Michael Rectenwald and Clint Russell return to discuss the Libertarian National Convention, framing former President Trump as a symptom of statism rather than the disease. They warn of an impending $35 trillion debt crisis, the loss of the dollar's reserve status, and potential World War III via proxy wars. Rejecting utopian reformism, they advocate for a decentralized revolution against tyranny, citing COVID lockdowns and Agenda 2030 as regime tools. The episode concludes by urging delegates to support their movement over establishment figures, emphasizing that true liberty requires wrecking the current system rather than seeking office within it. [Automatically generated summary]
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Urgent Engagement Beyond Ideology00:14:25
Fill her up.
You are listening to the cash humans.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith, and I am very happy to be joined on today's episode by two guests, both returning to the show, Michael Rechtenwald and Clint Russell, who are presidential and vice presidential candidates on the Libertarian Party, respectively.
What's up, boys?
How are we?
Good, man.
I can't believe that you've decided to slum it with us after sitting down with Tucker, but I take it as an honor.
Well, this is my job, right?
I have to go funnel everything back to the good libertarians who are out there.
So, yeah.
That's what it's about, man.
That's what we're looking for.
Yeah, well, that seems, I mean, I think, look, I think that's kind of the, we'll get into some of this stuff, but I do think that's more or less kind of the purpose of what we're all trying to do, you know, is kind of like make an impact on the broader culture as much as possible and draw as much of that back to hardcore libertarianism as we can.
Anyway, we'll get into this.
Of course, as people are aware, we have the Libertarian National Convention, which is coming up in just a couple of weeks now, less than a couple of weeks, I guess, a week and some change in Washington, D.C.
So I wanted, let me start here.
As I'm sure people know, I've endorsed Michael Rechtenwald for president.
I endorse Clint Russell in whatever he does in life.
And of course, I support you being the vice president presidential candidate.
I think you complement the ticket very well.
But I want to ask both of you, and I'll start with you, Reck.
So the big news that really kind of pierced well out of our libertarian circles and into the broader mainstream was the people who will be speaking at the Libertarian Party convention.
Obviously, Robert Kennedy Jr., who you did an event with in California, I believe it was.
Yes, it was.
Yeah.
Right.
Vivek Ramaswamy will also be there and doing a debate of some sort.
And of course, the big news is Donald Trump, former president, current frontrunner to be president once again, will be speaking.
Now, and I don't want maybe one of the candidates running will correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me like just about every single presidential candidate except you had a very negative reaction to this news.
It is certainly something very different than what Libertarian Party conventions have been in the past.
Why is it that you are the only one who doesn't have that reaction?
Well, you know, I don't have TDS.
And look, but moreover, this is a massive opportunity.
I can't believe these people are willing to squelch or squander it.
We're looking at the possibility finally, after 50 plus years for the Libertarian Party to get on the stage with a major national candidate.
And because of the, you know, hyperbole and caricatures of Trump, which these people buy into full lock and barrel, that they have been freaking out.
Whereas I see this as a massive chance to finally get our message across, not only to him, but to his followers and the American people broadly speaking.
So how could it be a loss?
I just don't get it.
Yeah, and I think your comment, you know, about that you said, first of all, first of all, I don't have TDS.
I mean, I think that really strikes at the core of it.
It's something I've talked about a lot, especially as someone who's a fierce critic of Donald Trump.
I mean, Clint, you hosted a debate between me and Sticks ex.
I always mess up his full thing about Sticks.
I'll call him Styx, who I like very much, but we had a debate on the legacy of Donald Trump.
I'm a fierce critic of Donald Trump.
But at the same time, you know, I see so many like LP members who will tweet things like, you know, Biden and Trump are both statists.
You're like, yes, that is true, undeniably.
But like, could we maybe have not the most shallow take on this pretty amazing thing that is that Donald Trump does represent something like a complete cracking of the corporate media and this dynamic where the president is opposed to the deep state.
And there's just so many things there that you would be like, okay, this is an interesting moment.
And if we get to attach libertarianism to it in any way, that would be a huge win.
The alternative is not that we win the White House or the alternative isn't that we are invited to the debate on CNN.
The alternative is just nothing.
You know what I mean?
It's like this or nothing.
I don't know, Clint.
What are your thoughts on all this stuff?
Well, yeah, I mean, I think it is exactly what you guys have detailed.
It's the biggest opportunity we've ever had.
And for those that think that Donald Trump is going to come into the national convention and convince the libertarians to become GOP, I just don't think you know libertarians.
Like, I just think that's totally delusional.
So when I hear libertarians saying it, it makes me feel like they don't know like the people that they're surrounded by.
So I just think that the risk reward is so in our favor.
It's unbelievable.
And, you know, I'm, I'm thrilled at the opportunity.
I mean, how often do we get to have this type of attention, this type of engagement with the people that will ultimately probably end up ruling over us?
Can we persuade them?
Can we, and, and, you know, Dave, you made this point a thousand times.
It's like Trump is not, you know, the disease.
He's the symptom.
And his, we're not, we're not trying to reach Trump per se as much as we're trying to reach the millions of people that will follow him to the end of the earth.
And like, we need to reach those people.
So I'm absolutely excited we get that shot.
Yeah.
