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Unknown A
Really, over the next four years, as we see Trump and the Republican Congress not being very libertarian, I think a lot of libertarian ish people might take a second look at the Libertarian Party. I really don't care about the culture war. I want a cultural ceasefire. Can we stop talking about that when we have a lot of other things that are really important, least of all like, you know, the economy to worry about? I don't want to eliminate welfare because I hate helping poor people. I want to do it because I find that to be an inefficient and wrong way to help those who are in need. Doge, for instance, there's this Department of Government Efficiency that Elon Musk and Viva Ramaswamy are beheading. I imagine much of the regulations and much of the things they're going to find that need to be cut and eliminated are ones that have to do with the space industry.
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Unknown A
Instead of finding all of the government to eliminate, they're going to find the government they want to eliminate. Can we make a square deal that neither of us should have the government involved in our lives? And he goes, that sounds like a square deal. I said, good, you're a conservative libertarian, and I may be more of a progressive one, but if you have that mindset of, like, the government should not be involved in other people's decision making, even if I don't agree with it, that's libertarianism.
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Unknown B
What was your best. How many interviews did you get when you were running for president? I listened to your Fox.
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Unknown A
I mean, dozens and dozens. Probably the most high profile one was John Stossel. Okay, Yeah. I think he was the one that got the most views and stuff.
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Unknown B
But what was your favorite interview?
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Unknown A
Oh, geez, there's a lot of them. There were some podcasts out there that were actually really fun because we didn't talk a lot about politics, which was great because they bring a presidential candidate. We ended up talking about whatever. So, yeah, yeah, that was always fun.
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Unknown C
Is John Stossel, is he like a libertarian still, or did he go full maga? Okay.
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Unknown A
Oh, yeah, he's very much still very libertarian. In fact, he was probably one of the nicest interviews I did because it was like not having to explain things. He was like, oh, yeah, I already know this stuff. And so basically he was like, I'm going to ask you questions. I already know a lot of the answers, but you're educating people who don't know them. And so he was very nice. Who is the other podcast that I did that. What is the name of it shit is escaping my brain right now.
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Unknown B
I listen to you got interviewed. I think it was a news lady. She's like, darker skin, curly hair. She's beautiful.
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Unknown A
Oh, that was local Atlanta news. That was Atlanta. Yeah, it was 11 alive. She was great.
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Unknown B
She was great. It was a really good interview.
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Unknown A
Yes. I really like the local Indianapolis Press, too. They were really, really nice to me because I was speaking at the Rainbow. Rainbow Chamber of Commerce. So, like, it was about LGBT and business leaders. So it was, like, perfect for a gay libertarian. And I didn't even think about it. They're like, so what do you think about the fact that you're going to be on the ballot all over the country and you beat Pete Buttigieg to the punch of being, like, the first gay candidate on the ballot out of the country? I was like, you know, I didn't even think about that until you brought it up that I. That Pete Buttigieg might be a little miffed about that. But. Oh, well. But yeah, that was great.
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Unknown B
So what is. What's some of the baseline information people don't know about libertarianism that they do to even engage with even today's episode?
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Unknown A
Yeah, I think the biggest misconception about libertarians is that we're selfish people, that we don't care about other people, because a lot of times our philosophy is rooted down to what we believe in politically. Like, we don't believe the government should be doing this. We don't believe the government should be doing that. For instance, we don't believe in the welfare state. Right. It's not that I don't want to help poor people. It's just that I think that doing that through government creates cracks that people fall through. I believe in mutual and direct aid. I believe in helping my neighbors. I just don't trust that bureaucrats in D.C. are going to do the best job of that. And so, like, trying to get across that it's not that we don't care about other people, it's that we. We do care about people. We just find different solutions.
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Unknown A
And I think many libertarians are really loving people. They just get kind of. And they also get tagged with, well, you're only in it for the business and not for individual people. And it's like, but I want individual people to have a great job and be able to raise their family and have a great life. I'm not just in it for big business. I just think that government's just as crooked as businesses. So I don't know. That's the biggest Misnomer to me is that we are selfish or hateful. When I like to think of myself as a really loving person and most libertarians I know that are like that too. Most people are like that.
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Unknown C
So I was a massive Ron Paul Stan in 2008. I think I just got out of college. I had my year and a half mandatory high school teenage boy Ayn Rand revolution. So I started with her short story anthem, and then. And then the Atlas Shrugged and then I was full on my objectivist stuff. And then as time went on, there were a couple things that kind of changed for me personally, I guess when looking at libertarianism stuff, I'm kind of curious how you feel about this. The two huge issues that I saw kind of with libertarianism is one that Republicans love to adopt it as an aesthetic so much, the whole Tea Party everything. So Republicans are. Republicans will just oftentimes like, call themselves like, libertarian, especially back in that day with the Tea Party, because it was like the way to virtue, simply that you were a good Republican and they'd be all for, you know, know, cutting spending and minimizing government, except in any kind of.
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Unknown C
I mean, yeah, any kind of like moral issue or social issue or like military issue. They were massively. Now all of a sudden, they were the biggest government sorts ever. That was the. The first issue. And then the second issue was that it started to become really hard to draw that line between like, are you a good person who has an alternate way of approaching things, or you're just like a piece of shit. And that line became like, very blurry. My go to example for this, for instance, was. I'm also a huge fan of. Did you watch Pennatelli's Bullshit? Yes. So I loved Penn Jillette. I think I probably watched every episode of the first three seasons. Penn came off to me as, As a guy who, like, if you were to ask him, how do you feel about mandatory vaccines? He would say, this is something that every individual should have the right to make.
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Unknown C
Government can't force you to take anything. This is like, what's moral? And then if you were to ask him, what about you? Are you vaccinated? He'd be like, of course I'm backside. I'm not an idiot. And that would be like, oh, okay. Whereas, like today it feels like, again, the libertarian aesthetic is adopted. And then, you know, like the same question posed to. I'm gonna say, like a modern libertarian. And I'm not implicating you guys, just like all the people that run around calling those libertarians you'd say like, oh, like, how do you feel about mandatory vaccines? They'll say, I don't think the state has a right to intervene there. And it's like, oh, are you vaccinated? And they'll be like, I'm not letting Bill Gates into my bloodstream. And it's like, okay, that has nothing to do with the government then. This is just your personal perspective.
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Unknown C
So, yeah, I guess. How do you feel about the general evolution of what a libertarian is seen as and how people can distinguish between the good ones and the bad ones over the past, like, couple decades?
