Thoe Bishop and the host dissect Ron DeSantis's presidential bid, analyzing his Twitter Space launch with Elon Musk that bypassed corporate media to reach millions. They debate whether DeSantis can overcome Trump's charisma by leveraging his anti-lockdown record and exploiting Trump's ego regarding Operation Warp Speed and election fraud claims. While policy stacks like RFK Jr.'s lose traction against cultural anger over "trans ideology," Bishop suggests DeSantis must adopt aggressive stances on Ukraine and higher education. Ultimately, the discussion implies that while Washington offers temporary tactical advantages, lasting solutions to these crises likely require spiritual revival or strong state-level resistance beyond D.C. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Dynamic Corporate Press Flocking00:15:05
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What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
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All right.
So for today's episode, I wanted to talk about the big news from yesterday, which is that Ron DeSantis has officially joined the presidential race.
And I couldn't think of anybody better to talk about this with than Thoe Bishop.
Of course, has been on the show before, the communications director over at the Mises Institute.
And when you want to talk about anything that is related to Florida, Republicans, from a Rothbardian, Austria-libertarian perspective, he's really the only game in town.
This is the person you have to talk to.
So Thoe, welcome back.
Thanks for joining me.
Thank you for having me.
And it's been fun.
There's some other chairs in the state party that are big fans of yours.
So it's been fun to see that coalition growing here in the free state.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That it is cool.
Well, you call it free, but I can't even trans my kids there.
So what is, you know, how much freedom do you really have if you can't trans your kids?
Anyway, so I wanted, okay, I want to talk about this from every angle that we can kind of hit it from.
Let's just start.
Let's start with the announcement yesterday.
This was a first for a presidential campaign to kick off on a Twitter space.
This was a Twitter space that was hosted by Elon Musk and David Sachs.
They had some technical glitches, but then it worked pretty smoothly afterward.
I'm curious your opinion on just before we even get into the substance or the campaign here.
I saw some people like kind of criticizing him for starting the campaign on a Twitter space or criticizing how there were the glitches at first.
That I will say, I completely disagree with.
I thought this was a cool way to start a campaign.
I thought it kind of snubbed the kind of corporate press, the establishment a bit.
I thought the fact that there were technical difficulties even made him look cool because they all came from the fact that so many people were on there.
It was a kind of interesting thing.
I was on for a little bit.
I was like trying to put the kids to bed, but I had it on for a little.
And I was just scrolling through all the faces and like everybody who's anybody on Twitter was there.
So I actually liked that.
But what did you think about that as a way to kick off the campaign?
I'm a little concerned because I got my mom on Twitter for the first time.
So I don't know how I feel about that in the long term.
Oh, no.
It's interesting.
I personally, when I first heard the idea, I had a little bit of skepticism.
I think that there is a dynamic of being too online per se.
And I think that that's a signal to, I think that was some of the concern out there.
But there's the other dynamic, though, where to me, like if DeSantis is going to have the ability to overcome the guerrilla of Donald Trump, he's going to have to find a way for a campaign that's going to be based in competency.
He's going to need to be able to attract talent.
And so I think in some ways, this is him trying to elevate his relationship with Elon Musk, who has said nice things publicly.
You know, Barack Obama back in the day, he was getting help from people like Steve Jobs, utilizing his specific skill set to help that campaign.
If this is something that builds a relationship where Elon Musk can provide assistance beyond simply a check, beyond simply a cool, few headlines that makes DeSantis look, you know, tech friendly or something like that, that's something that I think is important for just the broader strategy of the campaign.
The event itself, the early technical difficulties, it created a lot of bad headlines.
I get that side of it.
But I also, thinking back, there's not a lot of introductory events that people really talk about.
I have no idea what happened at Tim Scott's campaign.
No one didn't make any sort of register here.
So the fact that everyone's talking about it negatively or positively, that is probably, I think, a good thing in the long run.
And so, you know, it is, it was interesting too to see the sort of people being brought in.
It wasn't your typical, you know, I think that that anti-media and practice, not simply rhetoric dynamic is definitely something that DeSantis camp is going to lean into.
But it's kind of neat to see someone like Thomas Massey come in and ask questions and things like that.
Now, how much of that's rehearsing ahead of time, you know, politics theater, fine.
But I like that dynamic as well.
And it was kind of neat seeing just the different accounts being able to view it all.
And again, you know, I think I saw something about six million plus people have already viewed it.
That's higher than CNN ratings.
And so I think this broader change and something you've talked a lot about of breaking up the media, the corporate press's control of the political process, I think this is definitely a step forward for that.
Yeah, like even as you mentioned this and I hadn't been thinking about it like that, but like what campaign introductions really got a lot of hype?
And like the only ones I'm even remembering are, well, of course, Trump on the escalator coming down.
And I remember Barack Obama's first speech when he announced he was running.
But of course, both of those were only huge because the corporate press decided they were for very opposite reasons, but because they were going to, you know, lionize one guy and demonize the other guy.
They made those huge events.
Whereas this, it really is outside of CNN deciding this was a big event.
Although they probably would have either way because he is the only legitimate challenger to Donald Trump.
No disrespect to Vivek.
Just saying, when I say legitimate, I mean the only one who, according to the polling data, seems to have any chance of winning.
So, all right, let me ask you a general question and then maybe we'll take it into more specifics.
You have obviously been very supportive of DeSantis as the Florida governor, especially through the COVID times, understandably.
Where do you fall in the DeSantis versus Donald Trump slug fest that is inevitably coming?
Right now, I'm kind of, I'm in a really interesting sort of neutral period right now, which is not particularly entertaining.
It's a dynamic where I think that the floor for DeSantis is much lower, right?
I understand the concerns about him being more of a traditional Republican when he's in Congress.
How does that translate?
Going into particularly the midterms in 2022, my preference would have, I had a strong preference for him to hold off four years.
I thought that it would be a sign of wise judgment to wait his turn, serve out the full term, maximize what he can do in the state, have those two years off, which maybe there's some risk in there.
You get that Chris Christie effect in 2012, and you've got to hit when the iron's hot.
But I thought he could kind of wave, ride that wave and kind of use a two-year media tour through that.
The midterms, though, changed my calculation.
You know, seeing how, you know, I thought, you know, I bought into the polls, I bought into narratives.
The idea to me that someone was going to drive past $5 gas at the gas station and then go vote because of abortion outside of a fairly small group of people that are very strong about that issue, I thought was completely, it went against everything I thought politics up to that point was.
I thought that the real pain that people feel on a daily basis, it was really, you know, it was very depressing because it just shows how much people have kind of are more and more motivated by very much that sort of act of this mentality over the kitchen table concerns that I think has long have, you know, at the end of the day has dominated political dynamics here.
You know, it's the economy stupid.
So that was a big, you know, big reawakening for me.
I mean, that was, I think that's what changed the entire calculation.