I mean, there's these people have been inculcated with this crazy propaganda tool and element that, you know, about Trump being this peculiarly horrible person and horrible president when clearly if we run down the list of presidents and what they've done, he's no more wretched than the rest.
So, I mean, I find this to be ludicrous.
And, you know, we can actually aim to move the Overton window in our direction.
If we could influence him, if he could release Ross Ulbric, for example, if he were reelected, that would be amazing.
We would save somebody's life.
So this is very serious stuff at hand.
And I think it's just really foolish to hopefully we don't squander it thank, you know, thanks to the kind of reception that we might get amongst some of the others who are just have the same leftist knee-jerk reactions as the people that have been indoctrinated over these past, you know, eight, 10, 12 years.
Yeah, no, I mean, there's, there's definitely been a lot of that.
It's been a very interesting moment.
I, you know, I did a whole podcast on just kind of the response initially from libertarian party members.
And it is, I just find it to be one of those moments of like where you see who's who, you see who's actually, you know, like who's interested in hanging out here in this party that we have and being, you know, ideologically consistent and feeling like I'm a 100% pure libertarian, which by the way, I do think all three of us are 100% pure libertarians, but you can have that and then also be like, I'd like to mix these ideas with the real world.
I'd like to see how we get some type of marriage between these ideas that we have and the real world.
And when you're talking about that step, which like, don't get me wrong, because I really love libertarian theory.
I'm actually like one of the, like, I'm interested in like Bob Murphy writing.
You know, Rothbard, you know it.
Yeah.
Like, but and I'm interested in the interpretations of that, like Bob Murphy writing about what defense would look like in an anarcho-capitalist society.
I find those things really interesting, but it's like, you can also recognize that as soon as you go from having that conversation over here, like, well, in an ANCAP society, if I built my fence a foot over on your property, what would the resolution be?
But whenever we're going to try to marry that into the real world, that's going to, by definition, involve some type of compromise.
And like, that's where people get allergic.
Amazingly, Angel, as Angela McCartle pointed out in a XSpace, it is the most radical libertarians who are the most willing to engage in the real world.
That's the irony of ironies.
Yeah.
No, there's, there absolutely is something to that.
Yeah.
There's that, that, the kind of the, the libertarians who, let's say, and look, I'll just be blunt here.
Let's say like the classical liberal caucus, who I guess has tried to position themselves as like the anti-Mises caucus, you know, group within the Libertarian Party.
These are people who support funding the war in Ukraine, funding the war in Gaza.
They, in terms of history, talk about how dropping the nukes on Hiroshima and Nakasagi was justified.
They praise Mitt Romney.
They reject the non-aggression principle.
I'm not exaggerating anything.
This is what I've seen members of that caucus.
But then when they Donald Trump is speaking, not like we're endorsing him or we're supporting him, anything.
We're running candidates against him.
But the fact that he's speaking, they're like, oh, you sellouts.
And it's like, sell out from what?
You're not even the thing.
You're not even the thing that you claim to be selling out from.
So yes.
Anyway, it's going.
One of the things that I've said from the very beginning, I've never heard a good response to this is one way or the other, we're going to get more independent media paying attention to our convention than any convention ever.
And at some point, they're going to be like, hey, I want to talk to the candidates.
Hey, I want to talk to Dave.
I want to talk to Spike.
I want to talk to these guys and see what they have to say about it.
It's just objectively, if nothing else, going to let us get our message out a little bit more than otherwise.
Well, doesn't it also just demonstrate how close the elections are going to be and how valuable our votes are?
I mean, there's this real, I don't know kind of defeatist mentality that because we're unlikely to win the White House, that what we do is irrelevant.
And it's like, well, Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK Jr. don't agree.
They don't think so.
They think we matter.
They're taking their time to come and talk to us.
If you don't take that as a reason for optimism, I just feel like you're not paying attention.
Yeah, 100%.
I couldn't agree more.
And I also think that there's like, you know, like as Rick, as you were just kind of saying, there's this almost seeming contradiction that isn't really a contradiction when you think about it, that the most radical members are the ones who are most willing to engage in these type of strategies.
And I think that there's.
There's got to be, once you're talking about applying something to the real world, there's got to be an element of practicality by the nature of applying something to the real world.
That's the way it works.
And it is interesting that I do think both of you guys are, that's another thing that kind of separates you from the other candidates who are running.
I mean, I've heard a lot of the other guys, some of whom I like more than others, but a lot of them are like good enough libertarians, but they all kind of want to say like, I'm running to win, or even this kind of like, we are going to get 5% or any, it's like there's this other disease that has infested the libertarian party where it's like, and I've noticed this amongst Mises caucus people too,
it's not exclusively like the old guard types, but particularly with them, where they're like, I want to sit in this little corner continuing to do what we're going to do.
And then we'll all hand out awards for like our own little, you know, participation within this little thing.
And we'll pat each other on the back.
And then we say things like, we're going to set the world free in our lifetime.
You know, it's, we're going to win when I'm president.
I'm going to do this, that, and the other.
And it's just all this, you know, top down centralized government reformist really rhetoric.
That's what they're coming on with.
I've been trying to say this the whole time, Dave.
You have no idea how frustrated I've been with these candidates.
There was there were certain calls, like, for example, there was one question.
I think it was posed in Colorado.
And the question was very simple.
Do you hate the state?
