Fighting Foreign Election Interference, w/ Guest Michael Rectenwald - Liberty Report Extra Ep.2
Michael Rectenwald, a former NYU and Duke professor, details his shift from Marxist theory to civil libertarianism after witnessing campus "intellectual totalitarianism." He recounts his disappointing Libertarian presidential run, alleging Trump's camp interfered to block right-wing libertarians. Rectenwald then explains founding the anti-Zionist America PAC (Azapac) to challenge U.S. political class extortion by Israel, arguing that taxpayer-funded military adventures radicalize global opinion. By distinguishing Zionism from specific state actions, he aims to silence critics conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, urging listeners to visit aza-pat.com or his Substack for more. [Automatically generated summary]
This is an extra Liberty report where I'm going to be speaking to a number of people about a number of ideas that I think are interesting, that I think you'll find interesting, that don't necessarily fit in with the format of the usual and normal Ron Paul Liberty report.
You'll remember last week I spoke with Caleb Malpin, an interesting writer and intellectual.
Well, this week I'm also speaking with someone I consider a very interesting writer and intellectual, and also like Caleb, non-controversial.
But I'm talking about Michael Rectenwald, a fascinating guy.
I first got to know Michael at a Mises Institute conference a few years ago over here in Lake Jackson.
And we've kept in touch and I've kept a monitor of what he's been up to and he's done a couple of interesting things.
So Michael, welcome to the program.
Welcome to the Liberty Report Extra.
Good to be here, Daniel.
Thanks for having me.
It's good to have you here.
Well, let us know a little bit about yourself for people that may not know you as well as I do.
Yeah, sure.
So, you know, as is pretty well known, I was a professor at NYU for 11 years.
And before that, at Duke and Carnegie Mellon, Case Western Reserve University.
I retired officially from NYU in 2019 after there was some controversy regarding wokeness and the ideological police there.
And so since then, I've been writing books and doing speaking engagements.
I ran for president as a libertarian on the Libertarian Party.
Indoctrination and Political Nomination00:14:02
I tried to win the nomination.
That was foiled.
But I've been basically, I'm back at teaching.
I can't say where because they'll come from me.
So I am teaching again in university and running as a PAC, the anti-Zionist America PAC.
So you're teaching underground.
What's interesting, Michael, I mean, you talked about it a lot in your presentation for the Mises Conference a few years ago.
But, you know, you've made a real journey from the intellectual left, and then you went through sort of the conservative right.
And now you're sort of off on another plane.
I mean, it's interesting for me because I sort of came from a similar milieu.
You had a BA in English.
I think you earned a few years before me.
I got mine from UC Berkeley in 88.
And so we probably were in sort of the same general intellectual ferment at the time studying English literature with the prevailing schools of literary analysis that were a theory that was going on exactly at the time.
And I think you were probably more political.
I was more punk rock.
I was, you know, I was, I guess my rebellion at Berkeley was to become sort of a right-wing punk rock guy, you know, sort of thing.
But I mean, always, always a rebel.
But walk us a little bit about what that milieu was like and how it affected you and how you came out of it.
Sure.
So I do recount all this very, very thoroughly in my book, Springtime for Snowflakes, Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage.
Yeah, so I was an undergrad, as you said, in English literature, and then I went into advertising for like nine years.
And I did pretty well in that, but I got burned out.
It was disgustingly repetitive and boring in a way, although it was very good.
It was very remunerative.
I decided to go back to graduate school and I went to undergrad.
I'd finished in 83.
By 93, as you probably can very well remember, there was a major change that happened in the institutions of higher education, and particularly in English departments, which started to and had by the 90s very well and completely incorporated into the curriculum what is known as broadly theory,
literary and cultural studies, literary and cultural theory.
I became very immersed in theory, inclusive of, of course, Marxist theory, and there are many versions thereof, and postmodern theory, feminism, post-structuralism, post-post-this, post-that.
And I became pretty indoctrinated in a way.
I would say I was never completely, I was always pretty independently, a pretty independent thinker.
Even as a Marxist, I became a Marxist and wrote, and this was not what I taught.
I didn't teach Marxism in the university.
I was not proselytizing from the Letkern, as it were.
I taught English studies.
I taught my specialty is actually 19th century science and culture.
So that's what I wrote my dissertation.
And I have two books, three books on that area.
And one was just published, in fact, in December 2025.
So I still do this stuff, but from a different standpoint, of course, I had, you know, pretty much imbibed much of the premises and conclusions of Marxism.
