Chris Spangle and hosts debate the Libertarian Party's internal fractures, specifically the Mises Caucus's aggressive cultural messaging versus classic non-interventionist principles. They analyze accusations of "cancel culture" regarding Joe Jorgensen's Black Lives Matter support, the Ron Paul Institute's alleged clickbait misrepresentation, and the alienating effects of conspiratorial rhetoric targeting figures like Daniel McAdams. Ultimately, the discussion concludes that excessive hostility and ideological purges damage recruitment potential, suggesting the movement must balance necessary criticism with inclusive outreach to survive intense political polarization. [Automatically generated summary]
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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.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Very happy to have our guest join us today, who is Chris Spangle.
He is the host of the We Are Libertarians podcast, also a longtime member of the LP and, you know, a libertarian commentator, much like myself.
Thank you so much, brother, for joining us.
Yeah, thanks for the invite.
I appreciate it.
Absolutely.
So I had posted in the Mises Caucus Facebook group asking, you know, because I've been thinking a lot lately about kind of the divide within the liberty movement.
And I've been talking about it on the show quite a bit.
And I was like, who would be a good person for me to talk to who's been critical of me or the Mises Caucus, Tom Woods, people like that?
And Mark Clare, a mutual friend of ours, who I respect very much, was like, you got to have Chris on.
This will be a really great conversation.
And he, you know, likes both of us very much.
So credit for this episode to Mark Clare from The Lions of Liberty, which is one of the best libertarian podcasts out there, or three of the best libertarian podcasts out there.
And if you don't enjoy the episode, all the blame falls squarely on Mark Clare's shoulders.
It's not me or Chris's fault.
Don't do that to me.
Put it on Brian McWilliams.
Let's blame him.
Okay, there's, you know what?
We're already starting with a point of agreement.
We will blame Brian completely.
Mark, you're off the hook.
If you do like the episode, Mark gets the credit.
If you don't like the episode, Brian receives all of the blame.
Blaming Brian Completely00:04:34
There we go.
So it's interesting.
I was listening to a couple, I listened to a couple episodes of We Are Libertarians.
I listened to episode 447, which is titled How to Win the Culture War, Valuing Unity Over Disintegration, and episode 451, which was titled TweetGate, the Mises Caucus, and Dave Smith.
And I'm going to, I'll link to both of those in the description.
So if you guys want to, you can hear those episodes in their entirety and kind of, you know, judge for yourself.
What, you know, I don't want to misrepresent anything or take it out of context.
But I will say one of the things that strikes me, and I noticed this when I had Spike Cohen on my show as well, is that there will be people like me and you who really have a tremendous amount of overlap in terms of what our views are,
what our political beliefs are, and what our goals are, ultimately, which I think both me and you, as you make pretty clear in the show, our goals are to expand the liberty movement, to see more liberty in real life and get more people interested in these ideas that we believe in.
And yet, we have many different kinds of conclusions and cultural views on the current kind of dynamic of culture in 2020 America.
So it's interesting to me to explore.
Do you, why don't we, you know what, before we even get into that, why don't you just for if anyone's not familiar with you or your work, why don't you just tell my audience a little bit like who you are, what the show is, and what you do.
Sure, I appreciate that.
And I couldn't agree with you more because I've been, you know, listening to your show in preparation for this too, just so I didn't misrepresent you.
And like I listened to the Hop and Malice episode, and there's a lot that we agree on, including the Pork Fest comments, which we can get to later.
But yeah, I started out in Talk Rady in 2004, and I was a Republican, and I was a pretty hardcore Bushite at the time.
But I was college Republicans in 04 and almost got impeached because I didn't really give a shit about gay marriage.
And I was like, this immigration plan, I don't see why this is a problem.
So I started to see like little veins of things that I didn't agree with in the Republican Party.
And then I found Ron Paul's campaign.
The thing, like, I had heard Neil Bortz talk about libertarian, and I worked on a campaign with a guy named Andy Horning who was a libertarian.
And so like I started to hear the free market ideas and all that started to appeal to me.
But the thing that didn't make any sense was the non-interventionism, non-interventionism piece.
And Ron Paul and those debates and then studying him turned me into a libertarian.
And so I started talking to the local Libertarian Party and I was like, why are you guys not functional?
Which has been a question of mine for about 15 years now.
And they said, we don't have an executive director.
And so I went and worked there for four years from 08 to 12 in the Libertarian Party.
And then I went from there to work for the Advocates for Self-Government as their marketing director in 2013, which are the quiz people.
If you've taken the world's smallest political quiz, they're the ones who started that.
And then now I left there and I work for a nationally syndicated radio show in the comedy world.
And in 2012, I started We Are Libertarians, and I've been podcasting in the libertarian space since 09.
And we've had many different iterations of the show.
And the current one is really talking about current events.
And what I try to do is appeal to people who don't know what is going on.
They know they're not Republicans.
They know they're not Democrats, but they don't know what they're politically homeless and really talking issues.
Because when you're a new libertarian, you're like, how many different percentages of issues can I agree with on libertarians before I am one?
And so that's really what strikes people.
And so that's mainly what we do.
And I appreciate this conversation and the ability to come and talk to you because I actually am not a Libertarian Party person.
And you actually, I just rejoined like the last few days because you, Matt Welch, others are like this Libertarian Party guy.
And I'm like, all right, after four or five years of not being a member, I'm like, I can't escape it.
I might as well embrace it.
These are, these are my, this is my fucked up family.
So here I am.
Well, I'm glad I'm counting you as one more of my recruits.
Political Homelessness Explained00:08:46
Yes.
That's your story.
Actually, Spike Cohen.
He gets the credit.
Damn it.
Damn it.
All right.
One, one for Spike Cohn.
No problem.
So I actually, I didn't realize you had left the party and certainly didn't realize you had rejoined.
Well, listen, I think that's great.
That sounds like an awesome idea.
And, you know, like a, I'm right there with you in terms of what like the mission of your show is.
I think that's, that's excellent.
So why don't we, you know, I will say, I like I, as I mentioned, I listened to these two episodes and I took umbrage with a few things that were said.
Do you share umbrage with or to whatever?
You get what I'm saying with this.
So what I wanted to do, I just have two clips from the show that I wanted to play and kind of respond to.
And then you can let me know what I'm missing or see what, you know, where the disagreement is.
So the first clip I wanted to play, again, I'm going to post these full episodes in the description so everybody can go check them out and check out other episodes of the show as well that are unrelated to me.
Although, you know, I'm concerned more with the ones about me for the moment right now.
But let's play the clip from episode 447, How to Win the Culture War, Valuing Unity Over Disintegration.
Me on Twitter, when I defended Joe Jorgensen, or what, frankly, I'm, I know that Dave Smith is a is a great podcaster, but what Dave Smith was doing to Joe Jorgensen was a form of cancel culture.
It wasn't an honest, open dialogue with Joe Jorgensen about her beliefs.
He was calling her out.
He was saying to his following, attack that woman for having Marxist beliefs.
When the woman, are we supposed to sit here and believe that the woman who is from South Carolina, this middle-aged white woman, is a secret Marxist plant?
She was a secret Marxist in college and decided to run on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1996 and then has just been biding her time these last 30 years, waiting for her moment to strike and make the Libertarian Party liberal.
Don't insult my intelligence.
Joe Jorgensen is not some Marxist plant.
And if you said that, you looked foolish.
And then you got mad when people said you looked foolish.
And they were mad because you're contributing to call out culture, which was stupid.
Instead of saying, I'm going to offer some grace to the Libertarian Party presidential candidate and ask her to clarify what she believed in a polite manner.
Which she did.
She did.
But it took a lot of screeching to get there.
Yeah, it's the same cancel culture that they complain about.
They spend all of their time fighting and arguing about identity politics.
And then Tom Woods retweets some guy today who says, you know, something about black people and capitalism.
Black people should be capitalists.
And it's like, aren't you retweeting out the same identity politics that you say you don't like?
Eric Chile does the same thing where he talks about.
We can end it there.
So let me say, as you said, if you said that, then you looked foolish.
I guess my issue with that would be that I never said that or anything close to it.
I honestly, Chris, I don't like I want to say that you're strawmanning me, but I don't even think this technically counts as a straw man.
It's just a flat out inaccuracy.
I don't know if you heard from somebody that I had said Joe Jorgensen was a secret Marxist or that I said that I was telling my fans to attack that woman for having Marxist beliefs.
I've said, I've done, I've covered this pretty in depth, what my issue with the tweet was.
And I said at least a dozen times on the show that Joe Jorgensen is not a Marxist.
And when people accused me of saying that, I said, this is ridiculous.
And anyone saying that is retarded.
That's not my issue.
And so I don't know where you got that I was telling my fans to attack Joe Jorgensen for being a Marxist from.
Well, first, I agree with you.
And let me just say I'm sorry.