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Unknown A
Yeah, well, I think you're right. I think a lot of Republicans who call themselves libertarian aren't very libertarian. I think you could probably count on one hand the number of Republican, like, true Republican libertarians out there. I think Ron Paul is certainly one of them. Even if there are areas where I disagree with him on certain policies, I certainly think that he looks at things through a libertarian lens, a reduce government, increase individual liberty lens. I think Thomas Massie is much the same way. I've gotten to meet him personally, I'm sure. I disagree with him, particularly on the Jones act, which I find to be. I'm more libertarian than him on that. Right. But I don't think he is necessarily a bad person. I think there are people who use libertarianism as, like, I want to reduce government, but they want to reduce the government they don't like.
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Unknown A
And for me, I want to reduce all government. Like, I want to help. I want people, I want poor people to have help from their community through mutual and direct aid. I don't think government's the best way to do it. But I don't want to eliminate welfare because I hate helping poor people. I want to do it because I find that to be an inefficient and wrong way to help those who are in need. And so for me, it is this aesthetic of, like, we only want to eliminate the things we don't like. So Doge, for instance, there's this Department of Government Efficiency that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will be heading. I imagine much of the regulations and much of the things they're going to find that need to be cut and eliminated are ones that have to do with the space industry, to do with the pharmaceutical industry.
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Unknown C
You think they would be self interested in how they would cut.
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Unknown A
Instead of finding all of the government to eliminate, they're going to find the government they want to eliminate. And that's my problem with Republican libertarians. I Wish there were more libertarian libertarians out there who argued it on the base of philosophy. And so I do think there's a muddling there. And then the contrarian nature that you mentioned, I think there's a lot of folks out there who call themselves libertarian, and maybe they have libertarian opinions, but really deep down they're contrarian. If the government said breathe, they would hold their breath until they passed out because they want to be contrary to whatever the government says, even if it's a good thing. Which government, Every once in a while, broken clocks are right twice a day. And so for me, I'm not a contrarian on the basis of just government is bad. Therefore, everything that's ever done is government is inefficient, it's terrible, and oftentimes it's run by corrupt and terrible people.
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Unknown A
And that's my issue with it. And I think you're right. Do I want vaccine mandates? No. Did I get vaccinated? I did. And I don't think that should be something that, like, terrifies people, especially libertarians. That should not disqualify you from being a libertarian because you made decision yourself that you did not insist be made for other people. And that's really what libertarianism is. And there are people who I will disagree with till the end of the, you know, till the cows come home, but I will reserve the right to be wrong if that makes sense, and not do it in a hateful way.
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Unknown B
So you ran for president as a libertarian third party. Do you feel talking just a little bit about this idea of, like, what libertarian, libertarian NISM is. Oh, my goodness. Do you feel that there's been a, like, decay of it as far as, like, values? Do you feel like there's less libertarians even within the Libertarian Party that embody that, like, principle, which is I want people to be able to choose? I feel like that's a pretty founding principle of libertarianism. That's what you described just now. Do you feel like that is on the way out even within the Libertarian Party, or no?
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Unknown A
I do think that there is a potential for the Libertarian Party where we're in kind of a valley right now. And I think what happens with a lot of alternative parties outside of the mainstream is when there is, like, a major event, something crazy happening, people out of fear flee into the corners of either the red or the blue because they feel like I can't afford to vote outside of the system because of X, Y or Z. I think Covid did that for a lot of people, both on the Left and the right, and they fled their ideological trenches where they feel like they can win. And that has depleted the libertarian movement quite a bit. I am ready to see that grow, because particularly now that we have a Republican in office and a Republican Congress. I'll tell you right now, things I don't.
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Unknown A
I predict won't happen. Government will not shrink, the deficit will not shrink, the government will grow, the war state will grow. All these things will grow. And these things that are very important to libertarians who maybe pull the lever for Trump in this 2024 election, they're going to realize they were duped and hopefully bring them back into libertarianism once they realize they were tricked.
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Unknown C
Yeah, that's very frustrating to me that I would say that politically and philosophically, maybe very, very foundationally, I might align with libertarians, but once we start to get to the policy world, I want to be totally separate. But for the people that were libertarians, I don't understand how you look at somebody like Donald Trump who had a booming economy from 2017 to. For at least the first, like, two, three years, and still deficits. Not, like, crazy, like, massive deficits, huge tax cuts, which are fine, but paired with no spending decreases, just more government stimulus, really. And, yeah, that, like, I don't know why. I remember that coming out of the Ron Paul era, where I was still, like, libertarian for a while. When I would talk to people, I would find out that that libertarian thing was just an aesthetic. And I could tease out very quickly.
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Unknown C
There was, like, a couple questions I get asked a guy, like, oh, how do you feel about, like, how do you feel, like, about open borders or unrestricted immigration? And they had, like, all these things that they'd want. I was like, oh, how do you feel about, like, free travel and people associating themselves where they need to be, like, economically for, you know, everybody's prosperity? Like, no, absolutely not. It's like, okay, I'm a Tea Party libertarian. It's like, okay, I don't know what this is. I'm not even sure what you're saying right now, because the, like, the free market and all of those market forces are good as long as they're, like, a thing that the person approves of. But as soon as, like, I said, yeah, reiterating, like, a social issue, something they don't approve of. Well, I need the government, you know, like, doing womb checks of our teenage women to make sure nobody's getting abortion.
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Unknown C
And it's like, holy fuck. Like, I can't think of a more intrusive thing. I think I would rather have, like, a trans teacher teaching my son during, you know, drag hours than to ever have, like, if I had a daughter, for her to be accosted by an officer because she's crossing a border to see if she's, like, getting a fucking abortion. That's insane to me. Yep. Yeah.
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Unknown A
I think there's a lot there where, you know, people, you're right, they like the word libertarian. The joke that I've heard is this, Libertarians are Republicans who want to seem cool. Right? Like, that's the word. I don't think that's what it is at all. It's a totally separate philosophy from what modern Republican, modern conservatism is. There's always going to be like, that Venn diagram where there's some overlap. Same with the Democrats too. There are overlapping issues with libertarians and Democrats as well, particularly on the drug war, criminal justice reform, and some other areas. But that doesn't make them Democrats. And like, that's what we need to, you know, that's what I'm trying to remind people, is that libertarianism is something that's very separate from either of the major political parties that exist. And you're right, there are people who will, who will say, I'm a libertarian, I want unadulterated freedom.