And they all equivocated outrageously, like, oh, I don't hate the state as it is.
I mean, I hate the state as it is, but I mean, I don't hate the state per se, you know, and on and on and on with stuff like this.
It was like a circus of equivocation.
I was the only one who stood out there and said, yes, absolutely viscerally and it's endemically evil.
And, you know, they think that means that we're not going to do anything, whereas we have an actual project underway to do something about it, which is not reliant on us taking over the central government and running the country that way.
We have the decentralization and nullification strategy.
They don't have any strategy after the election.
They're just looking for like default, you know, default rejection votes at the last minute.
That's all they're looking for.
They don't want to build anything from the ground up.
Just adding to the original question, you know, it's a world set free in our lifetime.
It's like, are you even free?
Like, are you actually going to set the world free?
Like, America isn't free.
Your state isn't free.
Your town isn't free and you aren't free.
Skincare Codes and Golden Opportunities00:02:14
You have to start at square one.
And I just think that it is really utopic and ultimately delusional to think that we are, we can even spend one minute of time talking about the rest of the world.
We have to focus on the here and the now and our families and our communities.
And that's, that's the main reason that I'm interested in engaging with people that aren't libertarians is that and being willing to talk to the Viveks and RFKs of the world is like, this is urgent.
Like we don't, we don't have the opportunity to just do these principle purity death spirals.
Like we actually have to engage.
Yeah.
And if we don't, it's going to become very, very serious very quickly.
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Medical Freedom Movement Gains Traction00:15:44
We have kind of this golden opportunity, really unlike anything any of us could have imagined just a few years ago.
And not just that, you know, it's like a, it's a colliding of all these different factors.
One of them being that particularly with COVID, the government has exposed itself, the corporate media has exposed itself in a way that they may never recover from.
And at the same time, as both of you guys know, because you both do it, as do I, we can get our message out and we can interact with this broader new media in a way that we never were really able to do before.
And also, there's like, I mean, I don't know exactly what the numbers are, but at least like tens of millions of Americans who are totally ripe for our message.
And I know that's something that like all of you, that both of you guys have noticed.
It's certainly something I've noticed where it's like, oh, I just like just talked with Tucker Carlson a few days ago and he's like totally loving everything I have to say.
And you're like, okay, this is like the most powerful, most, you know, highest profile person in news.
And he's loving what we have to say.
And so, you know, okay, there's an opportunity there.
There's something of value there.
We need to try our best to exploit this moment and gain something from it.
And, you know, I think it's something that the Libertarian Party really has to wake up to.
And I think it's one, it's one of the reasons why I'm endorsing the two of you is that there is this thing where, you know, like the same reason why people in the Libertarian Party would say like, look, Gary Johnson was such a success.
Gary Johnson got a lot of votes.
Gary Johnson got more votes than you guys are going to get this year for a lot of reasons.
Number one, you know, CNN was promoting him and the establishment used to have viewers and they were promoting him because they thought he would hurt Trump.
He was a former governor.
And also he was the third party candidate.
He didn't have to contend with an RFK, which the LP is going to have to deal with this year.
So, but so, okay, you could be down about that.
This isn't as great a presidential year to collect a lot of votes.
But then you also go, but what did that do for the movement?
Nothing.
Like you could tangibly say like, it's not zero.
I've heard of a handful of people who got introduced through the Gary Johnson campaign and then like became libertarians after that.
It's not zero, but it wasn't anything meaningful.
I mean, it's like this podcast is responsible for a whole lot more than that presidential run was.
So the question should be, if we want to live here in reality and not say like, we're going to set the world free in our life or we're going to win the White House, because neither of those things are going to happen.
Let's narrow the question down to, if you're running for president or vice president on the libertarian ticket, how are you going to leave the libertarian cause a little bit better than when you found it?
Like that should be the goal of this whole thing.
Absolutely.
That's absolutely the goal.
And that's what I've been trying to say.
Look, this is the moment to actually make more libertarians.
And as Clint pointed out, this is a vital message at this juncture because we're not just dealing with the opportunity.
We're dealing with also the possibility of the foreclosure of our rights to an extent we've never seen before.
So I think it's not only necessary to be the fanguard of this movement, but to take full advantage of these, as you said, these other media and to get exposure on them.
And I've been saying for the longest time during all these debates and so forth is that this isn't about getting votes at the last minute, these fall off votes that you get.
This is nothing or winning a single electoral candidate or vote or otherwise like making some sort of arbitrary dent.
Look, Harry Brown had many, many more, brought many, many more libertarians into the movement, into the, from the movement, into the party than any other candidate in recent history.
So that's the model, not getting votes at the last minute.
This is just a platform for spreading the message.
The campaign becomes a platform.
I've been trying to tell these people, look, this is, you've got to, I've reconfigured or reseen what this is about.
This isn't simply about an electoral campaign.
This has got to be about a movement.
And that movement has to start with us on the ground, as Clint said, at the local level and build from there, because we have no chance of penetrating this federal government like that at this time.
It's just not possible.
Yeah, I think the only real power we have over the federal elections at this junction, aside from campaign contributions, is that Donald Trump is a populist.
And if we have fanfare behind our message, there is a chance he will adopt it.
And you've already seen it.
He adopted much of his rhetoric from Ron Paul.