I think as I've gone and done a deeper dive in preparation for this and thought more deeply about this stuff, that particular comment was not fair to you.
And I think that my criticism of what I would say your faction, right, which I consider you to be a large voice in, and I can't imagine you disagree with that, is it kind of breaks out into three different camps.
There is the podcaster class, you and Tom and Eric and guys that do a lot of good and I have a lot of respect for, especially Tom Woods.
Like I, you know, I almost never say anything bad about Tom because I've learned so much from him.
And then there is the institutions.
There's the Mises Caucus and there's the Mises Institute.
And what is typically done against them is the lifting of quotes.
I can't say that I've listened to your podcast a lot until the last two or three weeks.
And so what you see is sort of the fakertarian stuff being pulled and the poll quotes.
You know, you see this or that.
And, you know, you know how it is when you pull a clip or you pull an image or a tweet or whatever, you take it out of context and you present that as that just is who that person is, right?
So, I mean, in the lead up to this, when you posted that I was coming on, that's what the Mises caucus did in that entire thread.
You know, he's just a left libertarian.
Here's this thing from a different writer who's not, you know.
And so it is easy to get an opinion formed of an organization or a podcaster based on a couple different things.
First, other people's interpretation of that information.
And it's easy to misinterpret that when you don't pay attention to what they're doing.
Second is the people who have an axe to grind, the Mike Shipleys of the world who come after you because they don't agree with our fundamental beliefs, you know, in terms of like property rights.
They're out for they're they have a different game that they're playing.
So I think it's easy to misinterpret what people say because of that third rung, which is the just the you work in media, I work in media.
And when you say something like that, that I'll give you an example, the Hopa episode with you and Malice.
I had a completely different interpretation of what that was going to be before I listened to it and then after.
So what I see from the outside perspective, who is not a part of the Mises caucus and doesn't consider myself a part of that faction, is totally different than when I engaged in that content.
What I heard was you interpreting Hoppe in a very succinct, clear way, and Malice making a lot of points that I was like, oh, yeah, I agree with that.
And he's, you know, talking about a lot of things.
There was a lot in there that I agreed with, for instance.
But you don't get that impression when it's extrapolated out, right?
And so when you say something, if a broadcaster says something, they say X, it gets amplified over and over and over and over in Facebook groups, on Twitter, and it's that game of telephone that eventually starts to completely distort the message.
And there are a lot of people who tend to twist things for their own personal gain one way or the other.
So first, I apologize to you because that's what happened.
I completely misinterpreted what you were saying about Joe, while I did take exception with your reaction to her.
We can talk about that.
Sure.
Well, look, I appreciate that.
I really do.
And it's like water under the bridge.
That's fine.
Like, you got it wrong, and I appreciate the apology.
It's just, it does, it gets frustrating because as you mentioned with this, this small group of people who come at me all the time, it's quite often the case that they will take the most controversial sentence that you said and try to, and, and then flat out lie about it.
And like you said, it's like this game of telephone.
I saw someone sent me a clip the other day where it like when it gets to a point, someone called into it's a Freedom Talk.
There's the show in New Hampshire.
Oh, Free Talk Live.
Free Talk Live.
Yes.
They called into Free Talk Live and they were like, you know, I don't know this Dave Smith guy is like, he's a complete neocon.
I mean, he was saying that Chelsea Manning and Snowden should be locked up.
And I'm like, dude, I've never even said anything remotely critical of Chelsea Manning or Ed Snowden or fucking, the other one was, I guess, Assange.
These guys are heroes to me.
Like I've never said anything.
Criticism Triggers Me00:08:35
And so it comes back and I'm like, when I see the reflection, I'm like, I don't know who this person is, but it's definitely not me.
So anyway, I appreciate that.
Can I ask you something about that?
Because I tend to think because I got when I basically like, I support the idea of the Mises caucus.
I just don't think that they're living up to their promise.
And we'll get to that.
But I tend to think that when I watch what you do on social media or what Tom does or Eric, it's easy to get that echo chamber starts to become your panel.
You know, Malice talked about Cernovich looking at his 600,000 Twitter followers and like you gather all this information.
Is there a part of what you're doing where you're so constantly bombarded by criticism that you start to, that starts to become the lens that you're looking through?
No, I mean, I don't think so.
I mean, truthfully speaking, I'm not constantly bombarded by criticism.
I just, I go back and forth with people on Twitter.
So I think people see that stuff.
There's a group of about 10 people who respond to just about everything I tweet.
Like almost every day they tweet at me.
And about, I'd say, I mean, even if you ask them if they're being honest, which I don't count on them to be, maybe about 5% of what they tweet at me, I'll respond back to.
And it is very much with, like I was talking about this when I was on Kokesh's show the other day.
It's very much within my personality to like, I'm open to the fight.
Like if you want to, if you want to come at me and mock me and call me names, okay, fine, let's do this.
And I have, I, I enjoy that in a weird way, probably more than I should.
But I do not, I don't throw bombs at any of these other groups.
You know, I remember this is a random example, but Tupac, as I, you know, I think of myself as the libertarian Tupac.
So I remember Tupac said when he got shot like in the early 90s, like five times in New York City.
And he said in an interview once that he didn't believe any black person could hurt him because he was their representative.
And he was like, I speak for you.
So like, why I'm on your, like I'm for your cause.
So you would never shoot me.
And so he actually went to take the gun from the guy.
Like he was like, you're not going to shoot me.
And the guy shot him in the hand and then shot him four more times.
And he was like, I can't believe it.
These guys actually shot me.
And truthfully speaking, I feel that way to some degree with libertarians.
Like from the very beginning of this, I was like, well, the libertarians aren't going to have a problem with me.
Like I, I speak for them.
I'm nothing but their advocate.
And so I, that was kind of my attitude in the beginning.
When I first, when we first started supporting Jacob Hornberger, that's when I first started getting like this crowd known as the Loser Brigade talking all this wild shit about me.
And at the time, I used to go back and forth a little bit with them.
Like they'd tag me in some of these groups on Facebook.
I don't even know what any of these groups are, but they'd tag me in something criticizing me.
And my attitude was always like, I'd treat them with nothing but like... good intent.
I'd say like, hey, listen, maybe you don't like me or you don't like Tom Woods, but take a look at Jacob Hornberger.
I bet you'll like him.
I mean, he's open borders.
He's for, you know, like all the, like, you're not going to find any of these issues with him.
So go support that guy.
I thought, like, I didn't think it would go in the direction it did.
But much like with Nick Sarwalk, look, I wouldn't know who Nick Sarwalk was to this day if he hadn't started attacking Tom Woods and Jeff Dice and people who I love in a vicious manner.
I could not, this is the truth, okay?
This is, this is the extent of how involved in the party I am.
I don't know the name of the current chair.
If you put a gun to my head, I think there's a bishop in it.
I can't tell you the rest of the name.
If you put a gun to my head and said, name the chair before Nick Sarwalk, I'm going to die.
There is no chance I could tell you who the chair was before.
And the same is true with this other group of people.
I wouldn't know who any of them are, except that they launch these vicious attacks.
And so, okay, I'll respond to them.
And more so the fact that they attack people who I love, who I know are really good people and who are heroes of mine.
That triggers me a little bit.
But so that's more or less my take on the whole situation.
That's the sense that I get.
And I sense you're kind of searching for like, why am I being singled out in this way?
Because it's got to be awkward and odd.
And so I don't feel, I feel you're fair and honest.
Otherwise, you wouldn't have Kokesh on.
You wouldn't have me on.
You know, but that's part of the breakdown is that the Starwarks and those of us who are outside of the, you know, I heard you talk in your talk about being called a cult.
And you're like, well, what are you talking about?
Well, those of us who are outside of it, that third rung, that group of people that amplify what you guys say, they mimic that breakneck style and they beat the shit out of the rest of us.
And then because they're usually anonymous Twitter account users, there's no accountability for those people.
So people tend to just blame you and Tom and Eric because they're like, well, somebody's got to be responsible for this asshole who won't leave me alone.
Because when you tend to criticize anything Mises or Ron Paul related, you get a swarm of several dozen, if not hundreds of Twitter accounts.
And I don't know if you're aware of that, but that creates a tremendous amount of resentment.
And I think what the Mises caucus is experiencing is resentment from people like myself who have been around for a long time that don't understand that resentment and just are caught off guard by the criticism.
Okay, but in the same sense that in the clip that we just played, which I, again, I grant that you, you know, apologized for and that's fine.
But in the clip you played, what you explicitly say is like, hey, if you're getting criticism online, if people are saying what you said is stupid, maybe you should look at that and like take that in and go, okay, there are these people criticizing you.
But then on the other hand, when other people get criticized online, it's like my fault that people, I understand you're not saying it's my fault.
I'm not saying that's fair.
I'm saying that's why you get to fault.
This is the thing, okay?
What, you know, the people who go, oh, it's like the Mises caucus are like a cult or they're Dave bots or whatever.