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Unknown A
Until it's not their freedom that's being worried about. And then they are just fine with restrictions. You know, immigration is a thing that, you know, a lot of people on the right attack me for just for saying that I want a 21st century Ellis Island. I didn't want completely unrestricted open borders. I just wanted people to come through, give their name so that we just know who's going in and going out. Kind of like a check in, checkout system. And to that, people are like, oh, you just want to bring Mexican rapists up to terrorize our communities? It's like, actually, no, I want to bring the. The 99.9% of people who just want to come here and work. And by the way, when we make that easier for them, the coyotes who are having to travel across the border to commit crimes, to traffic people, we can actually focus on them and we can actually stop them dead in their tracks while letting peaceful people live.
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Unknown A
And for that I was considered open borders. You just want to let everybody vote Democrat. It's like, that's the other thing that I had a problem with immigration. Why do you assume that if we gave amnesty to these people, they would instantly vote for Democrats?
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Unknown C
That says more about you than Anything else. And yet, and I'm curious if the position of the Republican Party will change a little bit as Latinos become a little bit warmer to Republicans, where maybe these people coming up isn't the worst thing, but to that credit, there are so many things where people will apply this very rigid line of argumentation. But then as soon as it's an issue that they have a different emotional feeling about, all of that goes away. You know, it's like, why do we regulate marijuana? We should just tax it and, you know, just have it be free and have it, you know, tax. Because it's like regulating it isn't working. And that sucks. I was like, you know, we're trying to make guns illegal. Well, what, you know, what do people think about places with, you know, no guns allowed? You know, they know the people in there don't have guns.
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Unknown C
And that's a horrible thing. It's like, oh, okay, well, we have like 13 million plus illegal immigrants. We need to deport all of them. We need a stronger border. We need to do. Aren't they going to try to immigrate anyway? Like, shouldn't we, like, try to find a way to facilitate this and make it. And it's like all the arguments for all the other stuff, like, go out the window immediately.
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Unknown A
It's insane to me because first off, as a libertarian, you want to reduce the size and scope of the state. And to do a mass deportation program like that, first off, is going to cost trillions of dollars to do. You're going to have to invade the civil liberties and privacy of so many people. Every employer in the nation, every person who's under a certain skin hue, will be stopped and asked for their papers. Like, that really is what would happen if we had a mass deportation program. That would be a huge violation of liberty all by the same thing feds.
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Unknown C
That a lot of these people don't trust because it's all gonna be federal officers that are doing the deportation.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah. That's the other thing that, that really just bugs the crap out of me. And, you know, for me, I'm a. I am a skeptic of authority. I believe that when you get power, it ultimately corrupts you, even the best people out there. Which is one of the reasons why I want to decentralize power. If you don't have a centralized power structure, you can't have an emperor at the top of it who's controlling every single aspect. When you decentralize that power out, you have more players on the board, more ability to Maneuver things and actually have movement as opposed to just the singular kind of thinking, which is, that's the problem with duopoly, that's the problem with the two party system. Because if you care at all about immigrants, you're some hippie lefty Democrat, but if you care at all about national security, you're some sort of warmongering Republican.
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Unknown A
There's. I mean, I believe in the military, not to go fight wars around the world, but I certainly want one to protect me from being invaded here at home. Doesn't make me a Republican. Just the same as saying, hey, you know, I recognize immigrants are human beings. They have inherent human liberty, they have inherent human worth. They can create things and create jobs and businesses. Oh, by the way, like, what is it, 40% of Fortune 500 companies are currently headed by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. Like, yeah, immigrants grow the pie. And so I don't like that simplistic thinking of they come here, they take from me, therefore there's less for me. Like, that just does not compute. And I think when we simplify our politics down that way, it's very easy to divide and conquer and lose that nuance you're talking about.
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Unknown C
Yeah, so. And then just my last complaint. I hate conservatives. Sorry, the. It's on that immigrant thing, it's the same thing too. Because it's funny that they'll say things like, like, we have to deport all these people. They're coming here, they're stealing jobs, they hurt the economy, it's not good. And then in the next breath it's like, we need to tariff or do something about Mexico, because everybody wants to build their factories down there because of all the, you know, workers that they have available. And it's like, well, how about instead of kicking them out of our country, then we just have them come up here and then they'll fucking build the factories up here. Like, what you're saying that there's a labor force that's so good to the south of our border or whatever, or apparently able to be so productive in these factories that we're losing out on, like China building factories or manufacturing down there?
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Unknown C
Well, then why not just let them continue to come up here? Like, what is, what the fuck are we doing? It's. Yeah, I find that a lot of. I'm moving a little philosophically, I guess. I feel like there's a lot of emoting going on when it comes to political positions in that when people are saying things, it used to be that a person would say something but the factual, like the logic of the statement would translate to something different. So somebody might say like I don't like immigrants, but that might actually translate to I don't like a certain race of people or whatever else or certain culture. But now I find a lot of it is just emoting. People are just expressing like an emotion. Like when somebody says like I don't like immigrants, what they really might be saying is that like I'm not happy with my job or life right now.
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Unknown A
Like everything economically insecure.
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Unknown C
That's a lot of it, basically.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown C
And it's all this amorphous. Yeah. And it, yeah, it drives me insane. Because any. Because the problem is when you can't identify the root of the problem, then everybody is just like going off into attacking the craziest things. And yeah, like you said, there is zero chance that there will ever be in the near future a budget surplus, at least under a Republican president. The last one we had was under Clinton who was a Democrat. So I don't know how. Yeah, the libertarian position of. And I know it's probably not like the true libertarians that are voting for him, but the Republicans have molested that aesthetic so much.
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Unknown A
To where there is a certain number of libertarians who think that, hey, if I go vote Republican, if I involve myself in the Republican Party, I'll make the Republican Party more Libertarian. My argument to them is that never happens. The Libertarian who goes into the Republican Party always gets more Republican. They never make the party more libertarian. They try their best, they get ostracized, they get singled out, they get primaried and they lose. And that, I mean, and that can be the most based pure libertarian error. You throw an R next to your name and you have to act within that. You have to get in that cloakroom, you have to caucus those people. You're naturally going to adapt more to them because there's more of them than there are of you. And you're not going to be the great game changer. And this is why I try to explain to libertarians we need to quit trying to invade the Republican Party to make them more libertarian and recognize that it's just not going to happen and brain drain from them.
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Unknown A
All the libertarians that are in this movement trying to do this and make the Libertarian party more professional and better functioning because there are small l Libertarians who have been trying to operate within the Republican Party. They do know the mechanisms of government. They do know how to run a proper campaign. They knew how to do these things well, they could take Those skills out of the Republican Party bring that to libertarians who philosophically are much more aligned but maybe don't have that deep of a bench. And like, I think that's a better thing for us to do to kind of grow the movement overall. You know, I might be biased as running for, as a Libertarian for President, United States as opposed to running as a Republican for Congress, but I think that's a better path for libertarians to take. Let's grow something else and try to tear down the two party system, make it a three or four party system.