If you do not believe that Donald Trump is a viable candidate, and we might be in a dynamic now when you consider the changes with the electoral process, the expansion of mass balloting, the changes that were made in the guise of COVID, a lot of it has been codified partly because of some of the losses in 2022 in states like Arizona.
It's very possible that we're dealing with a one-party national election at this point beyond the qualities of the candidate itself.
I've been also kind of caught about just how much a president can actually impact things.
I mean, things are so much worse now than they were in 2016.
I kind of thought, well, states, you know, it's only the state stuff that matters.
Federal government is just largely a distraction.
Well, two and a half years of Biden, now I'm reevaluating that as well.
So I can understand why he would need to make the calculation that Trump can't win.
I'm the only other guy that can do it.
Therefore, I'm going to step in that arena.
So my views on that have changed.
Whether or not what I'm wanting to see from both sides at this point is that there's something Trump embodies just revenge at this point.
You talk to his people, the people that are still by him.
It's just an emotional anger they have at a lot of bad people.
And so I understand that.
I understand Trump's record, not particularly strong while in office on dealing with those people.
There's a little bit of change after that first impeachment vote in terms of personnel decisions and things like that.
If you're trying to make a case going forward, that would be one to make.
And so it's a dynamic of can Trump demonstrate that he can be surrounded by competent people that know how to make real damage to the enemies that Trump rages about on Trump media that aren't Ron DeSantis, where most of his attention has been played late recently.
Or can DeSantis articulate that his more sober, competent approach can properly be utilized for those same sort of revenge style, dismantle the administrative state sort of message that is what Trump embodies in the minds of his followers.
And neither side has demonstrated that to date.
It's going to be a long campaign.
I'm interested to see.
I'm a little terrified as someone that has to deal here locally with both Trump and DeSantis people.
I think it's going to be a very nasty slug fight and it's already shaping that way.
But that's what I'm looking forward in terms of how this campaign proceeds now that we're now on the main show.
Yeah.
So, well, Donald Trump clearly has spent the last couple of months signaling to Ron DeSantis that if he gets in this, it's a bloodbath.
Like Donald Trump has been, and that's, I think, actually was probably a decent strategy.
If there was one thing that was going to keep him out of the race, that would probably be it.
It wasn't enough to keep him out of the race.
Also, Donald Trump really only operates at one speed, and it's that.
So I think there's just no way around that.
And at some point, he didn't deal with it in this Twitter space, but at some point, Ron DeSantis is going to have to figure out what's the strategy to do that.
You can't, there's no way to just allow Donald Trump to do that and not have a response.
There's a very, there's such an interesting dynamic here.
It's really a fascinating thing to like live through and watch.
I kind of think the dynamic might possibly be that DeSantis is the one who could beat Biden, but DeSantis is not going to be able to beat Trump in the primary.
I also think that there's something me and you have spoken about a bit going back months off air, but where there's this dynamic where because DeSantis is the only real threat to Donald Trump, a lot of establishment types are kind of flocking to him.
This leaves a big question open as to like, okay, is he going to, you know, does that mean that they think they can control him a little bit more than Donald Trump?
Does that mean they can control him a little bit more than Donald Trump?
One of the things I was really struck by by the Twitter spaces yesterday was I was like, there's almost, I thought perhaps he was going to come out with this energy of like, look, I actually know how to get this done.
You know, like I can actually lead this populist movement and I can actually drain the swamp or however he wanted to put it.
That didn't seem to be the energy.
And the energy seemed to be more of like something that I think the establishment types would prefer, which was like, hey, let's not be so flamboyant.
Let's not be so polarizing.
Let's just have a common sense message where we can cut that to me.
I'm just looking at that energy and I was like, I do not think this can beat Donald Trump.
I just don't see it.
No, I agree.
And you've seen this a little bit with some of the foreign policy topics.
He was on his statement that he provided Tucker Carlson.
I'm asking about the Ukraine, Russia situation.
It was stronger in language.
And then there was some backtracking on that.
He pivoted last night on Fox News by talking about the woke military, yada, yada.
I mean, that's a concern there that I have.
I would like to see a lot more strength.
Now, it is interesting to people.
Yeah.
And now the people around David Sachs, for example, is someone who's been a voice of a fairly reasonable voice on this issue.
So the fact that there are people around him, again, Thomas Massey being a very quick endorser there.
And I think it's, from my understanding, it's very close to DeSantis going back to the congressional days.
I mean, that might be a sign there.
You know, I think the wild card within this, because, yeah, and the conversation last night was interesting because it started off in a very poor way where it was DeSantis essentially just repeating the talking points.
And he was reading an op-ed, which is just not going to work.
It got a little bit more conversational as times as it went on.
It kind of allowed him to kind of show his depth a little bit, which I appreciate.
But the only path that DeSantis has is kind of the Cesarean path where he needs to be someone who can kind of get the blood pumping in the hearts of that Trump base that are so angry and yet be the person that the donor class has faith in as you're not burning everything down.
And I think given how insane everything is becoming, it wouldn't surprise me.
This has been my prediction for a while now that you might even see people like a Jamie Dimon, who's a lifelong Democrat, get on board with DeSantis' campaign only because they're terrified.
I mean, Diamond, who I very rarely say nice things with, he had a very pointed back and forth with one of the crazy squad people last year talking about energy policies and the way that they want Morgan, JP Morgan to invest their funds.
Given that the world is burning down, I think there's going to be a flight to a grown-up in the room.
Running a National Campaign00:02:22
And DeSantis can play that role.
The question is whether that covert, that corrupts that underlying message there.
If he seems, if he sounds like an establishment politician, he's not going to win this primary.
The role that I think is interesting, there's a lot of, you know, I understand the analysis that someone like a Tim Scott, someone like a Nikki Haley, they benefit Trump by expanding the options of the not Trump vote.
But it can create the dynamic where if DeSantis really wants to go savage to show that he has that in him without burning down the Trump people, he cannot back down from that.
That.
So he's going to, you know, he'll have to fight for himself, I think.
I think Trump's going to attack him from the left and I think that will provide some punching opportunities there.
But if he really wants to, to show that sort of dominating composure or posture that Trump, you know, has gotten Republicans used to, maybe Tim Scott and maybe Nikki Haley can be those surrogates there for the Desantis campaign to attack.
We've seen a little bit of this already from some of his packs out there, not affiliated with the campaign, but you know they're targeted.
Woke Nikki Haley um, you know, did all this sort of stuff.
I think that that is an approach that that Desantis is going to have to utilize.
Is he willing to do that?
Is he willing to to take on the risk of stepping on some toes?
I know some of his bit backers have been a little have voiced their displeasure with some of the moves that Desantis has taken the last few months um, you know, against Disney, against some of these others.
He needs to have that, I think, in order to have any sort of shot of of taking this to the next level.
And so again, how the campaign?
I I think the Santis is a very self-aware individual.
I think he knows his lack of charisma.
He is someone who has demonstrated a record of being able to to be very to self-evaluate very well and so if they can make those moves strategically to to kind of signal those things, then he's going to be at a good spot.
