Spike Cohen critiques the 2020 Libertarian Party's failure to win, citing a lack of central themes like ending lockdowns and ineffective messaging on systemic racism. He contrasts the party's slow response to January 6th with its quick condemnation of BLM riots, arguing this perceived capitulation alienated voters. Cohen also denounces Joe Jorgensen's brief inclusion of Alan Dershowitz as a Supreme Court nominee, calling him a "uniquely terrible pick" due to his support for the death penalty and war on drugs. Ultimately, Cohen asserts that libertarians must move beyond "losing admirably" by adopting bold, unapologetic strategies to address government overreach and culture wars. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Running for Vice President00:05:37
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You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash 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 be joined by Spike Cohen, who was, of course, the vice presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party in 2020.
How are you, brother?
I'm doing good, man.
How are you doing?
Very good.
Very good.
Happy to be talking with you.
So last time I had you on the show was during the campaign.
The campaign's over now, of course.
I'm curious, and I'm sure we'll talk a lot about, you know, the political stuff, but I'm curious just on a personal level, what's this experience been like for you running for vice president?
It was a very challenging and I'm not even sure how to describe it.
It was definitely very challenging.
It was very rewarding.
I got to meet liberty activists across the country.
It was, I learned a lot about what I don't think should be done in the future, whether by me or anyone else.
I learned a lot about what was done well.
And I got to make a lot of great connections with people to do liberty messaging stuff that we're already working on for this year and moving forward.
So, I mean, all in all, it was a good thing.
I certainly would, if I could do it all over again, I certainly would.
You know, I don't think anyone can say that we're happy with the results.
You know, it was weird.
The day after the election, you know, I find out we get what, 1.3%, whatever.
And people are calling me and congratulating me.
And I'm like, hey, thanks.
Why?
Why are you congratulating me?
And they'd say, oh, you know, you got the second highest number of votes ever for a libertarian.
And, you know, you did the best that we've ever done during a presidential reelection cycle.
And it's the first time the Libertarian Party got third place in all 50 states.
I'm like, we got 1.3%.
And they're like, yeah, but if you think about it, and I'm like, okay, no, so that's, and that's why, you know, going into this year, I'm focusing on, I think that we do have a, we need to try to move out of the era of losing admirably and actually look at how we can win.
We're probably not, we're not ready to win at the White House, but win the elections we can win, local and regional races, upscale that just enough to maybe win some congressional races and actually like begin doing the things we want to do.
But my personal experience with the campaign, it was awesome.
I mean, how often do you get to drive around in a bus with your name on it and go and talk to people about liberty across the country?
35 states, 75 campaign stops, tens of thousands of people from Maine down to New Hampshire down to California and everywhere in between.
It was amazing.
Yeah, I'd imagine that would be like the really cool part about it.
And I've never run for any type of office or anything like that, but I know doing, you know, doing like Pork Fest and doing the Contra Cruise and doing, you know, Mises University and like, and then also at a certain point, all of my stand-up shows just kind of became libertarian things.
I was going to say, there's probably a similar overlap there.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's, it's, but it's really great when you're a libertarian who's, you're kind of used to all of us used to being in this world where you're around not libertarians.
And it's cool when you're in a group of them and you're actually around like-minded people.
And it's like, oh man, yeah, like everyone's right here on the same level.
Like, oh, yeah, we all kind of get this stuff.
Was there anything just personally?
Like, I know Ron Paul, who always was a happy warrior and really seemed to enjoy campaigning, but like his thing was like he hated sleeping in hotels.
And like that was just like, he goes, oh, that's just brutal.
Was there any like thing that was the most challenging for you?
You know what?
I like traveling.
I fall asleep like a baby on airplanes and stuff.
Like it's probably mild narcolepsy, but no, so I not really, you know, I think the biggest challenge was just trying to do everything.
And, you know, there were things that slipped through the cracks.
Like, you know, I often, especially at the beginning, wasn't as on top of my social media as I should have been because I went from being at home like I am now, you know, pretty much 24, seven, able to post whenever I want to, to after the convention, the in-person convention in Orlando, I was home, I think, a total of like 10 days from then till after election day.
And so it was sort of this very quick, like, now you got to go everywhere.
So I think just the adjustment was the hardest thing.
But no, I liked it.
I, I, I, I, uh, I got to travel across the country, a bunch of states I'd never been to before, um, got to be on a bus, got to travel.
I ran up a lot of frequent flyer miles going around the country.
Um, I like traveling.
So I'd say, um, and I also like, I thrived on doing stuff on, especially that last month, doing stuff on very little sleep.
I was on fumes, just going from event to event.
I'd take naps on the van in between events and stuff like that.
So, no, I kind of live, it was sort of like, you know, that whole like, how often do you get to pretend you're a rock star for a few months?
Like, I liked it.
I really enjoyed it, actually.
The Debate Stage Strategy00:08:18
So I, you, you touched on there for a minute and I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that, uh, the, the reaction from people to the results of the campaign.
And, you know, there, the real, there are two sides to it, right?
Because everything is, is relative.
Um, and so I get, you know, I kind of get both sides.
And I made a video after the campaign was over talking about it.
And the first thing I did say was, because how can you not?
Like, it is kind of crazy and impressive to get what I don't know what the vote total ended up coming out to be, but it was over a million and a half people, right?
It was, it was either just over, just over, just under, I forget which, 2 million.
That was like, it was like 1.9 or 2.1 or whatever something.
Okay.
So, I mean, even that, you know, leaving all the other stuff aside, that is pretty incredible.
Like 2 million people voting for a libertarian candidate.
You have to, you know, if you're just, you know, like, I understand where anyone would be like, hey, that's pretty great.
And it really is.
Like, that's amazing that 2 million people, you know, voted for you and Joe to run this thing or whatever.
We probably wouldn't want to run this thing, but you know what I mean.
But I also understand the point that you're making, that there is this culture within the Libertarian Party of accepting losing.
And that's been, that's, that's because we always lose, you know?
And so it's, it's, there's two sides to it.
It's a reinforcing thing.
So there's this pattern, especially for the national, the national runs and to a lesser extent for like gubernatorial runs and stuff like that.
Although it seems like with gubernatorial runs, there's more of a, of a conviction to actually make the steps to try to win, but not always.
For the national, for the White House run, we have this cycle of saying, we're going to run someone and they're going to get into office and they're going to do all these amazing things.
And the way we're going to do it is we're going to leverage the media and we're going to get on the debate stage and then we're going to, we're going to convert so many people over that we're going to win and that we're going to be in office.
And then when we get 1%, 3%, half a percent, 2%, you know, whatever.
We've actually never gotten 2% with the Gary and Bill was the first time we got more than 1%.
whenever we get this incredibly low single digit number, we go, well, the system's rigged against us.
And then we repeat the four year cycle of how we're going to use the system to win this time.
And it's like at some point, I believe that, you know, I've been in business for almost 23 years now.
And what I've learned is that you can either win at something, you can either learn from how you didn't win so that you can retool and try to win or do better in the future, or you can refuse to find out why you didn't do as well as you would have wanted to do, why you didn't win.
And that's the losing.
Losing is when you don't even learn from what happened and try to retool.
And so that's why, you know, I started a show called Culture of Winning, where I talked to libertarians who have actually gotten elected to office to kind of demystify the idea of libertarians getting elected, number one.
Number two, talking to them about how they actually won their races.
And some of these were very hard-fought races, two-way races in deep red and deep blue districts.
And then from there, try to figure out a blueprint for how we can duplicate that.
What did they do to win their races?
How can we do that in other areas?
How can we scale it up so that a city council race becomes a city council win or a state legislative win can become a congressional win?
If we aren't trying to retool and figure out how to win and how to get our message in front of more people, because our ideas always win.
We just have to get them in front of people.
If we aren't doing that, if instead we're constantly doing this cycle of shooting for the moon with no real strategy, not really getting anything, blaming the system and then waiting another four years to do it again, we're never going to get anywhere.
Yeah.
No, I agree with you.
And I'll tell you, I've seen a lot of people, really good libertarians, who are always kind of hoping for this long shot.
This thing will happen and then everything will pay off.
And I'm very skeptical of it.
Like I saw, I was in a private group with people who were like telling me that they really, they really wished we could get Tulsi Gabbard to join the Libertarian Party.
And I was kind of like, well, I don't know.
I mean, she's not a libertarian and she's like the best, she's the best Democrat.
So maybe she should be over there trying to make the Democrats a little bit better.
And if she were to abandon her support of like Medicare for all or, you know, whatever other left wing control.
But if she were to abandon all of that and like become a gold bug or something like that, okay, we might like her a little bit more.
But what is that actually going to like increase her influence?
Maybe it's good that she's, she could be a Democrat on all those other issues, but she's pretty good on the war issue.
You know, like maybe we can't hope for this outside person to come in and be a libertarian that we actually have to grow our ideas and kind of convince people that we're the ones, you know, to like, again, if Tulsi Gabbard really read for a new liberty and it all resonated with her and she was a hardcore libertarian now, I mean, I'd be all for that.
I'm just saying it's like, it's probably not going to be this silver bullet where like big name comes over.
It is an interesting dichotomy within the liberty movement that we are at once opposed to the kind of strongman ideology that one or two people are going to fix anything.
But then at the same time, many of us are waiting for that big person that's going to come in and save us from ourselves.
And the problem with that, when we're constantly looking outside of our own organization for our savior to save us from ourselves, the message we're sending to grassroots activists who are doing the hard work to get into offices and to help others get into offices and to work their way up through the party and to try to help grow the party at the grassroots level, the message we're sending to them is you are wasting your time.
We're never going to take you seriously because we don't take ourselves seriously.
