Liz Wolfe of Reason Magazine critiques pandemic-era government overreach, citing vaccine mandates and eviction moratoriums as massive liberty violations that disproportionately harmed families. She evaluates Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candidacy, acknowledging his anti-establishment stance while questioning his inconsistent Second Amendment record and reliance on conspiracy theories versus her view of incompetent elites. Wolfe defends Reason's journalistic integrity against backlash, distinguishing between malicious conspiracies and bureaucratic incompetence, and calls for rigorous debate to hold officials accountable for shifting pandemic goals without internalizing progressive moral priorities that alienate hardline libertarians. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome to Part of the Problem00:01:58
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm very much looking forward to today's episode.
Before we start, very quickly, I just want to let you know, Cleveland hilarities, that is coming up in a week and a half.
Go to comicdave Smith.com if you want to come on out for that weekend.
Should be a lot of fun.
And the special that I just talked to the guys today, we're looking at in about a month.
It should be up.
So look for that, depending on how the post-production goes.
All right.
So welcome to today's show.
My guest for the hour is Liz Wolf, who is an associate editor over at Reason Magazine.
We prefer treason, Dave.
I'm sorry, treason.
Also, I think I should just say reason.
I always say reason magazine.
Even when I'm talking about the videos, I always say.
It's all incorporated.
So you can just use reason as the term for everything.
Yes, reason.
Now, as people who follow the show are probably aware, in case you're not, I'll catch you up.
Recently, Liz made a video about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I responded to this piece.
I also mentioned on Twitter that I didn't think it was a great look for reason.
Me and Liz had a little bit of an exchange.
We got a little bit snippy with each other, but Liz did agree to come on the show when I first invited her, which I respect very much.
So I appreciate you for coming on and for taking some time to have a conversation.
I mean, we're all libertarians here, and I think honestly, the RFK candidacy is super interesting.
The Liz Little Exchange00:14:36
I think some of your criticisms really had to do with a perceived failure on Reason's part to respond to pandemic overreach.
And you know what?
Frankly, there are so many people trying to retcon and memory hold their records on that that I think it's kind of important that we continue to talk about what a total deprivation of liberty that was.
Oh, yeah.
Well, look, I agree with you 100% on there.
And the truth is that, look, almost every major institution and organization and political party failed the COVID test.
And that was the Democrats, the Republicans, the Libertarian Party at the time, at least in my opinion.
And we can get into some more of that stuff.
I will say I think that Cato did a worse job than Reason.
Although I did think there was some stuff from Reason that really wasn't great.
It's just, it was certainly, I think, the biggest mass violation of basic human liberty on the biggest scale in my life.
Not to say that there aren't individuals who have their rights violated more, but for it to happen to the entire society, it was truly just an appalling outrage.
Well, the thing that was really astonishing about it is it's not just like vaccine mandates, which I'm sure we'll get into, which I think we both believe are horribly coercive.
And in my view, even more so when passed down on families and children, my God, the age group least at risk here.
And we're forcing them to, you know, not dine indoors in New York City in the middle of winter because our public health authorities said so.
I mean, that was obviously a huge blow to human freedom.
But then you also look at areas like the eviction moratorium, which is just obviously flies in the face of any expectation we had of property rights.
I mean, I am a landlord and thinking about the degree to which the government might institute eviction moratoriums in the future or even thinking about which cities and states are likely to do so is definitely something that I factor into my decisions.
It's just one of those things where it's like, this is a business.
This is not done out of the good of my, the goodness of my heart.
And you basically had the government undermining people's ability to make a living.
Yeah.
And it's, by the way, I mean, it's the crazy socialists are the worst at this, but the amount to which landlords are demonized and almost like that, that they're cons the concern of them is just completely as if every landlord is like some fat cat who does nothing and was just like gifted the property and then is just raking in money.
But I'll tell you, as I've never been, I've never been a landlord, but I just, I, as a home owner now, compared to a renter, which I had many more years renting than owning a home, it is like, it is kind of eye-opening to just how much you're like, oh yeah, there's a huge burden on me now that was not on me when I had a landlord, where if like anything goes wrong, there's just somebody you can call and that it's their job to fix it and bear the financial cost of it.
Whereas now you're like, oh, like my hot water heater went out.
Like, what do I do?
And you're like, well, you call a hot water heater company and spend 10 grand on it.
The way I think about it is like we are shouldering an enormous amount of risk.
And some of what we get in return for that risk, as well as the actual logistical challenges of fixing things when they go wrong, you know, is a little bit of money every month.
Not a ton of money, but a little bit of every money, a little bit of money every month per property.
It's astonishing to me that so many of the lefties who act like landlording isn't a real job ignore the fact that risk needs to be factored into the equation.
And I mean, I'll just like give a shout out to my husband, who I, you know, am landlording with, but, you know, he was working on Christmas Eve to fix something that had gone wrong at one of our properties.
This is also the type of job where you just don't have days off.
If something's wrong, you need to ensure that your tenants aren't in a really bad spot, especially because they might break a lease if that happens or they might sue you if that happens.
So I think that's just one of the many.
The eviction moratorium is something I keep coming back to as a long-lasting impact that the pandemic had.
But there are so many other things.
I mean, I've actually been really pleasantly surprised to see the New York Times doing too little too late, in my opinion, but tallying up some of the learning loss that kids have dealt with as a result of the pandemic.
I mean, turns out switching to Zoom learning for, you know, two years in many places, which is totally out of step with how, you know, like Western Europe did it, super out of step with how Scandinavia did it.
They basically said, hey, look, it's important that children remain in school and that's something we need to preserve as much as humanly possible.
And in the U.S., for whatever reason, in part because of teachers unions, we just didn't do that.
We didn't prioritize that.
And now kids that were already falling behind in reading, reading below grade level are now in a much worse spot.
And my question to the teachers unions and to liberal cheerleaders of this is, what happens next?
What happens to these people?
What happens to these kids?
You're screwing them over early in their lives.
Yeah, I was, I literally went on a whole rant on my last podcast about this, but it's one of like the things that it was one of the things that I found so abhorrent during the pandemic.
And I think it's just as a general criticism of our culture, that it's like, it really does seem that there is no, there's no like putting the kids first.
I mean, I think that has like the death from just like so many different like areas of our economy, of our culture, of our political.
It's like this idea that, you know, and particularly during the pandemic, where it would be like, hey, we have to like rob from these kids to protect old people always just seemed very perverse and backward to me.
I mean, like, I don't know, like I, I have kids.
Um, you have a kid as well, I believe, right?
Yeah, right.
So like, I, like, we were as parents, you know, if you could try to think what it will be like when you're a grandparent, but the idea that like if I was in my 80s, that I would want my grandkids to sacrifice anything of their life to cut down on some risk to me would just seem so backward.
Like that is not at all, would not at all be where my priorities are.
And it was very, it was amazing, appalling during the lockdowns where they would like, even when they were like demonizing the teenagers who went to the beach at one point.
And you're like, these are-it's like, these kids have had nothing.
I mean, try to put yourself in, remember back to being a teenager.
Like chilling is your whole life.
That's like everything.
It's the most important thing in the world.
And to have all of that robbed from you for months already at this point, because this is well into the summer.
And you're like demonizing them for trying to get like one day to hang out with their friends when this is, they're doing it in the safest possible way.
I don't know.
In the entire world, I don't know how many people caught COVID on a beach, but the number's close to zero.
Like no one is getting sick on a beach.
And it was just, there was something deeply disturbing about all of that to me.
There was not.
The flatlocking of playgrounds, right?
Oh, I remember it.
Yes.
I remember it well.
It's just, it boggles the mind.
Like, how is it that people in positions of power thought that these were the appropriate things to do?
Okay.
So, all right.
