Tho Bishop joins James Smith to dissect paleo-libertarianism, analyzing Murray Rothbard's critique of Sam Francis's Beautiful Losers regarding Rockefeller-Morgan institutional capture. They debate the "Caesar" strategy versus neoconservative imperialism, examining how inflation and central bank manipulation shifted public opinion toward Austrian economics while exposing the failure of traditional conservative institutions. Ultimately, the discussion frames current populist distrust as a necessary reaction to bad-faith state actors, suggesting a future shift toward decentralized Republican state leadership to counter federal overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Unique Trump Year Perspective00:09:11
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You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving.
I hope you had some good food and spent some time around some people that you love.
I am very happy to be joined today by Tho Bishop, who, of course, is an editor over at the Mises Institute, which is the greatest institute in the history of institutes.
He's also a Florida man, Liberty Republican.
What's the name of your Bay County?
Is that yours?
The Redneck Riviera.
The Redneck Riviera.
All right, very good.
And I think, if I'm not mistaken, the world leading paleo-libertarian historian.
I'm working at it.
I'm working at it.
Is there really any competition in that?
Oh, unfortunately, like, if I could have a conversation with Justin Raimondo right now, I would give anything for that.
I'm reading some of his stuff now.
I'm going through Reclaiming the American Right, and he was just a treasure.
But it is great.
There are a lot of people in the Mises Institute orbit that lived through these years.
I talked to Tom a little bit when he came through a couple months ago.
So that's been fun.
But I'm just having a blast being able to dive into what I think is a really interesting and important little niche of American political history.
Yeah, no, it is great.
Can I say something?
Man, I've never said this publicly before, but Justin Ramondo, I never had a conversation with him.
I don't think we ever interacted in any way ever, but I remember this very well.
And he was already sick, you know, at this point.
But so he followed me on Twitter for a while.
And I followed him and would always like keep up on his stuff.
And I'm a huge fan of his.
And he unfollowed me at some point.
And I don't know.
This always haunts me.
And I'll never have an answer for this ever.
But I was like, oh shit, did I say something that like pissed off Justin Raimondo?
Because I know he ran his own Twitter.
It wasn't like he had anyone else running it.
So at some point, he unfollowed me.
And then, of course, unfortunately, he passed away.
But yeah, he was a treasure.
I love his writing, man.
Like his, his writing from like the 90s through the first decade in the 2000s was some of the best stuff ever put out there.
Just incredible.
Absolutely.
And his biography, Amurr Rothbard, is fascinating too, because it's his perspective of this movement.
And that's one of the things.
I mean, one of the reasons I came into the Institute orbit in the first place, I wrote, I read Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism.
And it's kind of funny because there's some people that kind of view it as kind of an attack on Murray at certain points of his life and whatever.
But like reading that, it made me love Murray Rothbard even more than I did before.
And it's like Raimondo, looking at his perspective and throughout all this, particularly since he was not always on Murray's side in some of those debates.
He had such a unique voice out there.
And I got a retweet from Raimondo once, and that was a huge, huge moment.
Pretty near the end, he was very interested in his perspective of the Trump years, I think was very, very unique amongst anyone, even within libertarian orbit.
And just having a few more years of that would have been fascinating.
But this is so life goes.
Yeah, no, exactly.
That's right.
There's a lot of guys like that Who I know of, both in the comedy world and the libertarian world, who I'm like, man, I just really would have loved to see what they said about this moment or what they said about that.
But anyway, yeah.
So there, you know, I think there's something, you know, you post these articles quite a bit and you really find stuff that I've never found before from the kind of like 90s Rothbard, Rockwell world.
And I'm really grateful for it.
I mean, we'll get into in a bit the article that you just sent me that you posted today that I was really just so fascinated.
And I was just enjoyed reading so much.
I think, okay, there's many different divides within the liberty world, libertarians.
And many of them are at this point to me almost kind of boring, you know, like minarchy versus anarchy or something like that.
Or so like, I don't care.
I just really don't care.
I mean, I guess I do a little bit.
Like I'd still be interested to debate that with someone, but it doesn't have that much relevance.
And there's other disagreements like me and you had a whole debate about the LP versus the GOP and there's all these other different things.
But I think one that's really important is those who can grapple with the paleo error and those who cannot.
Like those who can appreciate 90s Rothbard and those who just re and go, oh my God, so horrible.
I can't stand this.
And are incapable of grappling with any of the ideas of like 90s Rothbard, Hoppe, the whole paleo strategy and all of that stuff.
And those of us who can look at it, and I'm not even saying, by the way, those who can agree with everything in it, there's some stuff to disagree with.
I disagree with some of it, but that you can look at it and go, man, there's something really fascinating to this time period.
And so it's always great when you find these articles that I've never seen before.
And it's, I don't know, it's like a gift to go like, oh, yeah, okay, I get to sit down and read this piece.
Well, I've just had so much joy doing it.
I've got a buddy of mine, Michael Combs, that's been doing some great work and helping me get some of the HTML from all these old scanned copies because it's kind of difficult to find.
And for a while, to be honest, like I was expecting that this was kind of, you know, I was going to find a bunch of stuff that I wouldn't want to share with anyone, right?
There's kind of this taboo aspect to, you know, the Triple R.
And it's kind of just thrown in with the Ron Paul newsletters, which, you know, you had reason articles about, oh, well, this is definitely the rock wall.
And this is just a continuation of this paleo strategy and all sorts of stuff.
And then you start reading that and you realize that's really not it at all.
Like what you have is basically, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, wishing we could talk to Ramondo again.
Well, what's kind of neat is that reading these articles, you kind of get a feeling for what how Murray would be dealing with the current political environment.
