Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - The Takeover Is Complete
Aired: 2022-06-02
Duration: 48:02


=== Reno Night Underwear Party (09:18) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:09]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:10]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:12]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:16]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:22]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:27]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:31]  Here's your host, Dave Smith.
[00:00:34]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:35]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Heart of the Problem.
[00:00:38]  I'm Dave Smith, rolling solo for this episode.
[00:00:42]  For this episode, I wanted to do a recap of the National Libertarian Party convention, which of course happened last weekend in Reno, Nevada.
[00:00:54]  Technically, I think Sparks, Nevada, but right outside of Reno.
[00:00:59]  And go over that a little bit.
[00:01:00]  I know our last episode was live from the convention.
[00:01:05]  And so this one, I'm going to recap everything that happened.
[00:01:09]  And then I promise next episode, we'll go right back to another regular Part of the Problem episode talking about all things that matter and the empire and the economy and all of that good stuff and the corporate press, all the stuff that you know and love about the show.
[00:01:26]  But I did think it was worth recapping what happened over the weekend.
[00:01:32]  All right.
[00:01:32]  So let's go through it quite a bit.
[00:01:33]  And also just talking about the Libertarian Party in general and why I'm so excited about it.
[00:01:39]  So recap number one.
[00:01:42]  I got COVID.
[00:01:44]  That part kind of sucks.
[00:01:45]  But yeah, I got COVID again.
[00:01:49]  So I'm starting to feel a bit better already.
[00:01:52]  But yeah, I was really not feeling good for the last for the last couple of days.
[00:01:57]  But anyway, so I'm here quarantining in my usual background of when I have COVID, staying away from the family and all that stuff.
[00:02:06]  But yeah, I guess several people did get it who were at the convention.
[00:02:11]  So it's one of those things.
[00:02:13]  Kind of sucks, but it is what it is.
[00:02:15]  I'm already doing a bit better.
[00:02:18]  So hopefully nobody got too sick who was out there.
[00:02:23]  Yeah, I wish I was vaccinated because then I could say, thank God I'm vaccinated or I'd be dead.
[00:02:30]  But I guess I can't say that because I'm not vaccinated.
[00:02:33]  But thank God I'm unvaccinated or I'd be dead.
[00:02:36]  I don't know.
[00:02:37]  You don't hear people say that enough.
[00:02:39]  All right.
[00:02:39]  Anyway, so last I spoke with you guys was the night before the convention.
[00:02:47]  That's when we did our live podcast there in Reno with Angela McArdle and Michael Heiss.
[00:02:52]  So this was the night before the convention, Thursday night.
[00:02:57]  Then the convention started Friday morning, went Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
[00:03:01]  So the whole weekend was incredible.
[00:03:04]  The shows we did Thursday night were just phenomenal.
[00:03:08]  Three sold out crowds, just unbelievable energy.
[00:03:12]  Everybody was so excited going into the convention.
[00:03:15]  Friday was amazing.
[00:03:19]  Friday night, we had the Mises Caucus bash, which with a bunch of incredible speakers.
[00:03:28]  Zuby came out and spoke, which was really cool.
[00:03:32]  Daniel McAdams spoke.
[00:03:34]  Scott Horton hosted the event.
[00:03:36]  Angela McArdle spoke.
[00:03:38]  Maj Ture spoke.
[00:03:42]  Then I spoke.
[00:03:43]  And then I introduced Ron Paul and Tom Woods spoke as well.
[00:03:48]  It's just like an incredible event.
[00:03:49]  It's like a thousand people standing room.
[00:03:52]  It was just unbelievable.
[00:03:55]  Really cool to cap off the night with Ron Paul speaking, gave a great speech.
[00:03:59]  That guy pushing 90, still sharp as attack, and uh, still as inspiring as ever.
[00:04:05]  So, that was incredible.
[00:04:07]  Um, so the from the very beginning of the convention, it was it was pretty obvious that we had the numbers, and um, there, you know, they tried a few uh shady things, all of them got shut down, and um, basically, we just rolled, we just rolled the convention.
[00:04:27]  It was uh, there's, I was very confident that uh, the Mises caucus uh was going to win at Reno, but we didn't just win, we won everything.
[00:04:44]  We won every single position, literally every single position in the National Libertarian Party is now run by the Mises Caucus endorsed people who took over the entire party.
[00:05:01]  Uh, so this has been this has been a project that we've been, you know, we've been working on for a few years now, and it uh, the mission to take over the Libertarian Party uh was achieved this last weekend.
