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May 2, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
27:30
Do We Have A Libertarian Future? With Guest Michael Rectenwald

Libertarian professor and intellectual - and presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party - Michael Rectenwald joins today's Liberty Report to discuss the mood of the country from his vantage point on the campaign trail. What are the main obstacles on the path to liberty and how might they be overcome?

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Michael From Pittsburgh 00:02:00
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel Mick Adams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to have you here today.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Good.
We're ready to go because we have a special guest today.
Yes, indeed.
That should be exciting to us.
And we thought up the best questions in the world because he is well educated.
He's been to all the big colleges.
Oh, that's not a thing to brag about.
How big were the colleges?
What were they doing?
How did they take care of all their problems?
But anyway, Michael Rechtenwald is running for the nomination for the Libertarian Party presidential race.
And we're having him on higher terms so he can expose his views and we can find out more about him.
The one thing I found out about Michael is that he essentially was born and raised and currently lives in Pittsburgh.
And I spent a few years there, like a lot.
And so he knows the area where my wife and I grew up.
So, but Michael's also had a long list of educational opportunities.
And I had a BA from the University of Pittsburgh.
I got part of my medical education at the University of Pittsburgh during the OBGYN residency at McGee Hospital.
And then there's a master's degree from Case University that he has English literature.
He has a lot of education and literature.
He has a PhD in Carnegie Mellon.
All these places I do remember.
He also had listed, but I'm not quite sure, but he might bring it up because he was associated with, or at least he knew the name of Hillsdale College.
And that, of course, has been a college that has identified with Hans Senholtz and libertarianism.
But we're real glad to have you with us today, Michael.
Mixed Universities, Private Rules 00:07:55
Please say hello to our viewers.
Hey, hello, everybody.
Nice to be here.
And thank you very much, Dr. Paul, for having me.
Very good.
You know, since the thing that's in the news, I usually try to look at as many different things as I can.
Our stuff, the libertarian stuff.
And also, I look at old-fashioned main street media.
What are they doing?
And sometimes you only have to look at one of them because they're all saying the same thing.
But lately, in these last several days, and I think rightfully so, that the big issue has been the universities and the rioting as it's going on and what it means and who's at fault.
And there's lots of talk about it.
I have strong opinions about it.
But you've had a lot of experience in politics as well, as you've had experience spending time in universities as a teacher.
I'd like you to give us a quick assessment of what you think is going on.
And are there any several things that you want to suggest that these people in the universities give them some advice?
And maybe I fall into the category.
I'd like to give them a lot of advice, but it's about 20 years ago, a long time before any of this stuff started.
So how about telling us a little bit of how you're looking at this mess that we have in our universities, the great universities, you know, and now we question exactly what's going on, rightfully so.
Yes, I mean, you know, a lot of these protests are really astroturf protests.
They're funded by, you know, these billionaire philanthropists and they have leaders that are being paid to do this.
And listen, I support fully the right of students to protest.
But I noticed that in this case, they're getting crushed by the police and by the university.
Whereas in the past, during my tenure at NYU, for example, I never saw anybody come down on protesters when they were burning down buildings, threatening speakers, punching speakers, pulling their hair.
But in this case, they're getting crushed by the university administration and the police.
And I just think that they have a double standard here.
And, you know, I wonder what that's about.
But, yeah, it's out of control in the sense that the university has been playing favorites and it's had a specific policy that has endorsed various politics rather than being neutral, which I think it should have always been neutral politically so that you have different views without endorsing one set of views or another.
And unfortunately, they've been endorsing particular views.
Right.
Daniel, do you have a question or comment?
Yeah, Michael.
Well, first of all, thanks for coming on the show.
We welcome you.
And just tell our audience that, you know, we don't endorse candidates, but we want to get to know candidates.
We had Vivek Ramaswamy on the show several times and all candidates for the presidency, including Joe Biden himself, are welcome on our program.
So come on, Joe, come on and join us.
But Mike, you make an interesting point about what's happening on the campuses, about the selective enforcement of the rules on campus.
I mean, we saw what happened on Tuesday night at UCLA where some outside pro-Israel groups were beating the heck out of the pro-Palestinian peaceful demonstrators and the cops weren't doing anything.
I wonder what's happening with this double standard.
You know, Judge Napolitano, who we all respect a lot, has a terrific column out today that we have up on the Ron Paul Institute, ronpaulinstitute.org, where he's saying, what's happening to the First Amendment?
Why are they trying to restrict speech?
We have a history of speech on campus and sometimes even ugly speech on campus.
Why do you think all of a sudden now we're seeing such a crackdown?
Well, I think that we're talking about a third rail, really, in the case of Israeli policy and influence over the country.
Unfortunately, this is not a topic that's allowed to be treated.
It's not allowed to be protested, and it's not allowed to be discussed that much, broadly speaking.