And, you know, with a postmodernist twist, as it were, kind of a postmodern, postmodern inflection on it.
And then, you know, and I started becoming very disenchanted with the university in the mid, you know, in the mid-10s, 2015, 2016, when the developments there were very foreboding as I saw it.
There was basically a policing of opinion going on.
It started to ramp up.
Interestingly, as Donald Trump emerged as a presidential candidate against Hillary Clinton, it seems like the campuses went into a total hysteria.
And anything that sounded at all remotely like Trump or criticisms of social justice or political correctness, as it were, was deemed right-wing and extremist.
So I made these critiques and a student newspaper had interviewed me because I had started this Twitter account called Anti-PCNYU Pro.
And I called myself the deplorable professor.
And mostly out of shock value, frankly, it wasn't like a real adhesion to Trump, but I'd like to stick it to the Hillary Clinton people because I found her to be utterly disgusting and I still do.
So that caused a fallout for me at the university.
And it wasn't, you know, it was almost instantaneous that I became a libert, at least a civil libertarian when I recognized that without individual rights, particularly the right of free speech and supposed academic freedom on a campus, which was, it's a total misnomer.
There is no such thing.
I found myself, you know, totally divorcing the whole left.
In fact, I renounced the left all of it at once, including Marxists, because I thought that I don't want anything to do with these people.
They were utterly censorious.
And, you know, what I saw is the budding totalitarians, frankly.
Mism.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, I recognize that.
I went back to grad school in 91, and I was at the time doing international relations, but it was the same thing.
I mean, it was just assumed that you were an adherent to all of the theories, you know, post-colonialism and all of these sorts of things.
And if you were, if you happen to not agree with that, if you happen to dare think about realism, for example, in world affairs, which I've come to reject for a number of reasons, but you kept it quiet.
You kept it quiet.
And that's another thing that I was living in San Francisco at the time.
And that's the other thing about living in San Francisco in the early 90s.
If you were not, if you did not buy into their indoctrination, you kept your mouth shut because the open mind was only open in one direction.
That's actually why I left San Francisco in the middle of my master's thesis because I couldn't take it anymore.
Yeah, it's very tough to take.
I saw graduate students when I was coming through as a graduate student, a PhD program in particular, Carnegie Mellon, I saw students literally thrown out of the program for being what they call brave men, for wanting to write about, say, property rights through lock-in ideas and things like that.
They were dismissed and basically said, no, nobody wants to work with you, you know, as a dissertation advisor.
So you're going to have to leave.
I've seen this.
I saw this numerous times.
And then at NYU on hiring committees, I saw as stray white males particularly were put in one pile and then basically discarded unless they could find somebody from the other pile.
They would not go back to the white male pile.
I saw blatant discrimination and the use of identity as a means to squelch thought and to squelch expression from other people.
This, what I call, you know, sort of they're cry bullies.
This is kind of like snowflake totalitarianism.
Yeah.
But it's more vicious.
I mean, the snowflake as a word is such a dainty little thing.
It's actually a very vicious thing.
It's a throat to the knife kind of thing, you know.
And I remember in grad school, there were a couple and you would find them through the underground, you know.
But I went with one of the other students.
We would pass around National Review like pornography, like under the table.
I mean, it was that bad.
You could not let anyone see you read it.
And of course, now I think National Review is disgusting.
But my friend actually, ironically, at the time, he read National Review.
And I forget the, he was also into Chomsky.
So he really was interested in the whole perspective.
But the Chomsky stuff was fine.
You could have it on your desk.
But the National Review, you got to put it under the test.
I call them snowflake totalitarians because they mobilize their so-called fragility in order to squelch your right.
True.
That's good.
That's a good image.
That's a good image.
Well, let's go into the LP stuff because that was an interesting, was an interesting choice that you made.
We don't have to go into all the details of it because I do want to get to the main reason we're talking, which is now your new life as a lobbyist, which is interesting.
But I just, I wonder, I mean, what was your biggest takeaway from the 24 race?
So you were, as I understand, as if I recall, you had not been involved in politics, you hadn't run for office before.
And boom, you jumped in off the deep end.
What's your yeah, I jumped in.
I was asked by the Mises caucus to run by Michael Heiss, and I deliberated it and, you know, naturally not thinking of all the possible downsides to the whole thing.
But it was an interesting experience.
And I found that the LP, you know, ended up to me to be very disappointing in the sense that it resembles, or at least they're trying to be like the major parties in many ways in terms of, you know, I think was ledger domain in the final tally and the final voting.