What you should do is use the cheat code of running as a Republican or Democrat and getting away from all the ballot access problems and getting some of that taxpayer money for your campaign.
And then we'll take you seriously.
And then, and then there were plenty of libertarians I've met that if they ran as a Republican or Democrat, they'd easily win their race.
That's the whole point is we're trying to smash the system they've created, but we also can't do it using their system.
I will say this: if we can get on the debate stage, then that will be a big growth for us.
We saw Ricky Harrington in Arkansas and we saw Donald Rainwater in Indiana.
They got on the debate stage and they got way better results than most of the other people running in similar races.
But you have to have a certain level of support to even qualify in the polling to get on the debate stage in the first place.
We're not going to get from 1.3% to debate stage without doing some serious work in the meantime.
Yeah.
Well, I agree with that.
I also think that you have to have the right person to go on the debate stage.
I've told this, I've told this story before on the podcast, but there was one time during the 2016 election, and I believe it was there.
I think it was Cato had put out an article about like, if only Gary Johnson could get on the debate stage, he would do this and that.
And I was talking to Kennedy.
This is back when we actually used to get to do Kennedy in person and it wasn't in person.
Yeah.
Before we were doing Kennedy on Zoom.
Yeah.
Right.
So we were in the green room.
And I was saying to her at one point, we were talking about it.
And I was like, I don't know.
I was like, is Gary Johnson?
You know, he had had a few blunders already.
And I was like, is Gary Johnson getting on the debate stage really going to help us that much?
Or could this end up going bad?
Because like, if he just sticks his tongue out and starts talking, like, this may not be a good look.
And we're talking about it.
And I go to Kennedy.
I was like, I mean, he was on the debate stage in 2012 when he was running as a Republican.
And Kennedy goes to me.
She goes, no, I don't think Gary Johnson was on that debate.
And I was like, no, no, no, he was.
And we argued back and forth for a minute.
She's like, no, I don't remember.
So I'm pulling out my phone and I pull up the clip and I'm like, look here, it's Gary Johnson on a Fox News debate.
And Kennedy didn't even remember that he participated in that.
Gary Johnson's Blunders00:02:00
Okay.
So just to give you perspective, Kennedy, the libertarian at Fox News, had forgotten because it was so unremarkable that Gary Johnson was in the debates.
So I do agree with you that getting in the debates would be good, but you got to have someone there who's going to do a really good job when they're there.
Like I would have loved to see you in the VP debates.
Just my opinion, no one else's.
I don't know what Joe would have done next to Trump and Joe Biden.
I will say this.
If you look at that total mess, that total, I don't even, I mean, Dempster Fire is so overused that, but it really, really does well describe that first debate between Trump and Biden.
I think anyone standing between them, I think people wanted to vote for Chris Wallace for president just because he was sitting there going, guys, please, enough.
Like, please stop yelling.
Like, someone, please say something of value.
I think even just anyone, honestly, anyone, any placeholder just standing there saying, I have an actual solution to the question you just asked, I think would have done well.
You know, but that's different than saying who would have been the ideal person, but that's for sure.
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Speaking from Strength00:15:34
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I will say that I really didn't like the messaging of let her speak.
And I understand that people want to be in the debates, but I also think that libertarians gotta, we gotta kind of realize that we can't be out here begging to participate in their club.
And if they won't have us in their club, I mean, I think you were right when you said it before.
We have to get so big and so undeniable that they need us, that they need us almost for ratings.
And then our response should be like, if you invite us to that debate, I will consider it.
You know, like we should be coming from a place of strength.
And I just thought that that hit all of the wrong notes.
Like, like, let her speak.
It's like, no, she, she can speak and she should be speaking on her own.
But anyway, whatever.
That's just my own.
Yeah.
So let her speak actually started as a grassroots thing.
It was outside of the campaign.
And then the campaign seeing all this support for it was like, yeah, okay, well, we'll get behind that.
Yeah, I, and it's tough because I know a lot of the people behind Let Her Speak that did some incredible work getting the message out there and everything.
I will say specifically as to the actual message, it struck me as like kind of like, like you said, please let us participate as opposed to speaking from a position of strength, especially for when you're running for president.
It's for many people, incorrectly, people want to vote for someone they think is strong, even though their job is to preside over an organization.
It's not, you know, to rule the country.
But that's, that's the perception we've been given.
You know, they want to vote for someone who's perceived as being strong.
And it was kind of an odd way of doing it.
But I mean, one of the biggest problems the campaign had, I've heard you and others say, you know, well, you should have had the lockdowns as your central message and you didn't.
And I said, well, we didn't have anything as our central message.
We went out with sort of all libertarian talking points, but we didn't pick one or two things and hammer away on those things.
And the problem with that is that only helps if everyone's already predisposed to supporting you because then they can pick that thing that you said that they agree with and go, see, that's their message.
That's what they're doing.
But if someone's predisposed not to support you or doesn't know what to think and they hear something they don't like, then they go, that's what your main message is.
And it's like, no, that's just one of many things that we're saying.
But that was a failure in strategy.
And I was saying, you know, at least going into the summer, I would say, you know, I felt like that's what needed to be done.
When you're not at the top of the ticket, there's a limit to what you can do.
I can control my messaging.
I can control what I'm saying to people.
I can go to Miami and, you know, have a respond to having our venue shut down by having an illegal anti-protest rally and salsa party out in the middle of Cayocho in Miami.
But at the end of the day, I'm the bottom of the ticket.
So not only can I not control what the narrative is from the campaign, I'm not going to get nearly the same attention as the top of the ticket would get doing something like that.
Sure, sure.
Absolutely.
That's understandable.
You know, I've actually, I've thought about it a bit and I don't have a strong opinion on it one way or the other, because of course, like I'm, I prefer that you were the VP on this race than Jorgensen just picking whoever was her VP.
But I just wonder structurally if it isn't a little bit of a weird system, the way the Libertarian Party does it, where you have a situation where like you, you ran with Vernon, you know, and then you're kind of picked as the VP and she's picked as the presidential candidate.
And it's like, okay, you guys are thrown together now.
Like even whether you guys probably have even know each other or if you do, if you've ever, you know, it's like, it's just kind of a strange system and it's a.
it's a difficult position, I'm sure, that you're put into where if when you are the vice president, I mean, your role is always going to be to some degree support, you know?
And if you disagree with something coming out of the top of the ticket, obviously you're handcuffed to how much you can say, hey, I completely disagree with doing it this way, you know, and like, so it creates kind of a weird situation.
The thing to me about the messaging, I mean, there's, there's lots of things, but I remember watching, this would just like drive me crazy.
And I, and this was never true about you.
And I think possibly because me and you, like, we're both podcasters and you kind of have to put out content a lot and you live in the news of what's going on right now.
What's the latest story?
What's happening now?
But I remember watching speeches like stunt speeches that Joe would give that were, I mean, there's like libertarian talking point after libertarian talking point, but literally could have been given in 1997.
I mean, I'm talking about had no application to what was going on in 2020.
It was just kind of like, well, these are the problems with big government.
These are the problems with the war on drugs.
These are the problems with this and this.
And there was never like a connection to what is going on right now.
And to me, I think whether or not you're going to pick a few issues and run on those or be libertarians in general, I do tend to agree with you that I think it makes sense to focus on a few big issues.
But we can't be out there just being like, hey, we have this really great philosophy.
So you should be over here with our philosophy.
We have to explain to people how we have the real solutions for the problems that are in front of them right now and make a really compelling point.
And then when they're like, wow, how do you have all these solutions?
It's like, well, because I have this philosophy that's because of the beauty of self-ownership and personal autonomy and privacy.
And you can kind of connect it back to that.
And yeah, and I'm actually consistent with this whole thing and it's one coherent worldview.
But first and foremost, you want to have like a solution to the problem that they care about.
And that would be a major theme in your speeches.
It was not so much in Joe's.
When I was in, I can pick any place, but I'll pick Oakland.
When I was in Oakland, and so it was about 50% libertarians who supported me who came out to see me and 50% people in the area who saw this bus with a woman's face on it, but said president, what is this?
And so they show up.
And so it's, you know, very almost almost 50-50 group of libertarians and normies saying, what the hell is, why are you here?
And so I'm giving my speech and then I do Q ⁇ A. At every event, I did at least like a half hour to an hour of Q ⁇ A because I felt like that was much more important than what I have to say is what the public there has to say.
And so one of the, one of the people in the public who wasn't a libertarian, and I would get questions like this all the time.
He said, basically, he talked for a couple of minutes, but he said, basically, what are you going to give us for us to have the education you need?
And so I hear the grumbling from the libertarians.
What are you thinking about?
We don't give you anything.
And so I actually, I think at one of the places, it might have been that one.
I said, guys, be nice.
Like, it's, this is a legit question.
And so my answer was, what are you going to give us?
I'm going to give you everything back.
I'm going to give you the money that was, you're no longer going to get robbed by the government by a federal program that does not care about what your schools look like.
That money is going to go back into your community where it belonged.
It would never be taken from it in the first place.
I'm going to give you back all the power and freedom for your schools at the local school level to make educational decisions that best fit your children and the students in your area and take it out of the hands of a bunch of politicians and cronies and bureaucrats.
And the whole crowd cheered, including the normies.
Now, I just sold them on at least getting rid of the Department of Education at the federal level.
And really, I was, I mean, basically I was selling them on privatization and decentralization of education.
I presented it in such a way of we're going to give you your power and your money back.
And it really resonated.
I will say this.
There was an attempt from Joe's side of the campaign.
And it was weird as for the reasons that you mentioned that there were kind of sides to the campaign as opposed to a campaign.
But on Joe's side of the campaign, there was an attempt to talk about how libertarianism was the common sense set of solutions to the problems that we were facing.