I mean, there's a great deal of censorship where this is concerned and a lot of propaganda.
Of course, the state is issuing propaganda nonstop about this.
And, you know, I think the students have a perfect right to protest.
I do think that they don't have a right to block ingress or egress or to physically assault people.
And I don't think much of that is going on, frankly.
They shouldn't be violating university policy.
But the thing is, over the last 15 years, I would say, the students were doing all kinds of crazy things.
I mean, even myself at NYU, I got threatened.
They threatened to kill me because I was criticizing some things about social justice as such.
And nothing happened to these people.
Whereas, you know, in this particular case, this is a verboten topic.
Speaking of Judge Napolitano, he actually endorsed me as well.
Michael, I want to mention something that I talk about, even though it's not practical in the sense that anybody's seriously considering it.
But I like to see things in terms of what's it like when things are private and owned by the people versus once the government either has total indirect or direct control and they own it and everybody has to be served.
And I see the university system especially very mixed up.
And if we look at medicine, it's the same way.
It used to be that medicine was private and the main goal was to make sure the doctor-patient relationship was protected.
But of course, we know that COVID literally has destroyed that and there's a lot of problems like that.
But do you have any thoughts on this?
There's not a whole lot of really private universities, but there are some, or they lean that way.
Do you think that has given them some protection and without violation of civil liberties, allowing them to do a little bit of policing on the people that are overreacting?
Absolutely.
Well, so you make a great point that these so-called private universities, because they are so heavily funded by the federal government, not only directly through research grants and so forth, from everything from DARPA down to their scientific endeavors, but also student loans and grants.
This gives this government a tremendous leverage over these private universities, such that we saw presidents of private universities hold before Congress and dress down about their particular views, which I think is ridiculous.
So we need to have more privatization.
Certainly, they should become private.
I think all funding, federal funding to these universities should be cut, and that includes student loans and grants.
I think that this would bring down the cost of tuition because the more money, as you know, the more money you throw at something, the higher the price becomes.
So this is one of the big catch-22s about the education crisis in terms of tuition costs, but also it gives the state all this control over these universities where, whereas if they were strictly private, for example, like Hillsdale College, which does not take any federal funds, they can do what they want.
Private Universities Under Threat 00:11:22
And that's the way it should be.
Wonderful.
Michael, if I may, you for some reason seem to have a desire to relocate yourself to Washington, D.C., 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I guess it's appropriate being from Pennsylvania.
It'd be a natural move, right?
You'll feel like you're at home.
But I thought we might dive into a couple things that you may be facing if by some way you're elected.
And I'm looking at one tweet that came out yesterday, actually today from Sean Davis, who's the CEO of the Federalist.
And it was reposted by Thomas Massey, who is all of our favorite person in the House.
And it's all about Speaker Mike Johnson, because Dr. Paul and I both had a pretty favorable view when he first came in.
He's a fresh face.
He looked like a mild-mannered guy.
But then things went really wrong.
Well, here's what Sean Davis, and these are criticisms from the conservative side.
Sean Davis wrote, Mike Johnson responded to FBI corruption by giving them a new headquarters to Biden lawfare by fully funding the Department of Justice to border insanity by spending billions on migration assistance to Hamas's attack on Israel by giving them a $9 billion earmark and to college communism by enacting speech codes.
He's the single most incompetent politician I have ever seen.
That is pretty tough.
What do you think is going on with Mike Johnson?
Well, I think he's a Trojan horse.
You know, they thought they were getting a gift, but it turns out that he's just embodying the same exact policies that he was supposed to be opposing.
For example, this massive funding bill for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, which is just an outrage.
Nobody really wants this.
I mean, there are a lot of people that want funding for Ukraine for some reason and Israel, but it's not the same people usually, which is another contradiction, you know, but he's rolled all this into one.
And, you know, this is just part of the course where you have this guy that's supposed to be a reformer, or at least to some extent, trying to curtail the growth of the government.
And instead, he ends up bolstering it and doing the agenda that really it seems to be what the regime demands.
And he has seemingly no agency.
He doesn't have any particular will.
He just rubber stamps what the regime is looking for.
And it's quite a charade to see him doing this since he got in under completely different auspices.
You know, it's hard to analyze why.
And I'm always asking why they do this.
It doesn't make any sense.
And for a libertarian, you know, when we look at this, it doesn't make any sense to us.
And then you ask, why do they do this?
And the question with Johnson is, did he become, did he change his opinion and his mood?
He gets in there.
He's impressed with all this power structure and maneuvering that he actually thinks he has to become more practical in order to be realistic.
Does that happen to him?
I know this is opinions that we're looking for, but at the same time, some people might weasel their way in and they believed it all along.
They were just fibbing to us in order for them to get into a position where they can do more good for us.
