Dave Smith critiques the Libertarian Party's internal toxicity, arguing that "woke libertarianism" is dead due to factions prioritizing ideological purity over tangible results. He condemns nominee Chase Oliver for his flip-flopping on mandates and highlights how members viciously attacked Josh Smith's family while ignoring real-world crises like lockdowns. Smith praises Angela McCardle's pragmatic pivot toward extracting concessions from Donald Trump, such as freeing Ross Ulbricht, asserting that leveraging influence with the administration yields better outcomes than running another unrealistic pure libertarian candidate doomed to fail against the party's own hostility. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Addressing Libertarian Party Members00:14:49
What's up?
What's up, guys?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am rolling solo for today's episode, and I have something a little bit different than what we typically do on the show in mind for today's episode.
This is a kind of a message, an address to libertarians, members of the Libertarian Party, more specifically, because we got to talk.
And there's some things that I wanted to say about kind of the state of the Libertarian Party and my experience as a member for some years now.
And so I was in Philadelphia last night, which by the way, thank you to everybody who came out.
It was a great time.
I love that club, Helium in Philadelphia.
Great room.
So the show was a lot of fun.
And some of the guys from the Libertarian Party came out, Michael Heiss and Dave Casey and Dan Smotz.
And we were hanging out for a while.
We were just talking about everything.
And so a lot of this stuff was on my mind.
And I had posted on Twitter that I was going to do like kind of put out a video, you know, like addressing my feelings on the Libertarian Party, the recent presidential campaign that despite what you're thinking, the Libertarians did run a presidential candidate this year.
I promise.
I know for a fact it happened, even though there's very little evidence of it.
It is in fact true.
So I wanted to talk about that a little bit.
And just because I was with these guys last night, this stuff's just kind of been on my mind.
And I wasn't going to do it as an episode of the podcast.
I was just going to put out a video, but quite frankly, I'm just very busy.
And so it was just like, you know what?
Let me just do it today as the podcast episode while I have some time to sit down and do this.
You know, obviously a lot of crazy things are happening in the world, but we'll be all over that and there'll be plenty of time to talk about a lot of them.
So I felt like this was the moment to do it.
So let me give some thoughts.
And then if I don't exactly know how long, you know, I never, some of these rants, I'm not exactly sure how long it'll take, but if there's time, I will get to some questions from the live chat as well.
Okay.
So I joined the Libertarian Party in 2018.
So I've been a member since then.
And, you know, that's not, there's people who have been in the party quite a bit longer than that.
I was, of course, I was a Libertarian for a decade before that, but I was never in the Libertarian Party.
Back then, Ron Paul was running for president and most libertarians were supporting him and he was a Republican.
But after the Ron Paul presidential runs and after in 2016, Rand Paul's presidential campaign did not go the way many of us had hoped it would, I started being interested in the Libertarian Party as a vehicle.
I saw Gary Johnson had run for president that year and had a big opportunity that I think was squandered.
And I just, it started becoming like an interesting option to me that like, you know, man, if someone had been there and done a really good job with that, I think that that could have been something really cool.
You know, in 2016, if you can remember, you know, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were like the two most unliked candidates who had ever run against each other.
There is this third party with the name libertarian.
And it seemed pretty obvious to me that if they had run some Ron Paul type candidate, that could have really made a lot of noise and really changed things and continued the energy that the Ron Paul presidential campaigns had.
And so that was interesting to me.
And then I guess it was the next year, 2017, was when Michael Heist, I can't remember.
I joined in 2018.
I want to say it was 2017 when Michael Heist first went on Tom Woods' show, but it might have been 2018.
But anyway, so he went on and he was basically making this pitch that the Ron Paul libertarians should join the Libertarian Party and make the Libertarian Party more Ron Paul and less Gary Johnson.
And that to me just seemed like the obvious choice.
And it was like, that was the plan.
Like, okay, let's do that.
Tom Woods joined and I was like, well, if Tom's doing it, then I'm going to do it too.
It's that simple.
And look, obviously, where the Libertarian Party is now, my, not only mine, many people's view of how the Libertarian Party should be used has changed since then.
For many years, that was my thing is we should make it the Ron Paul Party and do Ron Paul stuff and run a presidential candidate who's like Ron Paul, and then we could get the Ron Paul revolution going again.
That was kind of the way I looked at it.
It was, I think in many ways, that to me, that was just a given that that was correct.
Like, I don't know, there was a lot more enthusiasm and interest in our ideas when he was running for president.
And so let's do that again because that's better than not doing that.
I feel differently about the party now.
And, you know, to some degree, I think that that is in part due to the fact that the world has changed drastically.
And, you know, if you in 2017 or in 2018, if you like, if you have the exact same political strategy that you had back then, I'm not saying it's like this isn't a logical proof.
I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but the onus is probably on you to justify that rather than the onus being on someone who's changed their views because the world has changed in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago.
You know, this was a pre-COVID time.
Everything is different.
And there's lots of, and we'll get into some of, you know, the differences.
But that, you know, that to me at the time seemed like the way to go with it.
And we, obviously, there's a lot of other stuff that happened.
I'm not going to go through the entire history of it, but the sitting Libertarian National Committee at the time essentially went to war with us Ron Paul people.
We were happy to fight that war and we won.
And we took over the entire party.
It started kind of building year by year.
And it culminated really between 2000, the year 2020 and the year 2022, when in Reno at the convention, the Mises caucus took every single seat with super majorities to the entire party.
In those years, particularly toward the end of 2020, was when I was heavily recruited to run for president on the Libertarian Party ticket.
And I was very open to the idea.
At first, it seemed crazy to me, but the more people explained it, the more I started seriously considering the possibility.
So, this is like in the year 2020.
And it's, I'll tell you, there's something really interesting about this because as we were like gaming this out, which essentially the way it happened was that, you know, I think Scott Horton actually wanted me to jump in and run in 2020 in the middle of the presidential like primary.