So let's transition from this to, because this is, I'm glad we started this way, because I do think that there's, there's an interesting conversation to be had about RFK.
And, and I think that some of the points you made in the video were fair points.
There's actually a few things that you mentioned that I was like, oh, I really wish I could hear him directly respond to this, which fair enough.
I mean, he can, even though you weren't in the room with him.
But what were the points?
Like, what did you agree with?
Well, specifically, the, okay, so a couple of things.
Well, I think there's something to be said for when you're talking about, look, we can, we should be on the side of like kind of a repudiation of the entire COVID regime, but that does not necessarily mean that we want to take on the baggage of say, like, believing that the MMR vaccine can, you know, is a factor in autism or something like that.
That there's, you know, it's not, it's not.
It's not the factor that it's linked to autism, right?
Yes, I should say that it's linked to autism.
Sure.
That's, uh, that's what I mean to say.
I also thought there was, um, you had a, um, a point about, was, is it mercury or aluminum that was removed?
Marosol and aluminum.
Yeah.
What was removed?
And if you would think that if this was linked to autism, then you would see a reduction in that.
I'd be curious to hear.
I've never heard anyone like ask him that.
I'm happy to interview him and I'm happy to ask him.
He obviously already sat down with Reason two weeks ago and spoke with Nick Galesky and Zach Weissmuller.
I thought they did a very solid job.
You know, if he wants to keep coming on to Reason's shows, I'm happy to do it next time.
Like we are happy to engage with him.
We are, I am super, super against deplatforming.
I am interested in hearing people out as much as possible.
But I do think we should, we should, we ought to listen to everyone.
We ought to hear everyone, but we should be judicious about who we believe.
And so that's sort of my approach coming into this.
So if RFK wants to engage further with Reason, I am super interested in that.
Yeah.
Well, I did think that the, I thought Nick and Zach's interview with him was very good.
I like Nick and Zach a lot.
I thought that he, it was, it was a good opportunity to kind of push him on some of the positions, particularly in the past that he's had that really were bad.
He gave some decent answers to some of them.
Some were somewhat unsatisfactory to me, but at least it was better than what it sounded like, you know, previously.
Let's operate in specifics.
Like, tell me more specifically, because I think we're both pretty familiar.
I mean, I've watched that.
Okay, so he was asked specifically about what's become a famous like little clip of his there where he said some, I forget the exact quote, but he said something about jailing climate, climate deniers.
And he specified that he was talking about, you know, people who have committed fraud in their businesses.
So in other words, if you know, he was comparing it to the tobacco execs having knowledge that their product causes cancer and then misleading the public to tell them that it doesn't.
So in other words, if you could demonstrate that someone at an oil company or whatever knows that their products are leading to contributing to rising temperatures, but then is telling people that they are not.
So it's not a perfect answer.
The truth is that.
It's.
That is better than what the clip sounded like.
Um however, I I did ultimately agree with Nick's point that you're like this is like you know you're, you're giving the government the power to decide what is fraudulent and what isn't and uh, I don't know.
It's also an an odd evolution of Rfk's beliefs over time.
I mean, he said that the original clip was at the People's Climate march back in, I believe 2014, and then, you know, obviously we should sort of take his most recent soundbite into account and weigh that most heavily, because over the course of nine years, somebody's views evolve, and that's perfectly good and wonderful.
Um, the thing that I thought was interesting though, is for Rfk somebody who's such a skeptic of power on all levels, for him to express such confidence that the court system that judges and juries will adjudicate this properly and not in a way that totally um, you know, trounces free speech protections was a little bit surprising to me, like they don't always get fraud adjudications correct right, and so for him to sort of it almost felt like he was demurring and and you know, he's so distrusting of so many different institutions, and yet these courts would get it right.
What?
Yeah well, if liberals were better they'd be libertarians.
So you know, I agree with you on that.
There's an odd um, there is something odd about believing everything he does and still not coming to the conclusion that, like this, this power must just be uh, you know eliminated.
He has a few areas so so I totally agree.
I think he does have a few areas though, where he's just like a little bit oddly inconsistent.
One thing that I actually really want a straight answer from him on and I think Nick and Zach attempted to get here, um and Rfk sort of basically said, oh, if there was a bipartisan consensus I would sign legislation on it.
But like he has a really inconsistent record when it comes to the second amendment um, he has in the past expressed support for assault weapons bans, which I mean any good libertarian will tell you.
Any assault rifle, any assault weapons like these are just terms that gun grabbers use but they're not actually technical terms.
Even the people who don't know what an a, what ar in ar 15 stands for like, i'm sorry, but like, if that's your starting point and you don't know what this stands for and you think it stands for assault rifle, we're not going to go further in this conversation.
Right, and so in the past he has expressed support for banning those.
And then um, Dennis Kucinich, uh, basically I believe in, over the course of his political career got like an f from the NRA um which obviously they're different people.
Just because you're somebody's campaign manager does not mean that that's what the candidate supports.
But then more recently he's sort of demurred and and basically noticing some of his support from conservatives and libertarians, Rfk has been like well, you know, maybe i'm not interested in taking away anybody's guns uh, but then he'll say things like, well, if there's a bipartisan consensus, then I would in fact sign that legislation, and like, I don't know, that's not a strong defense of second amendment rights in my opinion.
And I think, no, I agree.
I guess where I would look to me, like I, um, I'm thrilled that RFK is running.
I think his campaign is amazing.
I think it's so great that he's doing this.
That being said, he is a liberal Democrat, and I don't expect him to be a perfect libertarian on all of these issues.
I'm not advocating that libertarians vote for the guy.
I do think that there's a lot that we should be pleased that he's doing this.
Look, what he was saying with the gun answer, it's not great.
It is remarkable how much better he sounds on these issues now than he would have a decade ago, even particularly climate change, where now he says the free market is the best way to price in pollution and stuff like that.
And like these, it's just, it's, it's, it's undeniably an improvement from what he would have said.
Pandering to us, though, like a little bit of a, well, the interesting thing about it is like, is he pandering to libertarians?
I mean, that wouldn't seem like much of a strategy for running in a Democratic primary.
Silicon Valley and tech bros, right?
Like there's sort of this interesting thing.
So a few different places have made this point.
I know the free press has made this point.
I know New York Mag.
We talk about it a lot at recent, but like the sort of loose coalition that he's gathering is bizarre and interesting.
I know they've been termed conspiratualists before, this mixture of like, you know, conspiracy theories, but also spiritualist sort of like horoscope followers, whole food shopper, Gwyneth Paltrow goop types, like this whole like almost LA contingent, many of whom were very radicalized, I think understandably so, by like California COVID policy.
Of course they were, right?
Is RFK a Good Ally00:02:41
Who wouldn't be?
LA had absolutely draconian responses to that, as did so many places like my home, New York.
But RFK, he's like gathering, he's tapping into this, you know, rising coalition of sort of oddball political independents.
And so it's hard for me, like, I think that's a really good thing to be noticing about American political culture, the fact that many people don't feel represented by a political party.
They feel as though the Democrats, you know, they've been left behind by the left.
But at the same time, like, I don't know if that means he's a good ally or friend to libertarians.
Well, the reason why I think he is, and I guess it gets down to like what you, what, how you define a good ally or what that means, like in the sense that I thought Dennis Kucenich was a great ally to Ron Paul on issues of war and peace and on, you know, certain issues that were very, very important.
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Perjury and Vaccine Stances00:12:26
I think that what RFK kind of represents to me, I guess there's two major things.
Like, number one, look, his campaign is not centered around gun control, where he is on guns.
His campaign is not centered or even around where he is on climate.
His campaign is not centered around where he is on vaccines, although that is, I think, being forced upon him to a certain degree where that is going to be part of it.
To me, his campaign is a bold refutation of the Biden agenda.