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Unknown C
Can I ask one final question? I guess this is a big criticism that I have and a lot of other people have of third parties is sometimes it feels like you guys show up for the presidential election and then the more malicious claims to collect a bunch of money. But I think it's because it's the most visible election. You show up for the presidential election and once that's gone, the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, just kind of like recede from all of political life. Why do you think there hasn't been as much success or is there any effort put in trying to win more kind of like local municipality or state elections to have like a presence somewhere that you can point to and go like, look, libertarians are in charge of that. It's gone well.
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Unknown A
Yeah, there certainly is. You know, and I think that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. I think we have to have like there are people who argue we shouldn't even run a presidential candidate. We should only run locally, these races. I would argue that's a recipe for failure because you do have to have the visibility of the presidential campaign. Like when I ran for president, I recognized the chances of me winning are very, very slim. Like the, you know, that multiverse that exists would be like the most rare one that's out there, one of the libertarian ones in 2024. But what I can do is do a really good job of being an ambassador of our philosophy, being like, you know, the outward face to people, to introduce them to libertarianism and to maybe get them involved in their local party, in their local races.
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Unknown A
And so yeah, I think it's important for us to run a presidential candidate. But yes, we do try to run. And in fact, we in the past have run more candidates than we're running now. My focus over the next four years is, is actually professionalizing our party so we can run more candidates locally across the country. I want to see more city council candidates. I want to see more, you know, Aldermen you got to start from somewhere. We had a great thing called the Frontier Project a few years back in the Libertarian Party where we focused on winnable state representative districts, particularly in Wyoming. We ran in like three or four of them. We won one of them, one loss by like less than 50 votes. And so, like, we put ourselves out and we elected a state legislator, which is something we hadn't done in a generation.
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Unknown A
I find that to be very useful. Let's identify the most winnable targeting races and find a good Libertarian to run in those and really push those. We don't have to run every race across the country. We don't have the resources to. But we ran about 400 candidates in 2024. My goal is in 2028 to be able to properly fund and support at the national level, 800 candidates to double it. I mean, that's not. It's not crazy. I mean, how many thousands and thousands of candidates the Democrats and Republicans run?
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Unknown C
When you say 800 candidates to the national level, you mean for like, state anything?
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Unknown A
Anything state, local, national offices. But across the country, 800 libertarians running in races that are being well funded, supported by the Libertarian National Party. Given the proper, you know, you know, email support, social media support from the national party, I think we can make that happen. And again, really, over the next four years, as we see Trump and the Republican Congress not being very Libertarian, I think a lot of libertarian ish people might take a second look at the Libertarian Party for sure. But to your point, that is a very common thing. Jill Stein deactivated her Instagram account right after the 2016 election, reactivated it.
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Unknown C
Right.
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Unknown A
As she ran again. Right. Where did Jill Stein go in those intervening eight years?
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Unknown C
Moscow. Sorry.
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Unknown A
Yeah, but I think, you know, I think I'm going to continue to stay busy because if I do run again one day, I don't want it to be like, hey, I ran. I disappeared for eight years and I ran again.
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Unknown C
Yeah. Remember me? Yeah.
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Unknown B
I guess if I could maybe like, reiterate, why isn't the Libertarian. I need to get this word out of my mouth properly. Why isn't the Libertarian Party running locally more often? Like, what are the barriers? Is there specific barriers or is there no will?
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Unknown A
Yeah. Well, it depends on the state. Like, so, for instance, here in Georgia, we don't have local ballot access. So for us to run a candidate for, like, state legislature or, you know, an office that's partisan, we'd have to collect thousands of signatures, and we have the highest ballot access threshold in the country. And so we've, you know, not run members of Congress or for state legislature for George.
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Unknown C
I'm curious, what is how many signatures do you need for ballot access?
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Unknown A
So I think. So when I ran, when I was looking at running for Congress, they said basically it was like for each congressional district, 27,000, something around there. And so you want to get a buffer of about 35,000 signatures because they're going to toss a whole bun out.
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Unknown C
Damn.
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Unknown A
I mean, that's for a single congressional district.
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Unknown C
Okay.
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Unknown A
So that makes it virtually impossible. We help 5% of registered voters in the district.
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Unknown C
Jeez. Okay, we were trying to run. We helped a guy run for mayor in Omaha. And I think to get on that ballot, I want to say it was like 2,000 signatures. That's crazy.
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Unknown B
Georgia uniquely.
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Unknown C
He said it was a high.
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Unknown A
Georgia is uniquely bad about it. We did have statewide ballot access. Unfortunately I didn't get the numbers to secure that in the 2024 race. So we're going to have to do a ballot access drive to get statewide ballot access again. But. So some states are like that. Some states, they just don't have enough of a party apparatus. That's another thing that I want to focus on is actually building up the inter party apparatuses in state so they can properly support running a candidate. Because. And it's one thing you figure out when you run for office, it's not just you. Like certainly wasn't just me running for president. I had a comms director, I had a media director, I had logistics people, I had field directors. Like I had a. I had a staff of dozens and then a thousand volunteers. If you're not able to have at least two or three people who can help you, why run in a race?
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Unknown A
So we have to be able to provide that inter party support in some states that just the party itself is just not organized enough and I would like to see that improve.
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Unknown B
Is there a lot of funding barriers? Because if you want two to three people behind you, you need to pay them.
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Unknown A
Yeah, there certainly is. So like if you look at kind of the fundraising numbers. So when I ran for US Senate, Warnock and Herschel Walker combined spent about a quarter of a billion dollars. In the race, I spent just over $20,000 and I forced the runoff, which was great for the price of a used car. Running for president, Kamala Harris had over a billion dollars. I had under half. I had right around half a million. And so there's definitely a resource differential there. Part of that is, hey, you haven't won. Why would I give you money. And if you're not running something that's very different from the Democrats and Republicans, if you're just running this Republican light, why are they going to give you any money? They'll just give money to Republicans. This is another argument why I don't like the Libertarian Party kind of acting as a JV team for the Republican Party.
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Unknown A
I would say the same thing for the Democratic Party because why, why skip the middleman, just go right to them if you're going to vote for them. So I think it's important for us to be very different or else we're never going to get that fundraising.