And I said, no.
I was like, nah, this is, that's crazy.
I'm not going to jump in and do this right now.
But after that was over.
and the Joe Jorgensen campaign fell flat on its face, you know, I started to seriously consider doing it for 2024.
And the conversations that I was having with like my guys about it, and my guys being Michael Heiss and Scott Horton primarily, the conversations I was having was, it's just interesting the way everything went down in 2024, but essentially we kind of came up with this plan where we were like, well, look, here's how you could run a presidential campaign.
You just, you flood the podcast market and drown out the corporate media.
Now, this wasn't like, this wasn't some revolutionary genius idea.
It was pretty obvious.
It was like, I don't know.
Look, all of these shows are bigger than all of these shows.
It was very funny.
You know, there's this dynamic.
It's much bigger than the Libertarian Party.
But I see this all over the place where for years, and this happened for years as we were taking over the Libertarian Party with all the hardcore Ron Paul types.
The regime that we overthrew would constantly say things like, very similar to what the corporate media says.
They would go like, you know, Twitter's not real life.
Podcast bros don't move the needle.
Things like this.
And I always thought it was wild.
You know, people say Twitter's not real life.
It's like, well, I mean, kind of it is.
There's, I mean, like, there's some bots on Twitter for sure, but there are mostly real people are on Twitter.
And I'm not saying it's exactly like real life.
There are differences, but, you know, like, just for example, I remember there would be these guys, some of these really awful guys.
And one of them in particular, who I debated years ago and just totally embarrassed.
And I remember on January 6th of 2021.
So on January 6th, after that whole thing went down, I remember he, I forget what it was, but the Mises caucus put out some message, something, I don't know.
And he was like, this is it.
Mark this down.
This is the day that the takeover died because nobody's going to stand for people who aren't like, I don't know, condemning January 6th or something like that.
His worldview was literally like, if you don't have the exact same opinion as CNN, you are toast.
And I remember thinking this was so funny.
So I quote tweeted it and I was like, mark it down today was the day that the takeover was guaranteed.
And like, I don't remember the exact numbers of this, but I remember it was something like his, his tweet had like 45 likes and mine had like 5,000, like something like that.
It was like a crazy ratio, you know?
And I remember watching his guys, the guys who agreed with him in the comments being like, oh, they're all excited because of the ratio.
Like Twitter's not real life.
And I remember very clearly talking to Michael Heiss on the phone about this.
And I was like, these guys are fucking delusional.
Like, all I'm saying is that if I, let's say, look, the Libertarian Party has decided Democratically, unfortunately.
But that's they have a convention with delegates and you they are the ones who vote in who gets all of these positions.
Like, and I just, if I was ever like, hey, I'm going to win this popularity contest.
And then someone else was like, nah-uh, I'm going to win this popularity contest.
And my post had 30 likes and his had 6,000, I'd be concerned.
Like, I wouldn't look at that and go, that's not real life.
I'd look at that and go, oh, we're going to lose this popularity contest because clearly more people agree with them than agree with us.
But they didn't have that attitude.
And, you know, anyway, it's been interesting to watch a lot of that.
It was so obvious at the time.
I felt like in a way the takeover was like a microcosm of this bigger dynamic.
But it's like, yeah, podcasts are real life as much as any show is real life.
It's just a show.
What matters is how many people are watching the show, whether it's on CNN or at Joe Rogan's studio in Austin, Texas, it doesn't really matter.
There's cameras and a microphone and there's people watching it.
Who has more people?
That's kind of the metric for whether it's relevant or whether it's real life.
And so anyway, we had this plan.
It was interesting.
At the time, no presidential campaign had ever really tried to do it like that.
And that all changed in this election cycle.
Anyway, due to, you know, many factors, and really it was just family stuff primarily, I ended up bailing on running.
And I pulled out.
You know, I've talked about this in the past, but essentially it's, you know, it's not that I didn't want to do it.
It's that I couldn't.
I just couldn't do it.
And I do, as I've said many times, I apologize for that.
I feel bad that I kind of like, I so heavily flirted with the idea and then ended up pulling out.
But I was, I was really planning on doing it, but particularly through around like 2022, I had basically decided I was all in and I was going to do it.
And I didn't.
And that's a mistake I won't make again.
If I could go back in time, I wouldn't have flirted with running and told people that I was planning on doing it unless I was 1,000% sure.
So that mistake is on me.
What happened?
So in that time period, after I pulled out, somewhere in there, I guess it was earlier this year,
Angela McCordle, who is the chair of the Libertarian Party and who was installed by our takeover of the party, or I should say elected, not installed, but whatever.
She ended up somehow pulling off this incredible feat where she connected with Donald Trump and was able to get him to come speak to the Libertarian Party convention at the Libertarian Party convention and get many promises out of him that are really not insignificant things.
Trump at the Convention00:11:33
He basically said that if the Libertarian, you know, like that the Libertarian should support him because he promises to and then had a list of things.
And one of them was freeing Ross Ulbric on day one.
One was putting a Libertarian in his cabinet.
He said he'd fight against the central bank digital currency and a few other things that were like not insignificant, you know, concessions or promises to get out of the guy who ended up becoming president of the United States.
And this has now kind of represented an opportunity for a change in the way that the Libertarian Party is used as a tool.
And okay, so essentially, I think that this was brilliant and that it's absolutely the best thing that the Libertarians could do.
I know there's a lot of members of the Libertarian Party who will not agree with this strategy, who are already not agreeing with this strategy.
And they don't like the fact that Angela was, you know, while not explicitly supporting Donald Trump, was certainly, you know, making it pretty clear that this new strategy is how the Libertarian Party should be used.
A lot of members of the Libertarian Party were saying, no, no, no, you got to support the Libertarian nominee, whoever that is.
And in this case, it ended up being this guy, Chase Oliver.