It's blatantly not true.
There are people who disagree with me in the Mises caucus.
Every time I talk to Michael Heiss on the phone, at least two or three times in the conversation, he'll say, Well, I disagree with you there.
Let me give you some pushback on this.
Like, they don't just agree with me all the time.
But the fact that a lot of them do agree with me doesn't make them cult members.
I mean, it's like it's a very convenient tactic.
Um, and it's a very convenient tactic to say, I'm gonna challenge Dave on this.
And then, if someone agrees with Dave, well, they're just a cult member.
But if someone agrees with me, oh, that's that's completely fair.
And that just proves that I'm right and that Dave really should take a look in the mirror or whatever.
I mean, that just seems like to me, that seems childish and just an unit's a heads-I win, tails-you lose game.
Um, and look, in terms of like people being shitty on Twitter and YouTube comments, believe me, um, I've asked people not to be shitty in those environments.
Twitter and YouTube comments are cesspools.
That's kind of the nature of the world today.
Um, there are, by the way, to the loser brigade members who call me things like fucking a Nazi sympathizer, or one of them said recently that I praise Holocaust deniers.
Like, I'm a fucking Jew whose family was slaughtered in the Holocaust.
If you're calling me that, I really don't care what you get back.
Like, you lose the ability to say, oh, people are being mean to me on Twitter.
Like, you're engaging in that game.
And if they give it back to you, I'm actually fine with that.
But in general, if people are coming with good faith criticism, people shouldn't be shitty to them.
But the other thing that happens, and this is the nature of anybody who's got any amount of a following, is that you got a few people out there who are the more, who are more dickish than the others, and they end up being what you focus on.
So, for example, right, this is just one example that is in my head for whatever reason.
Kratom Freedom Ad00:02:26
So, I tweeted out something about when the feds were rounding up people in Seattle.
Was it Portland?
No, it was in Seattle when there were the Department of Homeland Security goons coming in and grabbing people.
I tweeted something out very critical of that.
And I said, I was like, look, this is a really terrifying precedent to set.
This is the worst way for the government to handle it, for it to be coming down from the feds.
This is, even if you're critical of the riots as I am, you got to have some concern over this.
And there was maybe a dozen people who responded to it, like, fuck that.
They're commies.
They get what they deserve.
But the tweet got like two or 3,000 likes or something in that range.
I don't remember exactly.
And so a bunch of the loser brigader types started jumping on that.
Like, look, even when Dave's right, look at his fan base.
They're awful.
They just hate commies and they're just anti-left and they're authoritarian and all of this.
But they're looking at the dozen people who said this and ignoreing that, like you could, you could, with a stronger argument, look at that and go, oh, look, thousands of people agreed with what Dave said on this.
So it's just a very convenient, very dishonest line of attack, in my opinion, to kind of say, okay, yeah, look, there are going to be some people out there.
And that's not what I promote.
But, you know, that's the internet.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
10 to 20% of any audience that I've ever worked with of any size is just fucking insane.
Like literally just batshit crazy.
Insane Audience Metrics00:08:30
And I think one of the, one of my goals in coming here, because there's a very real danger for me coming here, because if you see the Mises caucus group, it's like I've been working to build a brand for 10 years from scratch, no funding from anybody other than my listeners.
And there's a very real chance that the 10 to 20% of insane people in your audience network affect me into just being the next Star Wars or part of the Loser Brigade.
And that's not why I'm here.
I genuinely care about the libertarian movement.
And I think you do too.
Otherwise, you wouldn't be having these conversations.
And part of what I want to get across to you and to some of the other Mises caucus guys is that your message is being completely obliterated by the people in your camp that it's not a few dozen people.
Like it's hundreds of people.
So we just did a survey of our audience.
We've got this new project that we're working on.
And we did a survey, you know, and like of 100 people.
And it's literally like three pages of highlights of the reason I don't want to be a libertarian is because of the abuse, because of the alt-right paleos, because the racism and the comments that go unchecked.
And I'm certainly not holding you accountable for anything that like an individual says on the comment section on Instagram, for instance.
That's insane.
But there is some effect in an audience.
When you do the loser brigade stuff, other people feel licensed to do that sort of thing and they don't do it as well as you.
And they feel a sense of permission that I can abuse somebody who seems left, right?
Like, or like it then becomes a cudgel that they use to attack other people.
And so I've just learned over time with my audience, because I used to pick a lot of fights too.
Like name a libertarian, I fought with them, never do a podcast in the middle of a divorce.
I have a lot of mea culpas to make.
I'm starting with you.
But I have a responsibility to try and build a movement that is more open to people that don't share my experience.
And if I have any criticism of the Mises caucus, it is that they tend to look at people who don't share their experience and dismiss that and say, we don't want them to be a part of this movement.
And that's where it becomes very difficult to do my job to go out and talk to people who, you know, like go look at any post on any libertarian think tank yesterday about women's suffrage.
And you see the just misogynistic shit that is said on those posts.
And you click on those accounts and you look and you see Rothbard, Mises, Dave Smith, Tom, Tom Woods.
And so people eventually start to draw the conclusion that you guys support that kind of stuff.
And then they start to look at the comments, the Fakertarian comments, and they start to draw conclusions.
And like that is that I think if I were to lay anything at your doorstep, it is how you build an audience with some of that stuff because the punching the enemy, the turning the left libertarian into an enemy thing, you do it with skill because you're a skilled communicator and a comedian, but it gives license to other people that take it so far.
And I'm talking to thousands of people take it so far that they eventually are hurting your reputation.
They're hurting the effectiveness of the caucus.
And it's becoming, you know, then they don't get checked, right?
Then there's the, well, fuck those guys.
They're all just losertarians anyways.
They're LOL libertarians or whatever they're called.
And it starts to diminish your credibility and your effectiveness.
And I think that's what's happening.
Yeah, but I mean, I don't know, you know, to say that it's like this is going to lead to a whole bunch of people being turned off and it diminishes my credibility.
I got to say, I don't really see it.
I think that, look, I mean, personally, like my influence and credibility, I think, has done nothing but go up every single year.
And I've got lots of metrics, just like Spike Cohen, I've got lots of metrics that indicate that.
And if what you care about is the liberty movement, as you said it is, and I believe you, I have a tough time believing that a lot of these other types who criticize me, the dozen of them or so, actually care about the liberty movement.
These are people who want whatever they deem to be the right paleo libertarians, which I guess they would consider me one of.
And look, I don't really consider myself a right-wing libertarian.
I don't consider myself right.
I actually agree with Walter Block.
I think we're kind of the third leg on the stool, and there's a lot that distinguishes us from both the left and the right.
But if you want to call me that, like, fine, whatever.
You know, I've certainly called people left libertarians who don't identify as left.
So I'll take the right libertarian label.
So they want to get rid of me.
They want me out of the movement and the audience that I represent.
They want Tom Woods out of the movement.
They want Ron Paul out of the movement.
They want Jeff Dice out of the movement.
They want Michael Heiss out of the movement.
They want Eric July, Maj Ture.
I'm sure I'm missing a few.
If you take all of those people out of the movement and the audiences that they represent, there is no movement left.
Like that, you could argue there is no liberty movement really to speak of right now, period.
That we're kind of talking to the remnant and trying to build it back up to where it was, you know, in 2012.
But, you know, if your goal is to kind of get rid of all of these people, I don't really see what we have left to speak of.
So, and I'm not saying that that's your goal, but it certainly is the goal of a lot of the other types that you're talking about.
And I would agree with you on that.
I think that there are a lot of those critics who do want to push you guys out.
Yes, listen, I have basically, and the funny thing, so I started this show in late 2012.
And I don't even know if those episodes are up in the archives.
I think it's in 2013 when we went to stand-up labs when we started.
I don't even know if we saved those old episodes.
And there was like no audience.
I built this thing up year over year.
So I came in right as the liberty movement was dwindling, right as things were kind of Ron Paul left presidential politics and there wasn't nearly as much energy.
And I have been bringing in thousands and thousands of people to the liberty movement since then.
I have gotten Mises and Rothbard and Tom Woods and Bob Murphy and all these people, their books in the hands of a lot of people.
That's been, my goal is always to spread the liberty movement.
And then for the last, you know, year or so, I've really made a push for people to, you know, join the Libertarian Party.
And that's when all of this stuff happened, because it's not so much, I think there's a lot of people who enjoy their little comfortable positions in the Libertarian Party and didn't like that there's a lot of other people coming in and bringing new people in.
And look, no question, are some of them a little rough around the edges?
All right, sure.
I'm very willing to have very uncomfortable, very politically incorrect conversations and to try to find truth within those areas.
And I'm not saying that I defend some random misogynistic comment, but if we're talking about women's suffrage, I'm fine with questioning what the actual results of that were.
I'm fine with questioning in general expanding voting rights and whether this is actually that good, whether it's really a good thing for libertarians to for libertarianism to have more democracy.