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Unknown C
I do think it's interesting that I've been having conversations with people that are running for the DNC chair recently. And one of the things that the DNC is looking at is like dramatically reforming the way that they are organized. Because even the organization and the main parties is pretty disastrous sometimes. But they enjoy a lot of entrenchment because they're there and that's who people vote for. But you know, we've done a lot of work in terms of organizing canvassers and door knocking and doing a lot of the on the ground work. And it's, it's crazy coming into the environment and assuming that like, okay, we're stepping in, like, I imagine that this is how things work. These are all the people that do these things and like here's like all the systems and everything. But instead it's like, okay, hey, what's up? We're here. Like, let's rebuild these campaigns literally from the ground up every single time.
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Unknown C
And it's like there must be some kind of like revolving talent or people that do this like long term. And it's like, no, the really good ones go to D.C. and they work with some of the national level candidates. But otherwise you're basically like rebuilding everything from the ground up every single time. Even getting support from the party is really difficult. So even the, even the main parties have this issue and I feel like rather than identifying it as like, well, the main party has, there's no way like a third party could solve it. That, that could be like an opportunity where a third party is like really slick at organizing, could, could gain a real edge there by having like established people that are working on projects long term that have good communication with everybody else that people can kind of draw from. I think it would be something really good to work out.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Oh yeah. I mean, there's a very limited number of professionals who know what they're doing. In fact, I had a registered Democrat and a registered Republican on my campaign staff because I needed people who had that relevant experience who had done it at the national level. It's one of the reasons why my campaign was managed by the person who managed Joe Jorgensen's campaign, because I was like, well, you know, he's at least managed national campaigns in the past. He's been a national chairman of the party. So, like, we're not starting from scratch. But you're right. A lot of times it's like, you're just, hey, hey, guys, let's get in here and reinvent this thing called the wheel. And the wheel's already been invented. We should be able to pass that knowledge on. I think that's one of the things we need to get better at.
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Unknown A
One of the things we did a few years ago in the Libertarian Party that I think was really, really valuable is we had regional trainings for both affiliates and for candidates. And so we had professional people who had run campaigns or properly run a state or local affiliate in the past, and we traveled a country from region to region, free for any Libertarian Party member who wanted to come and learn how to do it. I think that was a great program. If I were able to wave a magic wand, I would do something like that again with the Libertarian Party because I think it was valuable because we were able to run. It was in 2020, I think we had, you know, 200 people elected just in Pennsylvania because they identified races that had no one running running unopposed. They ran in those races, or ones that were only one opponent.
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Unknown A
They identified them. They ran really well. And that's how you got a huge backbench of people. We needed to be doing something like that.
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Unknown C
Yeah. For those races, like, people. Because my audience is young. So now these fuckers probably vote. You better be voting. They should be. But, like, when you open an actual ballot and you look, you know, the top of the ticket, and maybe you've heard of a few of the referendums, but otherwise there's a whole bunch of names on there that just maybe having seen, like, a single ad, maybe it's the difference. Like, oh, I heard this guy. Like, I like this dude. So having any presence at all would be helpful because a lot of people don't know. I don't know the judges. I don't even know we elected judges.
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Unknown B
Oh, okay.
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Unknown C
I'll vote for this guy because he's got the R next to his name or the, you know, whatever. Yeah, so having. Yeah, having that, like, on the Ground support across, especially for unopposed races, I think is really good. I like the strategical approach to doing a lot of the organizing because I think this might be in contrast to a lot of your views. But one of the things that I came into politics expecting a lot, kind of like eight years ago was it's like super corrupt. There's trillions of dollars and everybody's bought and paid for in the lobbyists and blah, blah, blah. So stepping in the thing that I was shocked about is holy fuck, first of all, nobody makes any money here. Everybody's broke and poor as fuck. I understand now why everybody wants to go to private industry, because why the fuck would you work in politics if you're trying to make any money at all?
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Unknown C
So the talent pool is already competing really heavily with the private market. And then just the amount of money available for like volunteers for canvassers, for campaigns, everything is like stretched so thin. And the skills and the know how and the talent are just like you. Like, if you find that one guy who can run a campaign, you like want to hold onto him for dear life and hope that he doesn't get like drafted up to something bigger. Yeah, man. There's a lot of like organizing related issues. It's way more chaotic than I would have ever expected. Coming into things, I can tell you.
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Unknown A
About the cost of things. So a great example of like limited number of people and raising the cost because of that, signature gatherers. So normally, you know, in a given year, you know, you pay 5 to 7, maybe $8 for a signature when you're doing per signature this year, because we had in New York, you know, you had L. Robert Kennedy, me, Jill Stein, you had all these people trying to run the price of like signature gathering went up to like $17 a signature. And so like, because there's just a limited number of people who have the compunction to go door to door to get or stand outside of a shopping center and get people's signatures and do it.
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Unknown C
Well, just to be super clear, just because of the way you're phrasing that I understand you're talking about like the hourly wages you'd pay about what it would amount to be. So like, if you expect to get a thousand signatures, you're probably paying about $17,000.
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Unknown A
Typically, as I understand, people are paid per like you're paid based on you bring in 500 signatures in that day.
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Unknown C
Okay. Or for the person. I'm just saying, because you can't pay a person to sign a signature.
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Unknown A
Yeah, no, no, yeah, Signature Gatherer, not what you're paying people.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Lord knows, trust me, if you're having to pay people $15 for a signature, Libertarians wouldn't run anywhere because we ain't got no money. No, but the truth is, is, like, that is, you know, law, supply and demand. That. And there is a certain number of professionals. And you're right, they're competing with the private marketplace a lot of the time. And, you know, for me, politics is about finding the right people to do the right job in order to be successful. It's never something that one person can do on their own, and certainly they can't plan it all on their own. Now, one of the things I think you have to be careful of when you're running a campaign, though, is to not let all of those voices remove you from your purpose, like, from what your personality is. And that can be. One thing that happens a lot campaigns is they try to curate you into being something that you're not.
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Unknown A
And that's where we see all this fakeness from politics. It's where you see. We were just talking earlier about Kamala Harris pumping her gas and how it looks so unnatural because it's probably been a while since she's pumped her own gas. Those kinds of things.
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Unknown C
Have you. I'm gonna be that guy. I hate to be that guy. Have you seen the Wire? I love the Wire.
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Unknown A
I have seen the Wire. Love the Wire. Yeah.
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Unknown C
It's interesting watching Carsetti's journey through, like, politics is, because you can see, and I imagine, obviously, like, the writers tracing a lot of. Into real world politics. And you can see it happen with politicians where it's like, I need to do this to get this vote. And it's not like. Like, nothing is ever a huge step away. Like, people will see, like, who they proceed to be as, like, a corrupt politician. It's highly unlikely that he was, like, super moral. And then one guy came in and he was like, here's a million dollars. Be really immoral. And the guy's like, okay, fuck it, I'll do it. It's more like, I need to get this guy on my side. So I'm gonna, like, make this little compromise here, then this one here and then this one here. And then by the time you've built this whole Jenga tower up, it's.