If, if he can't and most campaigns can't, this is a very difficult thing to run a national campaign, then it's going to be a disaster.
It's going to be Scott Walker or or a Ted Cruise race, where he had a very strong evangelical, passionate following but not able to just reckon with the trumpeting of 2016.
Um, and so if Desantis is as competent as he has, as I think he has been the last last several years um, I think he has the talent to do that.
Whether or not that actually translates to a national campaign, it just might be a battlefield well beyond the scale that he just can't, can't manage it, but that's that's, that's his burden and if he wants to be the man, he's gonna have to beat the man, and you know mediocrity is not gonna do it all.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Yeah, I will say I was very, you know, as you mentioned, Dave, David Sachs is phenomenal on the issue of Ukraine.
Like he's great on this stuff and he really understands what's going on.
Ted Cruz in Iowa00:16:13
And he's, I was really surprised that it didn't come up.
I just don't, I don't see how in any presidential forum, especially when the guy hosting it is like is really good on this issue, how that question didn't.
And perhaps it's, you know, somewhat was protecting DeSantis against not having the best answer on it.
But like, what could be a more important issue to ask a presidential candidate about than this?
Like, we're kind of at war with Russia right now.
What's your take on that?
So I was very surprised that didn't come up.
Yeah.
And it's something that it resonates with the base right now.
I mean, the most popular members of Congress are the ones that have been most outspoken about this.
It comes up frequently when I talk to just average voters here in Bay County.
They're talking about foreign policy.
Not only has their opinion changed, but the amount of care that they have to actually bring it up without it being presented in front of them has changed dramatically.
So he needs to lean into that if he's going to have a shot here.
The wild card in all of this, though, to me is Tucker Carlson, because Trump was DeSantis is only governor because he got the Trump endorsement that was able to elevate and kind of make up for some of the gaps that he had.
Based off of the stories out there about Tucker voting for Kanye West in 2020, the text messages that came out during the Dominion lawsuit showing very, very clear frustration with them.
It wouldn't be surprising at all to me if Tucker is just completely tired of Trump, sees him as unserious.
And so if you get a dynamic, and Tucker gave a fascinating speech last year in Iowa saying that he planned on very much having an active role in his nomination.
Now, obviously, his dynamic has changed with Fox.
But if you end up having a situation where Tucker ends up being a public surrogate for DeSantis, that changes everything.
That allows him to have, you know, he could have a rally with Tucker Carlson providing the sizzle and the charisma that Trump has, and then DeSantis coming in and providing the stake.
And I have a feeling that given that Tucker spends half his time in Florida, that there have been conversations between the governor and Tucker that we will never know about.
And that if Tucker believes after those conversations that DeSantis is the guy, given how he's been very clear about his views on that situation, that would go a long way in me reevaluating that risk-reward dynamic with a president, DeSantis.
And so that's a dynamic that maybe he doesn't see any value in doing it.
He has to build a list.
Do you want to tick off all the Trump people when you're trying to build your own venture?
Maybe that calculation changes.
But that's the one dynamic.
If there's something that can radically change this race overnight, it'd be Tucker Carlson getting involved on behalf of DeSantis or alternatively, getting involved with Donald Trump.
But that's the wild card.
I'm interested to see whether it plays or not.
Yeah, you know, there is a weird dynamic with DeSantis here where he's got the kind of never Trump Republican establishment wants it to be him.
But in order to win, I think he's got to do a lot of things that would piss those guys off.
And then, and even as you bring up Tucker Carlson, you know, like the all of those guys supporting DeSantis is going to be a turnoff for Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson hates all those guys and they all hate him too.
And also, I just think the fact that he really, by not being better on the war in Ukraine and not just, and Donald Trump, at least rhetorically being so good on it right now, he's really, he's closed off this big opening for him.
I just got to say, look, I was very impressed with Ron DeSantis in many ways throughout the last three years.
I remember watching press conferences with him.
Like once he dropped the lockdowns and dropped and kind of made this big turn and was like, I'm going to be the anti-lockdown, anti-mandate governor.
And I remember listening to some of his press conferences and it was refreshing and impressive because he wasn't just making this argument that was really at the time standing down the world.
I mean, like it wasn't just America.
It was the entire world was going crazy with this COVID stuff.
And he was like pouring through the data in his press conferences.
Like he was, he was doing something that Donald Trump had never done.
Even when Donald Trump was right on an issue, he never demonstrated that he had read a book about it.
You know what I mean?
Like DeSantis, you could listen to him and be like, oh, he's been like studying this.
He knows what he's talking about.
And that was impressive to me.
I don't know how much that actually means to average voters.
There were moments in this Twitter spaces last night where I was just like, I don't think this guy gets what this task is.
There was one point, one guy asked him a question and it was something, the question was something along the line, but he really opened it up to criticize Donald Trump.
Like he opened it up and he didn't even have to say Donald Trump's name.
He could have just in some ways like subliminally, subliminally, you know, taken a jab at him.
But the question was something like, you know, we hear these slogans of lock her up and build the wall and drain the swamp, but nothing ever changes.
You know, nothing ever actually happens.
How do we know that you're really going to do it?
And DeSantis started giving this long story about a bridge in Florida.
I'm not even exaggerating.
This was like his response to it was like, well, they said we couldn't get this bridge open for three months, but we got a bridge going in a week and a half.
And it was like, it was something out of like a family guy.
What was the character on family guy who just tell a long story about a bridge buzzkill something?
I mean, it was like, dude, you like you, this was just like, it was like a volley to or a setup, whatever, to like dunk it here, man.
And there, it was just like, this is not going to stand up to Donald Trump.
I, I just, he's got to find something else there.
No, no, I agree.
And the interesting thing is that DeSantis is in a position to tell a story about those accomplishments.
And I think that the main, to me, the most important thing that needs to happen is genuine accountability.
You know, changing laws, you know, passing things, oh, this never happened again, whatever.
That's, that's all fine and dandy.
Where DeSantis has really been successful and it's gotten criticism from a variety of folks for it is when he has not simply gone with the press conference headline of reform.
You know, we were reforming our medical laws or things like that.
It's when he's gone back and he's gone after accountability and gone after punishment.
You know, that plays into the Disney stuff.
It plays into particularly the higher ed situation.
But to me, like the most impressive stuff that DeSantis has done has been really taking a strong hold on the higher education system, getting tenure reform done, getting understanding that he has loyalists within these state colleges so that they can affect the professors actually being hired and changing the ideological makeup there.
And he's punishing those individuals that have done bad things in the past.
If he can't communicate that same sort of message out there on what exactly is going to be done to the FBI, to the CIA, to these different agencies, if you want us to retreat back and talking about the wokeness of the military, that's not going to be enough.
He needs to be able to articulate that he is more, that you can trust him to punish Trump's enemies, for lack of a better word, than Donald Trump is.
And that's going to be a link there.
He needs to evaluate some Walter Block libertarian punishment theory.