I think what the problem was was that when you are talking about, when you give a speech that mentions 10 different things or 15 different things, basically you're giving the entire platform in a, in a bridged version.
It's impossible to really drive home how ending the war on drugs is going to make our community safer and lower the amount of addiction and overdoses and get rid of these cartels or at least greatly weaken them.
You can't really drive down how these lockdowns are not doing anything to slow the spread of COVID, that they're just destroying people's lives and livelihoods.
They're leading to increases in suicide and that the answer is to trust people to make the right choices after empowering them with the information they need to be able to make those choices.
You can't do that if you're only doing, if you're only saying it that long, when your speech should really be focused on the main things that are being talked about.
We aren't Donald Trump.
We can't tweet something and that becomes what everyone's talking about.
We're not there yet.
So we have to look at what people are talking about and give our take on that in a way that makes more sense than what anyone else is saying.
And that's really, and like you said, you have to focus on what's in it for me.
And then when people, as they get in more and more and they go, well, why does that work?
You go, well, the reason it works is because we recognize that you own yourself and you can get into property rights and non-aggression and all those things.
But you can't start with that.
Because if that guy who said, what are you going to give us for education?
And I went, I'm not going to give you anything because I own myself and you own yourself.
And we have a right not to aggress upon each other.
And that's the only thing that, you know, we don't have positive rights.
We only have negative rights.
He'd say, I have no idea what the hell you said.
It sounds like you want to neglect me and my children.
I'm never going to vote for you or anyone that sounds like you ever again.
You have to approach it from, you know, what's basically what's in it for me.
What, what is, how is it going to help the person in front of them?
Well, right.
And I think for most libertarians, they'd agree that if they're just thinking it through, that the reason why our philosophy is amazing is because it actually works in real life.
And if it didn't, then this would be stupid and we shouldn't be wasting our time on it.
And if our philosophy, when put into practice, didn't help that person who you're talking to, like if we didn't believe that this would actually make life better for the vast majority of people, then it would also be stupid for us to be going along with this.
Like if we just thought that our, you know, if libertarianism put into practice would really help millionaires, but it would screw over the regular person who just cares about education for their children, then I wouldn't be for this.
You know, like the whole point of this is that we think this is real.
We actually think that the current system is completely rigged for the powerful.
And so we want to help a lot of these people who are who are not powerful.
And so like, yeah, we have to, we have to be able to explain that to people.
That's on us.
It's not on them to understand the philosophy that's never really been presented to them.
We can wait for them to figure it out and continue to get 1% and 2% and half percent, 3% or whatever.
And we can continue to wallow below 5% and hope for the day of getting 5%, which is another weird dichotomy.
We'll talk about what we're going to do when we win, but then wonder if we can even get 5%.
Anyway, it's a whole other thing.
But we aren't going to get anywhere by waiting for people to come to us.
I know that there were that you and the and others, you weren't fans of, you know, when I would go to like Black Lives Matter protests or when I would go to when I would go to like, you know, an LGBT thing or something like that.
The reason that I would go there, like when I went to the thing that Maj Ture was doing in Richmond with the local Black Lives Matter group and the book boys and the Black Panthers and spoke there, it's because I went there to say, you know, we, because their message was basically, you know, what they were saying was, you know, not only do Black Lives Matter, but if Black Lives Matter, we need to be able to defend ourselves.
And so I went there to basically say, yeah, the Libertarian Party stands with people of color.
And when I'd go to an LGBT group, say, the Libertarian Party stands with gender and sexual minorities.
When I talk to people that were poor, I'd say, we stand with people in poverty against a state that is disproportionately harming you.
And then from there, I can talk about the solutions to those problems, which fix everyone's problems.
But because they're the ones that often, you know, the data shows us are being disproportionately harmed by it.
Yeah, ending gun control, it helps everyone.
It especially helps those who are often many times more likely to go to jail for owning a gun, even though they're less likely to own one in the first place.
And their communities are being ravaged by crime because they're unable to defend themselves.
And that's where most of the gun laws are.
Same thing with the war on drugs, same thing with any of this.
But, you know, my intention was always to reach people where they were, whether I was talking to anti-lockdown protesters, whether I was talking to police accountability and Black Lives Matter protesters, whether I was speaking to Black Panthers, whether I was speaking to LGBT or GSM groups or whatever, gun rights groups.
That's what they care about.
That's the thing that has them either out on the streets protesting or forming groups and meeting together to coalition around something.
You meet them where they are and then you can, it's not, I don't, I don't know if you ever said pander, but others said pander.
I don't believe it's pandering to go to someone, talking to them from their perspective, and then, but presenting the entirety of your, a non-watered down version of what our proposals are to fix that thing.
I think that that's just good politics and good marketing.
I mean, I'm happy to hear what you think about it.
Well, sure.
So I agree with all of that.
I mean, and just to be clear, I was never critical of you for going to a Black Lives Matter event or for going to an LGBT event.
I mean, I think that's, I think go to whatever events will let you speak and tell them the truth.
I mean, I think that's exactly what we should be doing.
And I completely agree that it's like you, you want to, as you said, meet them where they're at.
I always like the way Scott Horton puts it, where you can attack the left from the left and the right from the right.
That like to me, that's like the, it's telling people like, no, you don't have to give up your identity at all, but here's why we're even better on your identity.
Like, here's why you should be, you know, so I completely agree with that.
I wasn't critical about any of that.
I was very critical about the messaging that was coming out of the campaign.
And so I'm not against going to a Black Lives Matter protest and talking with people and trying to persuade them of the libertarian platform and why this is really, you know, like the way to go.
But when the campaign is just on a national level, putting out messaging that is basically just, we are with Black Lives Matter.
We support the movement.
Now, to be clear, her direct comment was, we don't support the organization.
We support the movement, but we support the movement.
And a tweet that will live in infamy, that it's like, it's not enough to be passively passively not racist.
You must be actively anti-racist.
Hashtag Black Lives Matter, which adds nothing libertarian, kind of seems to imply something not that libertarian with the we must language.
Woke Nonsense vs Power00:07:28
Also, from my perspective, it is solidifying what the huge problem with the left in America is right now, which is that they get so distracted by all of this woke nonsense that they're not focusing on what the left should be focused on, which is what really matters, power imbalances.
That's what really matters.
When you go around ghost hunting, whether there's an impure thought in any white person's head out there in America, you end up getting rid of Aunt Jemima while all of the police brutality continues.
You know what I'm saying?
Now, so from my perspective, what I was critical of was just the messaging coming out, which was read loud and clear by a lot of people, whether it was intended this way or not, that we are with Black Lives Matter.
And the problem was that Black Lives Matter, the movement, a lot of good people who are just marching against police brutality, a lot of people who are just going out because there was nothing else to do during that time.
There was a lot of some hardcore socialists, some hardcore Marxists, some boogaloo boys, some libertarians.
So all different groups in there.
Some Democrats that are grifting and trying to get, you know, try and get involved.
Yeah, Black Lives Matter.
So vote for Joe Biden, who created all this mess in the first place.
So there's a whole different group of people.
However, if you're talking about the movement where there's all these groups of people, there was also an incredible amount of violence, property destruction, terrorizing of innocent people, surrounding people in restaurants and demanding that they chant your chant at a pretty clear threat of violence, billions of dollars of property destruction.
And when the messaging is just, we're with the movement and then the movement turns into this thing, I felt like you guys kind of hitched yourself to a problematic wagon.
So my messaging when it came to that, and in fact, I did this at the Black Guns Matter event.
That's what it was called.
It's called Get the Strap Black Guns Matter or something like that.
And that was the Black Lives Matter.
That was Maj Terrace thing in Richmond.
The messaging I did, and I did this everywhere.
I would say, here's why gun rights are the solution to everything we're seeing right now.
Yes, we need to end qualified immunity and hold bad officers accountable.
Yes, we need to end no-knock raids.
Yes, we need to end police brutality and all of these things.
All of that needs to be done too.
Here's why guns are central to that.
Every single Black Lives Matter protest I went to, there were armed people on the not police side of it.
And all of the things, like in Columbus, when I was in Columbus, Ohio, the week before, all the same protesters and all the same cops were there.
And those protesters got tear gassed and pepper sprayed and rounded up in vans and detained without charge for most of the weekend, let go on Sunday or Monday.
They decided to come back the following weekend.
The only difference between that weekend and the weekend I came was there were like six boog boys there with guns because I was there.
They came out to see me.
Those six boog boys with guns were the difference between what happened the week before and that week where no one got arrested, no one got tear gassed, everyone got to say what they wanted and got to go home afterwards.
On the same side, as you talked about with property damage, when the police are brutalizing protesters and focusing all their resources on that protest and leaving the entire rest of the city, which they've already disarmed over decades of gun control, to those who want to be opportunists, to those people who may not even be a part of the movement, to those people who may be a part of the movement and just are seeing an opportunity to rob, whoever they are, it doesn't really, it matters less who they are.
It matters more that they can't be stopped because the police have decided that they're unwilling slash unable to do anything about it.
They're busy rounding up people with picket signs.
And the people that can't, that would be defending themselves and their property and their businesses and so forth can't.
They can't effectively defend themselves because they aren't able to be like the rooftop Koreans in LA.
They can't effectively stop it.
But in the areas where there was gun ownership, that largely didn't happen because no one wants to catch lead over, you know, over some stolen goods.
No officer wants to catch lead over tear gassing some protesters.
Gun control is a major way of dealing with the power imbalance because as much power as a person might have, there's still a warm body that can catch lead like anyone else's.
And when there's enough other people that have the ability to project lead everywhere, that makes it so that that imbalance gets decentralized and everyone involved is a lot more humble and a lot more peaceful as a result.