So I think that in terms of the opposition that we can present to him and the fanfare that we can garner, I think that is the only short-term federal influence that we have.
Now, that may be disheartening for some.
I take it as heartening because we didn't even have that power before.
And because of the dire nature of the current paradigm, I think it's vitally important that we recognize that opportunity for what it is, that Donald Trump, Mr. America First, Make America Great Again, has been credited by Boris Johnson and who else?
It was two other politicians, Mike Johnson and Lindsey Graham over the past few weeks for greenlighting the $95 billion foreign aid, aka proxy war package to Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel.
That ain't America First, ladies and gentlemen.
I hate to spoil it.
So I think that these are the types of things that we have to hold his feet to the fire.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that Donald Trump may have sold out, that like he actually, whether it was the pressure of hundreds of years in prison or it was just the necessity of getting campaign contributions.
Well, it does seem like, listen, I'm just saying, it does kind of seem like he's coming out and he's just kind of like, yeah, no, I'm going to keep funding the war in Ukraine and I'm going to keep funding the war in Gaza.
And they're like, oh, man, all these cases seem to be dropping.
Like, it does seem like there's like this weird shift happening there.
I don't know.
Just bizarre timing, right?
Totally coincidental.
Look, I'm convinced that the military-industrial complex largely runs along with big pharma.
Those are like the two primary entities, along with some other foreign nations that really run our political establishment.
And I think that if he wants to get foreign nations, you mean Russia.
No, China.
China.
No, obviously, obviously Donald Trump is a proxy of Russia.
I would never think of any other nation.
I'm just trying to keep your YouTube channel alive.
Yes, let's please.
Well, no, look, I mean, I think there's something there to what you're saying and that it's like, yeah, look, there's no question that like Donald Trump had a crack at this, did not drain the swamp, has not shown the improvement that we'd need him to.
But that also, okay, that's that much more of a reason why we got to do whatever we can to influence that message.
And anyway, just also to, because I wanted to make this point on what I was saying before, one of my favorite things about your campaign, Reck, is that you've, and I believe you're the only one, correct me if I'm wrong, who's said that you're going to turn over all the data you collect to the Libertarian Party afterward, which is almost remarkable to me that no other candidate would make that promise.
Cause this just goes to like what I'm saying, that it's like, look, one of the things you get when you run a presidential campaign is you get a lot of information of the people who are interested in you.
And why would you not be turning that over to the party so that we can maybe build some of this momentum?
It's bonkers to me.
It's also like, look, there's one candidate who's, he's not like in serious contention, but who's like a very wealthy guy who's every anytime if you type in something Libertarian Party, you're going to see his ads, you know, popping up.
And he's made no commitment to like invest any money in the party or in the movement or in anything.
And he's just like, we're the winning candidate if it's not him.
Right.
Like, it's just like, so what the hell?
I mean, I really can't stress this enough that I think the only standard that anyone running for president or vice president in the Libertarian Party, the only question you should be asking yourself if you're asking, who am I going to support here is who has somewhat of a strategy to leave this cause in a better place than they found it?
Even if it's just an inch more, like, okay, like, okay, that's a little bit better.
Because otherwise, if you're just going to do what like Joe Jorgensen did, it's like, what?
You're just going to go give a few talks and then go away and people will remember your most embarrassing moment of the thing.
It just doesn't make sense.
I had never even heard the contention over whether or not you would turn the data over to the LP.
So I'll make the promise too.
Of course I will.
I mean, like, I'm, I'm doing this because I care about, you know, the movement, our ideology, and I care about our freedom and my progeny.
So yes, I want the LP to be strong.
I want them to be able to grow.
And I think that we have a real opportunity to do that.
I mean, there are a lot of, just look at what RFK Jr. is polling at.
Like the guy is not even good on Israel-Palestine, and he's still polling double digits.
Like, imagine had he been good on that issue, he would have got all the disaffected liberals.
I mean, he would have been polling 20, 25%, perhaps.
He might win.
He might have won if he had been good on Israel.
I mean, the opportunity there was enormous.
Just a point being that there is major desire for another option.
Major, major desire.
So we just have to kind of knock off the concept of like, oh, they've heard our ideas and they're not interested.
It's like, no, no, they actually haven't.
Maybe you're just not good at telling them the other ideas because I've had tremendous success over the past few years in reaching millions and millions of people.
They all seem to like me.
They all seem to like my ideas.
They don't reject me out of hand just because I'm a libertarian.
They usually invite me back to their show time and time again.
So it's like there is interest in our ideas and people's audiences, even non-libertarian audiences, are very interested in what we have to say because they realize that all of our kookified conspiracy theory nonsense actually was pretty damn accurate.
That's what we realized over the past four years.
The endless wars, we shouldn't have been in them.
They realized we were right over the past couple decades.
The budget deficit and inflation and that MMT is garbage and you can't print money indefinitely.
Yeah, we weren't so crazy now, were we?
Yeah, so they're listening to us.
So we have that opportunity.
Let's capitalize on it.
Absolutely.
Yeah, no, right, 100%.
And even beyond that, where like going forward, if you're kind of like, hey, Donald Trump's saying he's going to build the FBI a beautiful new building, I say abolish the whole thing.
His own voters are much more likely to be with us on that.
And that's like, so that's something.
Let's not pretend it's nothing.
You know what I mean?