Because I think there's so many parallels between particularly the 2020s and really, you know, kind of the Trump era with what was going on in the 90s.
You had on the right, there was a reevaluation of America's place in the world from a foreign policy perspective, right?
It was post-Cold War, we're kind of post-war and terror, at least domestically.
We still have a major footprint, but politically that's the case.
You had a lot more attention kind of being directed towards right-wing militia groups and things like that.
You have that going on now.
You have a lot of issues with police brutality, rising violence in the streets of inner cities, which is something that a lot of the most controversial aspects of the writing, Murray Rothbard's Take Back the Streets, and this and the other.
I mean, he was writing from someone that had the experiences of dealing with the peak crime years of New York City.
You know, you could read correspondence for him talking to his friends and like there's regular burglaries and things like that.
You know, you had the issues going on in some of the major cities throughout the 90s.
And here you had basically, you know, Murray Rothbard recognizing, disagreeing with some of his earlier stuff that if we're going to be able to have a larger conversation about some of these, you know, anarchy versus minarchy debates,
some of these higher level libertarian conversations, we're not going to be able to have that if the people in our cities don't feel safe, if there's not a degree of a common culture that promotes self-governing, and that there's a cultural aspect that is important for us in a community to not need the state to be, you know, to relied upon for our, you know, all these things that historically churches and civil groups and all this sort of stuff came about.
And I think that these are some sort of conversations we're having right now in the liberty side of things.
I think in the conservative movement as a whole, the kind of the reevaluation of neoconservatives and the rising populists and the influence of, say, a James Burnham and a Sam Francis has on modern day new right populists.
Well, you know, Rothbard's talking about them here.
And so it's just, it's an interesting way where we can learn from this period of the 90s, the intellectual discussion there, and try to identify ways that we can kind of build on it, some potential pitfalls that are out there from that experience.
And so, what I've been trying to do is learn as much as possible from men much more intelligent than I am to try to see, you know, is there any insights here that have relevance and what we're trying to do now and defending liberty now?
Reevaluating Law and Order Trust00:15:21
Right.
Yeah, I think possibly one of the things that kind of made me more willing or receptive to some of the like, you know, unleash the cops type stuff.
And the, the, the, you know, this is from Rothbard's paleo-conservative strategy, or I'm sorry, um, what was it?
The paleo strategy essay.
I can't remember the title of it.
That one thing is right-wing populism.
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Right-wing populism, correct.
And then there was a subtitle like about paleo-libertarian strategy or something.
But that, you know, I did, I was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1983.
And so I kind of, you know, existed in, I mean, very young in the 80s, but in the 90s, I remember the 90s very well.
And there was very high crime.
I mean, crime rates that even today, as crime is rising, they have not reached the crime rates of the early 90s.
And so this, I think a lot of people are starting to realize that, yeah, no, that is actually something that libertarians have to deal with.
And as crime was falling for three straight decades, it was very easy to kind of just go, no, this isn't even something we need to think about.
But as it starts going up, you realize it's like, yeah, look, I mean, you can talk about liberty, but if you can't walk down your street, then someone's biggest problem isn't their tax rate.
Their biggest problem might actually be, how can I get down the street safely at night?
And so I had this moment yesterday, yesterday or the day before, I was on Josh Smith's show.
You know, Josh, you've been on his show as well, Break the Cycle.
Excellent show.
Go subscribe.
And he had like a big panel on the show and I was there.
And he asked what our biggest problem with the criminal justice system was.
And so evidently I just jumped on and Scott Horton had answered before I did.
And he had said the same thing I said, which basically was our biggest problem was that there's this immunity for the state and that, you know, they don't like, it doesn't matter what they do.
They just completely get off of it.
And I brought up the case of Charlottesville, which of course is the most controversial one to bring up, where I go, okay, so they just had this court case that found that the people who organized Charlottesville owed tens of millions of dollars to the people who were hurt there.
And Phil, however you feel about that, I go, well, how come the cops don't know anything?
I mean, they're the ones who led the alt-right guys right into the Antifa guys.
And then I brought up that piece, which is the most controversial Rothbard piece where he says, unleash the cops.
But of course, his next line that everybody always leaves out is subject, of course, to liability if they're found to be wrong.
And to me, like what libertarian could read that and not think, okay, that's a pretty important element to this.
And isn't that, in a sense, our biggest gripe about this whole thing is that it's not that if somebody's being violent in the moment, and Rothbard goes out of his way to say, listen, we're not talking white collar crime here.
I'm not talking like this nonsense.
I'm talking like violent street crime.
We should have somebody who can stop that immediately with the same amount of violence.
And if they bring that to someone who wasn't a violent street criminal, then they should be responsible for that.
Like if you really look at that with an open mind, what's so controversial about that?
Rothbard basically has the Justin Amosh perspective on that.
But I also think that.
And it's interesting, too, because this is something I've thought a lot about of late, is that I think one of the issues where you have conservatives like Scott Greer taking shots at you and things like that is that libertarians, we talk about criminal justice reform and we talk about the accountability of cops, we so often focus on the nonviolent criminal who now has ridiculous fines and then had his life completely upended because some cop had a bad day and picked on.
And that's a big problem with the system.
But the other side of it is that they're bad at using violence against the genuine thugs of the world, right?
There's not too much policing.
There's just bad placing because there's under policing in so much of the parts of the country where we're having these sort of some revivals of the 90s era things and things like that.
And that's where I think, if we as libertarians, we're looking at this criminal justice issue, I think along with the side that's kind of promoted a lot by the left right now on the bail reform and things like that, focus, we need a Corey DeAngelis of policing, where it opens up the door talking more about the way that you have private firms in Detroit and elsewhere and pushing that where we're providing real answers to the actual security issue in these neighborhoods.