[00:05:16]  Um, and and really, really great people who we were able to put into these positions.
[00:05:23]  Uh, so it's I'm quite happy with that.
[00:05:26]  Um, it was a lot of fun.
[00:05:27]  I was a voting delegate, so I was on the floor with all the guys, and it was just fun to watch it happen.
[00:05:34]  Um, and so, yeah, so Angela McCartle won the race for chair with I think over 70% of the vote, just an absolute dominant uh victory, won on the first ballot.
[00:05:49]  Uh, Josh Smith won the vice chair.
[00:05:53]  Um, Karen Ann Harlos is uh the secretary, um, there's and just down the list, all the Mises caucus people, literally every single position.
[00:06:04]  Um, they tried a whole bunch of different moves to try to, you know, I don't want to bore you with too much of the details if you're not into it, but they tried to remove regions so that they could get a region rep in there.
[00:06:16]  They tried to uh fudge with the numbers of uh delegates at the very beginning.
[00:06:22]  Every one of these moves just got shut down, and the Mises caucus took the whole damn thing.
[00:06:28]  So, this is pretty damn cool.
[00:06:30]  Uh, in addition to that, there was somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000 was raised over the weekend after the Mises Caucus won everything.
[00:06:41]  So, there's a lot of excitement, a lot of people joining the party now.
[00:06:46]  And I would just encourage all everybody here listening now, you know, maybe you've thought about joining the Libertarian Party, maybe you weren't quite sure.
[00:06:55]  Maybe some of the people who were in charge of the party had turned you off from joining.
[00:07:02]  I know I've heard from a lot of people who have said over the last few years that they were like, Well, Dave, if you take over the party, then I'll join.
[00:07:11]  Um, but I'm waiting until then.
[00:07:13]  Well, if that's you, then now is the time to come join because it's it's it's done.
[00:07:20]  Um, and so I'm pretty excited for that.
[00:07:23]  And for anybody who listens to this show, who is at least maybe not lockstep with me on every view, but is at least somewhat, you know, somewhat appreciates my perspective on these things.
[00:07:36]  Whatever your feeling about the Libertarian Party is, whatever's turned you off about it in the past, I'm telling you now, it's my people, my people who I vouched for, every one of them, great people, are now running that whole thing.
[00:07:51]  So now is the time to join up and come join us on this fight, which is going to be, I think is going to be important.
[00:07:59]  And also, it's just going to be a lot of fun.
[00:08:01]  So come get on board.
[00:08:03]  And yeah, this is going to be something pretty incredible.
[00:08:08]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Sheath Underwear, my favorite underwear on the planet.
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=== Ron Paul Builds Libertarian Party (10:11) ===

[00:09:19]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:09:21]  So let's go through what happened, what led us to this point with the Libertarian Party, what happened with the Mises caucus, how this ended up happening at all.
[00:09:32]  And maybe I'll even address a few people who I will not be addressing again in the future, but this could be the last, the final time that I'll bring some of them up generally.
[00:09:47]  And I'll talk about what I think the party can do going forward.
[00:09:51]  I'll also give some advice to my fellow members of the Mises Caucus, and maybe even some advice to other people who are members of the Libertarian Party.
[00:10:02]  So for me personally, and for a lot of other members of the Mises Caucus, so for me personally, I was never particularly interested in the Libertarian Party.
[00:10:20]  And for people who have been listening to this show for years and years, you probably know this.
[00:10:25]  I mean, you wouldn't have heard me talking a lot about the Libertarian Party until maybe in 2016 is when I started addressing them at all.
[00:10:38]  And what happened?
[00:10:40]  So back in the day in like 2008 and 2012, when Ron Paul was running for president as a Republican, he used to get asked all the time, they would ask him, why are you running as a Republican?
[00:10:57]  Why aren't you running as a libertarian?
[00:10:59]  Because obviously you are a libertarian and there's a political party for libertarians.
[00:11:04]  And the Republicans were like made up of, you know, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney.
[00:11:10]  And so clearly you're a libertarian.
[00:11:12]  You're not one of them.
[00:11:13]  So why are you even running as a Republican?
[00:11:16]  And he would have his answers about how he was the true conservative or the true Republican.
[00:11:22]  And these guys were all basically deviations on what, you know, the party was supposed to be.
[00:11:28]  And there was a fair enough argument to that.
[00:11:31]  But he would say, he would just say, well, look, all the rules are rigged against third parties in this country, which is true.
[00:11:39]  And he would talk about how after Ross Perot, Because he scared the establishment so much that they basically rigged all of the rules to not even let them into the debates and to make it very hard.