So that was central to my messaging.
When it comes to that tweet, I did my best during the campaign to pivot it to my belief, which I still believe that libertarianism, when implemented, is inherently anti-racist.
It disempowers racists and just turns them into dicks with bad opinions who can't really do anything to hurt anyone.
The tweet was an issue because of what you say.
It didn't define what we were even talking about.
To this day, there's no actual definition actively anti-racist.
And the way it was presented, many people took it.
And I didn't realize this initially, but saw it as it was going on.
Many people took it to mean, you know, when your uncle cracks a racist joke, you have to get in his face and yell at him and tell him why he's wrong.
And or else you're not, you know, you're not good.
You're not doing the right thing.
And which is people are free to have that opinion or disagree or whatever, but that really has nothing to do with a presidential run.
It has nothing to do with a national campaign.
What are you running on?
I think that your uncle should stop saying stuff like that.
And a lot of people, you know, took it that way.
Other people took it the way that I think it was intended, the way that I've said it, the way that I hope that it was intended.
I really don't know.
But the fact that it wasn't messaged very well, obviously there's limitations to what you can put into a tweet, but there could have been more there.
Anytime I talked about anti-racism or I talked about systemic racism, it was very interesting listening to your interview with Hotep Jesus because you guys talked about what I would call systemic racism.
These are policies passed on a systemic level by politicians over the course of decades that were racist in their intent and racist in the outcome and what happened to different communities that these policies hurt all of us, but they disproportionately hurt people of color and other people, the poor and others that are the most likely to not be able to defend themselves against the state.
But you had proposals for what you would actually do.
Like you talked about solutions like fixing, getting rid of the war on drugs, ending the war on guns.
Hotep Jesus talked about reparations in the form of tax exemption.
Actual solutions as opposed to just saying racism is bad.
I'm against racism.
We shouldn't be racist.
Yeah, and now what?
Completely honest, like I don't agree with Hotep.
I wouldn't pass, you know, I wouldn't support racially based tax cuts.
No, no, no.
And I wasn't saying it all.
I'm just saying you were both talking about actual ways to fix it.
Yeah.
At least it's a solution.
It's at least it's a solution that I can kind of get on board with the spirit of.
You know what I mean?
like, oh, okay, yeah, that's an actual way to like kind of help people.
And I agree with you that, look, there's no question that there are laws that disproportionately affect different groups of people.
To be completely honest, whether they were racist in intent is, almost to me, very low on the on the list of like.
What matters is what they're actually doing to people and what groups they're actually uh, hurting.
All right guys, let's take a quick second.
Why People Riot00:18:03
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All right, let's get back into it.
My initial response to that anti-racism tweet was just that.
I said this sounds like something BANK OF America would tweet.
This sounds like something that somebody who has no ideas, has no policy proposals, just wants to say the right thing.
That kind of sounds nice, would say.
You know, it's just that and um, the thing really has taken on a life of its own.
Um, but I do think that there was um the that it really I think it hurt the movement, that um not to not to side with the people protesting, police brutality, I mean, of course, like that's.
That's a perfect slam dunk for us to be like absolutely, this is what we've been talking about forever and here are the problems with it.
But when you had, you know you have to, and this is what I was saying about Joe's, you know stump speech before.
When you're completely disconnected to the moment and the culture and what's actually happening and you're just talking in these abstractions about libertarian philosophy, it's very easy to not have your finger on the pulse.
And what was going on at this moment was that the the black lives matter protests had really devolved into a lot of black lives matter, riots and, as I said before, there's people getting killed, billions of dollars in damaging a swarm, huge amounts of people being terrorized.
I mean, I can tell you it's still to this day.
There were protests going on the other day in New York City.
People are flooding out of New York City and it's not it it's very strongly related to the rioting that that was going on there all summer long.
People are like scared.
Uh businesses i've were boarded up in the city where i'm from.
Like never before in my life I saw the boarding.
I saw it in Raleigh, North Carolina.
I saw it in parts of Oregon.
I saw it in parts of Washington.
And it was definitely, I mean, the reality is when you have protests that go on long enough, they almost inevitably turn into riots.
And part of that is because of the conditions created by the state.
You have, again, police focusing on protests and not allowing, not doing what you're supposed to be doing, which is protecting everyone.
And I completely agree.
The proper way to have messaged that would have been if we had been saying from the beginning, here we stand with those that are fighting that are fighting against police brutality.
And again, I would even say systemic racism, leave systemic racism out, leaving in whatever.
We stand with the people that are fighting against these things.
Here are our proposals to do that.
And then if something goes bad, we go, here are our proposals to deal with that.
And how everything we have been saying is consistent with that.
That is why I was never a fan of, you know, messaging that didn't at least somewhat detail what we actually meant.
Yes.
And it's like you said, that it was almost sort of like a Microsoft response or a, you know, a JCPenney's response or a Walmart response.
We stand with Black Lives.
What does that even mean?
Well, I think, but let me tell you, Spike, I think what's even more damaging than that is that what it signals to almost everybody who's critical of the cathedral, as I like to call it, is bending the knee.
Because what's going on this whole time, while there are riots and people are being killed and businesses are being looted and all of this stuff, what's the corporate press telling everybody?
These were mostly peaceful protests.
They're standing in front of fires going, you know, it's a pretty calm protest right here.
Fiery, but mostly peaceful protest.
So this was like the corporate press and the Democrat strategy all the way up until the DNC was we are pretending the riots don't exist.
And so when the LP is literally, I mean, as far as I know, I believe this is still the, I am the only one who actually got the libertarian Twitter handle to condemn the riots and looting.
And it was only after badgering them into doing it and their final condemnation was, it goes without saying.
It goes without saying that we're against rioting and looting and all of this stuff.
Yet on January 6th, it sure didn't go without saying.
They couldn't wait 15 minutes until those guys were in the Capitol before they're condemning that.
And this is what I'm just telling you, whether fairly or unfairly, this is what, and I kind of think fairly, what a whole lot of libertarians are seeing is that, oh, you will not condemn violence against private people and private businesses if the corporate press is not kind of allowing this narrative to be okay.
Yet you will condemn violence against a government building in the drop of a hat because that is, it seems to be bending the knee to the narrative, which libertarians really are supposed to have the courage to challenge because we don't agree with their narrative.
I'm not saying we don't agree with anything that Black Lives Matter protesters were saying, but like we don't look at Joe Biden as like, oh, this good guy who's bringing back, you know, normalcy and unity.
We look at him as a war criminal.
Yeah, we look at the corporate press as mouthpieces for war criminals.
So why should we be so concerned with being, you know what I mean?
Like being on their good side, fairly or unfairly, that's how a lot of people took this.
And just to prove how much the narrative can change on a dime, the same people and the same, meanwhile, I was fine with the messaging behind defund the police as an example of let's defund a lot of stuff.
Let's defund government and put money back in communities so they can decide what their police look like.
But the defund the peace police narrative that was coming from, as you said, like corporate media and the professional left, the center left corporatist press and politicians and political class immediately has turned into fund the secret police against domestic extremism, which we know is going to disproportionately be used against the very people that they were supposedly pretending to support the same time last year.
Like we know that.
We know the Patriot Act.
We know the 95 and 96 anti-terrorism bills.
We know the 94 crime.
But every time they say, oh, this is to fight against, you know, white supremacy or drug cartels or whatever.
No, it's not.
It's used to fight against poor people that can't defend themselves who are disproportionately overrepresented by people of color and other marginalized communities.
Like we know this.
This is what happens every time.
I can't speak for what the Libertarian Party Twitter said or what Joe's Twitter said.
I can tell you that I have always condemned anything that is an act of aggression against others, including the violence, including the violent aspect of the protests.
And I would condemn it.
And some people would say, oh, you're doing a both sides thing.
And I really wasn't.
I was saying I condemn these riots.
And I believe that ending the war on guns would greatly solve that, but it would have also greatly solved the violence being done against the protesters who were being peaceful by the state.
So it actually fixes everyone's problems here.
I'm not equivocating.
I'm saying these things are both bad and we should be, you know, they both have the same solution.
Let the common person own weapons to whatever extent they want.
And any gun control that we have in this country should be entirely focused on what we allow government to have.
Because if we were to give them a background check, they're the ones with history of mass murder and mass kidnapping and mass theft and fraud.
They're the ones going overseas and murdering people.
You know, I got a lot of flack on January 6th because of something I put up saying that before we say that tens of millions of people who are upset about this election and the many people that showed up to protest there and around state capitals,
basically protesting on behalf of a con man that screwed them over for four years, we need to look at why instead of writing them all off as idiots and racists and demograph and xenophobes and whatever, maybe it would be helpful to look at why they even got so desperate that they'd be rioting on behalf of a con man who didn't care about them in the first place.
And it largely got positive support, but there were people that were like, you're comparing people that are struggling against the state to white supremacists.
I'm like, no, man, maybe read it again, because that's the opposite of what I said.
We need to look at why that's another group of people that I think we should be meeting them where they are.
Even if where they are right now is Donald Trump's the true and rightful president or whatever.
If at the very least we can meet them at saying, we don't have to welcome them in and say, come and run for office or anything, but any group that is so angry at the government that they're actually okay with Capitol Hill being stormed, there's at least a seed of anti-authoritarianism in there.
Even though that wasn't what they were doing, they were actually trying to reinstall the lead, the, I guess, tyrant, the president that they liked.
The reality is they're any group of people that is so upset about something government has done that they're willing to protest or riot, we should be meeting them close enough to be telling them what our solutions are.
Yeah.
And that's what we've now trumped up.
Because it is like, I mean, that's how you have to speak to like some of these Trump supporters.