If he wants to nerd out about it, that's the rabbit hole to go down from an academic perspective.
He's got a little bit of that autism factor within there.
But that's the sort of stuff that he needs to show for him, I think, to have any sort of shot of breaking through there.
And yeah, that was not on display last night.
There was a calculation there.
I think it was a poor calculation.
And that concerns me because the campaign of DeSantis' past have not been particularly good.
I know he won by a large margin in 2022.
That was coasting off of both the passion that he had earned from saving businesses and everything that had done with COVID, alongside with just the demoralization of the Democrat Party in Florida.
But the logistics, I can tell you from being in a county where you're dealing with events, has never been particularly good.
His strength has always been on the governing side.
Christina Pasha, who was great at changing the narrative, she was on the governing side.
Now she's part of the new campaign.
She's not been a part of the campaigns in the past.
That's good.
So maybe, again, maybe that talent threshold will be improved nationally.
Ted Cruz's team, I think, actually had a very good nuts and bolts campaign in 2016.
It seems like he's getting a lot of those people.
But Ted Cruz was tanked because he couldn't reckon with, he couldn't outman Trump.
And again, if DeSantis wants to be that great man of history, again, the American comeback line is something that I'm tired of.
I just, I don't know if it doesn't really give me a whole lot of, it doesn't put a thrill up my spine.
The restore freedom, restoring freedom is going to lose against revenge tour 2024 with the way that your average Republicans are feeling right now.
And so he's got to, if he can't pivot, if he can't translate that, then again, we're going to be looking at a Scott Walker, Ted Cruz situation all over again.
Yeah, you know, there's something that I like, I think about this a lot, even outside of just like running for anything politically speaking, but just in terms of like communicating these ideas, the ideas that libertarians really care about, there's something where, and like, you know, like I'm thinking of this, as you said, you know, the American comeback story.
There's something where you have to recognize when after a while, when lines have been used over and over again, they just don't have potency anymore.
Like they just don't, it doesn't punch you in the stomach anymore to hear something like that.
Whereas you could imagine at one time that might have.
Like when Ronald Reagan was saying that, you could imagine where that'd be like, you know, yeah, the great American comeback.
I'm, I'm old enough to, to remember a time.
Young people listen to this.
I know this will sound crazy, but I remember a time vividly when taxation is theft was kind of a bold statement to make.
That would be something that was kind of like, whoa, you're like challenging people to think about all of this in a different way.
And the Fed used to be a very bad, they no longer have that anymore.
And same thing with like, we want to shrink the size of government.
Libertarians have to like come up with more.
And that's where you see like more of these, you know, type types of things like, like, you know, Fauci for prison.
We want to abolish this regime.
We want, you have to find like new language that kind of communicates in some way that I'm not just saying the same thing that everyone before me that didn't do anything with it was saying.
I'm offering you something different and something new.
And there was just a lot of the, in his commercial and in the spaces, too much of language like that.
And maybe this will appeal to some boomers out there, but I don't think it's going to have the energy.
This is Donald Trump to take on him.
It's a battle of energies.
And I don't think that's going to have the sting to it that he's going to need.
No.
I mean, that's why if you're my free advice to the DeSantis social media people, like they should be leaning into the fact there's no one more qualified to put Fauci in Gitmo than Ron DeSantis.
Yeah, well, that's right.
Waterboard the guy.
But that, the, the, um, but you're right.
And the, the interesting thing is that the, the, the issue, and I, I, there's a little bit of a hint to that about restoring normalcy or something like that.
You know, it's the culture war dynamics that really can separate DeSantis.
But again, that goes back to the donor situation.
There's a lot of donors who simply are not culture wars at all.
They're cultural leftists in their own right.
You know, they're freaking out about DeSantis' signing of the six-week abortion bill within Florida.
And I understand some of the dynamics on the abortion issue as a national conversation.
And I don't, you know, I prefer for those sort of issues to be handled at a state level anyway for a variety of reasons.
You know, but I think that given the lunacy, and you're now seeing it, right?
You finally have the conservative movement actually kind of being able to weaponize and mobilize on the commercial side of things, you know, with Target losing $10 billion in the last few days.
We see the Bud Light situation, things like that.
I mean, we also know Trump is not going to play that card.
Trump's already been, you know, leave Bud Light alone.
Leave Target alone, leave Disney alone, right?
That is where DeSantis is really in the opportunity here to outflank Trump from an anger standpoint.
He's been very clear and cohesive about it.
And ultimately, when it comes down to, we can look at national polls on a long national polls don't matter.
You think about the map.
For DeSantis to have any shot of winning, he's going to have to win Iowa.
And, you know, that's that's Ted Cruz beat Trump in 2016 in Iowa.
He has to win Iowa.
New Hampshire is going to be an interesting thing.
I think maybe Vivic has a unique position there.
You know, that's New Hampshire is such a weird state.
I believe last time it was Jeb's, I think, best state for him.
You had a very close split there with Donald Trump winning, Rubio and Cruz and Jeb did well.
Then you go down to South Carolina.
I think South Carolina ultimately is going to be where the real battlefield is because last time around, I believe it was something like 30% Trump, 22% Rubio, more or less 22% Cruz, where those Rubio voters fall.
I mean, are those Tim Scott people?
Are those Nikki Haley people?
Are they even in the race at that point, depending on the performance in Iowa and New Hampshire?
You know, that's going to be, I think, where the real battle comes down to.
And then you get Nevada historically.
The map isn't really fully set yet.
Maybe there's some changes there.
But then Nevada, the Senate candidate last year was a longtime personal friend of DeSantis.
Maybe that organization helps, but that was a state where Trump had his strongest performance in those early stages last time.
And so, you know, the culture war issues, I think, are going to be necessary for winning Iowa.
And again, but how do those translate into South Carolina?
That's given us fairly moderate Republicans.
I mean, you get the Nancy Maces of the world coming out of that state.
Does something that work in Iowa end up turning off people?
And so I can understand South Carolina considering their history as a bunch of firebrands.
Now they churn out the worst Republicans on the map.
So that's, you know, that's another situation.
Again, that's part of DeSantis' calculation here.
But if he's trying to play safe and timid, the donor class is not going to bail him out.
He's going to need Trump voters out there doing the legwork.
And that's the one issue where I've heard even Trump supporters criticizing some of those little hits in the short term.
Yeah, well, it seems like just to me, and look, I'm an amateur when it comes to advising a political campaign.
But if I were advising DeSantis, which I'm not, but if I were, I mean, it would just seem like it's like, look, Donald Trump's going to come at you with everything you have.
He's going to call you every nickname.
He's going to be nasty to you.
You're going to be little Ron or the low energy run or the sanctimonious or whatever his nicknames are going to be for you.
He's going to be hitting you all day long.
And look, what can you hit him back for?
Well, look, from my perspective, there's lots of things that Trump had weaknesses on in terms of like what was the correct thing to do versus how he governed.