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One of the, there's been a few kind of like controversial moments during this campaign.
One of them was Clint, where you went all Joseph McCarthy, I believe.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but it wasn't actually you who asked about whether people were vaccinated or not.
I don't think I asked that, but I did ask if they wanted to respond.
Did they regret it?
Did their perspective change from that junction when they made that decision to today?
Like basically what I was trying to get out of the candidates was, has your analysis evolved?
I want to know if you're like a crazy ideologue or if you're actually a thinking person.
That was the goal.
It wasn't changed.
None of the leading candidates other than me saw through the COVID propaganda.
None of them were out in front of it.
None of them.
I would say that the vast majority were vaccinated.
They went for the whole regime.
They fell for Hook, Klein, and Sinker.
So how can we trust them to be ahead of the next crisis that comes down the pipe?
They're just not prescient enough to be there.
So I think that's a huge lapse and it should be a very good indicator.
Yeah.
And then one of the candidates started calling Clint an extreme right winger and saying that he had put him on a McCarthyist trial, a McCarthyist trial at the debate.
It was hilarious, man.
This.
This video should go viral for how idiotic and erotic it is.
If anybody wants to see the highlights I I, I broke it down on the re-lockdown because I, I had to.
I I took the actual footage because, unfortunately for mr Hornberger, the debate was on tape, like we actually had the video.
That doesn't help yeah, so I got to juxtapose his analysis and his claims about me being some sort of Mccarthyite, uh versus reality and it did not turn out very pretty.
He had no idea what what covet represented at all.
Like what?
What an in massive rights infringement, uh episode in in uh American history it was.
Yeah, he just did not see that.
He just said, well, what we need is medical freedom, freedom of freedom from the uh state running the, the medical establishment.
Yeah, I know, it's like uh, it's, it's as if, like you know, like I don't even know what to say sometimes to these.
It's like yeah look, I know I believe in freedom too, but like if you were about to be dropped off to live as the average person in Sweden or North Korea and it was the roll of a dice, you would be like well, I mean, they're both statist, you know societies.
It's like yes no, I know, I know, but one's way worse, and like we're going from looking a lot more like Sweden to looking a lot more like North Korea, so like this is a really big deal.
It doesn't matter that you're like, your theory is that they're all, it's all bad.
Yeah well let's let's, let's also add, you know, saying medical health freedom doesn't really strike the root of what happened.
Here we have, we have the select committee that just came out yesterday with the report saying that there was, in fact, ECO Health Alliance and Anthony Fauci and NIH and NIAD were funding gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute OF Virology.
Conflating Defense With Justice00:11:47
That happened.
So if you think this is just about medical health freedom, you have no idea what happened and that is disqualifying because it's the biggest story over the past decade, outside of perhaps, the lead up to World War III.
So yeah, and if you've ever on this yeah, I mean, have you never heard of Crimson the the, the trials, the simulations that were run just before Covet took off, event 201 Crimson Contagion, Clade X do you know nothing about any of this?
This was the kind of they were.
They were basically pre-programming us for this and these people don't know anything about this.
Nothing yeah, but i'm the Mccarthy, you're not the Mccarthyite.
Well, he also, you know.
I mean, he also made a video about me recently in which his whole uh thing was that because I had I had on twitter.
I had said that you know look, it was always obvious this wasn't going to happen.
But Rfk had challenged, um the uh, Donald Trump, to debate at the Libertarian Party convention and I said hey, if this is done before the nomination uh is is decided, i'll jump up there and represent libertarians.
Someone's going to represent libertarians here.
Now look, I knew this whole time.
Obviously, I know Trump's not going to debate Rfk at our convention.
Um, and I know i'm not going to debate them at the convention, but it's kind of just like, oh yeah, let's make a bigger like, let's get more eyes on this, let's make you know and um, so he basically uh, Hornberger made this video saying that if I jumped up on stage I would just agree with Donald Trump and I would just tell him how happy I was to be here and like oh, mr Trump, you're so great.
And it's just like, oh dude, come on, come on, I call him Rip Van Winkle.
Now that we're, we're knocking off the bottom of the ladder here.
Um, I call him Rip Van Winkle.
It's like he was asleep for the last 20, 30 years, has no idea what's happened and he looks at this political landscape and has the same recipe that he might have 20 years ago.
It's hilarious.
Yeah well, there's also just been something.
There's something in the air and I really do at times think this is a more spiritual force than it is a force of this world.
But there's something where, between TDS and COVID Insanity and all of this, like a lot of people who you used to respect are like publicly humiliating themselves.
A lot of people you used to think were dummies have revealed themselves to be very smart people.
And like, it's just everything's kind of upside down, but there are things like that, you know, which is really rough.
I don't know if you guys even want to get into it, but I just saw earlier today, maybe you'd want to comment on this, Rick, because you've been, you've done a lot of events with the Mises Institute.
So Walter Block was removed as a senior fellow at the Mises Institute.
For people who don't know, Walter Block is a very accomplished libertarian economist.
He's been at the Mises Institute, I believe, since it started.
The Mises Institute is like our ground zero, like best organization of the best libertarians.
Right next to the Libertarian Institute.
Shout out to Scott.
There you go.
But I think even Scott would agree with me on this.
I'm sorry to keep you guys on good terms.
But there you go.
We're on good terms.