I guess maybe there's, we could talk a little bit about the presidential campaign that was Chase Oliver.
I will say it is tremendously, there's a tremendous irony to the dynamic here because essentially, I got to say, in hindsight, I think Chase Oliver being the nominee this year was probably the best case scenario.
That this is not a year where you would have wanted the Libertarian Party to get Kamala Harris elected.
I just think it would have been much worse for the country.
And I'll tell you, I can relate to a lot of libertarians who have the attitude that we should never be helping one side or the other.
We should be planting our flag in the sand and saying this is what we stand for because someone's got to do that.
Somebody's got to just say what the correct positions are.
I felt that way myself for many years.
And I still, to some degree do.
It's just a little bit more of a situational for me now.
One of the things where this really started to change for me was in the 2022 midterm elections.
So we took over the entire Libertarian Party, had every single seat by super majorities in May of 2020.
I believe it was May.
And then that year, in November, there was this very interesting situation in a Senate race in Arizona.
And the situation was essentially this.
There was this guy, Blake Masters, and he used to be one of us.
Like he was a full-fledged, hardcore Rothbardian libertarian at one point.
And he had written like beautiful anti-war articles that some of were posted at, I think, either Mises.org or LewRockwell.com.
But he was like being published in the hardcore libertarian sites and saying really, really great things.
Now, he had certainly gone in a more MAGA direction since then.
But, you know, like I had him on the podcast and talked to him, and he was pretty good on a lot of issues and really kind of gave me assurances that he was essentially still one of us.
I think he said at one point that the only thing he disagreed with Murray Rothbard about was abortion and everything else he was on board with.
So essentially what the dynamic that kind of changed was that it was really easy for me to just kind of not care about these things before, but now we had a different situation.
Blake Masters was running against Mark Kelly for Senate in Arizona.
Mark Kelly is at like one of the worst members of the Senate.
He's a Hillary Clinton Democrat.
And the Libertarian candidate was, it was like a dead even race in the polls.
And the Libertarian candidate was polling at like 6% or something like that.
And so now all of a sudden, everything was different for me.
I had taken over this thing.
I mean, I had spearheaded, led this effort to take over the Libertarian Party.
And now it was kind of like on me.
And now we were in a situation where something tangibly like much worse for the country was going to happen quite possibly as a result of what we are saying, you know?
And that there was like a responsibility that hit me there that I had never really dealt with before where I was like, oh, I don't like, I don't want to make the country worse.
That's not my goal.
This is 2022, if you can remember.
We're still, we're in the height of the craziness still.
Fauci is still telling people not to have Thanksgiving dinners and people are still wearing masks outdoors and people are losing their livelihoods because they're not taking the bullshit jab.
You know, it's like, which you couldn't say, by the way, on this show at the time, I also couldn't say that, or I might lose my YouTube channel.
You know, I mean, I still familiarize to say it, but the point is it was, that was the dynamic at the time.
And there was a guy who was like, okay, he wasn't a perfect libertarian anymore, but he had been at one point and he was still so much better than this other guy.
And it seemed pretty clear that like, if the libertarian dropped out and supported him, that could make the difference.
We could have just put someone much better in the U.S. Senate.
And that's like, anyway, I had never really dealt with that type of dynamic before.
And it was obvious to me what to do.
I mean, it was just so obvious.
Like, I don't even understand how anybody could argue with it.
Like, no, we should just keep doing what we're doing and get a much worse result, or we could work out a power move.
And that's essentially what we were able to put together.
We put enough pressure on the libertarian who was running to drop out and endorse Blake Masters, but he got him to come have a one-on-one conversation with him and give him assurances that he was going to be very libertarian.
And then he went on Ron Paul's show.
He did the podcast with me.
He came to the libertarians to convince them that he was going to be a liberty senator if elected.
And we ended up throwing our support behind him.
Now, he lost.
He ended up losing the race, even with our support.
So ultimately, the plan didn't work out.
But that's kind of neither here nor there.
You got to go for these things.
And had it worked out, this party, the Libertarian Party, who has been around for 50 years or something like that, started in the early 70s, for the first time ever would have pulled off a real power move that we are now in a position where we can get this guy elected instead of this guy if you put up a good candidate.
And if you don't put up a good candidate, then we're going to run and spoil it for both, for you and get the other guy elected.
And now we have some real leverage.
We could actually move the country in a direction toward liberty, like tangibly.
And so to me, that was like, you know, anyway, that seemed like the obvious move.
And when I came out with this plan, I was met with a lot of backlash from Libertarian Party members.
And not just like the camp that like was against me, but like from within my own camp.
A lot of these people just did not like this.
They were just very, you know, quick to be like, you're selling out or you're, you know, and I started to kind of come in contact with there's there's there's certain members of the Libertarian Party who are, I think, ideologically possessed.
And there are the woke libertarians and then there are like the party loyalist libertarians.
And what I think all of them kind of have in common is that there is, it's almost like there's this whole philosophy that is separate from libertarianism, from our philosophy, from our belief in self-ownership and property and non-aggression and, you know, laissez-faire and all of that stuff.
There's a whole other philosophy of either like wokeism or in this case, like party loyalty, which is separate from libertarianism and also is stupid and doesn't actually make any sense.
And I'd constantly find myself in arguments with people who are saying this where it was like totally incoherent what their argument even was.
You know, they'd start by being like, oh, you're not a libertarian.
You're a Republican because you supported the Republican.
And I'd go, okay, well, let's say the Libertarian nominee was a socialist and the Republican nominee was a libertarian.
Are you telling me I'm supposed to support the libertarian?
The big L libertarian socialist?
Like, no, I'm going to support the person who lines up with my views.
Like party loyalty is stupid and it's particularly stupid for libertarians to have any loyalty to a party, but it's stupid for Democrats or Republicans.