Does that really help?
Is it really worthwhile for us?
Look, when you have someone like Bernie Sanders proposing voting rights for felons and violent felons, is that something libertarians should really be for?
Violent criminals having a say in how their fellow neighbor is ruled?
Certainly doesn't seem to me like something libertarians should be for.
And I'll tell you, much like Ron Paul, and this is what I wish I really try to smack this into a lot of the LP types heads.
The only time there was a liberty movement in my lifetime was when Ron Paul was willing to say the bravest, most courageous things to a room that he knew very well might boo him out of that room.
And what I see from libertarians a lot these days is trying to say the thing that couldn't possibly get you booed out of the room.
Welfare and Name Calling00:03:14
And there it listen, just like with Ron Paul, people respond to courage.
They respond to somebody who believes in something and is willing to take the name calling.
Like, okay, yeah, Ron Paul's a traitor to his country because he doesn't support the troops because he said, you know what, they hate us because of what our troops have done, not because we're free.
And I am just not willing to lie in order to say something that will make sure that I'm not called any of the names.
I enjoy going into controversial areas.
You know, I saw Spike Cohen.
This is something you tweeted, actually, that Spike Cohen's response to what we should do about cutting welfare.
And what he said was, he goes, well, look, here's the truth.
And I know this from going door to door.
Nobody wants to be on welfare.
No one wants to be on welfare.
People want to work.
And it's just that government makes it so hard for them to work.
And that's why they end up being on welfare.
That sounds really nice.
It's a really nice sounding thing to say.
And I wish that was the world, but it's not.
It's just not.
And I don't know how, like, I'm not from, I remember on the show I listened to, you said that you're from, you know, an area that's like 95% white and that it wasn't until later in life that you got out.
I grew up in Brooklyn in the 90s.
I know, listen, it's not that like, oh, everyone fits into these groups.
I've known black nerds and white junkies.
I know one of a black dude who was my best friend in like the fifth, sixth, and seventh grade went to Harvard.
My sister's best friend, this girl, is now identifies as a guy.
I've known, like, I've, I've just grown up knowing a lot of different people.
I also knew a lot of people from the hood.
If you think there are no people who want to be on welfare and who are gaming the system and brag about it, it's like, it's a nice thought.
It's just not true.
It's just not reality.
And people, if you say things like that, you get attacked a little bit more and criticized.
But I don't care because I'm willing to tell the truth.
My mother was a, she's a psychologist.
She was in the 90s.
She worked in the hospital.
I don't want to give out too much of her information, but she worked in a hospital in one of the worst areas in New York City, one of the highest crime areas.
And it was, you know, in the 90s, I mean, the crime was through the roof.
It was a fucking, she would see children and their parents and determine whether or not they need to be taken away by the state.
It was the, oof, and made like no money while she was doing it.
She would, she could tell you horror stories about how people have children for what they used to call the budget, that you get a budget when you have a kid and you get more of a budget for each kid you have.
Now, if we want to honestly start talking about what the solutions are to try to fix some of these incredibly damaged cultures, because it's horrible what's happening to these children there, like if you actually care about those kids, you have to have like honest, difficult conversations.
And in 2020, if you do that, you get called all of the names.
But I think libertarians need to stop being afraid of that.
Pandering vs Violence00:05:18
I don't think that it has anything to do with, you know, the word pandering or virtue signaling gets thrown around a lot a lot.
And I generally think that's a very condescending, dismissive term because you just related your personal interpretation of the world through your experiences, your information, what you've taken in.
Spike has a completely different set of information that he's judging from, you know, and that is.
Yeah, but we're talking about objective reality.
I mean, it's not as simple as like my interpretation or Spike's interpretation.
Spike said, no one wants to be on welfare.
That is like an objective claim that is objectively false.
So it's, yes, you're right.
We have different perspectives, obviously.
I'm just talking about what is objectively real and what is not.
Now, that's not to say that it's fair for me to say everybody wants to be on welfare or every, I think that's very much true.
And by the way, I agree with Spike's policy proposals.
Like, absolutely.
Let's not, let's make it much easier for people to, you know, get be entrepreneurs and get jobs.
And let's not criminalize things that shouldn't be criminalized.
Let's not make them jump through hoops.
But I also think we should be honest.
And I agree with you.
And I'm probably guilty of accusing other people of pandering.
I know when people accuse me of pandering to the alt-right or whatever, which I think is absurd, dog whistling.
Well, it also, again, just like with the cult worship stuff, it becomes a very convenient, childish trick where you can say, okay, well, I don't actually have him saying anything that I object to, but I'm going to tell you that he's really saying something that you can object to, even though it's not there.
Now, you could pick out pretty easily.
I mean, I've done thousands of, you know, interviews and podcasts and all types of different things.
And, you know, certainly, you know, almost a thousand episodes of part of the problem.
I forget exactly where we are.
But you could, I'm sure, find five or six different things that a right-winger would like, or, you know, a lot more than that, but you could find things that I've said that a right-winger would like.
You could also find a lot of things that I've said that a right-winger would hate.
And you can say, like, all Dave cares about is bringing in, you know, alt-writers or whatever.
Okay, but I also go on Jimmy Doerr's show.
I just went on Ben Burgess's show.
I've gone on Rogan's show four times.
I'm trying to bring in anybody I can.
I'm actually pretty good at messaging libertarianism to the left as well.
So I don't know.
Again, so I get your point on that.
But whether it's pandering or not, just to kind of come back full circle to what we were talking about, my issue with the Joe Jorgensen Black Lives Matter tweet never had anything to do with her being a secret Marxist.
And in fact, the Marxism of the organization Black Lives Matter is really the least of my concerns right now.
Like, I don't really care that much.
I mean, I did one episode with Pete Kwinonas about the Marxist organization.
I think it's an interesting topic to know a little bit about, and libertarians should know about this stuff.
But really, that's not my issue.
And when Joe Jorgensen says she's supporting the movement, not the organization, I'm like, okay, I can understand that.
My problem is with the movement.
It's not with the organization.
And my problem, for anyone who listens to this show, there's no way you could not know what it is.
My problem is the dozens of murders, the hundreds of vicious assaults, the thousands of businesses that have been damaged, looted, graffitied on, and the thousands of people who have been terrorized.
I mean, go follow Andy No on Twitter.
Every day, there's a new just stomach-turning video of somebody being viciously assaulted.
And it's all being done in the name of Black Lives Matter.
Now, you can agree with the peaceful protesters and you can agree that the police brutality is horrible.
But if you just say, I support the movement, oh, and by the way, it's not good enough.
If you're not racist, you must be anti-racist.
That sends quite a message out there, which I think is really bad messaging.
And that's my critique.
It's, you know, bad messaging for whom?
Because the majority of people, the majority of Americans, which Joe Jorgensen is trying to reach, are in agreement with the general idea of Black Lives Matter.
They're against racism.
You know, the campaign is trying to reach a broader audience than just the people that you are trying to reach.
And people who watch Andy No videos all day long and just bathe in the Marxist element of Black Lives Matter.
That's not...
It's not about the Marxist element.
It's not about the Marxist element.
It's about the violent element.
I don't care if somebody's in a room reading Das Capital and talking about how we should share the means of production.
I don't care about that.
The point still stands.
It is, I understand your point about the attacks, but when Jorgensen sends out that tweet, she's not signaling to leftists, which is what the majority of the criticism, maybe not you, but the majority of the criticism of that tweet was that she's pandering to leftists.
When in reality, the majority of America agreed with the general spirit of that tweet.
Jorgensen Tweet Backlash00:15:07
Yes, I agree with you.
They're not sophisticated.
Yes, the majority of America agrees with the idea that racism is bad.
That's why it's absurd when we're constantly lectured about how we live in a white supremacist society.
Yes, the majority of Americans are against racism.
However, there's a lot of polling data to suggest that actually the Black Lives Matter thing, shockingly, as the riots continue, is getting less and less popular.
And the truth is that people are incredibly turned off by the woke lecturing about racism.
And I don't think, like, yes, I understand the goal of the Jorgensen-Cohn campaign is to attract more people.
That's what I want them to do.
The reason I'm criticizing them is I think they're doing a very bad job of it.
So I want to go back to the Libertarian Party stuff.
I want to jump back because this is, you said that you don't know much about the Libertarian Party.
And, you know, you said, you basically said Ron Paul is the libertarian movement.
And that's just not true.
Well, no, but hold on.
What I said was that the only time we had a really substantial movement going in this country was when Ron Paul was running for president.
And I do believe that's true.
Okay.
All right.
I appreciate that clarification.
When one of the problems with the Mises caucus is that when they came into the party in 2018, they have to, I don't think that they understand everything that came before and everything that the way that they talk, the way that they message, how it turns off people that they need to build coalitions with within the party, which is part of why you're getting criticism.
When they came in, the takeover language that you just used and the takeover language that Heist continually uses, we're going to take this party over.