[00:11:52]  They make it so hard that a huge part of what third parties have to focus on is ballot access.
[00:11:58]  So you waste a lot of time and resources on that.
[00:12:00]  They have all these different rules that make it very difficult to compete.
[00:12:04]  It's part of the reason why we have, you know, only really two parties who dominate the political scene in America.
[00:12:11]  And so that was Ron Paul's answer.
[00:12:14]  It was like, yeah, that's why.
[00:12:15]  So I'd rather just run as a Republican.
[00:12:18]  And that made sense to me.
[00:12:19]  I never even really second-guessed that.
[00:12:21]  I just went, yep, that's the answer.
[00:12:23]  And so that's what it is.
[00:12:24]  So Ron Paul's running as a Republican.
[00:12:27]  He's the most libertarian member, the most libertarian person running, including the LP candidates at the time.
[00:12:34]  He was more libertarian than anyone in the LP.
[00:12:37]  And so, yeah, it was, it was just not much to think about.
[00:12:43]  So I'd support him.
[00:12:45]  And then a lot of us were very excited for Rand Paul's presidential campaign in 2016, but the campaign ended up really falling flat and it didn't go good.
[00:12:58]  It was very heartbreaking for many of us, but the campaign just did not continue on in the tradition of Ron Paul's presidential campaigns and it didn't continue with the energy of Ron Paul's campaigns for that reason.
[00:13:15]  So after Rand Paul, his campaign collapsed, and I think they were out of the, they think within a month of primaries, they had already just completely suspended the campaign.
[00:13:30]  And then Donald Trump kind of rose and just was completely taking over the primary.
[00:13:36]  And it was Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton.
[00:13:40]  And you had a situation where you had these two incredibly flawed candidates, incredibly divisive candidates, and generally unliked candidates.
[00:13:55]  In the history of polling, I believe the two most unliked candidates were Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
[00:14:04]  And then you had this third party, which bore the name libertarian.
[00:14:11]  And this was just kind of an interesting situation where we all kind of looked at this and went, ooh, I mean, if you're a libertarian, it's hard to not look at that and go, well, this is a huge opportunity.
[00:14:25]  This is a huge opportunity where the country is so like profoundly aware that the whole political system is failing them.
[00:14:35]  And then there is this other option, which is called libertarian.
[00:14:42]  And like, wow, what an incredible opportunity to really introduce these ideas to a lot of people.
[00:14:49]  And in this year, when they had this opportunity, they ran Gary Johnson and Bill Weld.
[00:14:59]  And let's just say they blew the opportunity.
[00:15:05]  They got a good amount of votes.
[00:15:07]  They got more votes than they had ever gotten before, but the votes translated to nothing.
[00:15:12]  It didn't even translate to a measurable increase in membership for the Libertarian Party.
[00:15:19]  I mean, they got almost nothing out of this entire election.
[00:15:23]  And of course, what they got was, you know, embarrassing memories of, you know, not just like Aleppo or like the sticking his tongue out and stuff like that.
[00:15:33]  But I mean like the more substantive stuff of like, you know, endorsing Hillary Clinton and saying that she's a good person and all of this, just horrible.
[00:15:47]  You know, I think that stuff got out there much more than any real understanding of what libertarianism is.
[00:15:53]  So it was this huge opportunity.
[00:15:56]  Many of us were just so upset that it was wasted.
[00:16:02]  So in 2017, Michael Heiss, which we talked about briefly on the last episode, Michael Heiss decided he wanted to start this Mises caucus.
[00:16:11]  And the idea was to bring the Ron Paul revolution into the Libertarian Party and to make the Libertarian Party look more like Ron Paul and less like Bill Weld.
[00:16:23]  Now, at the time, a lot of the establishment types in the Libertarian Party were floating out the idea of Bill Weld running again in 2020.
[00:16:32]  So he was really just determined to stop this.
[00:16:36]  And I had him on the podcast after Tom Woods had had him on his podcast.
[00:16:41]  And I really liked Michael Heist.
[00:16:43]  The kid's just really incredible.
[00:16:44]  And I think those of you guys who know him know what I'm talking about.
[00:16:48]  He's super smart and really passionate and just really, he's a really compelling person.
[00:16:54]  And that's part of the reason why he was able to build up this thing that just took over the third biggest political party in the country.
[00:17:03]  But I didn't join in 2017.
[00:17:07]  It took a little bit more time for that.
[00:17:09]  But around this time, what started happening was that the kind of establishment of the Libertarian Party started getting very threatened by this idea.