I mean, a lot of the libertarians' best guys, all of the libertarians' best guys who have been elected to important offices ran as Republicans, but we should still support them because who cares about the party?
The party's just a vehicle.
And I always said that.
I always felt that way.
But anyway, with the Blake Masters thing, that was kind of my first glimpse into really how prevalent that strain in the party was.
And I think it's a real problem.
And it is a real problem because it is what ends up happening.
And I know Libertarian Party members, you know that this is true, okay?
What ends up happening is that you end up getting a lot of people who feel really good about themselves for being pure.
They feel really good about themselves for saying, I'm a 100%er.
I get an A-plus on my non-aggression principle test that I just gave myself.
I pass every single issue.
And they are unwilling to do anything that might actually move the ball forward if it meant getting a little bit of dirt on that purity test.
Like, and the problem with that is that now you're just in the game of making yourself feel good about accomplishing nothing.
And I don't think anybody who's in the Libertarian Party can honestly say that's not a bit of an issue within the party.
People feel really good about themselves for accomplishing nothing and doing nothing.
That's a problem on a very fundamental human level.
That's a big problem.
The Problem of Ideological Capture00:14:32
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Um, I think that there's a tremendous amongst a lot of those people, there's a tremendous detachment from reality.
And that was pretty clearly seen in the Chase Oliver campaign.
I mean, it was just wild to me to see, first of all, the fact that, think about it like this: okay, the delegates who ended up getting him the presidential nomination were the ones who were against the Trump strategy.
And yet, they put somebody in there who would be the best candidate for the Trump strategy, and they don't even realize it.
They don't even put that together.
They don't even put together the fact that there was no chance that Chase could do anything with the, like, that there was a 0.0% chance that anything other than what came out of this presidential run would come out of it, which is nothing.
I mean, I'm sorry, nothing.
And I'm not somebody who just goes like, well, how many votes did you end up getting?
Or how many members are there in the party?
I'm not even measuring anything by those like crude metrics.
I'm saying, did anything happen?
Anything point to something positive?
What was it?
Chase didn't even, I mean, he didn't even build his own profile.
I don't even think he's any more well-known than he was before he ran for president.
Even Joe Jorgensen and Spike Cohen came away from that with like 150,000 followers on Twitter or something like that.
Chase got nothing.
I don't think he had a tweet that went viral.
He didn't have one thing that he didn't even try.
But I really look, I think there's a few lessons that we can take away from that.
One, and I do just think this is really important for libertarians to recognize, because I think in many ways, this should be the nail, the final nail in the coffin of woke libertarianism.
Woke libertarianism is dead.
And it is just, however, first of all, it's stupid and it's not consistent with our theory.
But on top of that, simply, even if you disagree with me on that, and you're wrong, but even if you disagree with me on that, there's just simply no market for it.
Nobody wants it.
Nobody wants to, no dissident of the regime wants to embrace the artificial culture imposed on us by the regime.
It's just, it's a deathblue.
And, you know, there's a real problem with, here's the essence of the problem with woke libertarians, as far as I see it.
If you look at Chase Oliver, during COVID, he, you know, he would have been talking about how he's being responsible and wearing the mask and how he got vaccinated and how he did, you know, just all of that.
Now, he's not saying that today.
In his 2024 campaign, he's not going over there and telling anyone, hey, you know, when that pandemic hit, I made sure I was always wearing a mask at Thanksgiving.
And when I had people over for Thanksgiving, we all wore masks and we socially distanced.
We did the right thing during the pandemic.
We were responsible.
He's not saying, hey, man, I talked to my doctor and I took the vaccine because I trusted his advice.
He's not saying that now, right?
He was saying that at the time.
Now I heard on one of the debates that I saw, he said he was tricked into taking the vaccine because the government lied to him or whatever.
You know, if you go back and you look at what Chase Oliver was saying in 2017 or 2018, when he was shrieking the woke stuff at its loudest, you know, calling Ron Paul or racist or calling the R L N C racist or something like that or whatever.
He's not saying that now.
He's not saying any of that now.
Why is that?
Because it's fucking, because it's all been revealed as being stupid.
But the problem with being a woke libertarian or woke at all is that you can be counted on to consistently fall for the propaganda every single time.
And then you never even admit it.
You won't say it now, but you won't admit that you were wrong then.
And guess what?
You'll fall for the next one every single time.
I mean, I saw the other day, you know, one of his posts was he was calling out Nick Fuentes for saying your body my choice after the election.
And he was talking about how, you know, like repugnant that is.
And, you know, it's all this like moral preaching.
But it's really just like, it's like, really?
That's what you have to say right now?
Right now, as the world has drastically changed in a way that is like, with has enormous possibilities that would have been unthinkable just recently.
That's your comment on the state of things?
Is that the guy who says things so people like you get offended, you're offended?
It's just like you can always be counted on to fall for it, to fall for the bullshit every single time.
And that does not inspire support.
And the worst part about it is that I'd see all these libertarians, the ones who were supporting him, I shouldn't say all the, not that there's that many, but the ones who are supporting him would constantly be talking about what a great messenger he is.
He's such a great messenger.
And like, is he?
What, like, what are you talking about?
What you would think if somebody's a great messenger, their message would resonate with someone.
With someone.
But we don't see any of that.
And I also got to say this, and this doesn't apply to everybody, but there are, at least in my experience, there are a lot, a lot, like a high percentage of those Libertarian Party members who fall into these kind of these categories that I'm talking about, who are ideologically captured.
There are, you know, the ones who are party loyalists, the ones who are woke libertarians, who just disproportionately tend to be really bad people.
And, you know, I don't exactly have that all worked out in my head, but I guess there's something to the fact that, you know, it's like, you know how like a lot of born-again Christians did some real messed up shit in their life?
And then it's almost like, oh, okay, like, yeah, you're born again Christian, but this is almost like a little bit of a way to cover because now you could say, I found Jesus and now I'm a really good guy.