When in reality, most people look at the Ron Paul campaign, they look at the Ron Paul messaging, they look at the idea of the Mises caucus, and they go, yeah, I mean, I've been a libertarian since 2007.
If you asked me, are you for Austrian economics and for non-interventionism?
The answer is yes, right?
And so most people look at that and they go, well, what are you talking about when the Libertarian Party needs to be reformed into the spirit of true to libertarianism when Murray Rothbard really has captured the heart and soul of not just the movement, but the entire party?
And then you come in and start telling us we're going to take it over.
You start offending people, not you.
I'm talking about the caucus.
You start picking fights.
And then eventually the caucus now, I think the general promise of what you get, people are attracted to, right?
I'm going to restore the Libertarian Party to the idea of Ron Paul's non-interventionist campaign and Austrian economics.
People agree with that.
But then they join the Facebook group.
Then they join the different groups.
They start having conversations with people.
And they're drug into a never-ending Nixonian list of enemies that we must fight.
And that is what is starting to shed people off out of the group and also start to make people go, will you just leave us alone?
Like, you're exhausting.
We're tired of the fights.
We're tired of all the condescension that you somehow.
I just think, first of all, the Mises caucus, they have their pack.
They give money to all types of people.
They've gone to prags.
They've given money to the radicals.
They give money to all types of different people.
I don't think that it's ever been true that they come in here.
Look, again, like the situation with me.
I didn't come into the Libertarian Party looking for a fight.
Other people brought the fight to me, and I'm quite willing to have it and to win that fight.
And if you are for Murray Rothbard and Austrian economics and the Ron Paul revolution, then you should have no problem with us coming in and trying to move the party in the direction that we want to see them.
But the truth is that I don't think what you're saying is accurate.
Murray Rothbard may have captured the imagination of a lot of people or captured the belief system of a lot of people in the party.
I think that's probably very true.
I think that people at the top of the party absolutely did not want the Mises caucus to come in and start having the influence it has.
I don't think it's true.
I don't think there's any evidence to back up your assertion that this, what the way the Mises caucus is working or the way that I'm working is driving people out of the party.
All of the evidence shows that we're bringing tremendous amounts of people into the party.
I am probably the number one or number two recruiter for the Libertarian Party.
The Libertarian Party called me to see if I wanted to set up one of those pages so I get credit and get paid off all of the people that I'm recruiting because so many were telling them I'm the reason they joined.
And I turned it down because I'm not really interested in making money off of that.
I kind of see it as like a conflict of interest.
I'm like, no, if I'm telling you to do something, I'm saying I believe in this.
So let's go do it.
I declined for the same reason.
Right.
Yeah.
It just doesn't seem exactly like the right thing to do.
But so, no, I don't, I don't think what the truth is that the Mises caucus came in.
They, they recruited a lot of people, a lot of podcasters and a lot of different people in the liberty movement to join the Liberty, the Libertarian Party.
And when that happened, they were attacked and condemned with all types of smears that are not accurate.
Like Michael Heiss is a great dude.
He is not some right-winger.
He's working on decriminalized mushrooms and shit like that.
He's like a hard call, a hardcore Ron Paulian.
But to the group of people that you're talking about who do criticize me and them, Ron Paul is a racist to them too.
I mean, they think the whole thing is problematic, even though the man Ron Paul does not have a hateful bone in his body.
You could never find anything that he's ever said or voted for or supported that's even slightly racist.
You'd literally, what, I mean, they could go back to some fucking newsletters from 40 years ago.
I mean, yeah, we could.
I mean, some of that shit that Ron Paul is In Ron Paul has a bad habit of allowing people to do things in his name that are kind of ugly.
And it's happening right now at the Institute, too.
Like, would you send a new person to go look at the Ron Paul Institute news to his website right now?
Yes.
Okay.
I wouldn't.
So we disagree on that.
Why not?
Because it's conspiratorial.
Daniel McAdams never seems to find a Putin ally that he disagrees with.
And the non-interventionist.
Hold on.
So let's drill down on that because I actually heard that I took some offense to you said that you think Daniel McAdams is a Russian asset on your show.
Daniel McAdams right now is running around calling Students for Liberty in Europe a CIA asset, a CIA plant, because they're trying to expand voting rights in Belarus.
Okay, that sounds a little bit conspiratorial.
So does calling him a Russian asset.
Right.
So he also continually repeats the talking points that Abby Martin constantly pushes on Maduro, support of Maduro.
And he is anytime there is a foreign policy issue, he tends to align with Russia and with Putin's talking points.
And I think it's curious.
Oh, okay.
I mean, but that's like almost like, okay, so you could like, if we were in 2003, you could like accuse Ron Paul of being a Saddam Hussein asset because he always seems to be taking the same side as Saddam Hussein.
I mean, both of them don't want the U.S. military to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
So this is, I mean, this is like not a very strong argument.
Yes, Daniel McAdams is clearly against the U.S. Empire.
And so when they're vilifying their next potential target, he's usually on the side of saying that there's a lot of propaganda here and this isn't right.
Now, he has a view that I don't really agree with that we basically just shouldn't criticize the governments that the U.S. is targeting for whatever reason.
I don't necessarily agree with that, but I certainly see the point that he's making.
Yeah, I agree.
You can make the point, but the difference, like in the Ron Paul Institute's recent criticism of Joe Jorgensen's campaign and Adam Dick, who when he writes stuff, you have to like really fact check it.
Like your criticism of Jorgensen is totally genuine, totally valid from your perspective.
And that isn't always the case with the people that are currently writing for the Ron Paul Institute.
That's my point.
Okay.
Hold on.
Let me just, I just want to finish the last point just to make the point that I think Daniel McAdams is making, which is that if, let's say, in 2002, as there's the buildup to the war in Iraq, and you're a libertarian with like a libertarian publication, maybe you're a writer for Reason magazine, and all of a sudden you start writing all of these pieces about how illiberal Saddam Hussein is and how he's a brutal dictator and he oppresses his people and how he's the enemy of libertarians, which, you know, all is true.
It does, it seems a little bit weird.
And like the timing of that was, I could understand where a libertarian would be like, don't start doing this right now because clearly there's an agenda at work here and you don't really want to be on that side of the agenda.
So I understand that part of the argument.
Now, in terms of what you're saying about their criticism of Joe Jorgensen, are you referring to the All Lives Matter comment?
Yeah.
And I will say that McAdams' blog in 2011, by the way, was called Putin's blog.
Like he does have a track record with Putin.
Like, I'm just saying there's something off there.
And Ron Paul is a person that I respect.
And I look at this stuff and go, what?
The Jorgensen stuff, Adam Dick wrote a piece basically where Jorgensen gave an interview where she was trying to make the case that the free market will solve racism.
And that I played the clip on the show.
Yeah.
Right.
And their interpretation with a headline, which was then copied by InfoWars, was that she was saying private business owners must fire anybody who Headline said, though.
That's not what the headlines are.
We can go look at the, I'll read the headline.
The headline misinterpreted what Jorgensen was actually saying.
Okay.
Well, Chris, I mean, look, I read the article.
I know the one you're talking about.
The video was in the article.
So it's not as if they wrote something up about it drastically misleading.
I think the video said she praises a company who fires women for saying all lives matter.
Who actually clicks and reads?
That's not the point.
People don't actually click and read, which is the point of doing a misleading headline.
Well, no, if the headline is clickbaity, the point is to get people to try to click on it.
The point is not to have a clickbaity headline that people don't click on.
But the headline certainly what, listen, I'm just saying, if you're going to criticize people for misrepresenting something in the same breath, you shouldn't misrepresent it.
So if you're saying that the headline was, Joe Jorgensen says companies must fire people for saying all lives matter, I mean, you can look it up right now, but I'm Libertarian Party presidential candidate praises company for firing woman who posted all lives matter on Facebook.
Right.
That is very different than saying she said they must fire people for saying all lives matter.
And by the way, if you listen to the video, it's not really that inaccurate of a description.
Now, what we did on our show was we played the clip, we let the audience decide and said, man, it sure does sound like she's praising this company for doing this.
Now, I got to say, Chris, I mean, that is not nearly as misleading as you saying on your show that I was telling my fans to attack Joe Jorgensen for being a secret Marxist.
I mean, that seems to me like maybe, listen, I might grant you, maybe it's a touch.
Like if I was the editor there, I'd say, why don't you make the title Jorgensen Seemingly Praises Company?
That's my point.
Why would Adam Dick?
Why would the Ron Paul Institute, a libertarian think tank, take the most destructive or unforgiving version of that and make that their headline?
If we're all in the same movement together, you clearly.
So why are you saying on your podcast that I said things that I straight up never said?
People make mistakes.
I don't know.
Maybe you don't have to have the worst interpretation of it.
It does, if you listen to what Joe Jorgensen said.
How many mistakes do you need to consistently make, though?
Like this is a constant, this is what I'm talking about with the Ron Paul Institute.