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Unknown C
You're so inflexible and so hard to move on anything because you have so many obligations, like, socially and politically and then financially, that it becomes hard to, like you said, I think, like, represent, like, what you truly want to do and what you truly want to be in office.
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Unknown A
Yeah. I mean, you have to be. And so even running for president, you know, I was very, you know, aware of the fact that if I'm running for president as the Libertarian, I'm running for all the Libertarians. I'm running for the Libertarian tent. And so there might be policy areas that I want to stress more, but I know that are not being cared about by the voters or are not even care about, like the Libertarian Party in general. So it's like, I have to go, okay, well, I'm not talking about that because the voters don't care about that. I'm sure it's a great thing that I have a lot of knowledge on. But you know what? No one cares. And so I have to run the race that I'm running. I can't just, you know, just run the way that I want to, because if you do that, you're going to be missed by the conversation.
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Unknown A
And that's one of those balancing acts that you have to have, is keeping your authenticity while also playing to the voters and playing to what voters care about. Luckily, a lot of stuff I care about, the voters also care about, you know, economic issues, kitchen table issues. Because I am working class. That's the thing, you know, politicians. I always have to pretend to care about the guy who doesn't have $400 in their savings account. That's me right now. You know, I've been a working class person my entire life. I don't have to pretend to care about those people because I am one of those people. I have to pretend to care about the rich people.
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Unknown C
Actually, that's crazy because I feel like I don't think I've ever seen a larger limo than the one that you showed up in today.
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Unknown A
When you're talking about. I know, stretch limo.
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Unknown B
Yeah, it's a really cool Hummer. Yeah. How. How do you end up running for president for the Libertarian Party? Like, what's, what's the story behind all this?
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Unknown A
Well, really, what started it is. So it kind of goes back to 2020. I had organized within the Libertarian Party a lot, and John Lewis, the congressman, had passed away, and there was gonna be a special election. And in a special election, you don't need all those signatures to get on the ballot. And so they were like, hey, we need a Libertarian to run for Congress. Who wants to do it? And I was the only one who lived in Atlanta, was like, I'll do it. I'll try it. It was a nine Week race. So I figured, what the heck, nine weeks, I'll be there, be done. And after I did that in 2022, we were nominating somebody for Senate, and they were like, you know what, Chase? You did a great job in that nine week race. You should think about running statewide. And I kind of balled around with it.
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Unknown A
And I eventually said, well, what the hell, I'll try it. You know, somebody's got to run. And I did. And with that, I had a really good debate performance against Raphael Warnock. Herschel Walker didn't even show up. I would have torn into Herschel Walker. I had so many football puns ready to go with him, like, it wouldn't have been pretty. And I think he did the smart thing, iron by not showing up. But I had a great debate performance with Senator Warnock. I was very visible. I knocked on thousands of doors. And literally the day after I got the runoff, libertarians from across the country started calling me, going, you should run for president. I'm like, you're effing crazy. I just spent a year of my life doing this. I want to get back to something normal. But after about a couple dozen people call you, you think about it.
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Unknown A
And so the guy ended up being my campaign manager, Steve Dosbach, said, listen, just create an exploratory committee, travel to a couple of states. Because I was telling, I think it's only in Georgia that people care. So travel to a couple states. And that's what I started doing. So as I traveled to libertarian events like Texas and Indiana and other places, I was getting a very warm reception. And that made me go, okay, there's legs here. And I actually put together a campaign. This is something, by the way, that most libertarians don't do. Most libertarians don't have the exploratory committee. They just wake up and they go, you know what? I'll run for president. I'm gonna. I'm gonna declare myself as a candidate. That exploratory phase was so important because it allowed me to kind of gauge the party, where we were at, what was important to them as well as do I have the support to win my party's nomination.
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Unknown A
And then, of course, I won it at a convention. We do it. We nominate our candidates at a convention as opposed to doing primaries. We don't know who our candidate is going into convention. And I won after nine hours and seven rounds of voting. Because the way it works is if you don't get over 50%, they knock off the lowest vote getter until you know, until the later round. And I ended up in the sixth round beating my other opponent. And then in the seventh round, I had to beat none of the above, because none of the above is always on our ballot.
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Unknown C
So who was the last person that was on the ballot against you?
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Unknown A
His name was Michael Rectinwald. He is a. An academic. He was a former college professor at NYU and then, I think Hillsdale College. He also worked at. He is a. He was definitely somebody who was kind of more on the kind of right edge of things in terms of like, just kind of his personality style. And crazily enough, like, Trump came to our convention and spoke, which I was kind of against him doing.
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Unknown C
I watched this. I think. I feel like I remember seeing this.
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Unknown B
Why did he come?
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Unknown A
He came to try to get our.
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Unknown C
Votes because Libertarians are like. They're like the sexy Republicans or Republicans have adopted that aesthetic so much. Not. I'm sorry, every time I'm saying this, I don't mean to apply it.
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Unknown A
He was invited. He had met with our Libertarian Party chair, reached out, invited him. I was against that. I'm still very much against that.
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Unknown B
Why did the chair invite him?
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Unknown A
Because she thought, hey, if we deliver Libertarian votes for Trump, he promised to give us a libertarian in the Cabinet. Libertarians and top posts and to free Ross Ulbricht. Right now, two of those have not happened. We'll know in a week whether he frees Ross Ulbricht. I hope he does. I really do.
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Unknown C
Ross, he was the Silk Road guy, right?
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Unknown A
Silk Road guy, yeah. And I hope he is freed for his sake, for his mother. Lynn's sake is like the sweetest woman I've ever met. And for the activists who have been fighting for this for a long time now, if he does it, I will be. I will thank our Libertarian Party chair for putting that into his ear. I will thank other people for fighting for years for this. The person I will not thank is Donald Trump, because he knew about Ross Ulbricht four years ago. Could have freed him four years ago and didn't. He waited until it was used as a political tool to get votes. And I find that to be disgusting.
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Unknown C
Have you ever been. Have you been to Miami before?
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Unknown A
Yeah, have.
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Unknown C
Okay. I think I met his mom at the Miami Libertarian Convention just to fill.
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Unknown B
The, like listeners on Silk Road. What is the Silk Road? Why is this relevant?