And the two biggest issues in the Biden agenda have been first when he first came in was forcing this vaccine, the COVID vaccine on as many people as he possibly could and demonizing those of us who didn't take it.
And then, of course, his biggest issue right now is supporting a proxy war of choice on Russia's border, which I believe is the most reckless, insane policy perhaps in American history.
And he is like staunchly opposed to both of those things.
And I think he is capturing something in the zeitgeist because he is such a like refutation of the establishment in a similar way that Donald Trump did.
And not just in like what policies he stood for, but just like the essence of him was so like, you can't get more against this.
Like you just can't get more against Obama than Trump, like as people.
And the other thing is that he's what I find very interesting about this campaign and what I'm why I'm I'm not supporting it in terms of like giving him money or my vote, but I am like kind of like, all right,
I hope RFK knocks him dead is that I think he is, I think when Ron Paul, and I think probably the most important impact of Ron Paul's runs for president in 08 and in 2012 were that he kind of gave conservative Republicans permission to be anti-war.
It was kind of like, listen, I am the most socially conservative country doctor who's been married to the same woman for 50 years, who wouldn't know the smell of pot if someone was blowing it right in my face.
And I'm telling you, I am like the most anti-war guy.
You're not, you don't have to be a hippie or whatever you hate in order to be anti-war.
And I think having like a Kennedy, a liberal Democrat saying, I completely reject everything we did during COVID and I completely reject that we should be involved in this war in Ukraine is giving liberals permission in a sense to take those positions.
And I think that, you know, much like with Ron Paul, Donald Trump, for all of his flaws, and there are many, the candidate who won after four years later ran on, we were lied into all of these wars, which is a pretty remarkable change from where the Republican Party had been before that.
So I think there's a lot of potential there for Kennedy's impact on the Democratic base.
So a word on that.
I do think it is a totally defensible position for an anti-war libertarian.
I assume all libertarians are anti-war, but some people, you know, weigh that more heavily, or that was a bigger factor in them coming to libertarianism.
I think many people who came of age, you know, post 9-11 and during the Bush years and then the Ron Paul years very much feel that way, understandably so.
I think it is fair to weigh foreign policy positions more highly, more heavily than domestic policy positions when assessing candidates.
Think that that makes an awful lot of sense given the unfortunate amount of power that the executive has over waging war basically, and in many cases waging war in an unauthorized manner, right um?
So I think we can all sort of agree a lot of executive power ought to be rolled back but, given what it looks like right now, it is fair to weigh foreign policy considerations more highly than we weigh domestic policy considerations.
However, my job as a journalist is not to shal for big pharma or for a particular political candidate or any of the things that people have accused me of doing or of not doing.
I am interested in examining records uh, asking questions and generally having uh, you know, lots of curiosity toward the entire career um of a candidate like Rfk and the entire slate of policy positions um.
So frankly, a lot of his clumsiness with science, uh with with his understanding of vaccine science, really gives me pause.
His recent uh comments at that uh dinner which NEW YORK POST uh uncovered a few days ago, which I definitely want to talk about at some point, not to smear him as a terrible anti-semite, because I think that sort of misses the big picture um, but you know, like that's something that I am curious about.
I think it's indicative of his thinking and some of his sloppiness.
I don't want somebody that sloppy with facts uh in the White House.
At the same time, I think you are totally correct that this repudiation of Biden Era Pandemic policy, it shows that, like people have this appetite still for some sort of reckoning right.
I don't think.
I think people look at the current landscape and they see okay, you know yeah, the surgeon general changed from Jerome Adams to Vivek Murthy.
Okay fine, did we ever get an actual apology for the?
The quote unquote, noble lie.
I'm sorry, but when the government lies to me, I don't really consider that to be anything noble.
Um, you know, you look at the heads of teachers unions.
You look at the fact that Randy Weingarten is still in in charge and it's like well, what have we done exactly to ensure that teachers unions don't exercise that sort of influence over policymaking and over keeping children out of school ever again?
Uh, did we actually really get uh toward a situation where we have more school choice and where parental autonomy is actually respected?
Not really, uh.
And then you look at Biden and you look at, you know, even relatively recently, Jen Sake.
Uh, all of these people trying to retcon the records and acting as if they did something different than what they did.
Um, you know, in many cases I recall the news cycle, maybe a year back, maybe a little bit less, where Jen Sake was trying to make the case that really it was, you know, blue governors and blue mayors and Biden they were interested in reopening and it was, you know, the yucky red state mayors and the yucky red state governors who were against all of this.
And it's just like, do you actually think we're stupid enough to believe that?
Yeah, I mean, Fauci actually said in one interview that he never recommended locking anything down.
He, that was the news cycle in april.
Like recently, a few months ago, Anthony Fauci was trying and it's like okay well, like Homie, you're right on a technicality, I guess, because you weren't technically the one doing that.
But if you're passing down the guidance, that then every single governmental institution listens to, like you are the government agency that was tasked with this, and then you're passing down the guidance and then they're making the decisions.
As a result of that, it's like, I don't know.
It's a little bit like it seems, it reeks of, and I can understand why people still feel um, why they feel vindicated.
Uh frankly when, when it comes to a lot of covet policy, they we they, the people in charge were wrong about a lot of things, about vaccines preventing transmission.
They were wrong about that.
We're even now seeing a sort of new information coming out about not just the lab leak, uh hypothesis and the likelihood that that is true, but also the fact that people in power in many cases knew about that before they let on and kind of lied.
They did this two-faced thing where they claimed that it was very unlikely and just a dumb conspiratorial thing, but then private communications have more recently come out that indicate that they knew that earlier on.
It totally makes sense why people feel extreme distrust of public health authorities and extreme distrust of the Biden administration and wanting to make sure that Fauci is fired.
Um, you know, Jen Saki is no longer in her position of power.
But like Karine Jean-pierre um, you know any head Honsho of any teachers union like it's totally fine to want these people to disappear from public life and that, I think, is where what we ought to be demanding as libertarians.
Well, I think that's the, I think that's the moderate compromise position.
Disappeared from public life.
I mean, like I, i'm not like exactly.
Are you like a Prosecute Fauci type guy?
Oh absolutely, for lying to Congress.
I mean these absolutely perjury thing that Ran Paul was talking about.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a blatant lie, it's.
I mean, I guess again you could try to weasel into some type of like definition of like.
Oh, he didn't actually do the lockdowns, he just told the guy to do the lockdowns.
But there was clearly gain of function researching, research happening at this lab that got funding from a subsidiary of the NIH.
And to just under oath or whatever it is, that when you testify to Congress to just say no, we were never involved in any of this, I mean it's, it's.
It is that if you were testifying in a court of law you could be charged for perjury for that easily.
Well, and also the challenge there is.
Not only is it difficult to um argue intent when it comes to perjury, but there's also this challenge where people can be very weasely as to what gain of function actually is right, and so that's another sort of way we've seen Anthony Fauci hedge a little bit.
I don't know if you saw this, but back in december of last year I was on maternity leave so I uh, did not play any role in editing this piece, but Bonnie Christian, for reason basically, during that time when I think Elon Musk tweeted out like my pronouns are Prosecute Fauci, which is like a little bit of like a haha, like dumb culture war thing, like I kind of, what happens is like, whenever I see stuff like that, a little piece of me is like fuck yeah, like enough of the dumb pronoun, stuff like this is a little bit funny.
And then, like most of me, is just like okay, like you should actually be, I don't know man taking us to space or doing something more productive with your time Elon um, but regardless, Bonnie Christian basically reacted to this and, you know, noticed that quite a few members of Congress were sort of jumping on this bandwagon and decided to actually like call some other offices and investigate the degree to which there are actual charges to bring against Fauci.