But the one DeSantis is not going to hit him for being too much of a war hawk.
You know what I mean?
He's not going to hit him on that.
He's not going to hit him.
He's clearly not going to outflank him on being opposed to this war in Ukraine.
But the one that he's got on him is so obvious and right in front of all of us, which is that Ron DeSantis, and I know libertarian purists can give me crap about this and say, well, he did lock down technically first or something like that.
What Ron DeSantis is famous for is being the anti-lockdown governor.
Okay.
This is what he is famous for.
And with maybe he wasn't perfect, but he was a lot better than just about every other governor.
Is that he kept Florida somewhat normal and afloat while all the other states were under this crazy COVID tyranny?
People were flooding to Florida in droves for the freedom.
Donald Trump has a very bad track record on COVID.
Ron DeSantis has a very good track record on COVID.
This is his obvious angle.
And I just, I, you know, it's like, I wonder if there's any chance that he can not play that.
Personality and Trump Attacks00:14:45
That Donald Trump gave us Fauci in 2020.
He put him on the COVID task force.
He had him up at that podium every single day.
He is the reason why most Americans know who Anthony Fauci is.
And whereas DeSantis was going to war with Fauci, you know, I mean, if you're trying to spin this rhetorically, isn't that the obvious line of attack back to Donald Trump?
Absolutely.
And the problem is, is that Trump is so angry about DeSantis.
I mean, there's reports out there that he's never been angry at anyone.
He's about Ron DeSantis because of the perceived, you know, it's a betrayal and yada, yada, yada.
And, you know, Donald, Ron DeSantis would be working on McDonald's if it wasn't for him.
And that has driven him, you know, using truth social to talk about how New York outperformed Florida in COVID.
And, you know, that's insane to, I mean, everyone's fucking inflation.
So that's something where that experience, while you'll always have a section of the Trump loyalists that, you know, would believe the sky is green if Donald Trump deemed it so.
That, I think, is a very small portion of those who are still extremely loyal to Donald Trump.
They're loyal to him because they thought his presidency was good for them.
And I, you know, and they think he got screwed over.
And nothing has been worse for Ron DeSantis than the prosecution of Donald Trump.
And I think you're probably going to continue to see prosecutions of Donald Trump because that's a massive in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign every time something like that happens.
But the question there is that, and particularly now with the announcement yesterday that Trump is going to return to Twitter in June because of his deal with truth and all sort of stuff.
The question is, can Trump be baited into taking swings that the DeSantis campaign can then do some jiu-jitsu on?
You know, that's Trump was the master of the counter punch.
This is where, you know, that's what really fueled him on top of just the humor of it all.
And I have a feeling that that has been a focal point of the DeSantis strategy.
So maybe they're in a situation right now where they're keeping their ammo dry.
They're not afraid of being boring in the short term because their system which went up, you know, there's, you know, he's got donations coming in.
People kind of know who he is.
And it's when Donald Trump really starts swinging.
It's interesting right now, he's already on TV here, you know, running ads, attacking DeSantis for wanting to raise taxes for supporting the fair tax, going after DeSantis on amnesty, all these sort of things, which, you know, they are very weak.
They are weak attacks.
And I think it's easy to perceive them from a position of insecurity.
And I think a lot of what Trump's attacks, if they really thought that DeSantis was as low in the polls as some of the stuff that they promote out there, I don't think that they would be quite as scorched earth.
You see the difference with the way that he's treating Ron DeSantis, for example, than Tim Scott and Nikki Haley.
There is some insecurity there.
Is DeSantis in that weird position where he is one of the few people that Trump has ever faced with that is secure enough to really try to be able to pull off some of those counter punches down the road?
Who knows?
I mean, that's where the campaign is going to end on.
But that's that one thing.
Once it really starts getting head on, when Trump is back on Twitter in particular, that's going to be where DeSantis is going to have a chance to rise and shine.
Cause again, he's going to have to be able to attack.
Again, I think Trump's going to attack him from the left more often than not.
Can those punches end up delivering with a conservative with a Republican base that has become a lot more radicalized over time?
Yeah, didn't he attack him for being what was he attacking him on abortion for being too tough on abortion?
You're like, woof.
It is something that I haven't seen anyone get quite this reaction out of Donald Trump before.
And I always thought from back in the 2016 primaries where I was like, kind of, it was almost like watching this whole field who couldn't figure out how to deal with Donald Trump.
And it seemed kind of obvious to me, not that I know exactly how it would be done, but you go, well, look, this guy's weakness is pretty obvious.
It's, it's his ego.
And like, that's the guy literally can't not, like, I couldn't believe that all of them didn't kind of take notice that one debate when he couldn't point out the thing about his little hands.
And if there's a problem, you know, that Marco Rubio said and he goes, and believe me, there's no problem there.
And you're like, okay, that is who this guy is.
If someone ever implied that he had a tiny dick, he was like, stop everything because I need to set the record straight on that.
And you're like, okay, there's an insecurity here.
Like there's a weakness here that could be exploited.
And it does seem like it would be, it'll be interesting to see if maybe DeSantis can do this thing, which really nobody else has been able to do yet.
I do think in some ways, at that one debate, Joe Biden, I think without like, he didn't do anything to provoke it.
Donald Trump just completely miscalculated the moment.
And like he's, he completely approached Joe Biden the wrong way and tried to talk over him, which is not how you debate Joe Biden.
You debate Joe Biden by letting Joe Biden speak as much as possible.
That's what you want.
Donald Trump should have been like short, concise answers.
He should have been asking questions to Joe Biden throughout that whole debate and try and let him fall, you know, like destroy himself.
So he messed up there.
But there's no question it's it's Donald Trump's race to lose right now.
So DeSantis has to make something happen.
That will be very interesting to see going forward, what happens there.
Well, and one point that Richard Hania has made, I think is, you know, Hania is great at ticking off a variety of people on all fronts.
But one point I think was really good.
It was going back to the CNN town hall debate.
It was the clip where the debt ceiling negotiations came up and Donald Trump was asked about it.
He was like, oh, Republicans should, you know, you shouldn't do a no deal.
They should extract all these sort of things.
And then the moderator says, well, when you were president, you said that the debt ceiling negotiations can't be used as a negotiation point.
And he said, well, I was president then.
It's like, what's the difference now?
I'm not president.
And the audience laughed.
And Hania's point was like, this is what a lot of Republican voters want.
They want Johnny Carson.
They want the humor.
They want the entertainment.
And if that is what, you know, if that is the comfort that they are seeking from a massive media campaign, DeSantis will never be the funny guy.
You know, he can come in with an insult to press.
You know, he has some of those, again, he's adapted over time to make up for the fact that his charisma is not at the peak level.
I mean, I remember when he was running in 2018, you know, he was awkward as hell going around at a donor event where people are trying to give him, you know, they raise a million dollars and he's, he's an awkward, you know, he would have fit in at a Students for Liberty event.
He has improved over time and he's gotten a lot more sure of himself, but he's never going to be that personality.
