shoots him five times and then speeds off because all the protesters disperse at that point.
So there was no mob happening.
There was no rioting happening.
Garrett was not, never fired his rifle and never pointed it.
He had it at low ready.
And there are different degrees of low ready.
His low ready was almost pointed at his feet.
Like it was very, very low ready.
And it was in a defensive response to a car that, whether intentionally or not, almost rammed him and other people as well.
So what we were saying in that moment was that the reason he was there was to protect protesters and he died trying to protect protesters.
Are not claiming we didn't do it then, and we're not claiming it now to know what the driver was doing.
But we knew enough of the facts on the ground that we weren't just jumping the gun or firing off something.
I'm just not, I'm not convinced that we know what exactly he was doing.
And the video I saw of him from earlier in the day made me have some questions.
But look, either way, it's a really tragic situation.
Oh, it's a terrible situation.
Last thing I want to ask you before we get out of here.
And I really do appreciate your time and I appreciate your point of view on this stuff.
Do you, in general, and especially in light of this incident, but it does seem like it's become this thing kind of all over the country with these protests of blocking roads.
Not the case like this where people are crossing and, you know, okay, the guy is sitting there and wants to move.
I mean, look, truthfully speaking, just last thoughts on that.
I think probably everyone could have handled the situation better in hindsight.
You know, hindsight is 2020.
I think the guy probably shouldn't have turned into the crowd.
I think if he did, the crowd should have just parted and let him go.
I don't think you should have approached with a gun.
I think everybody could have done something better, but that's very easy to say after a situation like this becomes, you know, such a tragedy.
Regardless of that, there is this thing now, it's all over the country where people are blocking traffic.
I think this is really, really bad and is going to lead to more instances like this.
I think at best case scenario, you're inconveniencing innocent people who have nothing to do with the situation or police, you know, brutality or anything like that.
And at worst case scenario, you're going to get someone pissed off enough who's like, no, I'm not fucking turning around because you feel like blocking the street.
I'm going to try to go through you.
I also think it's a violation of the non-aggression principle.
I mean, I do think not being a pedestrian and crossing the street, but blocking a street is essentially illegally detaining somebody.
You have no authority to block someone's car and tell them to turn around.
What are your thoughts on that?
Well, I mean, it is illegal.
I'm not sure I'd argue that it was a violation of the NAP.
I mean, we do know historically that there have been civil rights protests that involved blocking traffic.
One of the most symbolic or most well-known protests during the civil rights era was when Martin Luther King and his protesters crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge.
They didn't get a permit to do that.
They were illegally crossing a bridge and then were brutalized as a result of it.
The argument behind, and I'm not personally, I'm not a fan of it because I think what happens is when you are blocking streets, you also, there's a potential that you have a situation where someone dies in an ambulance or someone who is trying to get to an emergency isn't able to.
I'm not a fan of it personally.
And I would let the people who have that as their strategy speak more on that.
Their idea behind why they do it is the idea that most people are living in a level of comfort and that doing this creates some discomfort for them to feel the discomfort that people are feeling as a result of being disproportionately harmed by government.
Whether that's what happens or not, I think it often is not what happens.
Maybe it is what happens sometimes.
I will say this.
I'm not going to flat out say I'm against this or I'm for this.
I will say it's not something that I think is necessarily the best idea, but I also don't think that someone being in front of you in traffic allows you to ram through them or anything like that.
I don't think that it is an inherent NAP violation, and it certainly isn't proportional to the level of when I hear people go, well, if you're in the way of traffic, you deserve to die.
No, you don't deserve to die.
Well, I don't, that, that I agree with.
I think it's more like the thing like if you say like, you know, kids shouldn't play in traffic.
And that's not to say that they deserve to die if they're going to play in traffic, but it's just to say it's a really bad idea and that it quite often might lead to.
I don't think kids should play in traffic.
If I see kids playing in traffic, I stop my car.
I guess it's the best way I would say.
No, yes.
Fair enough.
And I don't agree that it's a NAP violation, but if it is even a minor NAP violation, there is also proportionality.
Spike, if I just surrounded, if me and a mob of people just surrounded you on the street while you're walking and won't let you pass by, you don't think that that's some type of initiation of coercion?
I think if I'm walking, if you're saying surrounded me, that's a completely different thing.
If I'm walking one way and there's a bunch of people.
I demand you turn around.
Yeah, if I'm walking somewhere and there's a bunch of people saying we refuse to stand from where we move from where we're standing.
And you say, well, okay, well, I'm walking through and then they start banging on, you know, I don't know what the analogy is.
No, if they start banging on something that I own or harming me, now we're talking a completely different thing.
But if I'm walking up and you have a line of people and you say we refuse to move from where we're going and there's a way I can go around that, I don't think that that's inherently a NAP violation.
It's an inconvenience to me and you may be a dick move on your part, but I don't think it's a NAP violation.
It certainly isn't one that allows me to escalate to the point of harming you.
All right.
I want to the last question before we get out of here.
And I know this is the real one.
No, no, no, it's fine.
It's fine.
No, I'm enjoying it.
Go ahead.
Well, me too.
And I will say, I think you're a great spokesman for Liberty.
And I get where you're coming from.
I think we see things on this aspect a little bit differently.
But I would ask you this because I do think there are a lot of people certainly, and I get your point about appealing to the left-wing crowd and not just appealing, but speaking their language and talking to their concerns.
But there's also a lot of people who are really concerned with how out of control they think this movement nationwide has gotten.
What do you like?
I'm curious what you think the libertarian solution to this would be.
Mine would be, I mean, obviously, ideally in Kapistan, but we're not going to get there by the end of these movements.
So I would say that, number one, people should absolutely have the right.