Me and Scott agree.
But there is, it was another thing that was just kind of sad to see somebody who I've respected their work for so long.
I do think it was the right move of the Mises Institute.
I don't know.
What are your thoughts, Rick?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it had to be done.
Look, he makes a special carve-out exception for statism and genocide in the case of Israel, which he would not make a carve-out for in any other condition, any other case.
I mean, the guy is supposedly an anarcho-capitalist, and yet he's championing a state to demolish this other country.
And, you know, Hoppe crushed him on this.
He came out then with a 46 or 55 page essay in rebuttal to Hoppe.
I got through 20 pages of special pleading and couldn't go any further.
It's sad, but it had to be done.
I took, he endorsed me.
I took his endorsement off of my page.
I couldn't have it.
Wow.
He just was so far off.
Well, I listened to this.
Well, for people who don't know, it's not just that he's like, he's like a critic of Hamas or even like he's on Israel's side.
I mean, he wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago advocating the invasion of Rafa and that Israel finished the job.
And I do think, you know, I saw some people online who were like, oh, you know, is this, are we going to act like the intolerant left?
And are we like canceling him for having a different view?
But no, I mean, look, there, there has to be some line.
Like, I don't know.
If somebody just started advocating socialism and gun control, can they still be a senior fellow at the Mises Institute?
Like, no, you can't.
Because that's kind of the whole deal is that we're against those things here.
And likewise, this is for the whole history of the Mises Institute.
Look, this is the whole like Rothbardian legacy that they represent.
This is the central deal-breaking issue.
Nobody's saying because there's like, look, Walter Block is for complete open borders and Lou Rockwell and Hans Hermann Hoppe are border hawks.
But that was never an issue.
That was never like, oh, he's going to get kicked out of here.
There's, I guarantee it.
I mean, I don't know, but I guarantee there's pro-choice people at the Mises Institute and definitely pro-life people there.
There are issues, much like borders.
I think all three of us kind of agree on this.
Much like we are for border controls and reject open borders as un-libertarian.
But I also can understand there's a libertarian argument that could get you to open borders.
I reject it, but I get that there is one.
I get that there is a libertarian argument that could get you to being pro-choice.
I reject it, but I understand that there is an argument there.
There just simply is no libertarian argument that gets to it's okay to slaughter women and children by the tens of thousands for now and what certainly will be hundreds of thousands if this continues.
This is what was so disturbing about it is that I listened to the interview, you're welcome with Malice.
I have not yet for the record.
just know it's going to be too painful.
And I love malice, but I just, I, anyway, sorry.
It's going to hurt your soul, Dave.
I promise you this, because I mean, he just opens it up with such a straw man in that, well, libertarians believe that if you are attacked without provocation, that you have every right to defend yourself.
And it's like, dude, that's not what happened.
Not what happened.
And this is not self-defense.
Well, I mean, there are aspects of it that are self-defense, but there are aspects of it that are that are just abject terror on innocent women and children.
You have to be able to distinguish the two.
And it's like he just refuses to do that.
If Israel would have, you know, if they would have decided to hunt down the Hamas militants underground and root them out and bring them to justice, I would have supported that.
But this has nothing to do with that at all.
This is they have this leveled the whole Gaza Strip and they're now going, they chased everybody into Rafah and they keep threatening to bomb it.
They've already made incursions there.
They blocked off the, they blocked off the Rafah passage to Egypt.
It's unbelievable.
And they're and they're allowing these Israeli citizens to firebomb aid trucks coming into the into the Gaza Strip.
I mean, this is this is a level of, I would call them criminally insane, frankly.
Yeah, it's also just so, I mean, first of all, you know, obviously if you're going to say that October 7th was unprovoked, then the word provocation has no meaning.
I mean, I don't know what else to say.
That's again, that's not justifying it, but the idea that there was no provocation there is just too absurd to even really deal with.
But I think Russia-Ukraine, I mean, there's obvious provocations.
But it's also like so much more obvious than even Russian Ukraine.
I mean, like, you know, like Russia, there were clear provocations to Russia, but I mean, they weren't like, you know, it's not as if they were occupied for 50 plus years and then attacked their occupiers.
But, you know, this idea that, first of all, yes, libertarians believe in self-defense, but I can't stand people conflating what Israel is doing to self-defense.
Like if someone runs on your property and pulls a gun and points it at you and you shoot them, it's like, yeah, you defended yourself and we believe in your right.
But if that person runs and points a gun at you and then runs back to their home where they have their wife and five children and then you blow up the home, you can't go, I was defending the town.
No, yeah.
Yeah, we know that you, you live over in this part of town.
So, you know, we're going to go over and blow up the whole neighborhood.
Yeah.
Sorry, that's not self-defense anymore.
And to conflate that with self-defense.
And so no, look, it is simply not true.
And Walter Block really should know better than that.
It's not, if you say that, okay, libertarians believe that if you are unprovoked, you are attacked in an unprovoked manner.
Let's just say for the sake of argument, this was an unprovoked attack, that therefore you have a right to fight a war.
I mean, no, it's not as if what we believe is that now there are no restrictions on what you are allowed to do to a civilian population.
Like as if like we just believe that it is not the libertarian belief that say if al-Qaeda attacks us from Afghanistan, therefore every man, woman, and child in Afghanistan now have their rights suspended and we have the right to do whatever we want to any of them.