And so, you know, it's, that's, that's the problem that he faces.
It's possible that there's nothing that he can do to overcome what your average Republican voter really wants and maybe has nothing to do with policy.
Maybe make maybe the anger is there for some of them, but it's mainly just that humor.
It's the, it's the Trump show.
And that's, again, it's, it's, this is what democracy brings us, right?
It's not a debate over ideas.
It's a debate on, you know, what makes them feel good in the moment.
And, you know, that, that might be, you know, that might be the future there.
And, you know, the quality, you know, it's, it's ultimately, you know, that is the importance of personality.
You're going to have all the great record in the world.
Personality is so powerful.
Charisma is one of the most incredible forces in human history.
You know, the rise of Augustus came about because of a speech Brutus gave.
It had nothing to do with the law.
It had nothing to do with anything else.
Personality and charisma is ultimate political power.
And that's, can DeSantis improve himself utilizing what Trump will give him to make that point?
That's the challenge ahead.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think that he can't, he's not going to win this charisma battle, but he has to not, he has to close the gap as much as he can.
And then it's like where the fights happen, he's got to make sure that he's on the right side of these fights.
I mean, right-wing side of these fights, not correct.
I mean, like, which does correlate, but isn't always the case.
But there's, but there is something about like, this is like what Scott Horton always says, his rule of thumb is like when you're arguing for libertarians that you always attack the right from the right and the left from the left.
And there's, there's something to that, that you can't, you know, attacking like a right-winger from a left-wing position, like if you attack a right-winger by saying like, well, that's not very egalitarian of you.
It's like, what?
Yes, of course, that's the point.
It's not.
However, if you attack, attacking them from the right can really expose them.
And that's almost like the thing where like, that's what is troubling for DeSantis about the Ukraine thing.
And by the way, I'm just talking the politics of this here.
I'm not talking about like what's right or wrong.
I'm just saying what'll be effective.
But like the problem with that is that it's like, you can't attack Donald Trump from the, you've strayed too much from the establishment because that's his calling card.
But what you could attack Donald Trump for is like the areas where he's way too much in bed with the establishment.
And the other weakness, by the way, the example of this was Rand Paul, who, you know, I have nothing but respect for Rand Paul.
I think he was heroic throughout the COVID stuff.
His grilling of Fauci was just masterful.
I would have much preferred him be president than any of these other guys.
And I think that leaving aside all the political and charismatic aspects of it, I think you would agree too that his views are much more closely aligned to your views, probably, at least in political theory.
But man, Rand Paul put on a clinic of the absolute wrong way to attack Donald Trump.
And I remember this from the first debate they were in when he went at Donald Trump for not pledging to support the Republican nominee, no matter who it was.
And it was just like, obviously, that is, that is the worst.
Like, no, Rand, you're supposed to be the guy who refuses to support the nominee, no matter who it is.
Like Lindsey Graham's still on the stage.
Jeb Bush is on the stage.
You're going to support them?
Really?
I thought you were Mr. Principled Guy.
And like, he played it all wrong, whereas he should have not been like ticked off by Donald Trump.
He should have been over there laughing his ass off, amused by Donald Trump trolling all of these guys and been like, that's great.
And he'd be like, yeah, you know, say whatever you will about this guy, but he was against the Iraq war.
That makes him more qualified than any of you guys, you know, and then and then try to be strong till the end.
And then at the end, his job was to go like, all right, this has been entertaining, but like, seriously, guys, we got to like actually be grown-ups here and do something and then pivot away.
But he just had no clue of how to handle that.
Donald Trump's like his weaknesses are what you have to play on.
His weaknesses, like I said before, are his ego and his insecurity.
And one of the things that you see is that he has this inability to acknowledge any of the mistakes that he made.
And it doesn't matter how much that puts him out of favor with his base.
The story has to be that Operation Warp Speed was the greatest thing that's ever happened because he did it.
It can't ever be.
And so he has no way.
Donald Trump has no mechanism to address his awful appointments and tell you why that won't happen again.
He has no mechanism to address why these people were allowed to frame him for treason and none of them were brought to justice or why they were allowed to, in his view, steal the election from him.
And there's just those big openings here.
And I wonder if DeSantis is going to be able to figure out how to play on any of them.
Yeah, I know that's going to be the question going forward.
And because the problem is that, you know, once upon a time, and Donald Trump was good at this in 2016, is that you could kind of, you know, take advantage of different sort of policy stacks that kind of awaken.
So there's some whistling to Ron Paul people on the federal Fed issue.
And DeSantis is doing that with some of the cigarettes bank digital currency stuff.
If you're really concerned about the World Economic Forum, DeSantis has been playing into Florida versus Davos for a while with some of his stuff.
And so like I think that has been, that is, that has helped guide and lead some of the legislative emphasis from the at the state level this past year is try to create that different stack of people that are really passionate about these sort of issues.
But I think there's less and less of that really motivating politics.
And plus the interesting dynamic in this, particularly in some of the early states where you don't have to declare is that you also have, I mean, the closest candidate to Trump 2016 right now is RFK Jr.
And who is, you know, he's out there sharing, you know, Lou Rockwell articles and appearing on your show and addressing Bitcoin events and things like that.
You know, Trump in 2016, right?
Like he was the anti-vaccine guy, right?
He was promoting Ginny McCarthy, you know, pre-COVID vaccine, you know, connection to autism stuff.
I mean, there's all this, these sort of groups that he was able to dog whistle to.
RFK is the king of approaching and talking about and giving voice to a lot of these issues that are largely out of, you know, or obviously the vaccine issue has changed with COVID, but some of these issues that are overlooked by the mainstream talking points of everything.
And so I'm interested to see how, particularly in a state like New Hampshire, where you could vote either ticket, you know, how does that play into early states?
You know, does this RFK campaign get to that point?
But, you know, are those voters otherwise Trump voters?
Are they perhaps very motivated on the COVID issue?
Is that pulling away from DeSantis?
That as just like the ultimate wow in politics right now.
And again, I've been consistently impressed with, if you told me a year ago, you know, I'd be promoting, you know, being impressed by a Kennedy, I would have thought you've crazy.
But if you have told me in 2015 that I would have been a Trump fan, I thought you were crazy.
That's the most interesting wildcard in politics and how that ends up impacting the primary on the Republican side just by pulling voters away in those states where you don't have to be registered within the party.
That's a dynamic there that I'm going to be watching over time.
What do those voters kind of look like in terms of polling and how much emphasis, how much oomph can his campaign go through?
He's obviously his family's very well, he had a lot of experience on dealing with very sinister forces wanting to silence them.
Can that momentum that he seems to be building continue to be a force?
Civil Rights Regime Solutions00:15:02
That's one of the most interesting stories out there, I think.
Yeah, no, I completely agree with you.
I actually, I think in many ways, RFK is the most interesting candidate in the race for a lot of different reasons.