And I think Rand Paul's office had the best answer that they gave her, which was basically what you're talking about about, you know, trying to go after him for perjury.
And it would be a difficult case to prove, but Rand Paul seemed to be pretty convinced that that was worth doing.
So I think libertarians, my point being, I think libertarians, you know, have have a defensible case when they say that Fauci ought to be held accountable in that manner.
Yeah, well, I certainly, look, and I will just say, I don't know, you know, like what the legal statute would be, but for the guy to be blatantly, I mean, using his position as basically the face of COVID, being on the task force and being the head of the NIH for all those years to be, to be blatantly lying, or certainly making claims that the science did not support.
I mean, he was, there was never a compelling scientific argument that we know that you can't transmit COVID if you get this virus.
Like there was, they hadn't even tested it in the, in the preliminary tests.
And they didn't know that.
It was, there might have been some, some of them who were hoping that was the case, but just to misrepresent these things the way he did, certainly to me, you know, I don't know exactly what the legal authority on this would be, but I do feel like, yeah, there should be some punishment for that.
When you're using this position of authority, you're lying to people to get them to inject themselves with what is an experimental treatment at the time.
And you're raking in God knows how much money from these pharmaceutical companies because he wouldn't disclose that when grilled about it.
And he wouldn't, he kind of mocked Rand Paul for asking him, but he would, and then he mentioned that he got one royalty payment that was very low, but like, okay, like we don't even really understand what the relationship here is and it sticks like something's bad.
By the way, I also believe, I believe like, I believe war criminals should be prosecuted.
I believe a whole bunch of people in the Cheney and Bush administration, the Obama administration, in the Trump administration, including all the presidents should be prosecuted for war crimes.
And I believe that all of the lockdown governors should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
It's wildly unconstitutional.
There is no clause in the constitution that says, well, if there's a novel virus, then none of this applies.
Blatant, unconstitutional acts.
There is, you don't have to read the First Amendment for very long to realize you're not allowed to shut down churches and synagogues.
You can't do that.
So I'm, I'm like a bit of a vindictive libertarian now.
This is, we're in the realm of fantasy land now, but I think people should be prosecuted for crimes.
Lockdown Governors Prosecuted00:15:17
I think that it, so I, I appreciate your COVID rage.
I, have you like talked to Robbie Sauve at all or Matt Welch at all about this?
This specifically, no, I don't, I don't think so.
They are two men who like, I love to get like three drinks deep with both of them, because then we just do this adorable thing, which is like the extreme COVID rage fest just happens.
It just like spills up out of us because I think it was something where it just, this was so detrimental in so many ways to so many people.
And it's just like, it was, I think, a profoundly damaging era for so many of us.
And I think it'll take so long if we ever fully recover from it, which I frankly believe that like we've sabotaged, we've crippled a whole generation of children.
I feel lucky that like my son was born, you know, at the very, very tail end of this.
And, you know, my goal so far as a parent is to make sure like he is basically never in a mask.
And I've legitimately, I've looked at daycare centers in Brooklyn and I've, they've had masking requirements and I've been like, nope, I'll take my business elsewhere.
I don't, I don't want him to even, I don't want this to register as normal to him.
And it makes me really grateful that he's young enough that I'm able to have that situation.
But for a lot of kids, they weren't so lucky.
And it shouldn't be a thing of luck, right?
Like it's astonishing that we had the examples of like Norway and Sweden that we could have turned to and we didn't.
And I just atoned for this.
And there were experts all along who were telling us that we could, that this was an option.
And in fact, that this made more sense.
And they were not only demonized, they were silenced in lots of in lots of cases.
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My daughter, she's four and a half now.
So she was like a little over one when the pandemic first started.
And, you know, she's never worn a mask in her life.
I was able to avoid that.
Luckily, I'm, I'm, I'm in a better situation than many people are that this was an option for me to move and to, you know, like kind of navigate things.
But I, I, we had her last year when she was three.
We had her.
So right around this time last year, that we had her, she was going to go to this, like, like one of these fancy private preschools, outrageously expensive.
And they, they emailed us like a month before the first day.
And they were like, oh, by the way, these are our COVID policies.
And they were like, the children must be masked.
They, there's no hugging and they have to socially distance while they're in this.
And they go, and there's no parents allowed in the school.
No, that's a non-starter.
A parent needs to always have access to their no.
I mean, I literally, I called this woman up from the preschool and I was like, hey, I just got this COVID letter.
And I was like, can I ask you a quick question?
Are you fucking insane?
And she just, she had this response that like a preschool teacher has when you curse where she's just like very flustered.
And I was like, there's no kids around, lady.
Like it's me and you having a conversation.
And I was like, this is insane.
You think I'm going to drop my angel off for her first school experience ever is going to be me just turning her over in the parking lot to a room full of masked strangers?
You know, is she bawling her eyes out?
Is she having fun?
I don't know.
I guess I'll just find find out in several hours.
And I was like, no, this is insane.
And I want my money back because I'd already given them a sizable deposit to their credit.
They gave me the money back with no questions asked.
That might have had to do with the cursing.
But then we found a Catholic school.
Now, I'm Jewish.
My wife's Catholic.
And we found the Catholic school and we were like, okay, what are you guys doing for COVID?
And they're like, oh, nothing.
Like, we're just being normal.
And I was like, okay, that's where we're going.
We're going to this preschool.
And it is.
So, but I, but I also do recognize that there's millions of Americans who just don't have the options that I have.
And it's, I, I, the amount of COVID rage I have, I, I really cannot imagine how much rage I would have if I was in a situation where I didn't have the option.
Like my kids had to really suffer through something like that.
So this is yet another area, um, not to totally undermine your entire thesis, Dave, but we're like the evil bastards at reason are totally right.
Like my boss Catherine is legitimately kind of obsessed with this issue and has done quite a few videos about it, basically talking about how like, look, rich parents, we have school choice already, right?
Parents, you know, dual income families who live in New York and have the ability to exit whenever we want to, who go on vacations, like we have school choice already.
It is the poor parents who don't have it.
And the more we move toward a voucher system, the more we move toward backpack funding, the better off poor parents are.
And you actually go around and you talk to some parents who like poor parents who have had the opportunity to benefit from school choice in places where that does exist.
Like I know Florida's moved in that direction, Arizona.
We're seeing some traction in Virginia.
I mean, you actually interview them and a lot of the times they are so grateful for the ability to actually have more of a say in the influences in their kids' lives.
I'm sorry, but like that's not something that should only be limited to rich parents.
That's something where we're already via our taxpayer dollars funding kids' education in some form.
And it's astonishing that we are trying to protect the public school cartel.
It's like a absolutely insane policy.
And it's stunning to me that this doesn't turn more parents libertarian.
Yeah.
No, I agree with you on that.
And I think Catherine's great on school choice.
I'm sure.
I mean, look, I do think the libertarian position should just be abolish property taxes, abolish public schools in general.
I'm not opposed to that.
Yes, I would, I think school choice would certainly be preferable to the system we have now.
I think that there's, again, like I said before, I do think reason was better than say like Cato when it came to this stuff.
I think that, and perhaps it's it's part of the kind of characteristic of reason that they're that anger that you see with Robbie and Matt when you're three or four drinks in doesn't seem to come out.
Oh, no.
Are you kidding me?
It absolutely does.
Have you read Matt's COVID writing?
Yes.
And he, and that's, that stuff is very good.
But you also had Robbie, you know, and look, I love Robbie.
I've known him for years.
Let's focus on Matt for another second.
Like, are you serious?
Do you seriously mean to tell me that there's not enough Matt Welch COVID rage that has been released in the middle?
No, he's been good.
Yeah.
No, he went like full caveman style and like had his hair down to his ankles and was furious like he was stranded on a desert island or something.
Yeah.