No, like what we would believe is that the basic libertarian belief is that the same as it is on economics, that essentially there is no micro and macro.
That's the libertarian belief.
The justifications between interpersonal violence or between states is exactly the same.
And so like, yes, those people who were involved in that, you have a right to bring those people to justice.
We do not believe that the civilian population is now fair game.
Now, again, if there was a sense in which Israel was, as they have historically done, doing targeted assassination campaigns, special ops missions or something like that, and there was a very small degree of civilian casualties that came along with that.
The libertarian belief actually is that it's still evil that innocent people were killed.
However, in the more practical sense, you wouldn't see such a backlash about it.
And you would kind of realize, well, they were put in an impossible situation and they felt like they needed to enact justice or get revenge on these people.
But also, I would just point out, because there's such a conflation of these terms, justice or revenge are a different thing than self-defense.
That's not self-defense.
Self-defense is a guy was attacking me.
He was trying to kill me with a knife and I shot him dead and killed him.
A guy attacks me with a knife, gets away.
Weeks later, I find him and I call the cops and I go to get him.
That's not self-defense.
That's justice.
That's revenge.
Now, we are for justice.
I'm not saying we're against it, but I just hate the conflation of those two things as if Israel is in this situation where there's a knife to their neck and they have no choice but to invade Rafa.
That's just not the situation.
They could just not do it and we could figure out how to get justice for those Hamas militants who attacked them at some other time.
Anyway, just wanted to.
Back to Block, just for a second, back to Block.
I mean, in his 45 or I don't know how many pages, this very long retort to Hans Hermann Hoppe, he goes on and says that this is all the self-defense.
Unafraid To Support Liberty Principles00:12:52
And he cites Murray Rothbard all over the place.
But he skips over some very vital passages where Rothbard effectively said that there is no way not to violate the NAP with war because there necessarily will be innocent people as casualties.
So he's very radical on this and Block totally skips it.
He doesn't even see that in the text, apparently.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, switching gears.
We are getting ready to go to, we're getting ready to go to this Libertarian Party convention.
The nominations will be decided.
I'm very confident that you guys are going to be the team.
That's what it looks like.
And that's what the people who have their ear to the ground are telling me is likely.
That doesn't mean everybody listening, come on out.
If you're a delegate, come on out and support and vote for Reck and vote for Clint.
What are you guys looking, and I'll ask you first, Reck, and then go to Clint.
What are you guys looking to get out of this campaign?
Well, we want the nomination so that we can continue to build a movement on the ground and get this message.
So I'm just looking for the campaign as I said before.
It's a prop.
It's a prop for getting exposure to our ideas and to getting the message out there and hopefully shifting the Oberton window in our direction and getting the principles of libertarianism on the table.
We might get them on the table with Donald Trump himself.
Explain what the principles are of libertarianism and get that across to him and to the wider public.
That's what I'm hoping to get out of it and to support this movement of decentralized revolution, which I think is the most, it's not like the only strategy.
It's not like it's if it is the only path to liberty conceivable, but it is, I think, one of the only paths that are open to us at the present time.
Yeah, I think, I mean, I think we have an opportunity to reach tens of millions of people.
You know, Dave, you already do that.
I do that maybe annually, but I certainly don't do it monthly or weekly.
So that's what I'm interested in is I think that we need to have messengers that are truly unafraid.
I am unafraid.
Actually, I'm unafraid because I'm afraid.
I'm very nervous about the trajectory of things.
And therefore, I have immense courage when it comes to telling the truth in the moment when it needs to be said.
So I think that's what we need.
And if there's another candidate, I don't even know who's competing against me, to be honest, but if there's another candidate that can do it better, fine.
Like this is not about me.
This is not about growing my name recognition or my brand or anything like that.
I genuinely believe that we are on the precipice of full financial meltdown, loss of the U.S. dollars reserve currency status, $35 trillion in debt.
National, just the interest alone on that is going to be the largest expenditure over the next 12 months.
We are on the precipice of the Austrian bang moment.
It's coming.
On top of that, we are fomenting multiple venues via proxy wars with nuclear powers for World War III.
You just had a prime minister get assassinated or attempt assassination yesterday.
There's been a thesis that that's going to be the staging ground for NATO troops.
And it's like, this is very, very dangerous stuff.
And we need someone who actually sees what's happening and is willing to inform people as to what's transpiring.
I think I can do that.
So that's my calling.
That's the reason I got involved.
I just want to emphasize very quickly, I hate politics.
I don't like doing this at all.
I'm not even really fond of being a public speaker, to be honest.
The whole reason I became a podcaster, the reason I started Liberty Lockdown is because the tyranny became so overt.
I had no choice but to speak out.
I continue to speak out to this day because the tyranny has not dissipated.
It has barely diminished.
And now the risks are actually graver than they were in 2020 when we were in the teeth of lockdowns.
It is very, very serious.
And I feel like far too many people in our movement don't approach this with the level of seriousness that's necessary.
And certainly the GOP and the Democrats do not think of it as being as serious as it is.
We need people to wake up.
Yeah, couldn't agree with you more.
And by the way, Clint, you better be there, dude, because I'm going to be in your neck of the woods on May 31st, debating Chris Cuomo in Fort Lauderdale.