That old guy, that was, that's not me, man.
That was me before G, but now I'm a really good guy.
And you're like, oh, that's convenient.
That's convenient that you get to give yourself that out.
I just notice a lot of the same things.
A lot of the same things with my experiences with some of these like types have just been like, wow, you are like really horrible people.
And I mean, like, I'm not exaggerating when I say that.
And I mean, like, the people who, like, if for those of you guys who know this stuff, and if you guys just listen to the podcast and don't know, I know this a little bit inside baseball.
We'll be right back to outside baseball on the next show.
But when the Mises caucus first started and we were running Josh Smith to be the chair of the party, I mean, people like went after his family in the most vicious way to try to smear him for a campaign over who's the chair of the Libertarian National Committee.
It's not even like a position that has any power.
I mean, for the first time ever, Angela actually seems to have turned it into that to some degree.
But it's just, there was a lot of stuff like that, really vicious stuff where people were really trying to like ruin other people's lives.
And then at the same time, those people would like complain about mean tweets.
To this day, I still see him complaining about Chase being on the receiving end of mean tweets or something like that.
And it's just, you know, I saw Chase on Twitter trying to throw Angela under the bus and blame her.
It was like a couple days after the election.
And I was just like, looked at that and I was like, I'm sorry.
Like that is, that is a demonstration of somebody's character.
Like you, you're not a good man.
Good men don't do that.
You don't come out and throw everybody else under the bus after you fail.
You take responsibility for it, especially in Chase's situation.
Like Chase, just for people who don't know, after we took over the Libertarian Party, Chase was kind of like the resistance then, or one of the people who was in the resistance then.
And he called the National Party a bunch of bigots and said he doesn't want them to promote him at all because he doesn't want to be associated with bigots.
And now he's sitting here complaining that they didn't support him enough.
I'm sorry.
Like that's, you can't do both of those.
If you call someone a bunch of racists and say, I don't want to associate with you, you can't turn around and complain that they didn't help you.
Sorry, dude.
That's on you.
It's your job as the candidate to be so great that you inspire support from people.
And if you don't, that is your fault.
And you definitely don't publicly go blaming other people for your own failures.
That shows a lack of character, a lack of integrity.
While these people like to, you know, condemn all the bad people constantly, you know, it's like the worst thing about wokeism in general.
Not just woke libertarians, but woke ism.
It's like you're constantly looking for like the bigot, the bad guy, the sexist, the racist, the transphobe.
And isn't that convenient?
You get to put yourself in the position of being the moral judge of everybody.
And the question never even gets asked, like, well, what do you do?
What makes you such a great person?
Why do you get to judge everybody as awful while you contribute nothing?
And whatever, it's equally poisonous within the libertarian world.
But again, they're just, however you feel about it, there's just no market for this stuff.
There is no woke libertarian out there who could have done a better job than Chase.
That's what any woke libertarian would do.
Nothing completely irrelevant.
And if he did, you know, even attempt to, you know, okay, so one of the things that was this was talked about a little bit during this presidential race.
And even I saw there are some Libertarian Party members who were like, liked Chase, but were very upset with him for not coming on this show because I invited him on and he didn't come on.
And I did think there were some kind of interesting parallels to Kamala Harris not going on Joe Rogan's show.
I think, you know, within the libertarian world, this show is somewhat like the Joe Rogan show.
You know, obviously we're a much, much smaller show than Joe Rogan, but the Libertarian Party is a much, much smaller party than, you know, the Democrats and Republicans.
And so anyway, look, I invited Chase on.
I told him that at the convention after he won.
I invited him on.
Just felt like the right thing to do.
And I congratulated him.
It just felt like the right thing to do.
And then I publicly, I made it very public that there was an open invite for him to come on the show.
No one from the campaign reached out.
He never attempted to do it.
I've got the biggest or one of the biggest shows with, you know, a few hundred thousand libertarian hardcore libertarians or and at least, you know, not all of our audience are hardcore libertarians, but 100% of them are at least interested enough in libertarian ideas that they listen to this show, you know, and he didn't want to come on.
And, you know, it's funny because, again, like there's just all of these different kind of seemingly contradictory things and layers of irony with everything right now.
But I saw some of these libertarians and they were like, oh, Chase really should have gone on Dave's show and he should have done outreach and he should have tried to win these people over.
I got to say, honestly, I feel about it kind of the same way I feel about Kamala Harris going on Rogan.
It's actually, no, she played it right.
She shouldn't have.
You know, like if I, if you could remove all morality from me, like if you, if you took away my soul and let's say I had no sense of right and wrong.
So I'm working for Kamala Harris's campaign now.
I'm Kamala Harris's campaign manager.
And they float out the idea of going on Joe Rogan.
I'd say absolutely not.
Defending Meaningless Campaigns00:03:56
Do not go.
You will get ruined if you go on this show.
It would have been a bad idea.
And it's not because Joe was going to be like bad faith or just like attacker.
It's just because you can't really defend any of your positions.
And it doesn't work like that for you.
And I got to say this, I think the same thing about Chase.
I think that we would have, there's no way he would have come on and I wouldn't have gotten into some of the areas we disagree on.
And it just would have gone really bad for him because actually he's not a good messenger.
And a lot of his views are garbage.
And, you know, like, dude, he was celebrating when Donald Trump got kicked off of Twitter.
Talk about not getting it.
Talk about a libertarian who just doesn't get it.
That's the perfect example right there.
And he would have had to defend some of that stuff, which he can't.
It's all indefensible.
And he's not prepared to admit he was wrong.
So he would have been in a tough spot.
But the truth is, regardless of that, okay, it was the smart move for him to not come on, but it's also totally reasonable for those other libertarians to criticize him, to criticize him for it.
Cause it's like, dude, you didn't even try.
You just didn't even try.
I know he did one interview with Stossel.