Like, look, in the same way with all of these, you know, different things.
You have to be like, look, like, yeah, Donald Trump told you he was going to drain the swamp and you loved that about him.
And you're right.
And you know what?
You were right this whole time.
You were absolutely right to think that this whole thing was a swamp that needed to be drained.
But is John Bolton his national security advisor or Mike Pompeo?
Is that really draining the swamp?
You know, is the guy, you know, look at this guy, Barr, the attorney general, who everyone was saying is Trump's guy.
You know what?
just found out that Hunter Biden was under federal criminal investigation while Trump was being impeached and Barr never said a word about it.
Not this impeachment, the original impeachment.
He was being impeached for, I mean, both, but when he was being impeached for asking Ukraine to look into Hunter Biden, our government was looking into Hunter Biden.
And all of a sudden, all those leaks that we'd see all the time, not one, not one leak came out about it.
And so you can always point out to them like in this way, but look from, as you're saying with the guys on January 6th, I mean, I thought it was, it was stupid and it ended up doing nothing, accomplishing nothing except people dying.
It accomplished all the people that were on board with police accountability now talking about having essentially secret police to make sure that you don't have extremist opinions.
And I didn't succeed there.
Well, by the way, this is one of the major reasons.
I mean, it's probably like number three or four.
It wasn't number one, but one of the major reasons I was so furious with the rioting is I thought if you were on board with pulling back the police state at all, this is like the worst thing that could possibly happen for it.
Because this is, yeah, I mean, Black Lives Matter, when they first started protesting, were actually enjoying a large amount of support.
There's polling data to back this up.
When people saw the George Floyd thing, the overwhelming reaction from the American people was like, that is wrong.
And like, that is like really, okay, we see a guy here in handcuffs, face down on the ground with some guy with his neck, his knee on his neck with this kind of like perverse look, like he's kind of enjoying it.
And the guy dies later.
And like, I don't care.
I don't care if he had fentanyl in his system or anything else like that.
That's wrong.
Like no human being should be treated like that, you know?
And, but so, so there was almost a movement that was, had potential there.
And then after months and months of rioting, what do you think every right winger in America is going to say?
They're going to be like, well, thank God we have the cops.
Cause that's what now, yeah, in to the, in the same way as you're saying with the January 6th stuff.
Yeah, this gives, it's the perfect excuse to turn the war on terror inward, you know, and go after domestic terrorists now and all this.
But from those people's perspective, I think many of them just got caught up in the moment.
Some of them might have had some bad intentions.
But from their perspective, they think that this whole election was just stolen from Donald Trump.
Now, I certainly haven't seen evidence to convince me of that.
I don't trust anything the government says, so who knows?
But I haven't seen evidence.
Certainly, all of the evidence that the Trump lawyers were claiming they had seems to have all been a bluff, where they were like, we won this by millions of votes.
They would never see it in court where you can be, where you can be tried for, you can be put in contempt and perjury for lying.
Yeah.
Right.
So they stood up there.
They talked this big game.
Now, I do think that was wildly irresponsible.
Like, I think if you're going to say something like that, you got to have evidence to back it up.
But these people, these people, like many of them, probably, they believed in their cause.
They were like, hey, our guy, this was stolen.
This whole system is corrupt and all of this.
And of course, as you pointed out on social media, the 74 million people who voted for Donald Trump, like if you're going to condemn that large a group of people, then like, what, what are you left with here?
Okay.
So you're just going to say they're all white supremacists?
I mean, I don't think so.
I don't believe that, you know, Barack Obama had a 70-something percent approval rating, I think, when he first started the job.
I don't really believe the country has that many white supremacists in it.
I don't think so.
I think there's something else at work here.
If that many people were irredeemable, then it's hopeless for us to be doing anything.
And I said that to a few people.
I'm like, are you saying that we shouldn't talk to anyone who is a Trump supporter?
And they'd say yes.
And I'd say, why?
And they'd say, because they're trash and you can't talk.
And I'd say, okay, putting aside the fact that I was once a neocon Republican, turned constitutionalist, turned border Tarian, turned my final super Saiyan libertarian form that I am now.
But putting that aside, the fact that people do change and I'm an example of that, let's pretend that they are irredeemable.
They're just human trash.
Why are we doing anything?
If half the country is trash or almost half the country is trash, then.
what on earth are we even doing?
Like what there's there's no hope for any of us if people can't be brought to our side and be brought to a side of greater human liberty.
And, you know, the people that would reach a point of actually rioting and storming a capital, they have been told by their preferred politicians, by their preferred political speakers, by their preferred media, all of which are not some crank, you know, fringe thing, although there is some of that with like Q and stuff, but like Fox News, OAN, elected officials at the federal level telling them this, lawyers and attorneys telling them this.
And they go, well, then I guess it must be true because it's from my preferred media in the same way that we watch people that get their preferred media from CNN and MSNBC and their favorite Democrat politicians are often end up believing stuff that's garbage as well.
So, I mean, if we say that just because someone is already easily easily controlled by the media and the people they trust, that that makes them irredeemable, then it's worthless what we're doing because 95% of people aren't on our side right now.
So we have to engage people where they are.
It doesn't mean that we have to find the worst people and try to bring them in.
It just means if someone's upset, there's no one that we shouldn't be having some level of outreach to because we're never going to be able to win an election.
And even long before winning elections, changing the cultural political conversation in this country, which will work its way downstream to politics, we can't do that by saying we're only going to support people that already pretty much agree with us on everything.
It doesn't work that way.
It never did.
Most of us didn't come here that way.
And I've always thought that, and I'm sure I've not always lived up to this and have been less than perfect on this issue, but our job as libertarians is not to hate any group of the American people.
I mean, short of like violent criminals or something like that, but we are supposed to be the spokesmen of the American people against the tyrannical government.
That's our role, right?
Is that we speak for all of you, left and right.
Like you're all look, yeah, there's a whole bunch of Democrats who actually believed that Trump was a Russian agent.
And there's a whole bunch of Republicans who actually believed that like, you know, they were about to present the evidence that Donald Trump won by millions of votes.
You know, yeah, it's like, okay, yeah, people have some goofy beliefs, but like those people aren't our enemies.
Those people might be, you know, like manipulated or propagandized, but they're not our enemies.
Our enemies are the state and their cronies and they're people in the media and whatever.
Like those are our enemies.
It's not like the people who voted for Trump or the people who voted for Biden.
Media Attention Matters00:11:31
And whether it's completely accurate, neither side probably is completely accurate, but we are better off in assuming the best of Trump voters and Biden voters, assuming that a lot of Biden voters voted because they just thought Donald Trump was terrible and it was like this whole thing was awful and embarrassing and he's an idiot and like all this other stuff.
And a lot of the people who supported Trump supported him because they felt like this whole system was rigged against them and that he was the one fighting back against the ruling elite.
Now, whether there's truth to any of that or not is kind of irrelevant because our point is to go.
They recognize that there's a problem.
Exactly.
Yes.
And they're both right about the problem.
I mean, they might be wrong in their prescription, but they're both right about the problem.
There is a swamp that needs to be drained.
Trump was right about that.
He didn't do anything about it.
He probably made it worse.
He just filled the swamp even more.
Our enemy is not everyday voters.
Our enemy are the people who create and foster this discord between us and turn neighbors into opponents and enemies who sometimes fight each other literally on the streets while they themselves work together to pass these stimulus bills that are just corporate bailouts.
These people that were resisting Trump and impeaching him multiple times, they fully funded almost all every penny he asked for and actually sometimes gave him more than he asked for.
They would get upset when he didn't want even more for the military industrial complex or if he didn't want even more for a certain government program.
If this is someone that you think is akin to Hitler and you are whipping up the country into believing this, and Republicans did it with Obama too.
If you believe these people are the antichrist and Hitler and all this stuff, why are you fully funding their agenda?
Because it's all theater.
You need each other to play this good cop, bad cop routine.
And if we are out there saying to people that are increasingly divided and angry and frustrated and watching their income not be able to meet the increase in the cost of living while they're being told to stay home for their safety, even though their state has just as much of a COVID spread as a state that has almost no lockdowns, we can reach people by saying, yeah, you know, the emperor actually doesn't have any clothes.
What you're thinking is right.
And there are millions of other people who recognize it's right too.
Just because corporate media won't tell you that doesn't mean that it's not true.
It is true.
And, you know, this is a farce and a fallacy, but we need to be out there saying it.
Yeah.
No, so yeah, I completely agree with that.
If you were, if you could like do it all over again and you were at the top of the ticket.
So this is just your campaign and you're starting over in 2020.
You, you know, you mentioned earlier that you think you would focus on a few key issues.
Like what would you, what would you run the campaign around?
The lockdowns and COVID as it relates to healthcare, but especially the lockdowns and the economic devastation.
You know, it was pretty obvious by the time we got the nomination, which was she got hers May 23rd.
I got mine May 24th the following day.
By then it was pretty obvious.
And I had been making anti-lockdown videos since before they were even being implemented.
My first anti-lockdown video was like the first or second week of March, right before they actually started happening because it was, they were telegraphing what they were going to do.
As soon as they went from nothing to telling, you know, no, no groups of more than 50, I'm like, this isn't where it's going to end.
This is going to happen.
And people are like, no, it's definitely not going to happen.
It would never happen here.
I'm like, that's what they always say.
It will happen here.
It's happening here.
I believe that we should have been focusing on the lockdowns and that we should have been focusing on the COVID message, because if you don't have a COVID message, then it sounds like we're saying that we don't believe COVID's real or that we don't care about people that are dying of COVID or whatever.
You have to have that together and explaining how the healthcare system they created is why COVID's doing so, why it's spreading so wildly here and why people are afraid to go to the emergency rooms because they can't afford an emergency room visit and don't have insurance and all that.