A buddy of mine, Tate Fegley, who's friends with Corey.
He's a PhD with some experience as era.
I'm hoping that he can kind of start advancing the ball and some of this sort of stuff.
This, I think, is where we can actually provide solutions on the defense of private property side of things, along with the, hey, here's the innocent victims of the state.
And I think that will help kind of maybe build some of those bridges with your law and order conservative folks that may be recognizing that certain sort of cops really can't be trusted, particularly in the FBI and things like that.
There's a balance there that we have to find a middle ground.
Yeah, I right.
Okay.
So I see what you're saying with that.
And I think that, you know, it is this weird kind of like, it's almost like we have the perfect like middle ground, which, you know, I hate to have the middle ground because the middle ground sounds like Hillary Clinton.
You know what I mean?
You never want to be like this centrist in today's world.
But the truth is that what it's all about is protecting people and property.
And that's that, that's the issue is that so many people, and I understand where this Scott Greer guy is like, he's like, what are you talking about?
Defund the police or something.
That sounds like Black Lives Matter.
That sounds like what Antifa is saying.
And I get that.
I really do.
And particularly when there are riots, you know, raging through neighborhoods and then someone goes, get rid of cops.
I mean, what are you talking about?
But I think our job is to is to say, yeah, but look at this.
These cops like stood down and are completely unaccountable for that.
So wouldn't you rather have someone who at least, if they fail that badly at their job, are accountable for like, okay, you, you owe something or you have to do a better job at this.
And the thing that frustrates me about the kind of like defund the police argument is that you have these police departments all over the place.
I mean, so I'm in like a small town right now with no crime.
Like where I moved my family to has no crime.
And I mean, to the point that like I have the ring home security system and they'll alert you about crime in neighboring areas.
And the alerts we get, dude, I'm not even fucking with you.
It's like, I get like a family of ducks is out on the road.
Everyone drive slower.
Like make sure you don't hit these ducks.
I just saw them, you know, like that's the crime that I'm dealing with.
And our little local police department has like these armored vehicles that they just bring out sometimes.
Like someone, if you have a birthday party in my town, they, you can get this armored vehicle to trail your birthday run because they have nothing to do with it.
Nothing at all to do.
They're like, oh yeah, sure, we'd love to bring it out.
Have an excuse?
Sure, let's get it.
Looks cool.
And it does look cool.
But the point is that it's like, if I were to go like, I think we should probably cut back on this funding.
I don't really think you guys need that.
That's not the same thing as saying, like, if you see someone beating up an old lady, just look the other way.
You know what I mean?
And so, so this is where the disconnect happens, that it's like, so much of this stuff is not about like whether the level, like whether the budget is higher or lower.
The issue is that, you know, when, and this is the problem I think with libertarians allying with progressives ever, is that even when it's something that we're right on and they're saying the right thing on, once they get in there and do that, once we go something like, oh, you know, I think bail is kind of crazy.
I think it's kind of crazy that someone who's arrested for a gun possession charge or a drug possession charge or some other, you know, victimless nonviolent crime has to pay this crazy bail.
And if they don't have that money, then they just have to sit in a horrible, like, you know, jail or really prison in reality most of the time.
That's awful.
Okay.
And it is.
But then they go with that.
They go, yeah, you're right.
We need to repeal bail.
And you know, this guy who beat up the mother of his children four times and stabbed a guy once.
We're going to let him right back out on the streets.
And you're like, wait, who's arguing for that?
Like that's not.
And so that case will be used to absolutely turn any reasonable person away from the idea of bail reform.
And that, you know what I'm saying?
Like that's kind of what we're dealing with.
Yeah.
No, we're seeing it play out right now with the attacks after the parade massacre in Wisconsin.
Of course, and the media is doing everything they can just to make the whole situation, you know, circus in its own right, by not addressing the real problem there.
Right.
And I think there's also kind of a disconnect that happens so often when we're, you know, for example, like here, you know, we've got, you know, the police department probably has still a few toys they probably shouldn't have.
I remember we had a spring break crackdown a few years ago, like a major like armored vehicle like on the white beaches here, which just didn't quite look right.
But there is, I think, also a dynamic here where we're like the sheriffs in the role that that plays in a community.
Where again, I think it's easy for libertarians to kind of neglect some of the actual human aspect of the justice system, right?
We saw it play out with like the Kyle Rittenhouse thing where having like a decent judge, you know, who is made a big difference in that have, you know, a defendant having a fair trial.
You know, in the sheriffs, we've seen, you know, there's this great constitutional sheriff thing where, you know, you had you had sheriffs out in the east side of Washington state nullifying state gun law.
You had my favorite, which is Dara Leaf, who was a Michigan sheriff that defended the idea of citizens' arrests against Gretchen Wittmer last year, which I loved.
And I think that's the other side of it, too, is that there's a structural thing where, you know, I know if I try to deal with a state trooper in Bay County, it's going to go a lot worse than dealing with a sheriff deputy in Bay County.
And so I think there's another way we're just understanding some of these divides when it comes to local governance versus state.
And of course, the worst being the feds, that's another dynamic that I think can be lost in some ways in the libertarian discussion, which I think perhaps undermines some of the real aim here, which again is creating a order of property rights defense that we have some sort of control over, ideally in a market-based system, but short of that, a local control sort of thing and things like that.
And so I think that's an area where, again, there's perhaps some opportunity for common ground with, again, your law and order sort of conservative that now realize the FBI is trying to hunt them down.
Well, right.
And not just that.
Yeah.