I don't know if he did another big show, anything.
I didn't, I mean, and there seemed to be no effort to.
It wasn't even like the campaign didn't even have a strategy to do it.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So, you know, for him to then turn around and start blaming other people, that's that's pretty rough.
So, okay.
So, anyway, in conclusion, with all of that stuff, I would say I think woke libertarianism is dead.
I think a lot of one of the themes of 2024 has been, you know, some death blows for a lot of different institutions and ideologies that deserve death blows.
Why Woke Libertarianism Is Dead00:05:43
And I think woke libertarianism just, you know, there's just nobody else.
There's no woke libertarian who resonates with anyone these days.
This was a point I used to make, by the way, leading up to the takeover all the time.
And it's part of the reason why we took over the entire party and did it so easily.
I don't mean to downplay, there was a lot of work from a lot of people involved, but the reason why we did it so dominantly was because of the woke libertarians, there's not a single popular one.
They don't have one.
There's not one of them with an audience because this shit doesn't resonate with anybody.
Nobody who radically hates the regime wants somebody who falls for the regime's propaganda at every turn, which, by the way, is the definition of wokeism.
That's what it is.
It's falling for the propaganda.
And so, okay, so I think that should be, I think there's really no counter argument to that.
That's just you, you want to attach trans and the kids to libertarianism?
Good luck.
Good luck getting any support with that.
So the other issue that we have here is that you go, okay, so running someone for president, if you run a woke libertarian, that's not going to get you anything.
Now, if you don't have a good, even a non-woke libertarian, you got to have someone good, otherwise they're probably not going to resonate with anyone.
And this, I must admit, is an area where I really, I really got it wrong.
And it was something where I just didn't, you know, I have my blind spots just like anybody else, I suppose.
And I guess there was an area where I just kind of had an unexamined given in my mind that it was always like, okay, well, like, it was always very easy for me to see what Gary Johnson did wrong.
And I was very good at breaking that down.
I was very good at being like, look, he's doing it like this, but he should be doing it like this.
It was always very easy for me to see how Joe Jorgen, Joe Jorgensen, was doing it like this when she should have done it like that, you know?
And it Almost was just an unexamined given to me that, like, if we got in and we were picking who the nominee is, we'd pick someone really great who would do it the right way.
And what I, what I think I didn't appreciate was how difficult it is finding someone good who's willing to do this.
And because I was kind of flirting with it for years, that was almost like it became like a fail-safe or it became like a safety net where it was like, okay, well, if we can't get anyone else, then I'll do it.
So we got me at least.
And once I recognized that I couldn't do it, it wouldn't be the right move for my family.
Then I had to really grapple with that reality that, oh, it's not that easy to find someone good to do it.
Now, listen, just to be clear, there are lots of people who are really good.
None of them are willing to do it, myself included.
And I think that's something that we got to take into account moving forward with the Libertarian Party.
And there's several reasons why, you know, like I think Tom Woods or Jeff Dice or Judge Napolitano or Spike Cohen, I think a lot of these guys would be like incredible presidential candidates who could really maybe make some noise and really move the needle and really introduce people to a lot of our ideas.
But the problem is none of them want to do it.
And it's totally understandable that they don't want to do it.
Because all of the people who you'd want to do this, they have certain things in common.
Number one, they're very successful.
These are people who are doing really well in life.
And you're asking them to make an enormous sacrifice.
And that's something that's, you know, that's easy to say, oh, you should do that as you sacrifice nothing, but that's, it's a big ask.
It's a big ask.
And the other problem is like, I said, we got some really awful people in this party.
And there's kind of no getting around that.
And people with who do not care at all about advancing liberty.
They care about saying they want to advance liberty and, you know, saying, we'll set the world free in our lifetime.
But what they're really motivated by is feeling very good about themselves and keeping their own little completely powerless fiefdom.
And so for you, if you were to get any really great person and try to convince them to run for president of the Libertarian Party, then you also have to be honest with them and go, oh, by the way, there's this awful group of people within the party who will make it their mission to ruin your life if you do this from within your own party.
Not the opposition, not the corporate media, not the war machine, not the three-letter agencies, not the Uniparty.
Libertarians who are just terrible people will try to ruin your life if you do this.
And I got to say, that makes the whole thing a non-starter.
You know, after I pulled out of running, I tried to recruit several people to do it for me.
I just, I felt like an obligation.
Like, I want to have someone good who will do it.
So everybody at least gets, you know, part of what they want.
And it was so hard to sell it.
It was so hard to sell it to anyone.
I couldn't even do, you know, like, I'm not going to lie to somebody and like screw them over.
Running the Experiment00:07:24
So I'd be like, well, look, this is going to be rough and this is going to be right.
You're going to have to deal with this.
And by the time I'm done saying it, I'm like, who would want to buy what I'm selling right now?
And so I guess now that I'm looking at that and kind of, you know, keeping all of those factors in mind, I just have a much more sober analysis about the prospects for like recreating the Ron Paul revolution by running a pure libertarian presidential candidate.
I'm not opposed to it.
I'm not saying it couldn't work in the future, but I just see currently it seems unrealistic.
Seems unrealistic.
However, the world has changed in a lot of ways.
And the new strategy that Angela came up with, which is what I got to say, you know, it's the thing I criticize libertarians for all the time.
And I'll tell this story.
I'll try to make it fairly quick, but I always thought that this is like one of my favorite stories about the Libertarian Party and one of the major problems with libertarians, right?
And it's this story.
I know many of you guys have probably heard me tell it before, but it was Joe Jorgensen.
She was speaking.
I want to say it was June of 2020, something like that, maybe May, June.
And she's speaking at this park.
And if you could put yourself there, we are in the height of lockdowns, okay?
The first wave, the first brutal wave of lockdowns.
And this is, it's before, like shortly before the Black Lives Matter protest riots of the summer started.