Like we have the solutions to that.
And then especially during the summer when the, when the, when the, you know, the George Floyd Mortar murder and then it kind of reignited what happened with the Breonna Taylor murder and kind of led to the Black Lives Matter protests and riots that happened.
Then also focusing on that is like a third thing.
But that should have been our message.
We spent almost as much time often.
I shouldn't say we, the campaign often spent as much time talking about like ending the wars and bringing the troops home, which is absolutely necessary.
And I believe in it 100%.
Or like ending the Fed or like reforming education.
These are all important things, but they weren't what people were talking about.
And when you talk about every single thing that libertarians think about something, we already have very, very scarce, limited resources of how much money we have and how much effort we have and ability we have to get our message out in the first place.
And when you dis spread it out among so many different things, it makes it that much harder for people to even know what you're about.
It also allows people to cherry pick and go, okay, I disagree with you on this and this.
So I'm going to go vote for the guy that I disagree with 95% of the time because he at least looks like he has a better shot of winning.
It's just bad.
You need to get people excited.
You want people, you want to present a bold and passionate and principled message that not only doesn't scare them, but actually gets them excited to vote, disabuses them of the idea, creates a new binary choice.
Instead of Republican or Democrat, the Republics that have created this mess and pretend to be the enemies, but are obviously working together or this completely new way of doing things, the libertarian way of fixing the problems that the Republics have created.
That's the central message that it has to be.
And you do that by focusing on the main things that people were talking about.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And I also think that there's a real upside to having courage if you end up being proven right at the end.
And so someone like Harry Brown, which I will say is the, I've said this before on the show, but I think perhaps second to the Declaration of Independence, the greatest piece of writing ever is what Harry Brown wrote on September 12th, 2001, which I don't know if you're familiar with the Harry Brown wrote this amazing piece on September 12th that was basically like, hey, America, what did you think?
Like, what did you think was going to happen?
You think we can just bomb every country around the world and nobody, we're not going to create people who hate us.
Now, this was, I mean, if you can remember the climate and September 12th, the amount of courage.
Buildings were still burning.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, I mean, you were in New York City.
Like, yeah, it was, it was like unbelievable, you know, bravery to write that.
But years later, that's the type of thing that makes you a legend.
You know, like that's, and I think that really being against the lockdowns.
And again, I'm not saying you weren't, but I'm talking about making it the central message of the campaign early would have really paid dividends in the coming months when more and more people started waking up realizing that the lockdowns were just destroying people, destroying people's lives.
And that would have created a real binary where it's like the two parties who think government has a right to do this to you and the party who believes you have rights, that you are free and that you, and I don't care even if the virus is, you know, 99%, you know, survival rate or 20% survival rate.
It's like, give me liberty or give me death.
That's the libertarian.
No, go ahead.
I didn't mean to.
No, so I was just saying, I thought that was a great opportunity to spread that.
Now, I will say that when asked about the lockdowns, I know that Joe would say she is against them.
It just never seemed like, like, I look at it like this, right?
If, have you ever, I said this the other night when I was on a stream with Michael Heiss and Karen Ann.
And I said, have you ever heard anyone criticize the Ron Paul 2012 campaign saying, I don't really think it was anti-war?
You know, like, has anyone ever made the criticism of the Ron Paul 2012 campaign?
Yeah, it's like, no, of course it was everyone knew that.
And you could say whatever you wanted to about him, but you could not.
And I've heard a lot of people criticize Joe's campaign and your campaign for not being against the lockdowns enough.
And if there's even that misconception out there, then that has not been made a central enough issue.
And perception is everything there because, like, I literally, I don't know how many other people hosted and staged illegal anti-lockdown protests in multiple states last year.
There were, I'm certain there were others.
I'm one of a small group of people.
And I hope everyone can appreciate my frustration in doing those things and then hearing on social media, why aren't you against the lockdowns?
I'm like, buddy, I just literally held a salsa party on a sidewalk in front of 30 cops with Univision interviewing me about it.
The dance or the dip?
Yeah, the dance.
No, I think you're obviously an accomplished Latin dancer, which I actually am.
I'm actually a good salsa dancer.
But so we plan to have this event inside of Kuba Ocho, which is like a bar and restaurant and club in Miami.
The Miami police shut our event down as we were showing up.
And we said, okay, well, we'll have it outside then.
And they said, you can't do that because of COVID.
And we're like, we have the right to peacefully assemble.
We're going to do it.
Your move.
And so we did it.
And they left us alone because hundreds of people it ended up being a bigger event because there were people outside that got to participate and stuff like that.
But yeah, no, we had a salsa party illegally in violation of the COVID restrictions.
And we did that across the not salsa parties, but we did, you know, we did illegal events across the country where the police would say, you can't do that.
And we'd say, we're going to do it.
So we're here and you're here.
So, you know, you tell us what you want to do.
And we do that.
And it was because we have the right.
And we were also, we were outside.
Like it wasn't even, it was, we're doing nothing to spread COVID.
We are outside.
You know, it's not like there's hundreds of thousands of us all packed together.
We are being safe.
We are, you know, expressing our right to speak freely.
And it's your choice what you want to do about it.
And, you know, if we had gotten arrested, it probably still wouldn't have gotten that much media coverage.
You know, perception is everything.
But I do, I will say that I was at the bottom of the ticket.
So I could have done a lot of stuff and not gotten any attention about it because I'm not the top of the ticket.
And I, no, I agree.
I believe that we should have had that central to our messaging and not just central to our messaging.
But you asked, what would I have done at the top of the ticket?
I would have been a downright insurgent about it.
I would have been going to where the restrictions were the worst and organizing massive groups of people to just openly defy this stuff.
During the worst of the protests, I would have gone to where the police were being the most brutal and show up with a bunch of armed people and say, now what?
I would have gone to the places where the rioting was happening and encouraged mutual aid groups to show up with guns and to protect the homeowners and business owners and people that are just trying to live their lives in the cities those days.
You kind of have to do that because they're not going to give us attention.
You have to really go in front of where things are happening and make as much of a noise as possible.
Not even for the media attention, for the attention of the people to see that there's an actual alternative to this constant oppositional posture theater garbage from Republicans and Democrats.
Avoiding the Jerk Image00:17:48
That will create the media attention once you get the people's attention.
So it's not trying to focus on getting media attention.
It's trying to focus on letting the people know there's someone out here who's actually fighting for you.
And so I guess that would have been the difference with mine, but I didn't run for president.
Sure, sure.
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Let's get back into the show.
Do you think, because I know there's been a lot of people in the party who are really upset with the lack of anti-lockdown messaging coming out of the national Libertarian Party.
I know there's been a lot of people who have been critical over that.
I got to say, it drives me crazy when I look at the Libertarian Party's Twitter account and they tweet like once every four days, maybe.
Just like very little messaging coming out.
And I know that, you know, I look at you and since the campaign, I think you've been doing as much, if not more media, more engagement on social media, like just more out there.
I'm not even doing more media than I was during the campaign.
And then I see, I guess Joe's gone.
I don't know.
But whatever, that's fine.
She can leave if she wants to.
But like the Libertarian Party, like it's like you're this political party that's sitting on the greatest political philosophy ever devised by man.
And there's this crazy period in the country going on where like there's this new president in who is basically the author of every awful policy that we've ever hated for our entire lives.
Like the first 50 years, yeah.
Yeah.
They're trying to impeach a former president.
There's this huge moment.
They're openly musing about turning Dick Cheney's war on terrorism in on the American people.
Like this is just openly being discussed across all corporate media platforms.
And the Libertarian Party will, when they do tweet, they'll be like, yeah, we really should impeach Trump because he's so awful.
So like, where is the, where is the messaging?
I think that the issue with the LP National, and I think this is an actual system problem.
And it looks like they're trying to fix it.
I know right now they've never had a communications director, which I think is, they've never had a communications department.
And I think that that's, they've always in the past relied on the candidates to do that.
But the thing is, especially in the age of social media, that the party itself, especially smaller parties, have to kind of operate almost not like a person, but as an entity that is putting out opinions as that entity on behalf of everyone in the organization.
And I think that the fact that there isn't someone, there isn't a department that's in charge of that.
So, it kind of becomes this ad hoc thing that's often handled by committee, which, you know, any process of making sausage looks bad, but especially if there's not an actual like department or structure in charge of that.
I think a lot of what we're seeing is just as a result of that not being in place.
So, I'm hopeful that when that is put in place, that it will look a lot better.
I, I, I can't, I obviously can't speak on behalf of what's happening now because I'm not a part of it.
I'm in charge of you know, my social media.
Uh, and during the campaign, I was in charge of what came out of about at least 80 or 85% of what came out of my social media.
The other 15, 20% was largely what the campaign wanted to come out of my social media.
Um, but the, you know, now I'm 100% in charge.
It's, it's my social media.
I hope that coming out of this, that you know, the LP has a department and people in place who are going to do the kind of rapid response that are giving libertarian takes on hot button issues.
It will be very welcome for that.
I tend to not ascribe things to malice when they can be just described to a failure in process, especially knowing the people there in the LP.
I don't think anyone is actively saying, you know, well, let's let's, you know, let's not put anything out and let's only kind of put out somewhat tepid responses or something like that.
I think it's just an outgrowth of the lack of an actual system in place to be able to put that out.
And so, it sort of becomes people deciding by committee if and when anything's, which is why you get a tweet every four days or every week or something like that.
Um, and whoever's running the tweeting me or retweeting Justin Mosh or whatever.
Whoever's running that Twitter is not a big fan of mine.
They unfollowed me at some point late in the summer.