It's a consistent thing.
Daniel McAdams is constantly doing the most, if you're, why would they intentionally misinterpret the Libertarian Party presidential candidate's headline if they're a libertarian?
I don't think they're intentionally misinterpreting it.
If you listen to what she said, she's listing a whole bunch of acts by the market that she is praising and she throws in there this instance as well.
I think anybody, any libertarian, like any of us, at the best case scenario, if you saw that, would be like, Joe, what are you saying?
This is insane.
Going back to what you said, when you talk out loud and do as much broadcasting as you and I do, or as Joe Jorgensen is right now, you're going to say things that don't always line up, right?
So why would we cherry pick that and highlight that and put a big red red line around it?
Because it's the virtue of that.
Because it seems insanely, like at best, insanely tone deaf.
And at worst, it seems like she is actually praising this company for doing that.
And to be honest, it wasn't really clear which one it is.
Right now in the country, okay, there are a lot of forces at work other than just the state and the state apparatus.
And the truth is that the entire right half of the country and about 50% of the left half are terrified of this kind of cancel culture thing where you can literally be just some lady and say all lives matter and be publicly humiliated and ruined.
And that's a terrible thing to happen to somebody.
And so if you come out and you bring it up and you're kind of like, yeah, I'm on the side of that happening, that is a good reason for people to want to criticize you.
And she certainly made it sound like she was saying that was a good thing.
Like, I don't know, that woman who tweeted All Lives Matter or Facebook posted All Lives Matter, maybe she was like a shitty person or maybe not at all.
Maybe she was just some lady just saying a fairly, you know, normal thing that a lot of people say.
A lot of people on the right half of the country say all lives matter.
A lot of people on the left half say black lives matter.
You don't have to have the, you know, like, I don't know.
I mean, I didn't think Joe Jorgensen should have sent out that tweet because she's running for president as the libertarian candidate.
But if some lady said Black Lives Matter and she was fired over that, I would think that was outrageous.
Sure.
CBD Dreams Sponsorship00:02:16
Yeah.
I mean, in the body, you criticize her in the body of criticism, praise.
You look at it from, you have a perspective, right?
There has not been any praise.
It's just, it seems like it's an attempt to drive down the Libertarian Party presidential vote, which is my point with it.
It's an isolated piece of criticism that just struck me as very odd in a different way than the way that you might criticize her.
I'll take exception with you criticizing her just by virtue of that I don't know that it's terribly helpful, but I see your criticism and I think that it's a valid criticism and you are trying to help.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Let me ask you.
Let me ask you, if Joe Jorgensen was praising that company, which again, it's not really clear that she wasn't, but let's just say she explicitly said this was such a great thing for this company to do to fire this woman.
Network Effect Damage00:04:01
Do you think that would be fair for us to all criticize her for and for them to write a thing?
Okay.
All right.
Well, she, it really sounded like that's what she was doing.
So by the way, I know people who are advisors to the campaign who are close with the campaign who were sending her emails like, this is a crazy messaging mistake.
It sounds like you're praising.
Like, do you think this is good?
Even people around the campaign were confused about what it is she was saying.
So I don't know.
It just doesn't seem like that big of a problem to me.
Certainly not a problem that would make me not want to send people to the Ron Paul Institute.
My criticism of the Jorgensen selection was that she can be sloppy in interviews and doing, because I didn't really follow any of the primary season.
And then we helped Lions and Reason do a couple debates and hosted them and did the tech for them.
And she has a tendency to kind of lose her train of thought and kind of wander off.
And that can be a problem as they start to get into interview season.
Yeah, well, listen, I agree.
I mean, I think the heart of the problem is that, like, look, she's just not that great of a messenger.
And that's a really big problem when really all we have is the message.
I mean, the likelihood of Joe Jorgensen getting, you know, 63 million votes and becoming the next president is, let's say, very small.
Really, what you have out of these campaigns is you want to spread a message and introduce people to these ideas in a compelling way.
And I just think that she's not the best person for that job.
Now, that being said, when she first won the nomination, I publicly congratulated her.
I had her on the show.
I still to this day praise them when they do good.
In fact, I think their campaign, I think, tweeted out like an ad that me and Malice were like going over, you know, like what the best ad for them is.
And we were, we were, you know, praising her for their Bring the Troops Home ad.
I thought was really well done.
I just think that, number one, I don't think it helps the movement at all or helps any of our own credibility if we just get into this kind of like, well, I'm not going to say anything bad about the libertarians for the whole campaign.
The reason why people like libertarians, the reason why people listen to me and you and people like us is because they count on us to tell them the truth.
And so I think that's the best thing for all of us is to continue to tell people the truth.
And number two, when you're in the middle of a full-fledged culture war and you dive into that culture war, you can't be completely tone deaf.
And you have to be aware of the possibility that you're going to turn off an entire side of that culture war, which I don't think is a good idea.
So I guess my pushback on that would be that, again, that network effect, one of the biggest, one of the biggest, like over the last three weeks, specifically since your criticism of Jorgensen, whenever we are libertarians, for instance, post something pro-Jorgensen or any, you know, anything with Spike or Joe, all of the sudden it is hundreds of comments of how they're horrible candidates.
People shouldn't vote for them.
And don't you see that that in and of itself is probably more damaging to the movement or to her vote totals?
This is somebody that you support choosing to criticize her in the middle of a campaign, that network effect ultimately does more damage.
So is it, does it do more damage to her if I criticize her than if I shut up and don't say anything negative to her?
Probably.
Yeah, like probably it does.
But if I'm criticizing her for like legitimate reasons and the people who are listening to me or who I influence are also criticizing them for legitimate reasons, then I don't know.
Like that's, that's tough.
Culture War Narrative Loss00:15:00
This is this is grown-up business.
You're running to be president of the United States of America.
But people.
Go ahead, sorry.
No, well, the people who are like listen to, say, the podcast when I had Spike Cohen on.
I mean, I didn't like, I don't think I was unfair.
I pushed him a few times on a few questions.
Other than that, I pretty much like, we talked about a lot of areas we agree.
And I let him make his position or argue his position.
I will say, I only agreed to come on because I listened to the Spike episode and I thought you were very fair and you were very nice to him.
Yeah, I mean, I listen, I'm like this with everybody.
Yeah.
Listen, I don't believe, I'm all for like having a debate, or if there's somewhere where we disagree, like hammering it out, but I've never treated a single guest who I've had on the show poorly, with the maybe the exception of Sarwak, who I was pretty aggressive with him, but it was a little bit personal between us.
And even him, I was friendly with him.
By the end of the show, we had a nice conversation off air.
It's not like, it wasn't like a, you know, like, I don't know.
I don't, I, I believe treating my guests kindly when they're on the show.
Also, the difference with Sarwak was it was like billed as a debate, like we're gonna hammer these things out here.
Um, but yeah, I mean, look, a lot of people didn't like the messaging that they heard from Spike.
And I gotta say, I understand why.
I understand why.
Look, there is this kind of whatever you want to call it, like the kind of social justice-y, progressive narrative that really dominates our society.
It is the narrative that you hear coming out of both political parties.
You hear it out of the entire corporate press, you hear it out of every major corporation, you hear it in academia, you hear it in Hollywood.
And there's a lot of people who are really over it and they think it's bullshit.
And I kind of tend to agree with them that it is.
You know, Spike Cohen had a Facebook post the other day about how we're watching the beginning of a transgender genocide.
I mean, it literally, it was like my reaction when I saw that post was I was like, oh, what a garbage post.
So misleading, so dishonest.
So, you know, and he said basically there's like, there's been like 25 transgender people who are murdered this year, and that was the number for last year.
So, we basically, the amount of transgender people who have been killed this year has already equaled last year, and we're only in August.
So, he has this long post about how cisgender people have no idea what it's like to be murdered for who they are, but transgender people are being murdered for who they are.
2020 will be remembered for us watching the beginning of a transgender genocide.
And it's like, dude, he provides no evidence that these 25 people were murdered because they were trans, just that 25 trans people were murdered.
The crime rate is way up across the country.
The number of transgender people who identify as transgender goes up every year.
This could easily account for what we're seeing.
And to say 25 people being murdered is the beginning of a genocide is just all it.
It's like to people who are sick of this narrative, that shit turns them off.
And I understand why it turns me off.
I don't like lying in order to kind of seem like the good guy.
That's a common, but that's a common thing that the Mises crowd does is they take a difference of opinion and call it lying.
Heis does this to me personally.
We had, you know, he calls me a liar and he calls me a leftist because we had a personal disagreement two years ago and I didn't even realize he was still mad about it.
Like, you know, you hold on.
Let me just make this point and then, and then you can talk about the Spike thing because my point on that is that Spike is probably not lying.
Why not pick up the phone and call Spike?
You know, why not call him and say, these are my concerns?
You could get a hold of Spike Cohen, please.