But it's in the middle of lockdowns.
And if you could try to put yourself back in this, you know, time period, this is when CNN is literally running pieces, demonizing teenagers who snuck out and went to the beach.
You know, there's videos of cops, you know, chasing like surfers so that they can arrest them.
Just it's a moment of madness, like totalitarian psychosis has just swept the nation and everybody's crazy.
It's a, you know, truly a moment of mass psychosis.
And Joe Jorgensen's giving a speech and she's giving a speech at this park.
Now, at this park a few days earlier, there was this controversy because a father and son were arrested because they were having a catch not wearing a mask.
Father and son outdoors, okay?
And they got arrested for not wearing a mask.
Joe Jorgensen is speaking to a crowd.
The entire crowd and Joe Jorgensen is in a mask.
Okay.
Everybody's wearing masks outside at a park.
That's how crazy and all based on pseudoscience the whole thing still was at the time.
And Joe Jorgensen gets up and she gives a speech that could have been delivered in 1996.
She gave a speech about how like the centralization of power doesn't work and laissez-faire free markets rely on voluntary cooperation and blah, And like, by the way, none of what she's saying, I wouldn't agree with, but the insanity of not being connected to the moment you're living through.
Like, holy shit, you're running as the liberty person and totalitarianism has just swept the country and you don't mention it.
It doesn't come up.
I just like, I remember watching it with my jaw on the ground.
Like I could not believe that anyone wouldn't have the common sense.
But I'll tell you, this is it.
The reason why I tell this story is not just to trash Joe Jorgensen, although she deserves it, but, you know, there's a real problem that you have with not with libertarians in general, but with libertarians who are members of the Libertarian Party, where it is like they are so married to their theory that they are unwilling or unable to adjust to the facts on the ground.
And so that's what I really got to, you know, congratulate Angela for, is that it's exactly what she did.
You know, people will say, because there were the deranged haters of the Mises caucus who will say, the plan all along was to take over the Libertarian Party so that they could ruin the Libertarian Party, so that they could throw their support behind Donald Trump.
That was always the plan or whatever.
Believe that if you want to.
It's just straight up not true.
It's just not true.
The calculation in 2020, when we were first planning my run, was that, yeah, screw it.
Both these guys are so awful that we're not supporting any of them.
And we want to do our own Ron Paul thing.
And that kind of made sense in 2020.
I mean, Trump had been a disaster on the lockdowns, keeping Fauci on the job, signing the gigantic spending bills into law.
I mean, there was just so much horrible stuff going on that it was like, screw it.
We're not supporting any of this.
But what Angela did was, once I pulled out and there was no longer a viable plan for how we were going to reignite the Ron Paul revolution, she pivoted.
She adjusted to the facts on the ground and went, okay, we don't have that opportunity, but this other amazing opportunity did present itself.
And that's what she ended up doing.
And it was brilliant.
It was obviously the right move.
Look, I don't know what's going to come out of this.
Okay.
It is possible that Donald Trump does not come through with any of his promises that he made to the Libertarian Party.
That is possible.
He's not come through on promises before, and he is a politician at this point, after all.
And they do have this tendency to disappoint.
That is the reality of the situation.
It could happen.
However, there's a very good chance that he does come through on some of these things.
He made the promises.
It doesn't take a lot of political capital to free Ross Ulbric.
He might put a Libertarian.
He said he's going to put a Libertarian.
Maybe he puts a Libertarian.
If we get that, let's just say it's an if.
I'm willing to concede it's a big if.
But if we get that, that is something really not like that's something.
That's something big.
The party has been around for so many decades.
We've gotten nothing.
What do you want to do?
You want to just keep, you know, it's like the old, you know, definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
The libertarians and the libertarian party are sitting here, not only advocating that we do the same thing over and over again, but demonizing anyone who dares to suggest that we do something different, all while saying we're going to set the world free in our lifetime.
This is madness.
I would also, look, I guess I could kind of wrap up on this, because essentially what I'm saying is that the prospects of running another Ron Paul type presidential campaign are not looking so great right now.
The idea of running another woke libertarian is beyond pointless, beyond pointless.
I know it's very, in many ways, just like the corporate media, many people will not learn their lesson from this last presidential election and they'll say, the reason Kamala Harris lost is because of sexism and racism or whatever.
It's the same thing with Chase blaming the LNC.
Beyond Pointless Presidential Runs00:10:19
Oh, the reason my campaign completely failed was because you guys didn't help me more.
I'm sure a lot of people will have their own thing to look to, but the truth is, you just ran the experiment.
If you want to run another woke libertarian, it's beyond pointless, just a complete waste of time.
And it's going to be very hard to convince a really good Ron Paul libertarian type to do it, to make this enormous sacrifice where they will be viciously attacked by their own people.
Or I guess not their own people, but who are supposed to be their own people.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So those prospects are very, uh, very low.
However, we have this other option, which is that we could continue to do what Angela just did with Donald Trump and extract concessions, promises, and perhaps actually move the needle and actually increase real liberty in real human beings' lives, which to me is what this whole thing should be about if we're going to be involved in it at all.
Now, I want to be honest with you guys here.
I am not optimistic that the membership of the Libertarian Party will go for this.
Perhaps you guys will prove me wrong, but I think the membership is just dominated entirely too much by the ideology, the ideological captured groups that I mentioned before.
And I think they're just too allergic to relevancy, too allergic to doing anything where the strategy does not allow them to constantly pat themselves on the back and feel like they're 100% pure, good people, and better than everybody else.
And if the strategy involves like, okay, you don't get to feel 100% pure like you're better than everybody else.
You got to get a little, you got to get down in the mud and get a little dirty yourself, but it's going to really move the needle forward for liberty.
There's too many members in the Libertarian Party who will choose the former and reject the latter.
That's my honest opinion.
I don't think the party will go for it.
I hope I'm wrong.