No, he, but I'm just saying you had people like Robbie talking about how kind of like, I forget his exact comments, but how like, you know, like vaccine mandates were not as bad as mask mandates.
And so he'd rather have those than have the mask mandates.
There were, there were pieces from Reason kind of arguing that the problem with vaccine mandates is that they actually increase vaccine hesitancy.
And so therefore you get a lower, a lower overall vaccinated vaccination rate than you otherwise would have.
And I just think.
But were those articles like, were they just, were they like, this is the only reason why mandates are wrong?
Or were they like, these are one of the many unintended consequences of mandates?
I think that I'm sure it was the latter.
And they were not saying that these are the only reasons why it's wrong.
It still feels like, why are we even giving cover for this like insane violation of liberty?
And the truth is that we don't, it's not so clear that we wanted vaccination rates to be higher.
In fact, my guess is that with the COVID vaccine, we would have been better off with lower vaccination rates.
Now, it certainly depends on who was getting the vaccine.
But for example, I know somebody who's a family friend of mine.
He's a kid.
He's in grad school.
Isn't it 27 or 26, something like that?
And he was in a kid.
How dare you?
Well, okay, I'm sorry.
When I say kid, younger than me, I'm 40.
So it's, you know, you're all kids to me.
But so, but he was in grad school.
He had had his double, had the original double vaccine, got COVID.
And a month later, they were mandating that they get a booster.
There is no scientific argument in the world that a 26 year old who was double vaccinated and got COVID should get another booster shot right now.
It just makes absolutely no sense.
The risk versus reward is clearly out of whack.
Even if you want to argue there's not too much risk associated with the vaccines, there's not zero and there is zero benefit for someone in that situation.
So I guess my sorry, go ahead.
No, I mean, the, the, so first of all, to your point about the ways in which reason argued the case against mandates, I think it's important to actually like like show me articles, show me bylines, because I think like I have pretty good command of what we've put out there.
I edit a ton of stuff.
I byline a bunch of stuff.
I mean, we had really, really forceful objections to vaccine mandates.
My colleague Brian Doherty wrote about this, got a lot of heat for it.
I wrote about this, got a lot of heat for it.
Guess what?
When you're a New Yorker and you're with a bunch of like super sensitive social justice millennials all the time, being the gal who's like, fuck the mandates doesn't win you a lot of friends.
But you know what?
I mean, that's that's something that I'm totally, I'm totally fine taking the heat.
That was the right thing to do.
And like, that's the libertarian thing to do.
They were coercive and completely unjust.
And I think you're right that like there are certain settings where like, but I think, I think to that point, though, reason basically, like a bunch of different journalists at Reason all approach things with a whole bunch of different perspectives.
And one of the things we think about is how do we try to be persuasive in making our arguments in a bunch of different ways that might appeal to a bunch of different people.
So we are not just looking to appeal to the Mises caucus type of libertarian or the Dave Smith type of libertarian.
We're interested in y'all as well.
But we're also interested in the people who maybe came to libertarianism from the left and from a sense of like, I think right now, probably at this point in time, you may be relatively far away from the left.
Well, they've done a lot of pushing.
I mean, you know, I'm not, I really, I think in a lot of ways.
The point is we're trying to have a whole variety of libertarians or libertarian curious people.
And more than anything, like in addition to trying to make compelling arguments, we're also just kind of like investigative reporters a lot of the time.
We are interested in sometimes calling these government officials up and saying, why did you do this?
What the hell?
Your guidance was, your COVID guidance was this two months ago and really letting them, you know, supplying the rope with which they can hang themselves in a sense, because we're interested in comparing their record, like what they actually did to what they said they were going to do.
And on COVID, oh my God, there was a whole bunch of goalpost shifting.
And I think it is important that reason was there saying, what the fuck.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I agree with that.
I think that it's important to be willing to say something that like what your point being in New York and okay, this is going to piss a lot of people off, but you have to kind of say what you believe.
I think I've certainly had instances where I've pissed my own audience off.
And I go like, okay, but, you know, like, that's kind of important.
That's like, it's a very easy thing for all of us who are in kind of this space at all to, even if you're not consciously thinking about it, just respond to the kind of the soft incentives of like what your audience is going to love to hear and, you know, be guided by that.
So it's, it's kind of a good sign if every now and then you're pissing off your own readers or your own audience or the people in your area.
That was one of the things that really like annoyed me about people being like, there were a few people that were like, you know, Liz, with your RFK video, like you're alienating your base.
And it's like politicians have bases.
I'm a journalist.
I don't have a base.
There's no such thing as pissing off my base.
I think it's fair to be like, you know, actual libertarians, longtime subscribers of reason were pissed off by that.
But frankly, a Twitter ratio for a video doesn't convince me that that's the case.
There are a lot of people out there hanging out on Twitter, a lot of people who weirdly pay for their blue check marks, which is just goofy and bizarre.
Sorry, my dogs are barking because I collect animals like a crazy person.
But no, like, I mean, there were a lot of people with their little blue check marks on Twitter criticizing me and criticizing reason, but there's a whole contingent of people like you and I both know this.
There's a whole group of libertarians who will be pissed off at almost anything reason does that is provocative, right?
Like their acts that they're trying, their acts to grind is with reason in general.
And, you know, pissing people off just like doesn't really bother me.
There are even people who come to a tweet and will be like, here for the ratio.
And I'm just like, dude, like, look, years ago, that's something that legitimately, like, if I was getting ratioed, that would be like a stressful event for me.
I'm sorry.
I have a baby now.
I am interested in like spending time with him, spending time with my family.
The petty Twitter dynamics just don't really bother me.
So if people want to continue to heap the hate on, that's totally fine.
But it's just not something that ultimately at the end of the day, like that's not being ratioed isn't a good signal as to whether or not you did your job appropriately.
Well, okay.
So I completely agree with that.
And I think I've had several, you know, experiences like that where I've taken views that really upset a lot of my audience.
And I'm like, okay, but no, I don't care.
I'm going to.
You did a lot about like the Black Lives Matter riots, right?
I'm sorry.
You, you were a pretty vocal critic of some of the insanity happening during the Black Lives Matter, like to avoid community riots.
That was really good.
Yes, I was, I was furious about the rioting and the just rampant violence.
And then, you know, what's funny is that so I pissed a lot of libertarians off when I was just like furious about all of that.
And then I pissed a lot of like the like right wingers off when I remember because it was like after months of me ranting about how much I just, you know, hate rioting and looting and all the violence and stuff.
And then when that dude, Chauvin got convicted of murder, like I tweeted something and I was like, good, he deserves jail.
And then I had a whole bunch of people who were like, oh, now you're sounding like CNN.
I thought you were all against this.
And it's like, yeah, dude, like, no, I'm not just picking the opposite of what CNN says.
Like this dude hung out with his knee on a handcuffed guy's neck for like nine minutes.
Burn in hell, dude.
Like spend the rest of your life in jail.
I'm fine with that.
Defending Libertarian Principles00:08:46
So look, so that alone doesn't prove anything.
Although it is, I did find it interesting what a backlash online this piece that you made got.
Right.
Isn't it just predictable?
Like anything involving RFK, you know, incites the rapid fan base and of, you know, there are many libertarians in his fan base.
Like it was honestly, I was kind of like bracing for impact.
I totally anticipated that this would happen.
I mean, this is a huge traffic editor.
You know this.
I mean, you're in this business, right?
Sure.
But I also think that there's, there's something interesting about why this gets such an intense reaction and why it is.
And I think it's also like, look, it's within the context.
And the reason why I initially tweeted, I said this was a bad move by reason is that part of the context here is that the biggest storm in the internet just a couple of weeks before you made this video was this Hotez guy refusing, even when several million dollars were pledged to charity to have an actual like in-person debate with RFK.