But, you know, hey, I was, I was being pretty critical of them and I'm openly talking about taking over their party.
So I understand it.
That's a, that's, that's fair.
They have the right.
Maybe I'll earn that follow back sometime throughout this year.
I do.
Um, a lot of people have said this.
I've I, at least I've heard a lot of people say this, and I've kind of felt the same way.
So I wonder if you think this is accurate or fair or not.
A lot of people have said, man, Spike's messaging since the campaign has been really on point.
Do you think that there is, do you to some degree feel a little bit unchained not being in the vice presidential role where you're a part of the campaign's messaging and you can just kind of let it rip?
Or is that unfair and your messaging was always great and people are just noticing now?
No, I was always perfect.
It's it's you that's changed.
No, no, no, here's what here's what I think it is.
I think that part of it is that, like I said, 80% of my stuff was me and my team working together, and 15, 20% was what the campaign was wanting me and the team to put out on behalf of my part of the campaign.
So there's a little bit of that.
There was never really a time that I can think of where they said you can't say anything, but there was the fact that I can't look like I'm throwing Joe under the bus.
So if she says something that I wouldn't say, I even have to be careful.
I can't, obviously, can't go out and be like, I would never say that.
I disagree with Joe, but it's hard for me to even say something that sounds contradictory to what Joe said, because then it's like, why is Joe's VP throwing her under the bus?
So, you know, I had to, so, so there's a little bit of that.
I think honestly, the biggest part of it is I was so busy campaigning that I didn't, I just didn't have as much time to actually be devoted to my messaging on social media.
So an average day on the campaign is wake up at 3 a.m., either get on the bus or go to the airport, depending on whether I'm doing a bus tour or fly ahead tour, get on the airplane or the bus, head to the next event, do something for breakfast or brunch as a fundraiser or get together for donors and volunteers, then do some main event early to mid-afternoon, then do some kind of dinner thing, and then either get back on the bus or back on the on the plane or jump in a, in a, in a hotel bed at midnight or something like that.
And in between that, doing a ton of interviews.
And so if I had even a half hour to an hour to spend with my social media team talking about what we were putting out, then it was a lot.
And so I think that's part of it is that I was doing a lot of this stuff, but in person.
And so if you weren't following that, you were just following my Twitter or Facebook.
Now it looks like I'm more present because I am more present.
I'm able to, I have now hours a day to dedicate to it.
You know, even yesterday on Valentine's Day, where I pretty much took the day off, I was still able to put out two or three things because I had that brief time to be able to do it.
So I think it's kind of a combination of both.
Yes, some of it is just, you know, that I had to avoid saying certain things just to not look like a jerk who's running over my running mate's messaging.
But also at the same time, some of it's just I'm able to be more present and more responsive.
I don't think I ever responded to anyone's comment on Facebook or Twitter because I didn't have time to.
Like it's not crap.
I understand the thing.
I think it's difficult.
It's like one of these things where like being a libertarian and being involved in politics are a difficult marriage at times because in, you know, in the very essence of thing, I mean, me and you are both anarchists.
We don't really believe politics should exist at all.
So to any extent that you're participating in it, you're kind of participating in something that, you know, you're like, I think this whole thing shouldn't exist anyway.
And I'm only participating in it to try to eliminate it.
But I know that.
So I was recently on Reed Coverdale's show.
I think you did his show as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's he's great.
Love.
I love that guy.
And they, we were like talking about the Jacob Hornberger campaign and things that they were critical of him for.
And it was so uncomfortable for me.
And I ended up like, oh man, I don't know.
Should I say this or should I not say this?
And this is far from being his VP or something like that.
You know, you must have more of it.
But I was a very passionate supporter of his.
And then you almost feel like, well, now I don't want to throw him under the bus now, but at the same time, you know, when they're criticizing him for something he did that I was like super critical of him doing, you're kind of like, well, I also, and it's hard as a libertarian, we almost have this like impulse to just tell the truth, no holds barred.
Like, I'm all, and anytime you're at all pinched to be like, maybe I should bite my tongue right now on this one, it's just a difficult position for guys like us to be able to do that.
You die a little inside every time you're like, oh, gosh, I'm the system I hate now.
But here's the thing.
So what same thing with Jacob.
I had some criticisms that I've said privately to people about what Jacob did towards the end, but I love Jacob.
Like Jacob's a friend of mine.
We campaigned together, knocking on doors and housing.
Jacob's the real deal.
Like I like Jacob.
I don't agree with him on everything.
And I wasn't a fan of some of the way that he wanted to message, but I like him.
But same similar thing.
When people would say, well, what do you think about what happened to Jacob Hornberger's campaign?
I have to speak.
I feel like I have to speak more measuredly because I don't want to, it's not just I don't, it's not, I don't want to hurt his feelings.
Jacob's a big boy.
Jacob can take constructive criticism.
It is the appearance of the narrative of Spike Cohen's crapping all over Jacob Hornberger.
Or same thing with, you know, why is Dave Smith, you know, backstabbing Jacob Hornberger, especially now when everything gets shared in five-second clips and screenshots and so forth, as opposed to the full context of it.
I could easily have said something where people go, What does Spike Cohen hate Joe Jorgensen?
It's like, no, I was literally just giving my take on it.
It had nothing to do.
I didn't even know.
I would often look at what Joe said to make sure that I wasn't Alan Dershowitz.
Oh, that's a tough one.
Oh, I forgot about that.
Can you talk about that briefly?
I don't know how long your show is supposed to be.
Can we talk briefly?
Yeah, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
I hope that for the people that are watching your show, I don't have to explain who Alan Dershowitz was or why that would be a nightmare to hear that your running mate had or your running mate's team.
I'm not sure if it was her or someone in her messaging media team or what.
For some reason, her shortlist came out of who she would pick after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.
Yeah.
There were many names.
Some of them were good.
Some of them were good.
Then there was Alan Dershowitz.
And when I tried to explain to my wife how, because, you know, she's saying, why is that so bad?
And I was trying to come up with an equivalent of someone so terrible.
And the only name I could come up with was Alan Dershowitz, like other than something like Hitler or something like that.
But, you know, it was like, this is someone that's possibly a pedophile who also is a favor of expanding the war on drugs to the death penalty and waterboarding for drug dealing.
And it's his slavish support for Israeli occupation.
Like, this is, there's nothing libertarian.
And it was because he had done some free speech stuff in the 80s or something like that.
And so here I am on the campaign trail every single day, both in interviews and in front of me in QA's, people going, Alan Dershowitz.
And so that was a time where I had to say, and I pivoted as much as I could, but I said, as soon as within hours of Joe releasing her, releasing her shortlist that included Alan Dershowitz, the, you know, within hours, he was taken off the list, which is good because he was a uniquely terrible pick.
And people would say, well, why did she put him?
And I'd say, I don't, I do not know.
He's not.
She didn't even have to put out a list.
She didn't even really need to put out a list of Supreme Court judges.
And then she puts, and it's like, yeah, even if you could get past the fact that he's a drug warrior and seems to pretty much support the extermination of the Palestinian people and all of this, wouldn't the fact that he like admittedly was getting massages at Epstein's home?
Like, wouldn't that be enough to just go like, yeah, let's leave that guy off?
That's not all right.
Yeah, what are you going to do?
I also, you know.
All right.
All right.
Whatever.
I don't even.
What was I supposed to do?
Like, it was, I, I would say, but that was something I was like, listen, I'm not going to say, oh, well, he did stuff in the Alan Dershowitz was a bad pick.
That's why he's not on the list anymore.
And then I try to pivot to saying, hey, isn't it great that a politician heard the feedback and responded immediately to it?
So I'd give it a pause.
But yeah.
Look, Joe, Joe is a, I don't know.
Joe's a good libertarian.
I really don't like, I feel, I feel the same way.
Like sometimes when I'd be like critical of Gary Johnson and stuff.
And it's, I don't, you know, it's just like when you're looking back at these campaigns, sometimes you got to point out, like, hey, here, here's what we want to try to avoid doing in the future.
Things like this.
Let's not put Alan Dershowitz on the list.
And, you know, like what I said, there would even be, I think a lot of people, and I think that some people on your team as well really thought that my criticism of the campaigns was that there should have been like more right-wing messaging or something like that.
But it really wasn't.
Like if Joe Jorgensen had just tweeted out hashtag all lives matter, I'd have been like, what are you nuts?
Like, do you not know what that means to half the country?
Like to half the country, that's basically just saying, fuck Black Lives Matter.
You know what I mean?
Like, so don't say that.
But then at the same time, like, if you're just going to say, I support the movement, understand what that means to the other half of the country.
So it's just, it was just, and, and, you know, it would be things like, I don't know, you know.
Using the example of the woman getting fired for posting all lives matter and like all these little things where I just felt like there was a lot of like walking into a hornet's nest that was not necessary.
You know, like this isn't advancing anything.
It's just creating a situation where you're going to convince half of your base that you're not at all what they want you to be.
I think that part of that is, and I mean, when you go into this, you know that this is going to happen.
So it's not, it's not an excuse.
I think it's just an explanation.
When you're not used to being on live TV and radio all the time and you're getting asked gotcha questions and difficult questions and stuff that just happened that you may not have even heard about without fail, there's going to be some, I'm sure there were times I said stuff that was dumb.
If I looked at it now, I'd be like, really?
But because I have experience of being long before I did this campaign, I've been podcasting live and being on other people's shows live and getting tough questions live, because that's what I've always thrived on.
I would tell them, give me the tough stuff.
Give me the conservative talk host who wants to ask about the active anti-racism treat.
Give me the progressive host who wants to ask me why we want a healthcare system that would make all poor people die or whatever.