I mean, you want grace for what you say, but you're not willing to extend that to Spike Cohen, who is not the most radical Libertarian Party presidential vice presidential candidate we've had in the time I've been in the party since Benaric.
Okay, fine.
There's not too much competition for that, but I'll agree with you guys.
No, I'm totally in agreement.
I rejoined because I looked at his YouTube channel.
I'm like, we're in agreement on the marketing stuff, right?
Like when I put together, we're putting together this project on libertarianism, and I went through all these YouTube videos, like tens of thousands of YouTube videos, trying to find the right stuff.
When I looked, I found all this great Harry Brown talking about issues.
There's nothing from Harry Brown until Spike Cohen and Joe Jorgensen in terms of good policy prescriptions, good messaging that stands the test of time because the party presidential candidate is the only time any of our friends and family care about libertarianism.
That's the only time anybody asked me about that.
So it does matter.
I totally agree with you on that.
But why elevate that and open Spike up for scorn when you could just call him on the phone and privately say, like, hey, dude, I want you to understand my perspective and the people that I generally talk to.
Here's how this comes across.
Have you thought about that?
And plus, you also got these other things inaccurate.
Well, I mean, truthfully speaking, I don't have a relationship with Spike like that.
I've had one conversation ever with him, and that was when he was on my podcast.
And it seems pretty clear to me that he does not see the cultural views the way I do.
And so the reason I'm bringing it up is literally in direct response to you saying, look, there are all these people who are turned off by Spike Cohen.
And I'm explaining the reason why and giving a little glimpse of why it is that the way he's messaging turns people off.
Now, what people in, if they, if people want to have a big liberty movement again, like we did under Ron Paul, what people are going to have to understand, and this is going to be a bitter pill for a lot of the more left libertarians to swallow, is that you're going to have to find a way to not turn off the entire right wing of the liberty movement, if you will.
Ron Paul, by the way, was perfect at this.
And because of that, they all call him names.
Ron Paul was perfect.
Ron Paul was kind of like, hey, you can have your identity as like a bleeding heart leftist, or you can have your identity as like a social conservative.
And I've got a pure libertarian message that can appeal to both of you guys.
When Spike makes posts like this, he tells, he literally eliminates half of the audience.
In fact, I think a lot more than half.
Because truthfully speaking, I think there is a reason why every libertarian outside of the LP who runs for politics runs on the Republican Party.
I actually think it's really bad politics to turn off the entire group of people who are revolting against this dominant intersectional narrative in favor of the ones who are adopting it, because I think there's a lot less people who are going to be sympathetic to our message in that group.
And this is kind of a point that, you know, I know I'm sure you've criticized me and Tom for making, but we will point out the fact that of those loser brigade types who are criticizing us, none of them have a following to speak of.
And they hate every libertarian pretty much who's got a big following.
And that is, I think that in itself should show you that like, yeah, you know what?
Maybe if we want to have a movement at all, we're going to have to have some voices who are more in that camp.
But part of the reason, though, is that out of the Ron Paul movement, it was Tom Woods, it was the Mises crowd that got into social media, got into new media before anybody else did.
I mean, that was, and the Ron Paul campaign inspired a lot of that media.
But Ron Paul's message was, again, foreign policy and Austrian economics.
It was not cultural issues in the way that we're talking about it.
And if you go and look at, go look at the playlists on Mises on their YouTube channel.
In 2013, it's Austrian economics, it's foreign policy.
And then over time, especially through the Trump era, it shifts towards cultural issues.
And I think our focus and our constant conversation, and I've definitely been guilty of this because we talk current events and we want to talk what everybody else is talking about, trying to help people understand their reality.
Our focus on cultural issues as Trump has made cultural issues so much more predominant is what's turning people off.
Okay, so I think.
The message of libertarianism appeals to everybody.
It doesn't just appeal to right-leaning people.
No, and I never said it just appeals to right-leaning people.
And that's why I go on shows like Jimmy Doer and Joe Rogan and Ben Burgess's show.
That's why I go on these shows, because of course it can appeal to those people too.
Here's the thing.
If you say the Mies Institute in 2013, 2014, you know, 2012, they're purely talking foreign policy, Austrian economics, all of these issues.
And then there's kind of a change around, you know, the last few years.
Well, truthfully speaking, I mean, they still majority focus on those issues.
But yes, there might be a little bit more stuff involved.
But that it's like, yeah, take a look around.
The cultural issues have become much more dominant in the conversation today.
And that's not a complete coincidence from the fact that, you know, the empire is crumbling and they'd like to get people focused on this other stuff.
But I think it's completely inaccurate for you to say that Trump created this.
Trump was a result of this.
And that's a very important distinction.
What happened in Obama's second term?
And I'm not saying Obama did this.
I'm just saying in those four years of his second term, was that the social justice warriors of the country turned it up to 11 in a way that would have seemed crazy even the years before this?
There's Jonathan Height has done a really great job of covering this, and he traces it all back to right around 2013.
There was this, you did not, before that year, you did not see college students medicalizing why right-wing speakers could not speak on campus.
I'm saying you saw them protesting it, but you didn't see them saying, I'm the victim of assault or trauma because this person spoke.
You did not see people being fired from their jobs, regular people, not like people in the spotlight, fired from their jobs for saying really benign things that just might be a little bit culturally to the right.
You did not see people getting kicked off of social media.
You didn't see voices being, this is a new phenomenon.
The culture war has been brought to us libertarians, whether we like it or not.
Now, there is, so, so Trump is in many ways a response to this, a response.
So, look, what happened was the first black president in the United States of America got re-elected.
Barack Obama got elected and then re-elected.
And then white people around the country started being lectured about how horrible and racist they are.
And there's been a huge backlash to that.
And that backlash has taken the form of a huge orange middle finger in Donald Trump.
Now, at this point, right, look, if you look, like, I don't like to talk about race on this show.
I've done, I've like, I've said this for years, and everyone who listens to me knows this.
The right-wingers, the hardcore right-wingers who listen to me are constantly pissed off at me because I won't talk about more of the cultural stuff and the race stuff that they want me to.
But try being a political commentator today while there's this Black Lives Matter mass protest, mass riot across the country, and don't talk about race.
That's why it's pretty much impossible.
I always laugh when people accuse me of pandering to the left.
Like, I go, do you really think that it's more popular for me to stay because I largely agreed with Spike Cohen?
Like, when I listened to your episode with him, he and I are very much in line on a lot of these issues, build coalitions around classic libertarian issues like ending mandatory minimums, qualified immunity, these sorts of things.
Do you think that it's more beneficial to my brand to go out and talk about racial justice in the middle of this environment?
Like, I'm going to take a stand just like you.
And, you know, a lot of people have taken, have given me shit for it.
But I think it's necessary to have that conversation.
The reality with the culture war stuff is that one of my concerns is that we have lost.
Like, if you go back and spend some time watching some of the Harry Brown stuff, we've lost a lot of what made that 90s libertarianism special.
That Ron Paul, you watch his videos, stuff that made that special, the 88 campaign, how principled that was when he ran.
We've kind of lost sight of some of those issues that started to speak across the cultures because I think we're narrowing too much in on the culture wars because it is, it is all around us.
I don't agree that Trump is just a byproduct.
I do think that Trump has definitely made a choice in smashing that button, driving people crazy.
He does, he does use sort of the alt-right idea of I'm going to do things that make the opposition crazy that only they understand.
So when they react, I can just go, look at all these nut jobs over here.
Look at how bad they are.
You know, I do think that he does bear some responsibility for the amount of culture wars.
But you're right.
It was, we were talking about the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxism and cancel culture back in 2014 through all of this stuff.
I have definitely evolved on it over time as I've had different life experiences and gone out and talked to different people.
A lot of my shows, I don't agree with myself.
I am the least consistent motherfucker.
You know, so when I go back and listen to some of the old stuff, I'm just like, I see it differently now because of these experiences that I'm having talking with other people.
I'm on a podcast where with a comedian, Miss Pat, where I'm constantly debating a socialist and Miss Pat, and it's made me think, all right, where am I right?
Where am I wrong?
Like having those conversations has made me break outside of my bubble a little bit.
And so, you know, I think we're getting too deep into the culture wars.
And that is partially why we're having trouble connecting with voters.
Well, see, I see it in a very different way.
I think that culture is what actually moves voters.
And as much as we would like it to be monetary policy or something like that, the truth is most people in red states vote red because that's the culture around them.
And most people in blue states vote blue because that's the culture around them.
And we've got to find a way.
And for sure, we've got to be delicate with it and try to be precise and still insert a libertarian message and try to find some way where we can rise above the culture war and actually appeal to groups on both sides and say, hey, look, we have something to offer you.
Rising Above Culture Wars00:11:49
We have something to offer you.
This is the most principled compromise position that you can find, which is basically just that you're free to be as left-wing as you want to be.
You're free to be as right-wing as you want to be.
You can't force it on each other.