There was a lot of illegal from the standpoint of the LP's own rules activity going on.
Plus, I think there was some Trump interloping into the whole thing.
He did come to the convention, and I believe his people also had something to do with the final results because they didn't want anybody that was deemed anything like so-called right-wing running as a libertarian.
They did want to foreclose any possibility losing votes to the Libertarian Party.
They wanted the naked guys that show up naked at the events, right?
Most.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I interrupted you.
Yeah, they courted the Libertarian Party.
As you know, Trump spoke at the convention.
I had a mishap there, which was, I won't go into, but I didn't know I was taking 100 milligrams of THC.
I thought I was so-called gummy gate.
And, you know, that took a while to live down for me, frankly.
It wounded me psychically because, frankly, that's just not who I am.
And I was very disturbed by the whole thing.
But I don't think that was finally the last, the real thing because even after that, I won the first five rounds of voting.
As you know, they use the runoff thing where you have to reach 50%.
I won five times, but I lost in the end.
So because of one of the candidates through his support to the other guy, the guy that was second place all the way through, that ended my run.
I mean, there was a lot of power politics in the LP thing that year.
I mean, and I think a lot of people may regret, but a lot of people are also angry about how they were, many people got behind Trump.
But either way, Trump is no dummy.
I think obviously every day I think more and more that he's evil, but he's no dummy.
And I think people, and also there have been libertarians or libertarian-oriented people.
Certainly in his first administration, I knew some of them.
They're not there now, but they were trying to gently from the inside, you know, push toward this, which is an admirable thing to do.
But they were pushing this.
And I think they did understand this is a body of voters that in terms of electoral politics, everything else stripped aside, may not be something as relevant.
It may not be a threat.
But when you look at this in terms of swing votes, if you look at libertarians who are not going naked to the convention, you have a block of voters here.
And if you can tap into that, if you can tap into people who are interested in Ron Paul, that's going to be some votes that you need in critical places.
So I think they certainly knew what they were doing when they courted these votes.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I don't fault the party for wanting to try to become, you know, to sort of infiltrate, as it were, the Republican Party and the Trump campaign to push them towards libertarian ideas.
They did get Ross Albrick freed.
APAC Influence on Votes00:03:24
That is very notable.
I said that many times, that that is something that is an accomplishment of Angela McCartle that should stand in history, I think.
Absolutely.
She gets all the credit.
Yeah, she deserves a great deal of credit for that.
And although I don't think Ross ever gave it to her, frankly, publicly, but I think she deserves a great deal of credit for that.
But I think the whole thing was, you know, we don't, I think a lot of people didn't know just the extent to which Trump was compromised, shall we say, and the extent to which he was a dissembler, a con artist.
You know, I think the whole MAGA thing, as it turns out, was perhaps the largest con bait and switch routine ever played on the American political scenario.
Yeah, books will definitely be written about in the future.
That's for sure, I think.
No question about it.
But, you know, we talked about this sort of intellectual totalitarianism when it comes to, you know, when it comes to the university and academia.
But, you know, the other thing, kind of the main reason I'd like to talk to you today is that same kind of intellectual totalitarianism, but in the political realm.
And I'm talking really about the role of APAC, the American Israel Political Action Committee in our political life.
You know, this is something that I dealt with on Capitol Hill for a decade plus when I worked with Dr. Paul.
Things were very different then.
People understood that when it came to foreign policy, APAC had a pretty strong stranglehold on things.
And I went to many briefings.
Dr. Paul was on the International Relations Committee.
We went to many briefings on bills.
And anytime the bill was mentioned, anytime a bill was up for discussion, staff would have a meeting.
If it was about the Middle East, we would be assured by the senior staff, the committee staff, that this legislation was APAC approved.
And so, of course, all the other staffers were happy because they didn't have to read the bill.
And they knew it had a pre-approval.
People knew that things were being drafted by APAC.
It was something that was understood, but it was also something that, with a few exceptions, and I'm thinking of people like Jim Trafficant and there were a few others, it just wasn't mentioned, certainly not in public at the time.
And I'm talking about the early 2000s.
Of course, we can go back to They Dare to Speak Out, and that's a whole different conversation.
But I'm talking about my experience there.
Now, behind closed doors, for example, when we had the private lunches in Dr. Paul's office, a lot of members would complain about it.
They didn't like it.
They didn't like to stranglehold.
But a lot of them were afraid to do anything about it.
So that is what it felt like then at the time.
But now the world has changed and a lot of the things that were not said are being said.