It seems that there is not one like person in the expert class in America who's willing to like sit down with him and like actually have a back and forth, some type of conversation or debate, whether structured or unstructured.
And it just kind of seems that to have kind of like a hit piece on him a week or so after he was just on with reason just to me looked bad for the organization.
And I was like, oh, this is going to get a ton of pushback.
What looks bad about it?
Oh, because there's just, there's an opportunity to have, let's see what his response to this would be.
That's been the whole essence.
Well, the whole essence of the outrage over this Hotez guy refusing to debate him is that it's like, well, yeah, it's easy to just kind of like list your things that he got wrong, but it's much more interesting and revealing to see like, okay, but like, what would his response to that be?
And then how do you respond to that?
And so like when you kind of had the guy there.
Now I realize you weren't on the call with them.
So let me take you behind the scenes a little bit.
Sure.
So I basically, I am a regular on Rising and I had gone into a segment months ago and discussed RFK's rise in poll numbers.
You know, going in without knowing that that much about RFK.
That was sort of at the beginning of my time researching him.
And I got a ton of hate mail, right?
Like a ton.
And that was sort of like, whoa, okay, this guy, kind of interesting.
I knew a little bit about him because Matt Welch wrote his really, really good Strange New Respect piece for recent.
So I highly recommend that people look at that.
And that's very much like a media criticism type piece.
Like how bizarre is it that the National Review is like kind of like masturbating to the idea of RFK Jr.
Like they're like not everybody at National Review, but there was one writer who wrote a particularly bizarre 3,000 word love fest.
And Welch was really digging into this.
I think Fifth Column has done a really good job of digging into this as well, like Moynihan and Camille.
But that was sort of what got me interested.
And then I had this video in the works for quite a while, was doing a whole bunch of research.
You know, video production just takes a little bit of time.
And then Nick was reached out to and Nick is our interviews guy.
Like he's the one who maintains our podcast where he interviews people.
He just interviewed Mike Rowe at Freedom Fest.
Nick does absolutely awesome work and him and Zach are sort of doing this live stream on Thursdays.
And it just kind of made sense format wise for them to take it.
It is an interview.
And then basically I shared a lot of my notes and research.
I mean, Zach and I work super closely together on a ton of recent TV stuff.
We just produced a bunch of crypto related content, specifically on like the incoming SEC crackdown and, you know, Bitcoin Miami.
Zach and I worked together a whole bunch and I basically shared a bunch of my notes and research with them.
And then they went into the interview.
And I thought they did a really good job.
The problem is like, you know, no offense to you and your crew, Dave, but you guys, I think tend to have less strict time limits.
And ultimately, we just didn't have the ability to do a two hour long interview with RFK Jr.
And so there were lots of things, you know, that we wanted to get to, but especially, I mean, you know, RFK, he's a talker, right?
And so you only get to whatever amount you prep for and whatever amount you hope to ask him, you get to about like a third of it.
You know, if he wants to keep engaging, totally fine.
But I think putting out, I wouldn't call it a hit piece.
I would call my work highly critical.
And I think it's perfectly appropriate for a libertarian publication that isn't really showing favor to a particular candidate.
I think it's perfectly appropriate for us to engage with his candidacy in a whole bunch of different ways.
You see that with Matt's piece.
You see that with Zach and Nick's interview.
And then you see that with my video.
And we might engage with him in a bunch of different ways going forward, too.
But I don't think that that's untoward for a journalistic publication to do precisely that type of thing.
Okay.
I mean, the title was that he's a con artist, right?
I mean, RFK Jr. is long con.
Yeah.
Long con.
Okay.
I mean, that's okay.
Fine.
We could split the difference on hit piece or criticism.
But I mean, it's about his record, though.
And I think to some degree, his record has been a long con.
I think he's been somebody who's sowed a lot of mistrust and doubt about vaccines specifically based off of insufficient evidence.
And he's been discredited time and time again in that.
And look, I was very clear in that piece to basically say, hey, there are a whole bunch of things that RFK Jr. does correctly.
I understand part of his appeal, especially to libertarians.
He is an anti-war candidate.
You know, I listened to him at the conference that I was just talking about, Bitcoin Miami, where Zach Weissmuller and I went and shot a whole bunch of interviews.
It was really interesting.
Zach and I were both standing in the audience while RFK Jr. speaking.
And he was talking about the thing that got him first interested in Bitcoin was the Canadian truckers.
I mean, that was something that I covered.
I know Zach made an excellent documentary for a reason on that.
We were both kind of sitting there being like, this is a little bit bizarre and cool that a presidential candidate, a Democrat, is saying the thing that got them interested in Bitcoin is these Canadian truckers using freedom money to get basic provisions because they're doing a days long protest of a cross-border vaccine mandate.
I mean, that was kind of a really interesting political moment.
And so that was a really, really good thing to hear.
I welcome more and more presidential candidates, you know, looking into crypto and beginning to care about Bitcoin because I think it's an area that like they need to develop positions on.
We even see some legislators like Cynthia Loomis, who I think is a really good example of this.
Like, you know, we see Wyoming really trying to carve itself out as a more crypto-friendly state.
The fact that RFK Jr. is willing to stick out his neck for causes like that, as well as the anti-war cause, which is super, super important to libertarians, more power to him.
I totally respect that.
The things that I'm specifically worried about, though, an EPA under RFK Jr. would be awful.
Let's be very, very clear about this.
I do not trust his, you know, late to the game sort of free market sound bites.
I think he has a really long track record of cracking down on, you know, what he claims are polluters and climate deniers.
And he is in general in favor of very heavy-handed government intrusion, specifically to protect the environment.
I'm worried about his support of the Green New Deal.
And I'm frankly really worried about his anti-nuclear stance.
He was such a major player.
Like one of his greatest accomplishments was shutting down the Indian Point nuclear power plant.
Look, we're seeing this battle play out in Europe right now between France and Germany.
Germany is very interested in taking as many nuclear power plants offline as they possibly can, whereas France is trying to sort of bolster their nuclear capacity.
We also see, you know, Finland, I think, just brought another nuclear plant online.
Like this is going to be a huge issue in Europe over time.
Like they need sources of energy.
And I know nuclear is perfect, but it really concerns me watching places like California and New York repeat the mistakes that are made by lots of parts of Europe and having RFK being the one who's setting a lot of this environmental policy.
If he were to occupy the White House, look, we already see a lot of the left being super interested in anti-nuclear policies.
And I am extremely worried about where this leads if RFK Jr. is elected president.
Yeah, well, I think that's all very fair and reasonable.
And I do think that energy is going to be the big, the big issue over the next decade to two decades.
So this is kind of like the climate activists really have their sights set on that.
It's already becoming a major issue in Europe.
And there's a bunch of stuff, particularly out in California, where they already have legislation set to kick in in the next few years, you know, banning gasoline cars that run on gasoline and all types of stuff like this.
I think it's a big deal.
Worries About RFK Presidency00:15:13
And he's not great on it.
Although I do think he sounds better now than he has in the past.
I mean, he was a huge, have you read about the history of Indian Point?
No, I know what I was saying is he's sounding better on it today than he has been in the past.
But yes, he's got a bad track record on it.
I'm not disputing that at all.
I'm like tilting my camera around a ton because my office lighting is getting up on you.
We'll wrap up soon.
We'll wrap up before it hits your two.
I'm getting uglier and uglier as the day goes on.
We can just keep doing this interview and you can really, this could be your Liz Wolf hit piece.
So fear not.
There you go.
I'm going to edit this up to make you look real bad either way.
So don't worry.
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All right.
Let's get back on the show.
So I wanted to ask about one of the things that you said in the video that I thought that certainly had me raise an eyebrow.
And certainly like I didn't know much about you.