And that is kind of the libertarian puzzle that we're trying to solve with all of this.
But, you know, what I think is not helpful is when somebody like, I don't know, me, is willing to go into some of these more controversial areas and then it immediately gets misrepresented or just, you know, in many ways, in the most dishonest of ways.
I mean, like, there, you know, I look, even your podcast host said on one of the shows that I listened to that I said that race realism is real, which, first of all, I don't exactly know what that means.
I mean, if race realism isn't real, then it's not realism.
So I, but what I said, what I actually said, he said that I said it was a scientific fact, that I said race realism.
Oh, he's talking about talking about Molyneux.
And you don't understand.
Yeah, I know what you quote.
What I said was that, look, I think that the fact that there are average differences in IQs across race is a scientific fact.
We really don't know what leads to that from the experts I've spoken to.
They said anybody who's telling you it's this percent genetic and this percent environmental, we really have no clue what leads to exactly what is what causes IQ differences and that we do know that some environmental factors help it.
So let's focus on that.
That's more or less what I said.
I've never done a podcast on race and IQ.
I really stay away from the subject.
I'm not particularly interested in talking about it.
Why do you stay away from the subject?
I mean, you know that what you said is problematic.
Like, don't you what's problematic about what I said?
Do you don't understand how that's going to be taken?
That particular idea.
I don't care.
What did I say that's wrong?
I don't know.
I don't know enough about it to argue with you about it, but I know that it's going to be taken, you know, like, okay.
Right.
I know it makes you uncomfortable.
I get it.
It makes you uncomfortable.
It's an uncomfortable thing.
You're collectivizing people and applying IQs to groups of people.
Like that is.
I'm not applying IQs to groups of people at all.
I'm commenting on something that is a scientific fact.
I'm not saying that it's not due to environmental conditions.
Quite possibly it is.
The reason why I don't do entire podcasts about it is because I don't think it's particularly helpful.
If it's not, listen, all we can control is environmental situations anyway.
So let's focus on that.
Let's focus on what we know will help the situation.
And what we know will help the situation are libertarian policies.
If we want to help black people, we need to end the war on drugs, end the welfare state.
We need to like, these are the things that are going to actually make the situation better.
We as libertarians know that the situation will be better than it is now without these policies.
So that's what I focus on.
But my point is that if I go into, like I said one time on a on a podcast, I said that, and I guess maybe because I'm a Jew, I feel a little bit freer to speak on these things.
But I said, and I was responding to Ben Shapiro calling out, I think Nick Fuentes or someone like that for being a Holocaust denier.
And the video that he cited was seemed to me to be kind of tongue-in-cheek, but I don't know.
I don't really know every view Nick Fuentes has.
Maybe he's a Holocaust denier.
But what I said, and this is my libertarian take on it, is I go, you know, it's kind of funny to watch one of these war hawks accuse someone else of denying a genocide in 1945.
And then that's supposed to be so morally outrageous while you advocate for genocides going on today that you know are happening right now.
And somehow that's not supposed to be more morally outrageous than the previous one.
And I said, I don't really care if someone else doesn't believe the Holocaust happened.
I know that it happened.
It's almost like if someone to me were to say, I don't believe that you're a podcaster.
Like, okay, fine.
Like, what, what, what effect does this have on reality?
However, if someone is advocating the genocide in Yemen right now, I'd be like, yeah, no, that's actually a really big problem.
So this is more or less what I said.
And then this gets taken as Dave praises Holocaust deniers.
I mean, it's like, so like, so that type of shit to me is not, you know, that ain't going to help anything.
And I just find it to be dishonest.
Sure.
But that happens on the other side, right?
Like that, that's like you and I both know that you watch, just in the coming days, they'll take something I say out of this podcast and it will be for years.
It will be some joke or it will be, and I've seen it happen when other people come on your show, right?
Or when you debate Star Wars, right?
Like Star Wars an idiot for saying the Cheney thing and rightly deserves to be teased for it.
But it becomes, it doesn't become an intellectual exercise of refuting him for why that's wrong, which is what you do.
You try to lead and say, like, don't just sit there and mock the guy.
Here's why you're wrong.
Here's why I disagree.
It becomes an exercise of, it's right.
Again, it's like what Malice talks about with the alt-right.
It's that mercurial, like joking, mocking manner.
And when I mentioned in that clip earlier about cancel culture, that's what I'm talking about, right?
Like Malice's book, The New Right, was a great exercise in interviewing Taylor and refuting his ideas in the pages.
And he never, through the alt-right, dismisses or demeans anybody.
He refutes their ideas with other ideas and explains why this person, oh, Taylor had never thought about this particular thing, right?
That's what I'd love to see happen more and more in the liberty movement.
That's one of the reasons I wanted to come here, knowing that that 10% of your audience that's nuts is going to elevate me for scorn and make me a scapegoat.
And this is the, this guy is the reason that the Libertarian Party is not successful and that bullshit, because I think there's enough rational people in the 80 or 90% of your audience that will go, more of these types of conversations need to happen, right?
Like more of the Kokesh and Dave or Spangle and Dave or whomever, you know, here's where I'm coming at.
How are you coming at it?
You know, there's stuff that, because that happens all the time, right?
That gotcha mentality that we have of, you know, I hate it, right?
Like I'm, I'm with you on the Shipley stuff, but you have, but what I'm trying to get on this stuff, I'm with you on the Shipley stuff because that's the behavior, that loser, that loser brigade mentality, right?
Like Dave said this, Dave did that, here's why he's bad.
I hate that mentality, but I'm trying to say to the other side that does it too, like we're on the precipice of libertarianism generationally, like exit polling here in Indiana, the libertarian candidate gets 10% when the final vote total is 1%.
Like in Gen Z and millennials, we're wildly libertarian.
Like we're on the precipice of victory, but we're going to totally lose that if we continue to constantly fight each other and turn people off with all this bullshit, man.
Well, 10% in one demographic is not exactly the precipice of victory, but I appreciate your optimistic thinking.
I certainly hope that's the case.
Look, I don't, I get what you're saying.
There's certainly people who are shitty on Twitter.
And I will say, don't do that.
I don't think I don't like that culture in general.
You know, it kind of is a reality.
I don't know what we can do.
I would certainly say to anybody listening, don't be shitty to Chris on the internet after this.
It's, you know, he, I respect you coming on and having this conversation.
I very much respect you apologizing when you got something wrong.
So I think like there's no need for anybody to name caller be shitty.
That being said, when Nicholas Sarwak comes on the podcast and says that if Dick Cheney is the nominee, we should vote for him.
And then pretty much says, even if it was Adolf Hitler, well, here's why it might still be a good idea to vote for him.
And then he's going to go out and criticize other libertarians publicly.
If the response to that is to mock him as the guy who supported Hitler, I get why people want to do that.
I mean, in some cases, it is more justified than it is in others.
But that being said, yeah, we could all be nicer.
I think that a lot of people are, you know, there is tremendous anger in the country right now on all sides.
And the more right-wing side that you see getting angry online, I think people are really furious with the fact that they are constantly lectured, put down, and at risk, genuinely at risk, if they are to speak their mind publicly in any way.
I mean, part of the reason why the right-wingers have so many... anonymous accounts is because it is legitimately dangerous to your livelihood to be a right-winger on social media these days.
I mean, if you say the wrong thing, just like that woman who got fired for saying all lives matter, you're, and so now I'm not saying that every manifestation of that anger is justified, but I certainly understand why they're angry.
And I understand why a lot of left-wingers are angry about stuff as well.
Yeah.
I mean, if you, if you sit down and talk to people who are on the left, they'd argue that cancel culture has always existed.
And especially if you're a minority, a person of color, a woman, like that as white men, we're now starting to experience that same thing.
We fucking hate it.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I just like, I really don't like those narratives.
And I got to say, white men are not just starting to experience oppression.
White men are not just starting to experience hard times.
The idea that history has been nothing but easy for white men.
And now all these things are.
You just said that cancel culture is now ramping up and starting, like the right is starting to experience what's going on.
That's what the Dixie chicks got it in 2003 when the Republicans were using cancel culture.
Yes.
They're quite white, as I recall.
Yeah.
It is a phenomenon that happens constantly.
And it's a function of us trying to manage things from the top instead of looking at local solutions and managing up.
Like that should be our message.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I don't agree.
I don't disagree with that.
I think, yes, bottom up is always better than top down.
And absolutely.
I mean, cancel culture of different varieties has existed as long as you, you know, go try being anti-war during the Woodrow Wilson administration.
You'll find out about some hardcore cancel culture right there.
But so I certainly agree with that.
Listen, we are at the end of our time.
So I will say I really appreciate the conversation.
I'm down to do it again if there's more stuff that you want to hammer out.
Please let my audience know one more time where they can follow you and your websites and social media and all that stuff.
Yeah, feel free to follow me.
It's WeirLibertarians.com and libertyexplained.com.