[00:17:25]  And so they started kind of snapping back.
[00:17:29]  And it's interesting to look at it in hindsight because probably none of this ends up happening if it wasn't for those guys.
[00:17:39]  So the chair at the time, if you guys remember, this is now in 2018, or I guess it was in 2019 that, yes, no, it must have been in 2019 that I debated the former chair of the party who was out at the convention this weekend embarrassing himself in typical fashion.
[00:18:05]  But so we debated in 2019 and at the Soho Forum, an Oxford-style debate.
[00:18:13]  And, you know, it was interesting.
[00:18:16]  So I had joined the party.
[00:18:17]  Tom Woods had joined the party at this point.
[00:18:20]  And his response to this was to just start trashing Ron Paul, trashing Tom Woods, trashing me, really going to war with so many of the most popular libertarians.
[00:18:34]  And I don't mean trashing like he had criticism for us, like he said, oh, I think you're wrong on these issues.
[00:18:40]  I mean, trying to imply that the Mises Institute were a bunch of Nazis, that Ron Paul was a bigot, that the whole Mises caucus was connected to Charlottesville somehow, all of this just nonsense.
[00:18:54]  And this really galvanized our side.
[00:18:58]  And it just became a thing where it was like we just couldn't let this stand, particularly with the smearing Ron Paul.
[00:19:08]  We just could not have it that the chair of the National Libertarian Party was smearing Ron Paul.
[00:19:19]  That was simply unacceptable.
[00:19:21]  And so we vowed that we were going to overthrow this regime and turn the Libertarian Party into something that we could be proud of.

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=== Naivete In Political Debate (14:40) ===

[00:21:52]  The thing that always like that always fucked with me was I couldn't believe how short-sighted it was for these guys to do this.
[00:22:04]  Like, wouldn't you think if you were, you know, on the Libertarian Party National Committee, that you probably wouldn't want to antagonize the most popular libertarians?
[00:22:23]  Like, wouldn't you think to yourself, that's probably not good for business.
[00:22:29]  Like, that's probably not going to help me any.
[00:22:31]  And, or at least perhaps it would come to your mind, like, this maybe could work out bad.
[00:22:38]  This maybe could come back to bite me in the ass.
[00:22:41]  There seemed to be no sense of that from these guys.
[00:22:46]  So in 2019, the way it happened was that the then chair of the party challenged Tom Woods to a debate.
[00:22:57]  And I said, when I heard that he challenged Tom Woods to a debate, I said, like, basically, you're not even on Tom's level, but I'll go debate you and I'll fuck your shit up.
[00:23:11]  Something like that.
[00:23:13]  And then he accepted.
[00:23:14]  He said, okay, I'll debate, Dave.
[00:23:16]  And so I was like, all right, well, I said it and he accepted.
[00:23:20]  So I guess we got to do it now.
[00:23:23]  And I think that he really underestimated me.
[00:23:29]  And understandably, For you know, to some in some way, um, I think that he uh, you know, he was the chair of the of the National Libertarian Party, and he's a lawyer and probably thought of himself as a serious person with serious credentials.
[00:23:52]  Um, that's debatable if you ask me, but and I'm a comedian, and I could see if that was the situation.
[00:24:00]  You thinking, yeah, I'm gonna handle this guy.
[00:24:03]  Um, you know, I'm debating some comic, okay.
[00:24:06]  Um, now, this is easy to think if you really don't know me that well.
[00:24:13]  Um, if you knew a little bit more about me, I think you might think to yourself, ooh, this might be this might be a little bit tougher of a debate than you think.
[00:24:21]  But anyway, that's not what happened.
[00:24:23]  So, I went there and I smashed him at this debate.
[00:24:26]  And I got him on record saying some things that were that were not great for the libertarian to be saying.
[00:24:34]  And then the next day, he came on the podcast, and then I really, really messed him up in that one.
[00:24:42]  And I got him on record saying some pretty, uh, some pretty bad things.
[00:24:46]  So, the one, the moment, I mean, there was a bunch, there was a bunch of things that he said that really are oof, no libertarian should ever say.
[00:24:54]  But the one that really stuck out to everyone that was uh that was really bad was that he basically said at one point that you should support the libertarian nominee no matter who they are, no matter who the nominee for president is, you have to support him.
[00:25:10]  And I said, Well, what?
[00:25:11]  So, if Dick Cheney were to run for president on the Libertarian Party, do I have an obligation to support him?
[00:25:16]  And he said, Yes, yes, you do.