So I agree with you on that.
And I also think that there's, you know, we're living through a kind of interesting moment.
And I think one of the most one area where I see the most potential over the last, you know, in insanity of the last 19 or 20 months, I don't know.
I've lost count of 15 days, whatever it's been.
But is that, you know, I think right-wingers, by and large, forget the guy I was arguing with on Twitter the other day.
And maybe he might be better than he seems.
Twitter is the worst place to ever interact with someone.
Because I did have some people on Twitter being like, you know, actually, you guys should talk.
It'd probably go better than the Twitter stuff.
But, you know, I think a lot of right-wingers are reassessing their feelings about the police.
And maybe with some of the nuance that you just mentioned, but most people don't have nuance.
So probably not.
But, you know, I mean, seeing this video that was trending today of that mom who is being arrested for not having a mask on at a school board meeting and just seeing all the stuff with cops enforcing lockdowns.
And I'm not downplaying what you're saying.
There have been a few really heroic sheriffs around the country who have said, look, we are not going to enforce these mandates in our area, really in defiance of the political ruling class.
And that's incredible.
Those people are heroes as far as I'm concerned.
But much like DeSantis, when it comes to Republican governors, they're in the minority.
You know, they're not most people.
And most of the local police departments are like, well, that's the rule.
Our governor just decreed this.
And so I guess I'm going to arrest Susan, who's here worried about her three kids, you know, and didn't wear a mask.
So we'll put her in handcuffs.
And there is something, as much as I hate to see a video like that, there is something about that that I kind of go like, yep.
Okay.
I almost enjoy the opportunity to be like, yeah, look at this.
I mean, is this how you want it to be?
You want to support those that, well, I mean, he's wearing a blue uniform, right?
So in the most Loebert fashion to go, well, I guess he's in a blue uniform, so everything is okay.
But, you know, those Loeberts do have a point about that.
Well, and I think that goes to the point of just the importance that culture plays in all this, because there's definitely areas where you have a lot of, you know, Republicans are probably still defend a lot of really abusive uses of law enforcement in a variety of ways, including being bad on this.
Questioning the Entire Economy00:10:38
But what I find interesting is, you know, what develops these cultures that create kind of systemic disobedience?
You know, what is the culture that allows for the Darliefs and the constitutional sheriffs to thrive?
And I think that goes back to some of the kind of the aspects that Rothbard was trying to hit on in terms of what kind of the conservative movement kind of meant in its best form.
Because I think one of the issues that we've always had, and this is one of the things that was highlighted in the article I published today, is that you've had a group, you've had a nation of conservative Americans that most of them got their information from someone like a Russian Limbaugh, which relative to the time was a breakaway from the cathedral, right?
You had this sort of, you know, that American heritage, sort of instinctual, you know, conceived in liberty sort of, you know, kind of romantic aspect that was great.
And what the problem is, is that this movement of people have been so poorly misrepresented, been so actively betrayed by the people that they have trusted.
And they've trusted it with power.
They've trusted it with money.
They've trusted it with institutional support, et cetera, et cetera.
The conservative nation of America keeps getting completely betrayed by the people they put faith in.
And so that is where kind of in the 90s, the goal was to try to offer a new leadership to that, you know, that group of people.
And of course, unfortunately, then you have 9-11 happens.
That goes all out the window.
What you have right now is, again, the reason why you're able to have conversations, again, someone like Scott Greer, he's someone that I think needs antagonism for his Twitter account in particular.
And so that creates some incentives, right?
And it's fine.
I think Scott's one of the more interesting people on Twitter generally, but he needs conflict.
That's fine.
But the reason there is so much of this reevaluation, again, the degree to which conservatives distrust civics 101 institutions that even back then they thought they were supposed to respect, right?
Oh, you know, I don't, I disagree with Barack Obama, but I respect the office.
Well, now they're talking about Joe Biden crapping his pants at the Vatican, right?
There's no respect for that office there.
Well, it's a disrespect.
I think there's something about that, right?
It's like the fact that a lot of those conservative types, it's that they respected the office so much that they feel so betrayed.
And I think that's in many ways the legacy of Donald Trump.
More so than anything he actually did.
I think the fact that those people are so like they get it, you know, on an instinctual level that they get that it's like, no, these, by the way, all of the institutions that they would have defended their entire lives, you know, the FBI and the CIA and all of this stuff, they realized that they all turned against Donald Trump.
And they always would have called the media the liberal media or whatever, but there was something different.
A line was crossed with Donald Trump, I think, in their perspective.
Like it's not just that they were like, oh, we're against him.
They called him a Russian spy.
And I think, or not a Russian spy, but a Russian whatever asset or whatever the fuck it was.
That I think to conservatives means something.
That's what conservatives call you.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's not what you just get to call them.
And so I think that they realize that they did that based on nothing, that they really boxed them in.
And I guess they don't believe that the election was legitimate, which I don't, you know, I don't believe any election is legitimate.
So I don't know.
They might be right about that.
Who knows?
But so there is a whole new era now where there is like these people on the right who understand to some degree that the system isn't to be trusted.
One of the last episodes that Rush Limbaugh did, he read an article that I wrote, which was one of my more radical, you know, I wrote some of the things that I've read.
Really?
Is that true?
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
Oh, that's pretty cool.
And the beauty of it is that I was quoting from Anatomy of the State.
It opens up with, well, they finally got it.
They got Donald Trump in allusion to some of other Rothbard's writings.
And the whole gist of my article is that the distrust your average Trump voter has is more important than anything Trump accomplished.
And that's what makes him the threat the establishment always thought he was.
And so Rush Limbaugh read that on the day of Biden's, the day after Biden's inauguration.