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Unknown A
So Ross Ulbricht developed a website called Silk Road that allowed people to anonymously purchase things on the web using Bitcoin. So basically, there was untraceable purchases and of course, you know, people would buy and sell drugs and all sorts of other things on there. You know, he was kind of like, I'm not. The only thing that he did stop on his platform was child sex exploitation, which is a good thing to stop. But everything else, he was like, hey, Wild West. And he got busted under drug trafficking and other charges. But I find that to be crazy because he got like four life sentences and he was made an example out of. And what I find to be funny is that on X or on Meta today I can go buy drugs, but Zuckerberg or Elon Musk are not being thrown up as traffickers. There's a whole lot of other stuff involved in the case.
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Unknown A
That's just the part I will say.
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Unknown C
To be fair, because I think I brought this up once the stream and had a bunch of people email me. I, I haven't like dug deep into this.
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Unknown A
People say, oh, well, didn't he try to hire a hitman? Yeah, but the truth is, is that he was never charged with that. That was never part of the case that was brought against him. That, you know, that is not involved in the charges that he is in jail for right now. If that were to occur. Sure, bring a, bring a trial for that. But what he's in jail for right now is for charges related to that website and the trafficking and things like that, but drug trafficking rather. And so for me, I want to see him free. I think as a libertarian, you know, I think broadly speaking, he didn't do anything really wrong. If people sell drugs in your platform, I think that's, you know.
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Unknown C
But Silk Road, that was all behind Tor as well, right?
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Unknown A
Yeah, it was, it was like a, it was like a dark web. I don't know. I am a tech Luddite, so you don't want to really ask me all the specifics of all that, but really that was a promise that was made to libertarians and I imagine some libertarians maybe voted for Trump for that promise or for the promise of libertarians and top posts. And in that time we have been told, well, RFK Jr. Is technically a member of the Libertarian Party because he tried to win our nomination. So he's the libertarian in the cabinet. And a lot of libertarians are not buying that. Some people try to say, well, Tulsi's very libertarian esque, but she just flipped on fisa, which is like the biggest thing that you would not want a Director of National Intelligence to flip on. If you're a libertarian, you'd want them to be opposed to these kinds of things.
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Unknown A
So I think that's going to leave people wanting again. This is why I think we have a chance to grow the party over the next four years is Trump flames out. But I do want Ross free. I do.
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Unknown C
I will say I think I did. I think I heard him bring up Ross like, two weeks ago. I feel like I heard that in a. Either a speech or campaign something or when a campaign thing. But I feel like I heard that name again out of his mouth. So maybe, who knows?
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Unknown A
I know Thomas Massie's been mentioning it and trying to keep it in his ear, and I hope he is freed. And if he is, good on him. And I'm glad Ross is free, but I don't think that's reason enough to vote for Donald Trump.
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Unknown B
Do you think with Ross there was a bit of an Al Capone situation? Or like Al Capone was arrested for tax fraud, even though the crimes that he was actually doing were, you know, the drug trafficking and stuff, but also like, racketeering and there was lots of assassinations and stuff? Because my understanding with the Ross case is that they had pretty strong suspicion about the hitman and stuff. And they also wanted to make example because they didn't like the Silk Road. And so they could hit him with the drug trafficking. Because the hitman stuff is a lot harder to try and get evidence for and whatnot, which is why they kind of, like, slammed him.
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Unknown A
Yeah, I mean, I don't know how strong that case really would be because, I mean, I know for a fact there's a woman who was on death row in Georgia because she hired a hitman to kill her husband. Right. So if they can do that for the average person, why not the federal government with all of its lawyers and all of its capability to do that, make that case? I don't know how strong that case was. All I can know is what he was tried on and what he's been convicted of. And what I think he's been convicted of is wrong, and he should be freed. And he's already served 12 years in prison. I mean, like, let's think about that. Like, there are people who have committed way more heinous crimes than creating a website that are free today that, you know, spent way less time in jail.
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Unknown A
And so for me, I think he was kind of made an example of to kind of scare anybody else from trying to do the same thing. So for me, I don't really consider that to be like, the hitman thing, to be really that strong a case. Because if it were, they would have added that onto it. I think that was something that was thrown out there.
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Unknown C
Sure.
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Unknown A
To create more controversy around this case.
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Unknown B
Yeah. I think with the Georgia woman, I could be wrong. But what I remember is the hitman that she tried to hire was actually an undercover cop. And so they've got like full voice recordings of her being like, yes, I know you're a hitman. Yes, I want you to kill my husband, which is why it was such a clear and easy case. But I could be wrong that I could be talking about a different case in a different state.
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Unknown A
But either way, I mean, I think, honestly, after 12 years, you know, most people have served their time. Like, I'm not a, I'm not a punitive. You know, I believe that justice should be restorative. Now, there are some people you should have to separate forever life in prison. But for most people, I think if you've served 12 years and you've been a model prisoner the entire time, that's the other thing. He's been a model prisoner. He's never created trouble. He's never been violent. He's never shown any kind of, you know, he's shown, he's shown remorse. He's like, I, you know, I will do whatever it takes to get out of here because I just want to live as a free person, see my mom again.
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Unknown C
Sure.
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Unknown A
And so I think there can be no better case for commutation of a sentence, and I hope he does it. But again, these are the promises that Trump had made to libertarians to earn their votes. And I'm seeing most of those not being kept. I think over the next four years, most of those promises are not going to be kept. And we're going to see a much more authoritarian Donald Trump even more so than his first term. And for libertarians who are out there who have maybe supported Donald Trump and didn't vote for me, I hold no offense to you. I don't hold any offense. Come back home, realize that you were wrong. I'm not going to hold it against you. I'm not going to make fun of you for it. We want you back in the Libertarian Party to build up a Libertarian Party. You don't have to settle for Democrats or Republicans.
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Unknown B
I'm going to pivot onto something a little bit different. Do you have a follow up on that same line of thought?
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Unknown C
I was going to pivot too, though, so.
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Unknown B
Okay. I feel like a really common thing that you have to contend with as a third party, particularly in America, is the Spoiler effect, which is essentially how just your mere presence of existing and competing takes away votes from the dominant party from winning. Right. That's the biggest concern is why are you here? Just vote Republican. Because you're basically like Republican light, like the junior varsity team, like you said. What's kind of your. So I assume you disagree with the spoiler effect. So what's kind of your contention against that line of thinking?
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Unknown A
Well, my first initial answer that I always give people is you can't spoil something that is already itself rotten. The two party system, the way our government works is rotten to the core. It's corrupt, it's bloated, it's inefficient, it has all kinds of graft involved. You can't corrupt that. It's already corrupted. And so I'm not spoiling anything now when it comes to, you know, well, if you, if I vote for you, the other guy might win. Well, that's not my fault. That's the fault of the people in power who don't give you ranked choice, voting, approval voting or anything else. They are just fine with the election being spoiled because it preserves their power base. What we're doing is we're putting alternative ideas out there that hopefully either one of them, two major parties will adopt in an effort to steal our votes and actually follow through, not just say it.