Like I want to go into enemy or not enemy, but I want to go into hostile territory and explain the actual libertarian.
Above the Culture War00:10:21
Like I want to do that.
If you're not used to doing that all the time, then, and especially now you go from not doing that to doing it many hours a day because she got interviewed even more than I did.
She's at the top of the ticket.
I do think some of it is, you know, if you're producing four hours of interviews every day, plus all your other stuff, there's bound to be some stuff in there that you go, I don't know what I think about that.
So I think some of it was that.
I will also say, I mean, we, we know Joe was not, Joe was the, when Justin Amash dropped out, when Jacob Hornberger went kind of shrill at the end, when, when it really came down to when Ken Armstrong dropped back to VP because he thought Justin Amash was going to be the presidential pick.
So he was kind of positioning himself to be the VP pick.
When Kim Rough had dropped out months earlier, a lot of people were left with saying, okay, it's now Joe Jorgensen or Jacob Hornberger, who just did a lot of stuff that reminds me of the things that happened back in 2000 and Vermin Supreme, who love him or hate him.
He wears a boot on his head and he's, you know, he's he's going to campaign as a time traveling wizard who's going to give everyone a pony.
You either have to really be good with that as being the way of getting attention, or you're going to be like, yeah, no, let's not do that.
Those became the three choices.
And so people picked the one who had good, solid libertarian policies and looked like she wasn't going to, you know, do anything that was too out there.
Unfortunately, we often, the campaign often ran a strategy that was perfect if we were comfortably leading in the polls by three or four points and didn't want to rock the boat.
When you are pulling at the margin of error or not even being included in the polls, you have to do the bold.
And I say in your face, I don't mean violent.
I mean get attention by doing bold things that no one else is brave enough to do.
You know, how many other people do you know that campaign alongside, you know, 100 armed Black Panthers?
Have to do that stuff, or or you have to.
You know, you have to.
You know, look the uh, look the beast in the eye and say, this is wrong, you're bad.
If everyone else is afraid to say it, then i'll be the only one to say it, and you know, whether it's lockdowns or whether it's the wars or anything else, we have to be the ones putting out a bold, unapologetic message that connects with everyday people and explains how this will fix the problems that they're facing.
Or we're never going to get there, but we can get there once we do that.
Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with all of that.
And I think, look, I mean, all this stuff, it's in the past.
It's now a part of Libertarian Party history.
It is what it is.
So the best thing we can do is kind of learn all of the lessons that we can and take this stuff moving forward and just try to be more effective than ever.
And I got to say, and we could, I'll ask you about this, then we could wrap up.
But I think like the way I'm looking at it, I think there is a huge opportunity for the liberty movement going forward.
I really think that right now we're in a very unique time in American history.
We've gone through a year that is very tough to find another year to compare it to, where tremendous, tremendous suffering has been caused directly by the government.
And I mean, you almost couldn't think of a better example.
It's really funny.
I talk about this a lot on the show, but it's really funny that when the pandemic first hit, there'd be these pieces about how libertarianism is dead.
You know, like there's no libertarian in a pandemic and all of this.
And now you look at it, you know, almost a year later and you're like, okay, so the government just destroyed millions of people's lives with these lockdowns.
We've now got pretty conclusive evidence that there's no evidence that they helped.
You know, like there's, there's really no evidence that the free states have done any worse than the lockdown states or the free countries have done any worse than the lockdown countries have.
In this time, while the government is destroying millions of people's lives, they are robbing from the American people to bail out all of the big corporations.
You know, you've got like, it's like this perfect libertarian argument just waiting right there for us.
And on top of that, the country's in a culture war, like a really, really white hot culture war where the, you know, you had like the Donald Trump presidency and then this, you know, like lit a flame under the anti-Trump left, like I've never seen before.
You know, they were, they were the resistance and all of that stuff.
Now the resistance has won in the form of Joe Biden, who's just this bumbling, you know, like grandfather.
I don't know, my daughter.
Who when he wasn't a bumbling grandfather is the architect of everything that they were protesting last year.
Yeah.
No, it's literally, I think I like him better as a bumbling grandfather because he's less able to do more harm.
It's yeah, no, I agree with you on that.
If he didn't have all these evil people around him, I had, he was on, uh, he, I had the news on the other, this was like a couple of months ago and Joe Biden was on the news and my two-year-old just like ran over into the living room and looked at the TV and went, grandpa.
And then just ran away.
So like, that's, that's who we have up there is just a grandpa to what a two-year-old would think.
And you're, now we have this, this, you know, the culture war intensifying where the, all the Trump voters are going to be labeled as domestic terrorists and all of this stuff.
And I think libertarians really have the answer to the culture war that nobody else has, which is that we're the only ones who are offering a declaration of a truce to say that, hey, actually, we don't need to fight this culture war.
What we need to do is decentralize things and you can live in your culture and you can live in your culture and we don't have to be at constant war against each other.
I think going forward, we could be the only ones who offer a solution to the culture war, which is really not that we're on the left side or the right side of it.
It's that we're kind of above this.
We see this as a tool of the powerful to pit the powerless against each other, and we have the answers to roll it all back.
So I think there's a lot of opportunity going forward.
Yeah, we would live in better harmony if we're not being robbed of our power, our freedom, and our money, if we aren't being pitted against each other for political purposes that have nothing to do with benefiting us at all.
If we weren't being stuck with generational debt on, you know, we talk about taxation without representation.
How about having a debt bill when you're already before you're born?
Right.
So we could talk, and then with the lockdowns, usually the way government oppression works is they typically do acute harm to the, what we call marginalized communities, the people that are the least likely to be able to effectively fight back against it.
So whether it's the war on drugs, the war on guns, just the general policy of over-policing and over-imprisonment, whether we're talking about any of these things, they disproportionately hurt the poor and people of color and all the other marginalized groups that are out there.
The lockdowns are unique in that almost everyone is having the screws stuck to them, not fully equally, but yes, comfortable people in suburban areas are largely less aggrieved than people in metropolitan and urban areas and so forth.
So there is still some disproportionate harm being done, but not like it usually is.
This is unique in that every single American's life was disrupted last year, unless you're a politician or a multi-billionaire crony, corporate type.
Everyone else has been disproportionately affected by these lockdowns.
And the backdrop of it has been the shame campaign that if you, similar to the post-9-11 shame campaign, after 9-11, you go, I don't know if being able to hold and detain Americans indefinitely and others indefinitely without any charge is a good idea.
How is that going to make us safe?
And people go, oh, you're just, you just want the terrorists to win.
Well, now it's, you just want disease to win and for everyone's grandparents to die.
And it's like, no, I'm saying that I think that more people are dying because of bad government policy, not just from COVID, but from suicide and addiction and depression and spousal abuse and all these other and just the general crime rate increasing.
Crime rate always goes up when poverty goes up.
People are more desperate, they're more angry, and they take it out on the people around them because they can't attack the powerful.
So, you know, yes, we are in a unique position to be able to do it, but we have to actually do it.
We have to seize the narrative and we have to present something that no one else has the bravery to say.
You know, the story of the emperor's new clothes, new wardrobe or whatever it's called, is that everyone knew the emperor's naked or most people knew they were naked, but you couldn't say it.
And it wasn't just because you'd get punished by the emperor.
It's because everyone around you'd be like, what are you a schmuck?
Of course, look at this robe.
It's amazing.
But everyone knew, or at least most people were willing to look there and say, yeah, no, that guy's naked.
And it took a kid saying he's naked.
And finally, one by one, everyone else said, yeah, he's naked too.
This is our emperor's no close moment.
This is our moment to say what everyone or most people are thinking.
Yeah, you're right.
These lockdowns don't work.
Telling everyone to stay home unless you have to go to the store with everyone else at the exact same time because there's a curfew isn't going to, you know, is it going to slow the spread of COVID?
Telling everyone to stay inside, even though we know that flu season is the worst during the cold season, during the colder season because everyone's inside more.
Like we know that what you believe to be counterintuitive is counterintuitive.
They are lying to you.
They're all lying to you.
And everything that they're doing is just a good cop, bad cop routine to keep you against at each other's throats so that you don't recognize your real opponent, which is the one who is oppressing you, stealing from you, murdering people around the world in your name, imprisoning and kidnapping and ruining the lives of people here in your name and sticking you with the bill for it with interest while they hand off trillions of dollars to the crony corporatists who bought and paid for them to be in office.
That is an inherently populist message.
It is an inherently power to the people message.
It is an inherently intuitive message.
It is an inherently empathetic message.
And it lines up 100% with libertarian thought and action.
It's why we're right.
And we just have to do it.
And we have to be as bold and unapologetic and unafraid as we possibly can in doing so.
Amen, brother.
Couldn't agree with you more on all of that stuff.
That is the type of messaging that'll put Alan Dershowitz on the Supreme Court one day.
Just kidding.
An Empathetic Message00:01:02
Spike, dude, it's been a pleasure talking with you.
Thank you for taking the time out.
We got to do this again sometime real soon.
Where can people follow you and check out all of your stuff?
I'm on, if you type in Spike Cohen on anything on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter.
I'm on TikTok.
I made one video.
I got to figure, I got to give something to the kids.
Supposedly I'm on Discord now.
I don't even know where.
If you look for Spike on social media, you'll find me.
If you are looking for my mixtape, you will not find it.
It is out there, but you're just not, you're not going to find it.
People, many hundreds of people are looking for the mixtape.
If they couldn't find it, well, maybe you'll find it.
If you find it, you'll get the greatest prize of all, which is my mixtape.
But no, if you want to find me on social media, Spike Cohen on everything.
Absolutely, guys.
Make sure you go follow Spike.
Spike's been just on fire.
I follow you on Twitter and I just love the messaging over the last few months.