And it's precisely the way that Trump left that thing, lighting the entire election integrity aspect on fire.
And talking to people in my community here in Bay County that are Rick Santorum type voters from 2012, they have less faith in the federal government than a lot of capital L libertarians out there.
And that's that aspect that it's so interesting to watch where I'm no longer the fringe Ron Paul guy that people, oh, he's a nice kid.
He's smart, but he's kind of out there.
I'm now the moderate within a Republican county.
And the thing is that they're now looking for what are the answers to this?
We now have ourselves in the situation.
What's the answer to it?
And that's where I know Jeff recently done a Human Action podcast episode with Ryan and Macon on kind of the old right and Geret Goret and Garrett Gorette and this entire idea of the revolution was and kind of the recognition of the old right, that we had this revolution of the regime in the form and that you've all these conservatives kind of they're waiting for that, that Marxist Obama to take over everything.
But it already happened right, and that's that storyline.
That again, I think that if you know we, I think uniquely, if you read Rothbard, if you read these people, if you read Mises.org content, that's that line within this larger change in the right, but no, that that isn't being filled.
And I think, particularly with you know, especially when inflation you know now being that that sort of corner, that that that kitchen table sort of issue that every single family feels every single day, another reminder of how much you know the DC is ripping us off.
I think this is that sort of narrative that there's there's a there's a void in the populist intellectual right, that kind of Austrians uniquely filled, and that's what Rothbard was trying to fill with, and Lee Rockwell of the Triple R.
And that's kind of, again, some of the fun of rediscovering some of those writings right now.
Yeah.
Well, in many ways, I think that was what Ron Paul filled in 2008, right?
Is that he was the only guy who was and it was so interesting for that election, the 2008 campaign, not the 2012 campaign, which I think inherited a lot of the momentum from that.
But the 2008 campaign starts like my libertarian origin story starts with the Ron Paul Giuliani moment and the economy had not crashed yet.
And, you know, like at the time, you're like, oh, wow, Ron Paul's really making a great argument about these wars.
And then he's saying all this stuff about how the economy is doomed to fail.
And you're like, that seems a little bit out there.
And then when it fails, you're like, holy shit, like this just really fits perfectly.
And like, oh, my, and not just fails, but fails exactly how he said it was going to.
And so I think that monetary policy is something that really isn't interesting to people until it is.
And then once it is, they really are interested in it.
And inflation is one of these things that, you know, I've always said, I mean, I could talk to my father-in-law, who's like, he's a trucker and very smart guy, but just been a working class guy his entire life, a trucker and seen the entire country and knows all of this.
And you could talk to him about some of these other stuffs, like the more philosophical, theoretical stuff.
I'll be like, yeah, okay, but you know, we got to focus on what actually matters.
But if you talk to him about the value of money, oh my God, will he just go off right away?
I'm like, let me tell you what a house used to be worth.
Let me tell you what a truck used to be worth.
Let me tell you what this year.
And particularly over this last, you know, six months, you go, yeah, this is insane.
I mean, this is insane, the rate of inflation.
As you and me both know, it's far worse than what they're acknowledging it is right now.
And you go, yeah, well, okay, what do you think caused this?
I mean, maybe the trillions of dollars printed while the economy was locked down.
Maybe that has something to do with it.
That's one of the things that I get frustrated at times with the way that some of kind of the strategy discussions go because you got to get to the point where like, oh, well, you don't need to read Mises and Rothbard, read Lenin instead.
And no, like the reason why we're here doing what we're doing is because we can recognize that, you know, understanding Mises and Rothbard makes you better in understanding civilization itself.
Like this entire battleground, strategy isn't a substitute for end goals.
And the great thing about our ideas is that they can help us better understand the world, which gives us a functioning advantage against our enemies.
And so like, that's where, you know, and so that's also why like, you know, it's fair to go back.
It's like, okay, well, why didn't the economy die when Peter Schiff was predicting back in, you know, it's important to have some self-reflection on that.
But we also need to recognize that when we're talking about this inflationary moment, you know, I think there's, again, it's another opportunity for outreach on the right where we have all these concerns about sort of the cultural decay going on in America.
And oh, what's led to all this sort of, you know, whatever the culture war of the day is, the role that the Fed has directly played in subsidizing so many of the cultural aspects that the right is concerned about, you know, being able to connect those dots where, you know, we can relate, hey, you know, your gas pump's going up, everything, you know, it's 20% inflation in certain industries here and here.
Oh, and this is also why, you know, all of these issues that you've been complaining about in terms of corporate consolidation and things like that.
Well, this also plays the role here.
And again, if you had just Tucker Carlson to spend a little bit of time on the Fed, the same way he goes after vulture capitalists or things like that, the quality of this conversation would go so much further because he'd be hitting at the actual cause of the symptoms that I think he's more often than not rightfully going after.
Yeah.
And he has spent a little bit of time on that, but just not enough.
And when the thing is, like, if they could just, there was that, I mean, I know I hit him really hard for this.
Koch Brothers Strategy Shifts00:13:42
And I'm sure a lot of people, you know, in our world did, but when he blamed Austrian economists for the, oh, God, that was just so off.
It's so disappointing because you're like, Tucker, you're almost there.
You're like so close to being there.
But like, come on, man.
Yes, the Austrians have been in charge of everything.
This is a really weird line because Steve Bannon has used the same line.
Once upon a time, Pat Buchanan used the same line more or less, and he kind of apologized to Lou later for it.
Because the problem is that they're being too clever, like they think they're going after the Koch brothers.
And it's like, I'm sorry, guys.
Like, the Koch brothers haven't cared about Austrian economics for like well over a decade.