And also the fact that he's kind of, he is, his campaign is essentially like sticking your finger into the water of the left half of America.
And like, okay, we're going to actually test what the temperature is here.
Like it's kind of hard to get a gauge of like, okay, how much is redeemable of this 50% of the country or whatever, half 50% of the voting block of the country.
That's really interesting.
All of it is really shaping up to be a fascinating thing.
And like you said, it's a lot of a lot of the dynamics of politics has changed in this country.
And we all kind of find ourselves in spots that we couldn't imagine we would have been in just recently.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
I think something has been triggered, like this, this response on the right has been triggered with particularly the stuff with the kind of trans ideology being pushed on kids.
This is something that I've in my life, you know, I'm 40 and my whole life, the culture has always just been like a steady kind of progressive train of the next progressive victory, the next progressive victory.
It does seem like a line was crossed with this one.
And now there is a pushback in a whole different type of way.
You use the examples of the Bud Light and the stuff that's going on with Target right now.
But those are kind of manifestations of this, you know what I mean?
This dynamic of like the sexual, the sexualization of children and not just sexualization, but a weird type of sexualization that most people are not like comfortable with.
It does seem like DeSantis in Florida has been able to kind of tap into that energy, right?
I mean, that was really the impetus for going after Disney was that he had that bill banning this sexual ideology being taught to third grade and under and they were against it.
It's that type of kind of anger, I think is something that I think anyone on the Republican Party ticket has to ride.
If you don't ride that, you're not going to be able to win.
And the angle for DeSantis to ride that, I think in some way, even if not attacking Donald Trump, is just that, you know, right-wingers voted for Donald Trump partially because they were so fed up with the woke stuff in 2016 because they'd gotten pretty crazy at that point.
And you've got no victory to show for it.
You know, all this time later, it's just worse.
It's just worse.
And then he can kind of at least make the argument: look, I have an actual blueprint for how to combat this stuff and not just inflame it even more.
Right.
And I think that's where what I would like to see is DeSantis being able to articulate nationally why he has been so effective in Florida.
And I think the biggest issue has been his reckoning with the civil rights regime.
And it's been very good to see the intellectual sides of the right, I think, improve and understand why is it, why do we have this continual left-wing surge?
And it's because, as Murray Rothbard predicted and wrote brilliantly about, you know, for decades, is that the civil rights regime of the late 60s completely shifted liberalism in the West.
It was a complete destruction of replacement for a property rights regime for a civil rights regime that creates an ever-growing class of minorities that benefit from state patronage.
And it started with race and gender and then sexuality and now gender identity and things like this.
Laws no longer matter.
If there's an aspect that plays into that state privileged group, that's why when the Marine that choked out a person on the subway, the first thing out of his mouth is, I'm not racist, because he knows he's on trial for racism.
He's not on trial for murder.
DeSantis was very unique by taking a non-libertarian approach by expanding those civil rights protections to protect the unvaccinated, to protect conservatives that didn't want to be lectured to about their race in private businesses.
Nick Gillespie was very upset.
But I think that's an effective dynamic short of completely overthrowing that mechanism, but allowing it to apply evenly to those who are against the regime, not favored by the regime.
And so I'm interested to see if that, the problem is, though, is that this is higher level stuff, right?
Now, it is good that you have Oren McIntyre now on Glenn Beck's network.
I mean, that's a massive increase in terms of the quality of mainstream conservative content.
But can that be translated and have any sort of impact in someone that just wants to laugh at Donald Trump jokes?
I don't know.
That's going to be the challenge.
But hopefully this campaign is a real opportunity to really unravel exactly why this sick dynamic has put in place.
And of course, though, the larger issue is that no matter the outcome of this election, the inherent problems that we have cannot be solved with politics.
The economic situation is not a matter of political will, but a matter of centuries plus of just bad ideology guiding how the state has operated.
The trans issue and this cultural leftism, I think, extends back to a much larger crisis of meaning in this country that has all sorts of conditions, consequences.
And ultimately, nothing short of a spiritual revival, a non-political solution is going to be having lasting impacts here.
You do see that sort of percolating upwards.
I mean, I know both of us have a lot of friends that have found renewed interest in the church, have found non-political sources.
Again, some of that is big within the libertarian movement of finding something beyond simply political ideology to cling on to.
Maybe we are seeing enough of that movement.
I mean, it's amazing how many high school friends that I had that were Reddit to your atheists are now trying to find something deeper.
If that is something that is going on beyond the electoral scale, and if DeSantis can't end up finding a way to tapping into some of that with his message and his very strong posture on these issues, then that is something that could end up affecting politics, even though it's bigger than politics.
Now, the problem is, I have no idea how that plays elsewhere.
How that works on a national scale, I'm not quite sure.
But I do know in pockets of this country, that frustration is very there, very real.
And hopefully that creates the opportunity for something that creates a lasting change beyond simply the idea that one political election is going to bring the American comeback, to use his words.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
Maybe we could just talk about this kind of for the last few minutes here because it's such an interesting topic and particularly for libertarians, what you were talking about, like under the civil rights regime, kind of understanding what that leads to and then what the best way to fight against it is.
Libertarians, who I love very much, but a lot of them do have a lot of trouble with any time you get to this like advanced level theory stuff where you're like, okay, listen, yes, technically this is not a libertarian solution, but it's a not a libertarian solution to a very not a libertarian problem.
And so all things being equal, yes, undoing the entire anti-liberty system would probably be the best policy.
However, it's not clear that the second most preferable one might be this anti-libertarian solution to this anti-libertarian system.
I know I think libertarians like to bring things back to the binary of freedom versus statism.
And that is useful at times.
I do, I know you alluded to there.
Did you see, did you watch when Rufo was on with Nick Gillespie?
And yes.
I mean, listen, all respect to, I think Matt was on as well, right?
I think it was Matt, Nick, and Chris.
And Zach.
No, I'm sorry.
That's right.
It was Zach.
I like Zach too.
I like Nick too.
Not even anything against them.
I'm just saying Chris Rufo destroyed them, just destroyed them on their own because neither of them were willing to say that they actually wanted to overthrow this civil rights regime.
And then Rufo is just there.
Like he's like, yeah, well, I don't have these libertarian handcuffs that you guys have.
I'm allowed to believe in state action.
And so, yeah, I want state action here and this.
It's like, yeah, you know what?
I don't think you should be allowed to teach that the Nazis were actually great in a public school.
And so I also don't think you should be allowed to teach this crazy shit about white people being evil, you know?
Like, and I just, and the libertarians could win that argument if they would be libertarians about it.
But you can't win that argument while also saying, well, no, I mean, I don't, I don't want to get rid of civil rights protections, but I also don't like this latest infringement on them because then it's just ridiculous.
Then you're just playing one side.
It's like, no, you just have to accept that you will be demonized and lose.
That's your answer, right, Winger.
And Zach came close.
I mean, he said that basically based off of what has happened since, you know, maybe it's worth talking about repealing the Civil Rights Act.