So I don't know which one it is and I don't know if we could figure it out, but I think we have to be aware of both reasons that people do seem to change their minds.
Well, you would know better than anybody about how to stand on principle within government.
One of the few persons in American history to do so.
But I would say that I would look at his funding, who has funded him.
You know, I think they probably, I don't know this, but you would know as an, you know, having been in there that there's probably a carrot and stick type of incentive.
You know, you do this and you'll get this.
If you don't do this, you'll get that.
And I'm afraid something like that is what's going on, but I'm only conjecturing.
Daniel?
Let's move on to something that has really jumped to the headlines yesterday, Michael, and that is the passage of this Anti-Semitism Awareness Act in the House.
And what I find fascinating is even, I'm talking about the conservative, even the so-called professional conservatives, who all tend to be very pro-Israel.
They have come out strong against this bill.
I'm just going to read a couple of tweets about this.
This is Matt Walsh.
She writes for the Daily Wire, which as most of our viewers will know, is very, very pro-Israel.
In fact, they just fired one of their top people because she was criticizing Israel.
Nevertheless, here's what Matt Walsh said.
He said the vast majority of Republicans just voted for a bill to criminalize criticism of the Israeli government.
If this bill passes, you will be guilty of hate speech if you, quote, apply double standards to the government of Israel or accuse it of genocide.
He continues, this is honestly one of the most insane pieces of legislation I've ever seen.
Now, Representative Matt Gates, who's also very pro-Israel, he's from Florida.
He voted against the bill.
And here's what he said.
This evening, I will vote against the ridiculous hate speech bill called the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.
He says anti-Semitism is wrong, but this legislation is written without regard for the Constitution, common sense, or even the common understanding of the meaning of words.
He continues, the gospel itself would meet the definition of anti-Semitism under the terms of this bill.
And he includes some screenshots of the bill and its legislation that shows that exact thing.
So it seems crazy.
And then you have Charlie Kirk, another very mainstream conservative who says, in response to campus anti-Israel protests, the House is rushing to vote on a new bill, H.R. 6090.
This new bill will officially define anti-Semitism so the federal government can sue, prosecute, or sanction more people, businesses, and university for supposed violations of civil rights.
Charlie Kirk says, I abhor anti-Semitism, but this bill is flagrantly unconstitutional and an appalling attack on the First Amendment.
And Thomas Massey agreed.
I won't read his tweets on it, but he has agreed on this.
What the heck is going on with this bill and why did they rush it through?
What do you think, Michael?
Well, I think they used these college protests as a pretext to usher this in.
And we're looking at a bill that is relying on its definitions for anti-Semitism on an outside extragovernmental organization called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, whose definitions of anti-Semitism are extremely broad and vague.
So this gets you into a problem where you don't know when you're trespassing into this anti-Semitism.
It's the most outrageous, baggy kind of definition of anti-Semitism that is imaginable.
Just about anything could count as anti-Semitism.
Any kind of disparagement of Israel could count as anti-Semitism.
Any criticism of Israel and anything like even quoting scripture might actually, you know, the New Testament, quoting passages from that could end up being called anti-Semitic.
This is a massive infringement of First Amendment rights.
And as far as I knew, the United States does not have a category, a legal category of hate speech, but now they are actually introducing it through this bill.
It is an outrage.
You know, Michael, I like to find out when I meet people who have been or have recently become more libertarian.
And, you know, what have been the motivating factors?
And I'm assuming that you probably weren't as firmly libertarian as you are now to be running for the libertarian nomination for president than you were maybe 20 years ago or when you got in college or whenever.
Was there a transition?
And if there was a transition from being more, say, mainstream and moving in the direction of libertarianism, what has been your route of arriving to where you are now?
That's a great question.
Thanks for asking it, Dr. Paul.
The way that happened to me was on campuses, actually, at NYU, when I started to voice criticisms of NYU policy and actions surrounding what's known as wokeness or social justice, I was roundly and boldly critiqued and actually savaged by the administration and by fellow faculty members.
They tried to destroy my academic career simply because I voiced some criticisms in the student newspaper.
Before you know it, they pushed me into a leave of absence and condemned me.
This group called the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Group condemned me and declared me guilty, literally, quote unquote, guilty for the structure and content of my thought.
So I was literally accused of wrongthink.
So I immediately embraced civil libertarianism.
I thought that there's nothing more important than the ability to use one's voice, one's body, one's tongue to say and do whatever you wish as long as you're not inciting incipient violence.
And that was almost an instantaneous gestalt shift that I had.
And then I started to plumb deeply into the economic and political theory and history of libertarianism, starting with Mises and then into Rothbard and later into Hans Hermann Hoppe.
So it's been, it was a rapid change and quite a liberating one, Dr. Paul.
I mean, I felt like literally I was liberated from shackles that had been that had been attached to me.