And I'm talking about how to deal with the negative part of the rioting and the violence and that stuff.
No problem with peaceful protesters.
I think that people should have every right to defend themselves, their property, and that the local governments should not be prosecuting people for doing so, which as you pointed out before is one of the outrageous parts of this.
And I do think local police should be, if we're going to have police, they should protect people and their property.
I understand criticizing cops for being violent with peaceful protesters, but do you think it's also fair to say that they should?
Like, what do you think local police should do when a mob comes to loot a store?
Police State Discord Tactics00:04:44
By the way, if you hear snoring in the background, that's my dog snoring away.
So I apologize if you get, I don't know if the mic's paying for me.
I'm not entertaining Spike's dog.
He's well, he can't hear it.
If he could hear it, he'd be enthralled, I'm sure.
But no, so I think that if the police are there to protect lives, rights, and property, that's what they should be doing.
And in the case of these protests, the police should be leaving protesters alone.
If they are there with signs and they're saying, what do we want justice?
When do we want it now?
Or what black life, whatever.
Whatever they're saying, if you have a small detail of people there, just make sure it doesn't pop off and go out of hand, that's fine.
But what they shouldn't be doing is putting all of their resources there.
And the very second they violate, you know, five minutes into a curfew or whatever, just start opening fire with tear gas and pepper spray.
That makes that situation worse.
And now it embroils that situation.
And they shouldn't be leaving the entire rest of the city.
If I were the mayor of protest city or whatever, and there's a protest happening, I'd say, okay, we have a small number of cops there just to make sure nothing pops off and that they, you know, that they're just protesting.
Let them do their thing.
If there are minor violations of people doing stuff for the most part, just leave them be.
As long as they're not harming anyone, let them do what they're doing.
And then, and also keep the police in regular patrol everywhere else so that if people try to use that, take advantage of that to loot and to riot and to burn things down and everything else, go after them because those are the people actually violating the lives, the rights, and properties of others.
Also, if I were the mayor of Protest City, I would have already gotten rid of all the gun controls so that people could protect themselves.
And I would make it very clear that no one's going to be prosecuted in my fine fair city for protecting themselves and their lives and their properties and those of those they care about.
Yeah, and that's the best thing.
That's the best thing we could hope for because, as I've learned before, counting on the government for anything is never going to work.
And one thing I know you'll agree with me on too, but it's just really funny to see.
I mean, funny in a tragic way, but it's like for all the militarization of the police and these show of forces that they have, the one freaking time when you would actually be like, oh, maybe we need a big show of force when there's these, you know, major riots.
They just stand back and do freaking nothing.
It's intentional.
Yeah.
No, you're right.
You're absolutely right.
And by the way, it's brilliant.
It's brilliant on their part.
And I'm sure there are some provocators.
Look at this chaos.
Yeah.
And I'm sure there are some, there is some infiltration and stuff like that.
But that's my number one message, man.
If you're being violent at this thing, you couldn't be helping the cops anymore.
It's it really is the most counterproductive thing.
Don't make the movement.
Don't make people want a police state.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
In general.
Which is whatever your actions are.
Do not make people want a police state because the police are already doing that well enough and the government's already doing that well enough.
They don't need your help.
Your help will only make it worse.
Yeah.
And so much of a, I swear to God, I'm wrapping up.
One more question.
One more question.
So much of what Martin Luther King was doing with those movements that you alluded to was he was intentionally, and he said this quite blatantly, that he was intentionally demonstrating to the country what the police would do to them for their peaceful demonstrations.
But in this case, it's like we had the George Floyd thing on tape.
You had, by the way, I'm not saying you shouldn't protest over that.
I'm just saying you had this demonstration of what the police are doing.
And I just, one of the things that really bothers me about the looting and the violence and the mobs is that it really did.
You handed the justification back to the right wing of supporting the police state.
It's really, it's really tragic.
You're playing into the police state's hands.
Like if the police state goes, oh my gosh, I hope you don't rob that bank over there.
Don't go rob the bank.
That's what they want you to do.
I want to say with Martin Luther King, he had his form of the Boogaloo Boys in the form of the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers.
In many, especially in the northern and western states, they knew that if they were too rough on the protesters, it was going to get a lot worse because right on the outskirts of that were a bunch of really heavily armed people that didn't, that were not worried about their own lives.
They were worried about protecting the people there.
So that's why I'm happy about an increasing fusion between the Boogaloo movement and the protest against police brutality and for black lives, because it is demonstrating and it's also giving lie to one of the biggest lies that is coming from some of the top people in the Black Lives Matter organization that we need more gun control.
No, it's just the opposite of that.
We need more, not just black people with guns, we need people with guns who are able not just to protect themselves and their property, but also to demonstrate in a show of force that if there is an element within the police who want to brutalize peaceful people, they suddenly don't want to do that because a good number of those peaceful people have guns and it's not a good idea to fire tear gas into a crowd of really heavily armed people.
Joe20 Gun Support00:02:08
So I think that that's a fusionism that I'm very happy to see.
Yeah.
Okay.
Fair enough.
I think that's a very good point.
And look, I really enjoyed this conversation.
I am really rooting for you guys.
I will say that I am at times critical of the Libertarian Party.
I've been for a long time, but I really, it's because I love the Libertarian Party and I really want nothing more than the great message that you guys have to be received by a lot of people.
And I'm happy to have you back on anytime during the campaign.
If there's other stuff that you want to talk about, I enjoyed this.
And thank you for your time.
Jorgensen Cohen, 2020.
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Hell yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I wish you good luck in your journey, in spreading that message.
And yeah, hope to talk to you again soon.
Thanks, man.
I appreciate it.
All right, guys.
Thanks for listening.
And we will see you next time with a brand new episode.