So he did get close.
Gillespie didn't touch it.
And then Ruffo doubled down on it.
This is the same frustration, though, I had with Justin Amash when the, you know, the ban on vaccine requirements was happening in Florida.
He was taking the position of, oh, this is an infringement upon freedom of association.
But if you're not willing to say that the Civil Rights Act is an equal infringement upon that right, then you don't care about ultimately defending that freedom of association.
You simply are willing to be timid as it is only wielded against those who stand up against the regime.
And we're seeing this complete weaponization.
I mean, the way that defamation law, Ryan McMaken and I have talked about this a lot on Radio Rothbard, is the way that all these different legal cases work with what the civil rights environment has done, it has made the legal system ultimately, their emphasis on punishment and being able to make up rules as they go along has become crazy.
I mean, Trump being getting penalized to fill it $5 million for that whole case is absurd.
That gets into a dangerous dynamic where they can kind of cherry pick the jurisdictions to find them guilty of these civil rights violations or these thought crimes.
And again, there's no protection, right?
If you have an all-white jury judging a black teenager in New York, that is going to be attacked over those civil rights protections.
But if you have someone who is a clear ideological enemy in that same environment, they're not going to receive that same benefit.
And so again, one issue is, again, ideally you reign back in the state, you fix a fine.
That would be ideal.
But in the short term, if you're not protecting these clear enemies in this so slanted legal environment, then we are setting ourselves up for constant failure.
Now, I do have frustration with Rufo.
James Lindsay is kind of in this crowd too, where their aspiration is sort of this return to normalized constitutionalism.
And in doing so, they reject the out-of-hand ideas of secession and some of these more radical approaches to the failures of the Constitution.
But if you're codifying essentially the Constitution as it existed after 1968, then you're not defending the founding fathers.
You're not defending the Constitution and ignoring the entire point about whether or not the Constitution was a good or bad thing.
You're not defending that dynamic.
You're essentially just trying to robot the clock a couple of decades.
But that momentum, once you create those state-protected classes, patronage is the core of political power.
And so the more ability that you give the state to provide patronage, whether it's financial, goes to the Fed, whether it is legal protections, goes to the civil rights environment, then you're going to end up having that patronage used to reward friends and punish enemies.
And unless you have a tight grasp on who that class is and you're part of their friends, it will be weaponized against you, no matter if the temperature goes down a little bit, no matter if you restore some of those political norms.
Eventually, the incentives there are going to be too great.
That power will be corrupted.
And so we need to be very, very sober and serious about how those things operate.
The Santa's approach and taking that state level dynamic, I think there's something to be said there about that fractionalism between a state doing that against the priorities and the narrative and the privileges of the federal government.
I think that tension is very helpful there.
I'd be a little bit more squeamish about that being nationalized as a model.
But I think ultimately, hopefully that is the lesson of DeSantis as governor is the necessity for having strong states willing to take up and use their power to protect us from regime agendas, both in D.C., Davos, and elsewhere.
And again, how that translates in the presidential campaign outside of competency and whether competency can win, that's a different issue.
But I do think, though, that if there's hope for reason for some optimism in a very dire world, just simple awareness of how this power is really being used and getting closer to being able to identify the state for what it truly is.
I think we're getting closer there on the margins.
And that's ultimately as much as we can hope for as anything else.
Yeah, no, I think that's right.
I think that at least on a national level, we at least hope that the system can kind of be undermined, which has already been happening quite a bit.
And then really, I think the prospects for liberty, and we would probably both agree on this, are not going to be found in Washington, D.C., no matter what happens in this race, no matter how much fun it is or who ends up pulling ahead, I don't really think that's where our solutions are to be found.
But I do, I like talking about these issues like we were just talking about, because I think these are certain things that people who care about liberty have to grapple with.
That the world we live in right now is not as simple as we would like it to be at times.
Rothbardian History Perspectives00:02:54
And that the reality is that, you know, even like just your example you used, and we can wrap up in a second here, but just like the example you used, and I was arguing with libertarians about this the whole time, is that it's like, look, was it perfectly libertarian for DeSantis to ban private mandates of vaccines or masks or whatever?
Like, no, obviously it wasn't.
But you also just like, let's live in reality rather than just in theory and look at like, what is what is truly the big threat to liberty right now?
You know, like the big threat, it's the same way they'll do with like this trans stuff where you see the kind of woke libertarians like freaking out about, well, look, these red states have these anti-trans laws, you know, because they won't let kids get puberty blockers or something like that.
And you're like, oh, okay.
However you feel about that one regulation here, what is happening on the grand scale of the country is that this ideology is being pushed on a generation of kids, many who, many of whom's parents are against it.
And what about their rights to not have this stuff pushed on them?
And then it's like, okay, yes, yes, DeSantis' stuff wasn't perfectly libertarian.
It was also quite clearly a reaction to the most anti-libertarian policy of my lifetime, which was like this mass locking down and mass vaccinations of the entire country.
So I just, at least libertarians, like have a sense of proportionality with these things and think about who you're serving, you know, with what side of it you're attacking.
That'd be my final thoughts.
But anything else you want to add?
Yeah, so should we have state universities or public education?
Probably not.
But if we're going to have them, would I rather them having tunnel twins and hiring Mises graduates into teaching people?
I sure would.
So let's take advantage of it.
And Murray Rothbard's work on this is someone who can actually connect the theory to the political practice is always great.
Joe Salerno has done some excellent talks really applying it to the modern world.
I'd really recommend your audience to check those out if they haven't.
Yeah, absolutely.
Joe Salerno is fantastic.
And of course, check out all of Tho's stuff.
You're the co-host of Radio Rothbard.
And where else can people go to find your stuff?
Yeah.
So yeah, Radio Rothbard's on On Every Week with Ryan McMacon.
I'm actually on a Tampa radio show now on 9 a.m. over there, Money Talk 1010, Good Money with Though Bishop.
And one project that I helped with that your audience might enjoy, we have a nine-part animated video series on America from Republic to Empire.
That's a strong, hardcore Rothbardian perspective on American history.
You can find that at our beginnings series, Mises.org slash begin.
We've got a few different series, What Has Government Done to Our Money, Economics for Beginners.
But if you're looking for some easy to digest foreign policy radicalism and some revisionism there from that Rothbardian perspective, you can find that at Mises.org slash begin.
Congratulations on the Series00:00:39
All right.
Well, Tho, thank you so much for taking the time and helping me and my audience to understand this most crazy and interesting dynamic.
And I'm glad I got you now because I guess you probably won't be sleeping for the next few weeks there doing any podcast.
Congratulations.
For those who don't know, Tho's expecting his first child.
It's actually his wife is expecting, technically.
But, you know, it's the two of them.
I want to be very, you know, I don't want to put gendered roles on you here.
We can say that in Florida, though, we're good.
Oh, that's right.
That's true.
Very good.
Well, congratulations.
Go enjoy it.
I'm jealous of you that you are at the beginning of the journey.