Okay, one quick follow-up on that.
Have you sensed any response to anybody you've been exposed to, whether it's in teaching or just friendships of people coming in your direction and inciting a little bit of interest in their young people wanting to hear more about libertarianism?
Absolutely.
I noticed that, you know, some people that were fellow travelers with me, and I was on the left, to tell you the truth.
People that were fellow travelers with me on the left saw what I was going through and what the transformation that I was undergoing, and they actually followed me along this path.
And similarly, my own sons, my own sons have become staunch libertarians.
And that's very exciting.
Even my daughter, who was much more of a liberal type, when I told her that my platform is really anti-war, anti-state, and pro-freedom, she said, I'm done with that.
Spreading the Message of Freedom 00:06:08
That sounds great to me.
That's great.
Converting the family too.
That's fantastic.
I was going to ask you about one thing, Michael, and it was really big news.
I think it was yesterday that it hit.
And a lot of people are talking about it.
There's a lot of debate within libertarian circles.
And that was the invitation that the LP, the Libertarian Party, extended to both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to address the Libertarian National Convention coming up at the end of the month in Washington, D.C.
And the news, apparently yesterday, that Donald Trump has accepted an invitation to speak at the national conference.
What are your thoughts on it?
What do you think?
Good idea, bad idea?
Well, I think it's actually a brilliant idea.
It gets the Libertarian Party exposure that it would not otherwise have gotten in the media.
It gets us a platform from which to actually voice the liberty or the freedom philosophy to the broad American public in a way that might not have been possible.
It also gets us on the stage.
At least one of our candidates, hopefully me, will be on the stage with Donald Trump challenging him about his policies.
Now, some of the party has been reacting quite histrionically, I think, and condemning the whole thing as if they have kind of Trump derangement syndrome.
I think it's a good thing if we handle it well and use it as a vehicle to get our principles and our vision across to the American public.
I think it's a great opportunity.
Wonderful.
You know, I think we have a lot to be grateful for, even though mainstream media and the television and what comes out of our government, it all is so bad.
And it sounds like, well, at least 98% of the people agree with these people.
But I think that the more you search and look for the people you have talked to and have influence, and you look at what the Mises Institute has done.
And we'd like to take a little bit of credit from the Liberty Report that I don't come across as being, you know, all that pessimistic, scared to death at times because it's so dangerous.
But I look at all of history and all of a sudden, you know, there's been some lot of ups and downs with the desire to seek out and find truth.
And I think that's the main goal that we have is trying to figure it out.
And that's what happens in politics because in Washington, if there's a disease up there and they all catch in us almost all of them, and that's called nihilism.
They say, don't waste your time on trying to figure out what is true and right.
There's no way of knowing.
Well, I happen to reject that.
So I think it is pretty nice that you're very much involved.
And I'm delighted with you.
And what about your long-term thinking, you know, outside of what you're doing immediately?
Can you find some of the optimistic things and say, you know, we're making some inroads, just be patient.
And we are doing some good out there.
Absolutely.
So I say to those people, you know, listen, they also serve who only stand and wait.
And that's to quote John Milton.
Stand by.
We're not done yet.
We still have time.
And as long as we have a modicum of liberty, we can always work to expand it.
As long as we're living and breathing, there is no sense of hopelessness that we should succumb to.
So I share your sense of, you know, rejecting pessimism and nihilism.
And it's just the easy way out.
Nihilism is just a cop-out.
I think it's necessary to stand and fight and to continue to spread the message of freedom, the freedom philosophy, inclusive of the free market, individual liberty, and so forth.
So I really appreciate that you maintain such an optimistic, or at least, you know, you're positive about the prospects and the possibilities for change.
And that actually encourages me quite a bit.
That's wonderful.
And I think that there is reason for us to continue because the other option is so bad.
And I think it is worthwhile, obviously.
And one thing I like to see is people, when we've gone, we have our own conferences and different conferences that we have.
And most of the time, the people, you know, enjoy being together and like-minded people.
So I think there's every reason to, you know, look at it on a positive side because the negative side isn't as much fun.
So I think this is great.
But Michael, before we go, I'd like you to go ahead and see if you can get some people writing down your address and putting it in their computer and getting in touch with you.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much.
So my campaign slogan is wreck the regime.
That's REC the regime.
And so my campaign website is recktheregime.com.
And you can find all of the policies and our vision and get behind us to support this campaign.
We mean by wreck the regime, what we mean is we need to go after this behemoth of a national federal government.
And we need to take it and take an axe to it, really, and get it to livable proportions because it's completely out of control.
So go to rectheregime.com.
Thank you so much.
Very good.
And I want to thank you very much for being with us today.
And we wish you well.
And we also are very happy that we have our audience watching this.
And hopefully there will be some responses in a positive way.
But I want to thank everybody for tuning in.
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