I'm here, dude.
Oh, dude, I think it's going to be a great moment for all of us who are so against the insanity that I get to get my hands on.
Is it a live audience?
Can I be there?
Yes.
It's a live audience.
I'm going to be there then.
Oh, yeah.
100%.
Dude, you're going to eviscerate Cuomo.
I love the narcissism of these people that they think that he's just a stand-up comic.
This isn't going to be a problem.
You have no idea what you've stepped into, Cuomo.
You're in for a world of hurt.
All right.
Well, let's not tell him.
You know what I mean?
I still want them to show up for it.
So let's not get it.
All right.
We got like some more time here.
Reck, is there anything else that you'd want my audience to hear?
Any other final kind of like message before we go into this campaign, into this convention, excuse me?
Yeah, I guess both.
It's so vital to get behind the candidates that can get this message across.
And as Clint pointed out, you know, we're in the very dystopian times here.
It's time to really get serious about what we're up against.
And it's time to wreck the regime, man.
This isn't about reform.
This is not about tinkering with the state, tweaking things here and there.
We need to wreck it.
And what I mean by that is we've got to get rid of its power over us somehow.
And I think the means of doing that is decentralizing, decentralizing power with the ultimate goal of self-governance, getting these tyrants off of our back.
And more threats are looming than are really ever addressed by the Libertarian Party.
Like, look, we had the COVID lockdowns, but coming to a theater near you is probably the climate change lockdowns, the Agenda 2030 elements.
And we also live under the censorship industrial complex.
All of these things need to be opposed.
That's why I talk about it as a regime.
It's a big cluster.
Fuck, to be honest.
It's a whole cluster of entities that are teaming up against us to destroy our liberty.
And that's what we need to fight, all of it at once.
So it is time to wreck the regime.
I couldn't agree more.
And I also think I will, in addition to the pitch of your presidential campaign and Clint, your vice presidential campaign, I would also say, look, a lot of people put a lot of effort into the takeover of the Libertarian Party.
And this really is something that represents us keeping it.
And I think this is kind of the last battle for whether like the real Mises Caucus Libertarians keep the Libertarian Party.
I think we win this one.
It's kind of over and it's just ours basically going forward.
And in this tumultuous time, we own the third party in the United States of America.
And that is more valuable than just whatever someone might think about that.
It's not just like, oh, there's, we can run people for Senate and get a few percentage points.
Look in this new world, how much Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK and Donald Trump have to come now because the margins are so thin that this third party can actually mean something.
And look, I'll just say the old guard of the Libertarian Party who want it back.
These are the people who didn't oppose lockdowns, didn't oppose vaccine mandates, were supported trans and kids, supported open borders, supported like so much of this craziness that if is ever attached to the ideas of liberty, just guaranteed they'll never be taken seriously.
They'll never go anywhere.
And this is a great moment for us to keep this party, put Angela back in for a second term, get you guys as the candidates.
And then this is at least we have kind of like a home for the liberty movement going forward.
So that's something also that I really care about.
So please, if you're a delegate, make sure you get there to DC, support these two, support Angela McArdle.
And Flint, I'll give you the last word and then we can wrap up.
Yeah, I just to reemphasize, you know, I really, obviously I got involved with this movement because of Ron Paul and libertarianism, but because my dad, because he was a libertarian even before I was born.
And I care about it, man.
I care about this movement a lot.
I care about these people a lot.
And I think that it's important that the Libertarian Party represents kind of the Ron Paulian, Rothbardian wing of libertarianism.
I think that it is most in alignment with what my perception of libertarian principles amounts to.
And it has been because Ron ran in the GOP in 08 and 2012, I think unfortunately, the consequences of that is that the LP was taken over by a lot of people that don't align with my worldview.
And it has disturbed me.
And this is why when I first heard Yuan Rogan back in 16 or whatever it was, I was like, hey, we're back.
That's my guy.
I recognized it right away.
And I think that it's really important that we have at least one presidential run that actually represents kind of the Ron Paulian messaging and the courage that he had time and time again of saying the truth, even when it was unpopular.
We have to be those guys.
If we aren't those guys, we should not exist.
That is our primary value is to tell the truth when it matters most.
If we can't do that, then we don't need to be here at all.
And that's the reality of the 2020 presidential run.
It didn't need to happen at all because there was not the courage that was necessary.
We have an opportunity.
The situation is as dire, if not more so.
So I feel as if I'm compelled to do this.
And I think that we have a real opportunity to kind of galvanize the Ron Paul supporters that have existed kind of in the ether forever and bring them back together.
Yeah, like 100%.
And it doesn't, even just having moments that go viral or something like that can be enormously valuable.
So listen, you guys have my full support.
Thank you both very much for taking the time and coming on.
And I look forward to seeing both of you guys at convention.
Let us know, Michael, like if you have a final thought, that's fine or just website where people want to support you.
WrecktheRegime.com, R-E-C-TheRegime.com.
Go there.
Get behind this movement.
Support it in any way you can.
We appreciate it.
We're pulling it home.
Let's take over.
Let's do it.
Wreck the regime.
At Liberty Lockpod on X. Liberty Lockdown is the show on YouTube and all the other platforms.
Thank you again for having me, Dave.
I also do the best political show with Luke Radowski and I also do Tower Gang, which you should never ever watch.