I've seen you on a couple different shows and things, but having this conversation with you, I already kind of have more insight into where you're coming from.
But why, why did you kind of, you, you said something, I don't remember the exact line, but it was something about how he kind of portrays this image that the establishment is corrupt at best and evil at worst.
And he kind of winks at the idea that there are puppet masters pulling the strings.
I mean, just after the conversation we've kind of had, what a, that seems to describe you.
Like, what, I mean, all of us, doesn't it?
Isn't that, isn't it pretty undeniable that the establishment is corrupt at best?
I think that the RFK view of the world, and I'm curious about where you fall on this.
I want to understand it better.
I think that the RFK view of the world is one that generally speaking believes that these people in positions of power who are abusing their authority are malicious.
They are malicious and they are coordinated.
This is, I think, very similar to the Alex Jones worldview, which I find Alex Jones super fascinating.
I actually went to his movie premiere in Austin when I was super, super pregnant.
So I think that was my first, you know, inappropriate or controversial parenting decision as my baby's ears were developing.
The first thing he was hearing was like Alex Jones' crazy voice.
But it was super interesting.
It was the movie premiere.
Glenn Greenwald interviewed Alex.
He was there in person.
You know, I wrote about it a little bit for reason and basically wrote, it wasn't convincing, but, you know, big tech should not deplatform Alex Jones.
It's totally permissible for people to be exposed to Alex Jones' viewpoints.
I was exposed to Alex Jones' viewpoints and they weren't compelling to me, but I think I was made better for understanding his mindset a little bit more.
So I think the RFK worldview is, you know, believes that there is sprawling, coordinated, malicious action between all of these different people in positions of power abusing their authority.
My worldview is much more along the lines of people in positions of power are frequently incompetent, bad at judging trade-offs, and, you know, they have awful incentives.
And I think that leads to bad outcomes.
I think frequently I consider them to be more bumbling fools than outright malicious or evil forces.
I think they are too incompetent, too inept, generally speaking, to be highly coordinated.
I don't super believe in, you know, some of the things that RFK asserts are just truly nuts.
I mean, he thinks that the CIA killed his dad and his uncle, despite the fact that the guy who killed his dad is sitting in a jail cell and was, you know, he basically was a huge part of the exoneration campaign to get him out.
I mean, do you actually, do you find the sort of sprawling, malicious actor coordinated people in power worldview to be convincing?
Yes.
I think that it's not as simple as that.
And I think that there are, there's lots of competing power interests within like the, within the, you know, halls of power.
I think they don't always get their, but the idea that elites conspire to do evil things is just, I mean, I think that's just a fact of reality and always has been.
They're not always completely successful with it.
But for example, was there a group of neoconservatives who in the 1990s, under the banner of the Project for a New American Century, conspired to get the war in Iraq done and then took over all the positions of power in the George W. Bush administration and then killed a million people with this stupid war?
Absolutely there were.
Are there, well, let me just go for a second here.
Are there weapons companies who fund think tanks who then lobby for every single war?
Yes, 100%.
And what are these other than evil actors conspiring to achieve evil means?
And then you had another line in there where you said that, you know, like libertarians should kind of be skeptical that governments are, because they're so bumbling and stupid and inefficient, like that they could even pull something like this off.
But like, I mean, governments pulled off the Holocaust.
Governments pulled off two world wars.
Governments, I mean, like governments actually, I think, are very effective at pulling off mass events.
They're just always very, very evil.
Yeah.
So the thing that I think about in response to this is with RFK Jr. specifically, I don't think he diagnoses the problem correctly.
I think he is frighteningly nonspecific in his specific claims.
He talks a lot about regulatory capture, but he kind of just like points at names and agencies and then sometimes loops in studies.
And he's not very clear about what exactly people did on what timeline and how they were able to do that.
I think that, you know, I think it's important to not just outright act like, oh, here's the problem.
Some things get deemed conspiratorial thinking or conspiracy theories.
And then history and time prove them to be totally true.
We're seeing this in real time with a lot of the stuff related to the lab leak theory.
And it was totally wrong for so many mainstream media organizations to suppress that story.
And for frankly, a lot of big tech platforms to suppress that story.
One thing that I go back to that was actually pretty fundamental in me coming to libertarianism, other than just loving smoking pot was like learning about MKUltra and some other absolutely heinous atrocities that the government has pulled off.
I mean, it's really, really stunning when you take a really deep dive back through the federal government's relationship with drugs and how they've experimented and set drug policy.
And it's like, there are these types of things that really make you realize like reality is in some cases stranger than fiction.
I think it's really important to be precise.
So like some of the things that you are pointing to, you're being precise in your claims.
And when I'm pointing to MKUltra, I'm being precise in my claims.
I think it is important that we have as many people as possible.
This is like why I'm such a free speech absolutist, right?
Because it is important for people like us to be able to write about this and podcast about this and talk about it, because there are legitimately some absolutely terrible situations in which the government pulls the wool over our eyes and in which lots of mainstream media actors really do a terrible job of surfacing these stories.
So that's why it's important for there to be as much sunlight disinfectant as possible.
But I think RFK Jr. is terribly imprecise when he makes these claims.
I think he like hits the nail on the head in a tiny little way and then really fails to be clear about the claim that he's making.
For example, when he talks about the revolving door between big pharma and government agencies.
So the thing that actually really gives me a lot of pause about RFK is I follow Dr. Vinay Prasad pretty closely.
I find his work to be really good.
I think we're friendly.
We're mutuals.
And he is actually a really interesting character because he has long been a critic of the relationship between the FDA and big pharma and basically realized back in 2016, I believe, that we don't really have good data on that revolving door and how many people are exiting government agencies and then going into high-level positions at pharmaceutical companies.
I'm sorry, but isn't that something that we ought to like keep data on and know how pervasive of a problem that is?
So Prasad actually in like 2016 studied this really intensely and came up with some estimates on this.
And the problem is pretty bad.
Prasad is still not a huge fan of RFK.
He thinks RFK gets some things right and some things wrong.
But like the Prasad way of doing business, that's what I'm into.
I think that that's a totally fair criticism to make.
And I think that, you know, frankly, the fact that we have so many members of Congress then finding cozy jobs on K Street, that's another big problem, right?
And so it's totally fine to be a critic of this and to attempt to gather information about how pervasive this is and what outcomes it's leading to.
My problem is that RFK Jr., kind of just like Kennedy from Fox the other day on a podcast that I was on, she called it machine gunning.
And I think that that's totally the right way to describe what RFK Jr. does.
He just litters the ground with studies and names and stats.
And he very infrequently actually draws the connections between these things.
He's so imprecise and so clumsy in his language.
And I think that, frankly, the Upper East Side dinner that New York Post was reporting on with the purported anti-Semitic comments over the weekend, I think that that was a really, really good example of that.
Can I just read that super fast?
Cause I think it's an interesting question.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I saw the clip, but sure, go ahead.
Okay, so it was, we need to talk about bioweapons.
This is RFK speaking, not me.
We need to talk about bioweapons.
We've put hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes.
The Chinese have done the same thing.
In fact, COVID-19, there's an argument that it's ethnically targeted, that races that are most immune to COVID-19, because of the structure of the blah, ACE2 receptor, COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people.
The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.
Okay, so then later he walked in.
Ashkenazi Jews, baby.
We're going to do just fine.
And then later he had the tweet walking it all back, basically saying, I do not believe and I never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.
Okay, well, sure.
He basically hedged by saying, what was it?
There's an argument that it is ethnically targeted.
Okay, well, I mean, I appreciate the hedging, I guess, but at a certain point, this is sort of how he operates, right?
And then you actually look at the study that he was talking about, and I actually dug into it, bringing up ethnically targeted bioweapons.
Like it's the study, the paper that he's referencing doesn't really quite say what he's saying.