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All right, let's get back into it, dude.
If the Koch brothers had put a fraction of the resources into Ron Paul that they put into Scott Walker, like, I mean, come on.
Do you know what?
Like, this is the truth: the Koch brothers, and I, I'm not somebody who spends a lot of time like bashing the Koch brothers because the um, you know, despite all the old beefs and all of the old betrayals and all of that, I do actually think there's some good things that they've done, and it's also just like that's what the left loves to do: is like trash the Koch brothers and all of that.
But these guys, like, come on, man.
You wouldn't just, when you saw the Ron Paul revolution happening, go, you know what?
We got to put all this behind us.
If there was any part of them that actually still cared about these principles, they would have gone, We're going to put like a billion dollars into this and make it something they had.
No one else could have done it except them, and they could have taken this from being what we what it was to being some whole new level thing, and they didn't.
So, I'll never forgive them for that.
Uh, but anyway, um, so yes, to your point, right?
I think you're right that the and this is true of Tucker Carlson, this is true of Steve Bannon, this is true of like a lot of the um kind of populist, the new right, not what Murray Rothbard would call the new right, but the new right, what Michael Malice would call the new right.
A lot of the powerful people within that, the problem is that they don't understand monetary policy the way that they should, and so they do blame a lot of the kind of um well, it's like, yeah, I guess maybe we really should tax these really rich people, or maybe it's like the these venture capitalists really are causing all of these problems and they just don't understand it.
I don't think it's anything other than that, it's that they just they need to learn their libertarian lesson in the same way Hoppe said, We need to learn our cultural lesson, they need to learn their economic lesson.
You're watching people who have not learned their economic lesson, yeah.
I mean, particularly, I know Sardovinch kind of goes off this path every once in a while.
It's like, Oh, the future to the Republican Party is economically left, culturally right.
It's like, no, like that's exactly how you get to the problem in the first place.
I do think, though, we have an opportunity with now that Biden has renominated Powell for the Fed chair.
I'm interested to see if there's any opportunity to kind of create some sort of political drama on some of the firebrands in the Republican Party, kind of making this sort of a purity vote against a lot of the rhinos in the Senate in particular that are other guys going to rubber stamp it because Powell's nominally a Republican, right?
And that's one of those things where I'm going to, if I can get Matt Gates out there trying to make it a little bit painful for some of those rhino, this kind of centrist, moderate Republicans, many of them are already on their way out.
Like that's something where I think we could probably start making a gain there.
I mean, the monetary discussion is something that's not going to go away.
We're going to need to start finding some answers to it.
I'm actually really encouraged.
I've heard Matt Gates talk about the Fed.
I was absolutely shocked with how he was suggesting people actually buy into debt more right now because the way in which inflation helps debtors at the expense of savers.
I was not expecting that sort of level of nuance from Matt Gates on that topic.
But Blake Masters, the guy that's running for Arizona, I was in a space with him a couple of weeks ago and he was talking about how he read human action in high school, which I don't recommend anyone doing that.
So he's working on a whole different level there.
If that's again, if some of the drumbeats from that Ron Paul era can now have a moment again in this inflationary age, these are the little reasons that give me a little bit of optimism out there.
But again, we'll see what actually comes to be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, okay.
So I want to talk about, but because we will keep going on this, but I want to talk about this article that you shared that you just sent me earlier today, which really, I was so like, I'm genuinely grateful that you sent me this article and that I saw that you shared it on Twitter.
It took me back to, man, I remember when I first found Rothbard and like was reading his stuff.
And it's probably a lot of the theory stuff that probably wouldn't get me as excited today as it did back then.
But man, back then, I like just couldn't put the pages down.
But this was a piece that you sent me.
And I felt like I was brought back to that.
Back when I, when I first found Rothbard, like, I don't know, man, maybe like 2008, 2009 or something.
And I was like, I was single and had no kids and was just like, I just, okay, I found this movie.
This is my life now.
I'm going to read this.
I have a stand-up show at 9 p.m.
It's two in the afternoon.
I'm going to read till I go do that.
And it was, and now I'm like, today you sent me this piece and I'm up there like with my baby in an arm with the three-year-old over there and trying to read it on my phone.
And I'm still doing it because it was so good.
But it was Rothbard reviewing a Sam Francis book.
And this was so many things about this piece hit me hard.
And maybe we like, should we explain for anyone who's listening or watching who doesn't know what this is?
So like we were mentioning before the paleo libertarian or the paleo strategy as it's referred to, which is used as a pejorative by a lot of libertarians, but I just, I don't think it should be.
And I think there was a lot of interesting stuff that came out of that time period.
But so after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was kind of a shakeup in the Republican Party.
Pat Buchanan ran for president in 1992.
Didn't do that good, but was kind of the precursor to Donald Trump and like a way smarter, more well-read version of Donald Trump without the fame and the riches and the ability to destroy people on stage.
And there were all of these kind of intellectual figures in the background.
And so he's reviewing Francis' book, which is, I guess he would be the leading intellectual figure of the paleoconservative movement at that time.
Is that fair, you think?
Yes.
Yeah.
Him and Paul Gottfrey and Thomas Fleming and yeah.
Right.
So so I don't know.
You started off.
So talk about this piece that you shared today.
Yeah.
So again, I overlooked it for a little bit for a while because it was a book review.
And so Beautiful Losers was a book that was kind of a series of essays written throughout, I think it was over the last decade.
And it was Francis trying to understand, again, why the conservative movement failed to do what its people wanted to do.
And so what's great is that Rothbard's review is going throughout different subjects covering the book, and you kind of get his Rothbardian twist on it.