And maybe if Ross gets freed or we actually like stack up some real wins that the Libertarian Party can point to, some fruits of this strategy, then I think maybe, maybe there's a chance that I'm wrong about that, but I'm not particularly optimistic about it.
And then that, I guess, kind of brings me to my final point, which is that, look, as I was saying before, things change and you have to adjust to the facts on the ground.
And things have changed in a pretty unbelievable way.
I mean, it would have been very, very hard to see a few years ago that Donald Trump was going to surround himself with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and Bobby Kennedy and like all, you know, all of these people who, you know, that he was going to come to the convention and make all of these assurances to libertarians.
This would have been very hard to predict.
When Angela first told me about it, I had a hard time believing that was real.
I was like, what?
Really?
Are you sure?
Are you lying to me?
There's like, I just did, it seemed crazy.
But she was telling the truth.
And so with all of these factors and myself personally, I just find myself in a situation where, you know, look, I love Angela McArdle and I love Michael Heiss.
And I will always, you know, do what I can to support those guys.
I support the new vision for the Libertarian Party.
I hope the membership gets on board with it.
But if they don't.
They want to just continue to do what they're doing, which is the same, frankly, boring thing that is having absolutely no impact on the real world.
If at the same time that that's going on, and look, I'm not trying to overplay this like it's the biggest thing in the world, but like it is what it is.
And then at the same time, I have the president's son telling me that he's on it in terms of the effort of keeping the Warhawks out of the administration.
Now, whatever, that's not going to perfectly succeed.
One or two of them will get in, but like we can kind of move the needle.
Like I played a not insignificant role in keeping Pompeo out.
I'm looking at that and going, well, okay, gang, what's the best use of my time here?
It's so obvious.
To ask the question is to answer the question.
And so if the Libertarian Party wants to take a shot at relevance, I think they've got a pathway to do it here.
And if they want to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then that's your choice.
But I'm not particularly interested in the latter.
That's kind of where I'm at right now.
By the way, I do just want to say, and this is the last thing I say, I'll say, I'll wrap up here.
But I do, as I'm complaining about certain groups of people and certain tendencies, you know, first of all, if you're in this world and you know what I'm talking about, I think you know exactly what I'm talking about.
But I do just want to say that's not like, that's not everyone.
And I have like, you know, I was thinking this like as I was hanging out with Michael Heiss and the boys last night, like I have made great friendships in this run in the Libertarian Party.
And I just some like lifelong friends, people I really, really love.
And so there's a lot of great people in this party.
I don't mean to like paint with a broad brush or disparage people, but I think to those people, to the great people in this party, I'd suggest that, you know, I think a lot of the stuff I've been talking about needs to be grappled with.
And I think the truth is that a lot of these guys, a lot of you are already grappling with that and have been for a while.
It just, where we're at in the country today, you really can't overstate how crazy it is.
The entire regime, the entire, the state's propaganda apparatus has been destroyed.
And now we have this whole new thing.
You know, part of what always attracted me to the Libertarian Party so much was, look, I mean, and this was a fairly basic view, but I know it's one that I had.
It's one that I saw.
I was reading Jeremy Kaufman had a long tweet about like, you know, kind of on this broad topic.
And he essentially was reaffirming what one of the points that I was why I joined the Libertarian Party to begin with.
And it's fairly simple, but it's a good point, which is just that like, look, what I am, I'm a libertarian.
That's what I am.
It's the word that best describes my views in the world.
And there's a party that has that name.
And it's worth fighting for linguistic territory.
Like you have to, if we don't have language, we lose the ability to persuade.
We lose the ability to think.
We lose the ability to argue.
And so if there's going to be a party that's called the Libertarian Party, then we damn sure better fight to make sure that that represents what we think that ought to represent.
I always saw that as an obvious, obviously true thing.
And to some degree, I still do.
The thing is that as this dynamic has happened where the state's propaganda apparatus has been destroyed, what's come in and replaced it has been this network of gigantic shows on the internet.
For some weird reason, we still all call them podcasts.
It's the industry I'm in.
I do one.
It's what I do for a living.
And I refer to it as a podcast all the time.
I do not know why.
It is a dumb term that stuck around because I guess the first ones were on iPods.
Nobody has iPods anymore.
I haven't seen an iPod in over a decade, but we still call them podcasts because people used to cast them onto iPods.
Anyway, they're shows.
They're shows that are on the internet rather than being on networks.
And this group of gigantic shows has become the new core.
And in that world, I happen to be uniquely positioned where I get to define what libertarianism is.
I get to define that word.
I don't really need the party to do it anymore.
I don't like, I'm the libertarian who goes on all those shows.
That's what the libertarian has to say is what I come in and what I say.
That may not be fair or may not be right, but it is the situation.
I kind of get to define this word now because I don't really need the party to do that anymore.
So I think like if somebody like me who really loves libertarianism, loves these ideas so much that they've changed my life and I've dedicated such a huge portion of my life to them, I'm sitting here going, what is the value that the Libertarian Party is bringing?
What Value Does the Party Bring00:01:04
And anybody in that part, you better have an answer to that.
You got to have an answer, a really compelling answer to that.
Otherwise, there's no point in any of this.
And I think that Angela McArdle has provided us with an answer to that.
This is the value that we bring, you know?
And especially if we rack up some of these wins, if Ross is home with his mother rather than doing a life sentence without parole for making a website, then that's a really good deal.
And then that's a really good thing that you can point to.
And if someone goes, well, what's the value that you add?
That value right there.
That mother's nightmare is over.
Then you've got something tangible.
If your value is we're going to run another Chase Oliver in another four years, best of luck to you.
Best of luck to you.
I'm not going to be around for that.
All right.
We're going to wrap up on that note.
I appreciate you guys for watching.
I apologize to people if this is a little inside baseball for some of you.
We'll be right back to normal stuff in the next episode.