So walk us through this sort of intellectual transformation on your part and how you came to found this anti-Zionist political action committee.
Yeah, thank you.
So I want to make it very clear that this anti-Zionist political action committee, the whole thing, really does extend from my political outlook as a libertarian.
And that is to say, I am a non-interventionist.
Founding the Anti-Zionist PAC00:11:11
I don't believe that the United States should be intervening in other wars and causing wars and initiating wars, especially at the behest of other countries like Israel.
And I'm largely anti-statist.
I think the state should be reduced as much as possible.
And to see the state hijacked by this other entity, by this foreign influence, AIPAT, and there are 500 other organizations detailed in Grant Smith's book, Big Israel.
Yeah, he's great.
Yeah, he's very good.
And it shows how the so-called tax-deductible charity organizations actually funnel all this money into propaganda and West Bank settlements and things like this.
I just couldn't stand by.
And then with the genocide ongoing and feeling utterly frustrated and having some audience largely accrued through my writings, but also then the campaign, I said that I'm in a position to actually try to do something.
And I couldn't sit back and just watch or just tweet or podcast and things like this.
There had to be some action.
And I thought, what we need is an anti-Zionist party.
But then I know left, you know, from my experience with the LP and everything that you see, you know, you can't even get on a ballot in a lot of cases.
And, you know, RFK Jr. couldn't even get off on a ballot and then he couldn't get off the ballot.
They tried.
So they played the game.
As you know very well, the deck is totally stacked by these uniparty operatives.
They've got the state under their control so they can eliminate third-party candidates easily.
They block them out through all kinds of means, petitions and entrance fees and everything else, exclusions from debates, everything you can imagine.
So as you very well know, all the.
But I thought then, well, what is one way to do something?
And I thought, what about a PAC?
Because a PAC can fund any candidate, regardless of party, especially if it's a non-connected PAC, which we are as a PAC is non-connected or unconnected to any party or candidate.
So we can support anybody.
Then I thought, the interesting thing about the anti-Zionist movement is that I believe it's largely done in good faith, but I think they have a lot of mistaken premises for the most part.
That is mostly coming from the left and progressives.
They think that they can win by getting Democrats to beat Republicans.
Yeah.
Get even anti-Zionist Democrats to beat Republicans.
But the real bulwark of Zionism, as you very well know, is the right wing.
It's the Republican Party.
So they have to be defeated from that side.
And that's why we've backed a lot of Republican candidates who are running against well-known Zionists, like, for example, Randy Fine in Florida.
Oh, yeah.
We're supporting his primary competitor, Aaron Baker, who is running to defeat him.
And this is going to be a Republican district.
It doesn't matter who wins.
Whoever wins the Republican nomination will be winning that seat.
So this is the approach that I've been taking: how do we insert ourselves and start to get a, shall we say, an anti-Zionist coalition back in Congress so that they become disruptive and that disruption becomes known and that becomes part and parcel of our political discourse.
I wanted to make anti-Zionism analyzed in our country and make Zionism be the anathema that it should be.
And to talk about what we mean by Zionism, because that's a big, that's a question that always comes up.
What do you mean by Zionism?
Deny the Jews a right to a state.
Or that anyone should be able to have any philosophy they want to have is what I had believed.
Zionists, that's your philosophy.
You're welcome to it.
Absolutely.
But here's the thing where we draw the line: and I've defined Zionism for our purposes as the blackmail and bribery of the political class and the extortion of taxpayers for the benefit of Israel.
That's it.
Yeah.
That's what we oppose.
The purchase of our political class.
And no, it's interesting because just a few years ago, if you would say something, and here's a headline.
We did a show last week on the Liberty Report, and this is a headline that we both noticed.
Trump says he will make a mutual decision with Netanyahu on when to win the and when to end the Iran war.
Now, if you had said maybe 10, even 10 years ago, or maybe fewer, that, well, Israel seems to be driving our foreign policy, you would be accused of many, many terrible things.
But now it's absolutely normalized.
No, no, I'm not going to go to Congress.
I'm going to go ahead and go to the head of this foreign country, and we'll decide together when we should end this war.
I mean, it's a pretty radical transformation.
Yeah, and you saw, you know, members of the administration like Rubio coming out and saying the reason we attacked Iran is because we knew Israel was going to attack them and they would retaliate against us.
So we're being led, you know, the tail is wagging the dog very hard, as it were.
Whereas a pro-American Secretary of State, someone like maybe like James Baker would have said, okay, but guess what?
Not another penny, guys, and you're on your own.
Exactly.