And so it starts off by talking about the role of institutions.
And because like Francis is much like James Burnham, who had a lot of influence on his line of thinking, like he's a political scientist in kind of the truest sense.
He's an analyst of political movements and power plays and things like that.
And so he's going through and he's highlighting what led for the neoconservative takeover of conservative institutions.
And it's kind of interesting, like Rothbard actually says that Francis doesn't go far enough because so much of Rothbard's political analysis, particularly in the later part of his career, was how the way that the second half of the 20th century was defined by the battle over power between the Morgan family and the Rockefeller family.
And this hits in his The Origins of the Federal Reserve, his Wall Street Foreign Bank, Wall Street foreign policy and something or another.
I don't know.
And so he goes even kind of deeper in this sort of power-layed analysis.
And then he starts contrasting Francis with James Burnham.
Because his problem with Burnham, and this is something that comes through with Ramondo's work and things like that, is that they have a lot of respect for his intelligence.
They don't think a great deal of the managerial revolution, at least its conclusions.
But they recognize he's a very powerful figure.
And he was one of the leading neoconservative head editor, one of the chief editors over at National Review and whatnot.
But they viewed him as a man that simply wanted to cozy up to whoever was in power, right?
It's kind of the most vulgar sort of sense of that Machiavellian sort of word, right?
And kind of the one big key that he brought to the neoconservative right was not his understanding of institutions, but rather it was just a very, very strong anti-Soviet policy.
And so he wanted to justify the excuse that the building of an American empire to trump the Soviet Union.
And that obviously Rothbard saw was a danger to civilization because his biggest threat was nuclear war with the Soviets.
And so he contrasted that with Francis.
And Francis kind of has much more of this middle America.
He's got some great articles about kind of homeland rebellion against the imperial state.
And these sort of dynamics, it's kind of Gorvadal-esque at times, which is another one of my favorites.
There's just this great tradition of this middle American radical sort of anti-state conservatism.
And everything that he's outlining is aligned with this.
And one of the interesting aspects of this piece is that he starts explaining kind of some of Francis' own evolution and thought.
Because, for example, Francis had this idea that Ronald Reagan could kind of be the American Caesar and that with his popularity, kind of mixed like this popular charismatic guy with Goldwater sort of radical principles, he could be a Caesar-like figure to kind of claw back all of the expansions of the state post-LBJ and kind of kick us down to the road of restoring the old republic, right?
And of course, that doesn't work.
And he kind of outlines why I wrote, like, and it doesn't, but like, this is exactly the sort of stuff that this was kind of the Stefan Malneux sort of defense of Trump, right?
We have these sort of drumbeats of, you know, kind of the Caesarean sort of solution here.
I can talk about DeSantis, but it's another day.
But like, there's, there is that sort of kind of interest in that strategy again from the right.
And so Rothbard kind of outlines why it failed here, the inherent problems, this, that, and the other.
And so, um, and then at the end, he talks about how like this book is being blackballed by all the sort of establishment and things like that.
And kind of we can kind of see how that play.
But it's again, it's so fascinating because again, so many of the conversations that are going on within right-wing Twitter, like, you know, Rothbard talks about Gramsci and the way that the left succeeded and their march through institutions and things like that.
And Rothbard acknowledges that, you know, historically, like he's a moralist is what he calls it.
Like, you know, he's someone that's committed to the ideology and has a sort of righteous zeal in his product.
He's not an analyst, but you kind of get that sense of him applying that sort of analyst hat with his ideology.
And that's, that's the strategy of the right article.
Like you could see definitely where the Francis influence played so much in Rothbard during that 90s period.
And so it's just, it helps illuminate this, this very interesting part of Rothbard's career.
Yeah, I think that I actually think this was, I'm really glad you shared this because I think that the right half of the libertarian Twitter world or whatever could really benefit from reading this and really digesting it and taking it in.
Elites vs Populist Morals00:07:08
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And it's, I think that whether you're in like, okay, well, in the libertarian world, if you're like in the woke left libertarian, you'll just re and not even like understand it.
But if you're in like where I am, like if you were like a Mises caucus guy, or if you're like a Republic, a Liberty Republican type, or if you're like an agorist or anything like that, I think that there's something in this article that will challenge what you believe and then something that will reaffirm what you believe and then challenge what your opponents believe.
And then kind of like it really kind of brings it all together.
And it's all so relevant to what we're all dealing with today.
I'll put this article in the show notes for today's show.
But so there were a few things that were really interesting to me about it.
And one of them was, you know, kind of right, this the section that you told me to read when you first sent it to me was the, what was it?
It was morality versus something.
What was it?
The not strategy wasn't the term they used, but it was effects and morals.
Effects and morals.
That's right.
And it was great.
And it was great.
But the one on populism was actually the one that really stuck out to me more, where he kind of lays out this interesting kind of binary of who do you think is better, you know, from the libertarian perspective, the people or the elites.
And this will let you know whether you think a populist strategy is correct or incorrect.
That, well, who do you think is really better, the people of America or the elites?
And like, to me, I think that really underlines like what so much of the divide amongst libertarians is.
You know, like whether you, whether you think that like, okay, I think there's a lot of regime libertarians who would say, well, yeah, you know, the elites use force when they really should just do this in a voluntary way, but they basically have the right idea.
And then there's people like me and you who go, no, no, no, I think the elites are completely wrong about everything.
And I think that they are just propagandizing and manipulating regular people in this country to be way worse than they otherwise would be.
And people like that tend to favor populism, that we should whip up these, you know, as many regular people as we can to oppose the ruling class.
And to me, that was like the way he put it in that article was something that you go, that applies as much today and tomorrow as it did when he wrote this in 1993 or whatever.