[00:25:19]  And I said, Uh, I said, Well, what if it's someone way worse?
[00:25:22]  What about Adolf Hitler?
[00:25:24]  If Adolf Hitler ran, do I have an obligation to support him just because he's got the word libertarian next to his name?
[00:25:30]  And he said, Well, here's what I'll tell you: if you do vote for Adolf Hitler, well, then it could help other people in the party.
[00:25:37]  So, like, you anyway, it's kind of ironic now because the thing that ruined him was having this on tape.
[00:25:46]  And now he's in the position where it's like, Oh, okay, well, you were willing to support Dick Cheney and Adolf Hitler.
[00:25:52]  Well, I guess now you're just going to have to support the Mises caucus, which he probably won't end up doing because, you know, that's, I guess he was fine with it as long as he thought he was going to be the guy in charge, but he's not anymore.
[00:26:06]  And that guy became completely discredited in the movement.
[00:26:13]  And so, the Mises caucus, anyway, became more and more dominant in the Libertarian Party.
[00:26:20]  But in 2020, we just missed the mark.
[00:26:23]  We just had something like, I think I forget exactly what percentage of the party we were at the time, but our presidential candidate was he was in first place, but ended up not getting quite enough to clear the margin in the first ballot.
[00:26:42]  So, it went to a second and a third ballot.
[00:26:44]  And then Joe Jorgensen ended up peeling off more of other people's support than he did.
[00:26:48]  So, she just barely got the nomination.
[00:26:53]  And then, of course, the Joe Jorgensen campaign in 2020 was just another huge opportunity that got that was just completely wasted, completely wasted.
[00:27:04]  Perhaps not completely wasted.
[00:27:06]  It established Spike Cohen as kind of like a major figure in the party and in the movement.
[00:27:12]  And that was certainly valuable.
[00:27:14]  Spike is great.
[00:27:16]  And he's just gotten better and better, in my opinion, since the presidential election.
[00:27:22]  Now we get to this point here where I think we're going to have another big opportunity coming up.
[00:27:32]  And now we really have control of the party and we can make we can make of this opportunity what we want to.
[00:27:41]  So I'm very excited for that.
[00:27:44]  Now, anyway, another thing that happened as we started coming into the the the party and started becoming more and more dominant in the party is that it wasn't just the it wasn't just Starwalk or other people on the on the LNC who were really trying to kind of use the power that they had to thwart this insurrection that they saw.
[00:28:14]  coming up in the party.
[00:28:16]  Um, which to some degree is to be expected.
[00:28:19]  You know, to some degree um, you'd expect, if you're coming to try to um to take something from someone that they're going to fight to not allow you to take that from them.
[00:28:34]  That's to some degree to be expected.
[00:28:37]  But there were a few things that I really didn't expect, and part of this might be that I really was not that immersed in the culture of the Libertarian Party.
[00:28:52]  Um, before I I joined, I was very immersed in the literature of libertarian philosophy and I was very immersed in the news of the day.
[00:29:08]  I was very immersed in the comedy scene.
[00:29:11]  Um, I was very immersed in a lot of different areas, but I wasn't very immersed in the culture of the LP and and I never claimed to be I am quite a bit more now, but i've also changed that culture quite a bit and changed the face of the party quite a bit, um.
[00:29:30]  But so I was there.
[00:29:31]  There were certain things that I was I was surprised by and perhaps you know demonstrating some naivete on on my part.
[00:29:40]  So one of the things that I didn't I was unaware of coming into the Libertarian Party was the degree to which um wokeism had infested the party.
[00:29:55]  This was a real shock to me and I I you know, I I was in the world where I I was like like I knew all about libertarian theory and I knew about all the great libertarian leaders who I love.
[00:30:11]  So I knew everything that Ron Paul was doing um, and I knew everything that was happening at the Mises Institute and stuff like that, but I I didn't realize that there was this group of like woke libertarians.
[00:30:24]  I didn't even think that could be a thing.
[00:30:26]  I thought like, being a libertarian by nature would inoculate you against any of that.
[00:30:32]  I mean, how the hell are you going to let yourself be distracted by some like dumb cultural issue that's obviously being used as a distraction, like you know what I mean.
[00:30:43]  Like, how are you, if you know about the genocide in Yemen?
[00:30:46]  How much time are you actually going to spend on transgender bathrooms?
[00:30:50]  Wouldn't it just be like so obvious right away to go yeah no, that doesn't matter, this is what matters, or even if you think it matters, it matters so much less than these other things that are so much more important, so that.