That would have sent a message.
And there hasn't been anything.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, that's all it is.
We just want to cut off the funding, cut off the funding to this criminal enterprise.
Now, I don't care what you think about Israel.
I think robbing us to pay for their military adventures and imperialist ambitions is completely contradictory to U.S. interests in terms of American citizens anyway.
It benefits the MIC, the military industrial contractors, but it doesn't benefit the American people.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think, you know, I mean, the world changed since the October 7th Hamas military operation against Israel.
And I think the reaction of Israel radicalized a lot of people.
You know, I had come to become critical because I was dealing with middle.
I was very pro-Israel in the 90s.
Trust me, very pro-Israel.
I was happy when Netanyahu was elected, you know, this and that.
But as I progressed on the Hill, I met with Rachel Corey's family.
And in fact, I refused to meet with her family at first because I didn't want to get involved in any of that.
Not my problem, not our problem.
But I finally did meet with them and I finally started coming to understand that there is an unhealthy relationship here.
And it's, you know, sucking the future away, at least from us economically and morally.
And really, the October 7th incident, the reaction to it was radicalizing, I think, to a lot of people, particularly, I mean, certainly me as a parent, when I saw all of these kids being slaughtered in Gaza, I myself and I know many, many other people became much more radicalized and much more angry, not only at Israel for doing this, but at the United States government.
I'm more angry with our government for facilitating it, for giving them the money.
If you know the guy's a dope addict and you hand him the syringe, well, you're as guilty as he is.
Yes.
They're enabling and they're complicit.
And international law says that, in effect, if you enable and fund known crimes against humanity, then you are similarly guilty.
And I think our whole Congress, minus a few exceptions, are guilty and all the Senate for the most part also.
But, you know, even from that standpoint, we wanted to make it very clear that while we think it would be to the benefit of the whole world, should the United States decouple from Israel and quit supporting their crimes against humanity and belligerence across the Middle East, that it would also benefit the United States citizens.
It's good for the world and it's good for us.
And interestingly enough, kind of America-first nationalism is actually better for the world at large.
Yeah, in that respect, and one could argue that if you are affectionate toward Israel, I think it's certainly better for Israel.
Israel is in a psychotic state right now.
And partly is because the U.S. has been that dope pusher, handing them a new syringe over and over.
Whatever you guys do, I got your back.
It's like a kid who keeps stealing from the store and you keep covering for him.
He's going to steal bigger and bigger things.
And that's what happened.
What's happened?
And I would rather obviously have zero intervention, zero dealing other than trade.
But the fact of the matter is we've kept supporting and backstopping this bad behavior to the point where not only are they hated in their neighborhood, they're hated universally.
Basically, it's us and Modi and India, the only two countries now who are.
So no country should want to be in a position where you are universally hated.
That is not a good place to be.
No, it's not good.
And I think it's bad for the Jewish people, not only the Israelis, but also Jewish people around the world because of Israel's conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
And that is definitely a strategic ploy on their part to make all criticism of Israel off limits with the proviso that if you do criticize them, you'll be called an anti-Semite.
And of course, I have already been called this.
I'm surprised, Michael.
But also the conflation with Jewish identity and Zionism, because we both know many people of Jewish background who are the most ardent anti-Zionists, and some of them are our good friends.
And so and Finkelstein, Aaron Mattei, yeah, I mean, these are great.
The most strident and articulate anti-Zionists are actually Jewish.
And they're being put in.
There's, of course, organizations like the Voice of Rabbis, these Hasidic Jews that are largely anti-Zionist.
Yes.
And they bemoan this conflation and they see it as endangering them.
Yeah, they don't want to be identified with bad actors.
Who would?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, we're going to have to close out here, Michael.
I appreciate the great conversation.
Jewish Voices Against Zionism00:01:01
Let people know if they're interested in Azapac or you or your work, let people know where they can find you.
Absolutely.
So Azapak website is aza-pat.com.
That's aza-pat.com.
Or just search Azapak, A-Z-A-P-A-C on Google.
We still come up.
They haven't swelted us yet.
Surprised.
And my own work is largely on my substack now.
It's called RECT, R-E-K-T on Substack.
So if you just search for Substack, RECT, R-E-K-T, you'll see most of my new original writings.
And then there is my other website, michaelrechtenwald.com, where all my books and a great majority of my essays and appearances and media coverage is there.
Okay, great.
Well, Michael, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to Liberty Report Extra today.
And I also want to thank the viewers for tuning in.
Please come back to the next episode of Liberty Report Extra.