It also studies, you know, the effect of COVID on Latinos, South Asians, Finns, Amish people.
I mean, he basically really, really cherry-picked with this and tried to sort of claim something that the paper didn't really say.
And he tried to distance himself from the claim because people got very upset about it.
And I'm sorry, but like you look at Israel's experience, you look at China's experience with COVID, which by the way, we don't really have reliable data.
Is constantly, you know, trying to pull sights of hand.
But I don't think that there's a very compelling case that like Jews and Chinese people were spared.
I don't think that that's scientifically sound.
That's not a rigorous understanding of it.
And it's very unclear what he's trying to accomplish by introducing this.
Look, fair enough.
Look, I will say in his defense, this isn't like something he said at a speech or put out in like a press release or something like that.
It was kind of like a comment.
I get the point you're making.
What's interesting about it is that, of course, like the knee-jerk reaction from the press is to like call it anti-Semitic, which is like, just it's not neither, neither here nor there has nothing to do with anything.
Let me ask you this because we're up on time.
So I'll let you know in a second.
Do you think Hotez should have gone on and debated him?
I think Hotez is a little bit of a loser.
So maybe Hotez isn't the most compelling.
I think Hotez doesn't have a...
Shouldn't some expert, like some expert, like a scientist, one of these people actually debate him and go through chapter and verse and like let it be like if he's so wrong about all this stuff.
Like 70 plus hours, right?
Like, have you read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci?
Yes.
Okay.
It is dense with all kinds of facts.
Sometimes veering into like HIV AIDS territory, like I am, which makes sense because of Fauci's record.
Like I understand it.
But it would take so many hours to respond to the RFK type of machine gunning.
Why isn't he getting sued over that book?
Is it just because it's all footnoted?
I mean, like that, it's kind of interesting to me.
Like he's going after the most powerful guy.
It seems like there'd be a huge incentive if he's getting this wrong to like, I don't know, take him to task for it.
So, I mean, there's the book is very well.
It does a good job of backing up its claims.
Now, you may think it's getting some things wrong or not.
Anyway, I was just kind of curious.
One of the interesting dynamics about RFK is however right or wrong you think he is on these things, he's obsessed with them.
And so he's got a lot of things to cite.
And because none of the experts are willing to like have a debate with him, it's almost like it's left to like these journalists who just end up, they just haven't read nearly as much about it as him for the most part.
You know who I would love?
Peter Attia or somebody like that.
Like I really appreciate how Peter Attia is so highly critical of so much of the government nutrition recommendations and government, like the sort of medicine 2.0 approach.
And he just put out a book criticizing this.
I think Peter Atia is such a force for good.
And I mean, he's even been on like Rogan's show.
Atia is somebody who, or Irk Huberman or somebody like that would be interesting.
Look, truthfully, what I'd really like to see, much more so than even the RFK debate, is I would like to see Hotez or Fauci or some of these people.
I'd like to see a debate where they have to defend their record against a competent critic.
At the very least, I think we should be owed that for what we went through for about three years here, that they should have to like stand up and argue for someone pointing out how much they got everything wrong.
Okay, Liz.
Well, give me your last, give me your last reason criticism.
Just get a little bit of reason hatred out of your system, because I think that this is good.
I think this is productive.
I think that.
Rejection of Statist Worldview00:05:46
And then give me, and then give me like 60 seconds to respond and then we'll call a truce for now, for today.
I think that reason oftentimes, whether wittingly or unwittingly, they maybe they internalize kind of like the regime's moral priorities and then operate within that framework.
I know I've had this, I had an exchange once with Nick, who I like very much.
I like Nick Gillespie.
He's interviewed me several times.
I've had him on the podcast.
We've had drinks together.
I think he's a good guy.
But I remember we were doing, we did like kind of what turned into a debate once on a live podcast on Saddieus Russell's podcast.
And he was going off about Murray Rothbard praising David Duke.
I don't know how familiar you are with like in the weeds of a little bit.
So for the record, anybody can go read the piece.
Murray Rothbard actually did not praise David Duke.
He was talking about how interesting it was that David Duke, this is when he ran for governor in the 90s, that how interesting it was that the entire establishment freaked out on him.
And he was kind of making the point that like he was like, well, I mean, it's not because he's a former Klansman because you got like the lion of the center or not the lion of the center, whatever they call bird.
You know, they like you got former Klownsmen who are like in the establishment.
It's not like, so what was it really that pissed him off?
And then he had one line where he said something like he goes, oddly enough, there was nothing that objectionable to libertarians about what he was running on in his campaign.
Like he was like, he was running on like ending affirmative action and cutting spending and like these things that like shouldn't be that offensive to libertarians.
But this gets, but so he was going off on how horrible Rothbard was for praising David Duke.
And then I made the point to him where I was like, look, dude, like, and I gave like a list of several libertarians who had praised John McCain.
Like literally, like I said, had glowing things to say about John McCain.
And I was like, why are we like adopting the kind of progressive regime ethos that somehow it's worse to be a bigot than it is to be John McCain?
Like somehow it's worse to like be a racist, which is not a good thing to be, but like it's worse to be that than it is to be like a mass murderer.
Like I don't, I like, that's not like a libertarian worldview.
And I think there's just, this isn't a specific criticism.
It's kind of vague, but I think that it's like there, there is something within that kind of like my camp of libertarians, the Mises guys, the Mises Institute, the Ron Paul camp, I think there's usually much more of like a complete rejection of kind of the statist worldview.
Whereas I think that that is sometimes with reason and again, worse with Cato, I think they very much internalize it.
I think so my way of responding to that is, first of all, I think more specific critiques would be more helpful.
You know, I, when I can only sort of answer for how I look at the world, I would say I feel extremely iconoclastic living here in New York.
I love it here.
I think there's a lot of good here.
But I mean, fundamentally, at the end of the day, it is stunning to me that, I mean, I am, I'm a little bit of a taxationist theft libertarian at the end of the day.
I am somebody who like when the day is done, probably frankly, even after this podcast is done, Dave, after I take care of my kid for a little bit, like I'm going to go smoke a joint and I'm probably going to ruminate on the fact that like it is absolutely astonishing that the government thinks that it in any way has license to seize so much of my goddamn money from me, take it all away from me and then dictate how I live my life, dictate, you know, where my child goes to school.
I mean, there are so many parts of the culture where I feel totally disconnected and frankly in opposition frequently.
And if I indulge that when I'm walking around, it leads me to a very dark place.
And so I choose to some degree to, you know, choose to tolerate more and more things and choose to attempt to, you know, be understanding of how other people have different worldviews.
But I feel libertarian deep within my bones.
And I feel deeply distrusting, deeply skeptical of authority and so angry that some of the best places in this country to live in, like Los Angeles, New York City, have been so totally ruined by fucking busybodies who think they can tell us what we ought to do with our lives, what brings us value and joy and fulfillment.
And they think that they can seize our money in order to attempt to bring about the collective good.
And I'm sorry, but like, it's just a fundamentally, the people in charge in these places have a fundamentally misguided view of the world.
And it makes me feel like, you know, my stint in New York is a ticking time bomb.
It's deeply, deeply abominable and upsetting to me.
And like nothing would be better than having, you know, libertarians in charge of running these cities.
So I don't know.
I want to engage on this more because I truly think that like your worldview and some of us at reason, like I think reason gets pilloried.
We get a bad name from angry people on Twitter who are intent to come and ratio us.
And it's like, look, I don't think we're your enemies.
I think we're journalists and we frequently share a lot of priorists that have similar worldviews.
And I think the caricature that people construct in their mind as to what we are and what we believe, like, I don't know, fuck off with some of that.
It's a little bit silly.
And I wish people would actually engage with me for the things that I've actually endorsed and the things that I actually write.