[00:31:04]  So I was surprised by that, and also the other thing that I was surprised by was how many um, Which I guess goes along.
[00:31:13]  I guess it's just a different way of stating the same thing.
[00:31:17]  But I was surprised by how much like bad faith attacks there were by other libertarians.
[00:31:24]  But I always before this, my experience, before being in the Libertarian Party, my experience was always in the Ron Paul movement and then just like, you know, libertarians who I talk to on podcasts and things like that.
[00:31:37]  And I just always thought, like, well, libertarians are better than that.
[00:31:41]  Like, we're here.
[00:31:42]  We are where we are because we're thinking.
[00:31:46]  You don't just get here.
[00:31:47]  No one's just following what everyone else is telling them to do and becoming a libertarian.
[00:31:53]  No one's just like, you're not just vote.
[00:31:55]  You're not just in the Libertarian Party or a Libertarian because that's what your dad did.
[00:31:59]  And that's what his dad did.
[00:32:00]  And that's what his dad did or whatever.
[00:32:02]  But that is the reason why a lot of people are Republicans or Democrats.
[00:32:05]  You know what I mean?
[00:32:05]  But that's not us.
[00:32:07]  And I always thought like we're the ones who are always thinking and reading about this stuff and working out our philosophy.
[00:32:12]  So there's just no way that we would be infected with this.
[00:32:15]  But I was wrong about that.
[00:32:18]  There were several of them.
[00:32:20]  So it wasn't just that the Mises caucus got like pushback from the chair of the Libertarian Party or the people on the LNC.
[00:32:35]  It was also that like these like rando, these randos in the party with little, you know what I mean, like no positions or anything were coming out calling us racist Nazis, transphobes, xenophobes, all these things, like the type of attacks that you would expect to get, you know, from like 19-year-old progressives on a college campus somewhere that we were getting inside the Libertarian Party.
[00:33:03]  Now, this really was a shock to me.
[00:33:06]  I did not see this coming, but I caught on fairly quickly to it.
[00:33:12]  But I was, and this is really where I was kind of naive, is that at the very beginning of this, I was like, oh, well, these are libertarians.
[00:33:20]  So all I have to do is engage these guys and I'll show them that we have superior ideas here.
[00:33:27]  I was like, no, no, no, you're getting this wrong.
[00:33:29]  But you'll recognize that, of course, once I explain to you how you're getting it wrong.
[00:33:35]  And that's when I started doing these debates.
[00:33:38]  I did a whole bunch of them, like a whole bunch of them with other libertarians who were critical of the Mises caucus.
[00:33:45]  And look, again, I'm not, I mean, I guess it'll come off kind of cocky to say it this way, but it's really not me being that way.
[00:33:53]  Like I said, I lost a debate once to Sam Cedar, who he beat me up real good in that debate that we have.
[00:34:02]  And I've had other debates that were very close.
[00:34:04]  I had debates with Tho Bishop and Eric Brakey that were very close debates.
[00:34:10]  You can, you know, you could, there could be people who feel like I lost that debate.
[00:34:16]  Maybe that's how you feel.
[00:34:18]  I don't know.
[00:34:18]  I wouldn't say that, but they were certainly very close.
[00:34:22]  But these debates that I'd have with these, with the people who came to be known as the loser brigade, I mean, I just wrecked these guys in every one of the debates, just destroyed them.
[00:34:31]  Like they had nothing.
[00:34:34]  But that didn't resolve the situation.
[00:34:36]  They would just double down and double down and double down.
[00:34:38]  You're an even, you're even more of a Nazi now and all this stuff.
[00:34:42]  And so a lot of these people, the Wokertarians, they were just repulsive to most normal people.
[00:34:54]  And so after a while, we realized that it's like, well, since they're not having an honest conversation, they can be used, monetized in a sense.
[00:35:07]  And so what we would do is just kind of use them as like, you know, as a tool to get our people more excited.
[00:35:17]  So that's what ended up happening.
[00:35:20]  Everybody got into the idea of like, let's just beat these guys because they suck.
[00:35:25]  And so won't it be fun to watch them, you know, all, you know, melt down, a la Hillary Clinton supporters in 2016.
[00:35:34]  And so that's kind of more or less what happened.
[00:35:38]  We use these guys, we use Sarwalk and we use all the loser brigade to just kind of give us more and more juice and more and more energy.
[00:35:48]  And it really helped.
[00:35:50]  And so truthfully speaking, if the sitting chair of the LNC had never attacked Ron Paul and smeared him as a racist, had never attacked Tom Woods and attacked myself and all these other people, who knows what would have happened with this whole thing.