Right.
And this is the populist tradition in America, something I've always just found fascinating, like, you know, Jacksonians and things like that, because historically it has been, you know, in a country like America, where we've always had kind of a strong self-sustaining middle class.
What populism allows is the use of democracy to create sort of a middle class rebellion against the elites.
If you go to Latin America, you talk about populism.
You'll have a lot of good libertarians be very concerned because typically that means kind of like a peasant revolt.
And it's like there's a lack of, you know, they have less to lose.
And so like some of the extravagance that you can have from that is a little bit different than the way that populist rebellions really have played out in America.
And I think that's that aspect where it plays into so much like, again, if you think that any of these things are our good faith actors at this point, you know, the degree to which if you are a large corporation requiring vaccine mandates in October of 2021, this is different than trying to, you know, mandate them in June, in January 2021, where we kind of thought, okay, two shots and you're done, right?
There's enough evidence out there in so many different aspects.
And again, it plays out in so many different ways.
Obviously, the war, the way that election integrity issues, the reporting of basic crime now, the Fed, et cetera, et cetera.
The degree to which so many of the institutions in this country.
It's not that they're trying to make us eat our vegetables and and they're being heavy-handed with the use of the state for it.
It's just that so many of these people can't be trusted at all.
And if you have that, then if that is what's governing this country, then the question is, what tools do we have to fight back?
And and that's where again, I think you're you're starting to see a lot of of, you know, creation of new institutions and hopefully, this pattern of state leadership is something that will continue within you know, the Republican side of things, simply because that's something what they they didn't really do during the Obama years.
The Democrats are a lot more effective at doing that during the Trump years than the Republicans ever were.
And if this starts, I mean I can go now to a normal Republican meeting at the State.
And, you know, over in Tallahassee, you start bringing up the Democrats passing like Hr1 and for Uh, Election Reform, which would have nationalized and had all sorts of crazy rules.
Human Aspect of Politics00:03:34
You do that.
You have a bunch of boomers talking of like they're they're a Tom Woods fan from nullification and secession, like I mean it, it is.
It is that degree to which again, this breakdown and trust, viewing these people as bad faith actors, it's already kind of creating that animated spirit that again, the question is what's going to end up being the outcome of all this?
Yeah, because that's the scary thing is that you know the history of evolutions, you know that there's you always start with kind of a broad coalition against the regime.
Who ends up winning that power of acting that comes afterwards is a very different question and that's that's, that's where the game's at and that's that, that's I don't where, I don't, that's where I don't know where the answers go on.
That yeah it's, it's um.
So this is what's interesting about this Rothbard piece is that he, he kind of gets into all of what the central questions that we're dealing with right now are and, of course, as we alluded to earlier in the show man you just kind of wish he was here to, you know, give his take on exactly what we have.
Not that he's perfect, but that you'd really want to know what he had to say about the moment we're living through.
Well, I think one of the greatest you know assets that we have.
You know, whenever someone goes to the bookstore at the Institute.
You know, I would say my favorite book is the, the biography of Lewd Von Mises, on that shelf.
It's because the personal example of these people, I think, is so much more important.
It's just as important, if not more so, than their incredible works.
Because when you actually start diving into the history of, you know what did Loud Von Mises, do you know, when he was in Austria?
You know, fighting the commies and kind of the Nazis taking over Germany.
What did you know Murray Rothbard, do you know, during different periods of his life?
You know, you know, interacting in different political times.
You know what did we?
What has Loud Rockwell done in his career that has allowed him to have the amount of influence and and, and you know, success that he's had?
You know, if we can, if we recognize that you know these people might have answers that are different than what we've already kind of come up in our heads as the proper libertarian thing and because and they disagreed with each other right, so there's there's obviously, if you, if you have Mises and Rothbard disagreeing, then you know you should probably have a little bit of humility if you think that you've definitely got the right answer to whatever the question of the day is learning more from their personal example.
I think is just as important if everything Else.
And I think that that's one of the fun things about this is that not only am I kind of showing some of Rothbard's writings and his words here and there, but it's also that history aspect and trying to, I think we can always benefit from kind of getting some of that wisdom that can only come from real experience and not just whatever we can think up on our tweeting something great.
Yeah, no, I think you're right.
I think I've always really like one of the Rothbard books that I've enjoyed the most.
And I've, you know, I love so much of the stuff about theory, but I loved the betrayal of the American right.
And I just love like kind of the story of all these people and who was involved and what each of their like, you know, contributions were or what they did to set back the movement.
And I think it's important to understand the human aspect of all of this.
And I also think that for libertarians today, that's something that they should focus on.
I mean, not focus on, but be aware of.
They should be aware of that these are real people who made their had their own different like views on these things and were in a different place than we are today, but also that like maybe you're not perfect either.
And maybe there's something that like you're connected to this whole kind of greater pattern.
Real People, Different Views00:00:54
And I don't know.
Maybe that didn't mean anything, but I had an idea in my head when I said that.
Anyway, okay.
So Tho, where can people find more of your work?
You find me at Mises.org.
I do a podcast with Ryan at Make It On There, Radio Rothbard occasionally.
Then you find me at Twitter at Tho Bishop.
Not many Thoes out there.
So stand out.
And I've been doing a Redneck Riviera podcast with my buddy Ford Seuss.
So if I've been trying to sell Panama City Beach is one of the best places for libertarians out there.
If you see some photos or things like that, anyone listening comes through, hit me up on Twitter.
I'll buy you a beer.
All right.
Well, there you go.
An offer for a free beer.
Who would turn that down?
All right.
Dude, thank you so much for coming on the show today.