[00:36:07]  But he did.
[00:36:08]  And we used it.
[00:36:10]  And that really helped carry us to this point.
[00:36:14]  But the original goal that Michael Heist laid out never really had anything to do with going to war with any of these people.
[00:36:21]  It was about making the Libertarian Party into something that actually represented libertarianism because there's such a huge opportunity here to really change the conversation in this country.

=== Proud Of Our New Party (10:49) ===

[00:36:33]  And I think that opportunity is actually stronger now than it even was in 2016 or even in 2020.
[00:36:41]  Because in 2016, as upset as people were with the status quo, you know, it wasn't the post-COVID regime stuff.
[00:36:50]  And in 2020, as much as obviously the campaigns all should have been against the lockdowns and the COVID regime and all of that stuff, it's even stronger now because everybody knows how much of a failure the whole thing was, or at least anybody thinking knows that now.
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[00:38:32]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:38:34]  So my thing for to my advice to the Mises caucus guys would be that as much fun as it has been to kind of like own these libertarians who really deserved it.
[00:38:55]  And I understand that in this week after you just won, there will be some spiking of the football.
[00:39:03]  And I can't stop that from happening.
[00:39:05]  And it's, you know, some of that's appropriate.
[00:39:07]  It's appropriate when you score a touchdown to spike the football.
[00:39:11]  You know, that's part of the game.
[00:39:14]  But after you spike the football, you get back to the sidelines and get ready to work on the next play, you know?
[00:39:21]  So that's just what I would say.
[00:39:22]  I would say, do your little spike, take this week, maybe or whatever.
[00:39:26]  But after that, let's move forward.
[00:39:28]  And I would say what I will personally be doing, and what I would really recommend for everybody else in the Mises caucus is those people, you will never hear me interact with them again.
[00:39:40]  You'll never hear me mention any of them after this episode.
[00:39:44]  That's it.
[00:39:45]  I just thought it was worthwhile to tell the story one more time to kind of recap this whole thing.
[00:39:51]  But that's it for me.
[00:39:54]  These guys behaved in a despicable manner.
[00:39:58]  It was incredibly dishonest.
[00:40:00]  And we used them to further our cause, which I think was appropriate.
[00:40:06]  But that's it.
[00:40:07]  That's as far as I'm concerned.
[00:40:10]  That's done.
[00:40:11]  And I think that would be best if we all did that.
[00:40:14]  At this point, they have no positions of power within the Libertarian Party, and therefore they're irrelevant to us now.
[00:40:21]  We have to be in a transition mode here where now we move into leading the party.
[00:40:28]  The other thing I think that's important for the Mises Caucus guys to remember is that not everybody outside of the Mises Caucus in the Libertarian Party are those people.
[00:40:42]  In fact, the vast, vast majority aren't.
[00:40:44]  Many people outside the Mises Caucus are just like good libertarians who weren't completely up on what was happening here, may have in the middle seen different sides on social media, and they just don't know what's what.
[00:40:58]  You know, so now what's more important is to try to win over the good people, bring in new people, and not get bogged down in these old battles that have already been won.
[00:41:10]  And at this point, they've really just decisively been won.
[00:41:16]  And then, you know, my message for the good libertarians who aren't in the Mises caucus, who might have been a little bit skeptical about this whole takeover, you know, I would say to them, it's like, well, look, it happened.
[00:41:33]  Now it's our job to kind of show you guys how much this was a good thing.
[00:41:42]  And I think, by the way, raising six figures in the first few days is a good start to that.
[00:41:47]  But just wait.
[00:41:48]  Just wait to see the messaging coming out of National now.
[00:41:52]  Just wait to see the new membership that's going to be flooding in over the next year.
[00:41:56]  Just wait.
[00:41:57]  Give it a chance.
[00:41:59]  And I think you're going to be really happy with the direction that the party is going in.
[00:42:04]  Okay.
[00:42:04]  And then finally, my message to the loser brigade guys who are very butthurt about what happened here, many of whom are leaving the party and many of whom have already left the party.
[00:42:21]  My message to them is goodbye.
[00:42:26]  That's fine.
[00:42:28]  You can leave.
[00:42:29]  You can leave and keep yapping.
[00:42:31]  Nobody's listening.
[00:42:32]  We don't care.
[00:42:34]  That's that.
[00:42:35]  If you are interested in growing at all as a person, maybe take some time to reflect on how all of these efforts that you've embarked in have done nothing but help us because people don't respond to the dishonesty and the shrieking.
[00:42:53]  So if you want to continue doing that, fine.
[00:42:55]  But just take stock at least of how much it's worked so far.
[00:43:01]  Do you want to keep doing something that doesn't work?
[00:43:04]  Go ahead.
[00:43:05]  More power to you.
[00:43:06]  I won't be responding anymore.
[00:43:08]  And I hope that a lot of the other people in the Mises caucus won't be as well.
[00:43:13]  So now, leaving all that aside, I would say, why is it that we have such an opportunity here?
[00:43:22]  And what is it that's so important that the Libertarian Party can do?
[00:43:27]  Well, as I've said many times before, there's a reason why every single authoritarian regime in the history of the world relies on propaganda.
[00:43:39]  And the reason why is because ideas are important.
[00:43:45]  And before you can really have an authoritarian regime, you have to get people believing your bullshit.
[00:43:53]  This is why there's major propaganda campaigns associated with every next step in authoritarian crackdowns.
[00:44:02]  There always has to be.
[00:44:04]  This was the essential insight of Murray Rothbard in his masterpiece, Anatomy of the State, is that the thing that really separates the state from other criminal organizations, what makes it such a unique evil, is the perception of legitimacy from the people.
[00:44:25]  And so this is what we need to target.
[00:44:30]  You're not going to beat the state by having a direct violent conflict, at least certainly not our state right now.
[00:44:41]  That's their strong suit.
[00:44:43]  That's their strong point is violence.
[00:44:46]  We're not going to win that fight.
[00:44:48]  But what we can do is undermine their propaganda.
[00:44:52]  What we can do is create more and more people who believe in liberty.
[00:44:58]  If we want to live in a free society, step number one is getting a lot more people who want to live in a free society.
[00:45:06]  And we can get a lot more.
[00:45:09]  And now what we've got is the third political party in America.
[00:45:16]  Okay, it's third by a long shot, but still the third political party in America that bears the name libertarian is now run by great libertarians.
[00:45:26]  So the point is that we had a big opportunity in 2016 and we blew it.
[00:45:32]  We had a big opportunity in 2020 and we blew it.
[00:45:35]  We will not blow the next big opportunity that we have.
[00:45:39]  That's what the Mises Caucus has set the Libertarian Party up to be.
[00:45:44]  Now, at this point, you know, the distinction between the Mises Caucus and the Libertarian Party is almost kind of fuzzy.
[00:45:54]  I mean, it's all the Libertarian Party is run by all of the Mises people.
[00:45:58]  And when I say every position, every single position, we swept the entire thing.
[00:46:03]  So now we can really feel ownership over this party.
[00:46:08]  We can have a party that we're proud of.
[00:46:11]  This is in since I've been a libertarian, this has never been the case, that libertarians almost always had to like, even if they were members of the Libertarian Party, had to embarrassingly be like, well, yeah, I'm a libertarian, but not exactly like this person said, not exactly like that person said.
[00:46:28]  Now we're in a position where we can be proud of this party and we can use that.
[00:46:33]  And that's a great tool for spreading out our ideas and recruiting more people to this way of thinking because we don't have to keep caveating everything.
[00:46:42]  We can just be like, look, there, that's what we believe.
[00:46:45]  That's what we believe right there.
[00:46:49]  And I think this is going to lead to a huge opportunity to like really Introduce these ideas in a compelling way to large numbers of people, unlike anything that I've been able to do just as a podcaster or just other people out there like Eric July or Michael Malice or people like that.
[00:47:09]  I think this is going to be like a much bigger thing where we now have this infrastructure that will support all of these people who are out there as like the libertarian influencers.

=== Exciting Future For Libertarians (00:40) ===

[00:47:22]  So I'm very excited for what's going to happen in the future.
[00:47:26]  One more time, like I would say to everybody, get on board now.
[00:47:30]  This is going to be a lot of fun.
[00:47:32]  I think we're going to really kick up some dust.
[00:47:35]  We're going to really make a difference and do something really important here.
[00:47:38]  Everybody, right now, if you're the person who is like, I was waiting, but I'll join if you take over the party.
[00:47:45]  Well, we did it.
[00:47:46]  We took this bitch over.
[00:47:48]  And now I want you to come join.
[00:47:49]  All right.
[00:47:50]  That's going to be my episode for today.
[00:47:52]  As you can tell, I don't have that much of a voice.
[00:47:55]  Damn COVID and this weekend.
[00:47:58]  So I'm going to wrap the episode there, but I'll be back tomorrow with a brand new episode.
[00:48:02]  Peace.