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Unknown A
Right. That's happened with cannabis and some other things that we fought for or we can shift that, you know that overtime.
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Unknown C
Did you say that's happened with Canada cannabis? Oh, I'm sorry, I totally missed that. I got really confused. Sorry, keep going.
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Unknown A
That was cannabis when we fought, you know, we were anti drug war in the 1970s. A few decades later, the Democrats finally have gotten involved in that and even John Boehner sat on the board of a cannabis company. Right. So the reason why we're out there is to put the ideas out there, to put an alternative viewpoint out there that either can grow and those ideas could grow outside of the two party system or finally get adopted by them. But if we're not putting the ideas out there, we're seeding the field and we're just allowing these two bloated, corrupted things to continue to do what they're doing instead of trying to hold them as accountable as possible. So if anything, I think it's actually more helpful to have third parties involved, nipping at the heels of the major parties and forcing them to maybe act a little, just a little bit better, even if just a little bit on the fringes.
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Unknown B
Okay. This Question has been bugging me this entire conversation, but I was worried it was a stupid question, but I'm just going to ask it because I keep thinking about it. Why. Why is the Libertarian Party so associated with the Republican Party specifically? I, I think I know, but for example, a lot of things that you guys might care about, like reducing like drug sentencing or getting like decriminalizing drugs and stuff, typically is more of a Democrat party stuff. So what historically has led to it? Do you think that that kind of union makes sense? Or do you wish that there was more of like a left leaning? Or do you want to just be fully third, like not associated with either?
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Unknown A
The thing is that libertarianism is kind of a. It's kind of a philosophy that can, it's a very big tent philosophy a lot of times. And you can be everything from like a constitutionalist to a hardcore anarchist. Like there's a broad spectrum of what people would say when they mean libertarian. The reason why I think it's more closely aligned in America with the Republican Party is because it kind of sprung out of the American Republican Party. In 1971, David Nolan and the others who founded the party in his living room, they were splitting off from the Republican Party for two reasons. They were continuing the draft in Vietnam and they were going off of the gold standard. Like those were the two things that really spurned the creation of the Libertarian Party and not just trying to have a libertarian wing, the very Goldwater wing within the Republican Party.
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Unknown A
That being said, libertarianism itself historically kind of came from the left anarchist field of thought, like the original libertarianism, before there was an American Libertarian party. And so it is kind of this weird amalgamation of left and right. There are issues that particularly stick with the left. Gay rights, ending the drug war, criminal justice, reform. And there are areas that stick with the right. Lower taxes, reducing regulations, you know, gun rights, reducing the size and scope of the state. So there are areas, there are policy areas that can really attract people from either one. But it's really about changing the philosophy of not making it left versus right. It is right versus wrong. It is, it is authority versus freedom and liberty to live your life in peace. And so my broad tent is this living your life in peace. You're not hurting anybody. Your life's your life.
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Unknown A
Your body's your body. Your business is your business. Your property is your property. It ain't mine to deal with and it ain't the government's to deal with. If you're living in peace and not hurting anybody, that's Very attractive to a lot of people. But then when you get into the individual policy prescriptions, that's where it gets muddied. And people kind of fall off in the fringes, and they either end up voting Republican or Democrat a lot of.
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Unknown C
The time when having arguments with people. One of the things I've noticed over the past probably, like, two years is I will never just give a concept. I always have to ground it out in an example. Because I notice that when people kind of talk more abstractly, you can get two people who are very much like, we should all have the freedom to live our lives in the way that we want and make the choices that we want and associate with who we want. And, you know, to be able to do things for, you know, our children and protect our families. And that's why my child should be able to be gay or I should be able to have guns. Like, both of those people could have said everything. And then when they get to the examples, like, hold on, they totally disagree. I'm like, policy level.
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Unknown A
I'm like, okay, great example of that. Yeah. I was in rural Alabama doing a breakfast event. And after the breakfast, I started handing out my. My business card, not just to the people who came to see me, but everyone else. Because when you're running for office, you've got to be a shameless self promoter. And this guy takes my card, he's like, all right, I got a couple questions for you. And he goes, what's your faith? Yeah. I was like, well, I'm a Christian. He goes, well, what do you think about homosexuals or women in the pulpit? I was like, well, I'm an Episcopalian. We do have women priests. We also have gay priests. I'm gay myself. You know, that's. And then he started going, well, I believe. And I said, listen, how about this? You raise your family. Don't neglect or abuse your children. Live your life as you want to see fit.
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Unknown A
Go to the church you want to go to the school you want to go to. And I'm going to do the exact same thing. I'm going to live my life. I will not abuse or neglect the kids in my family. I will go to the church. I want to live as I want to. Can we make a square deal that neither of us should have the government involved in our lives? And he goes, that sounds like a square deal. I said, good, you're a conservative libertarian, and I may be more of a progressive one, but if you have that mindset of, like, the government should not be involved in other people's decision making, even if I don't agree with it. That's libertarianism. And in fact, the very idea that there will be people who live in a way you don't like and that you don't approve of is central to the tenet of libertarianism.
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Unknown A
You cannot have everybody living the way you want because that's how you become a conservative or progressive libertarian. Say, raise your kid. If they're gay, they're gay, you know, whatever, do your thing. Hey, if you want to have guns in the house, have guns in the house. Just don't shoot anybody. Hey, if you want to raise your kids in a very strict religious household, you do that now. If they rebel against you when they're 18 and they don't talk to you anymore afterwards, they become a hardcore atheist, which does happen sometimes. That's the way the cards fall. But you live your life in peace, Just don't hurt anybody else. And like that. Lack of judgment is one of the things I've had to learn how to get over as a libertarian. I've had to recognize there are people who live a life that is very different for me, and that if they told me that you have to live this life, I'd be very pissed off.
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Unknown A
But I allow them to do it. And that's really what we need in libertarianism, and that's how we get away from that conservative fusionism thing. You know, I really don't care about the culture war. I want a cultural ceasefire. Like, please, can we stop talking about that when we have a lot of other things that are really important, least of all like, you know, the economy to worry about. I don't care about how, you know, if someone raises their kids a certain way, as long as they're not abusing or neglecting them, and that's fine. And now there might be different, different definitions of what abuse or neglect is. And that's when you go into the court. And that's why we have a court system, and that's why we have trial by jury, and that's why we have all those systems. And that's why I'm a minarchist and not an anarchist, because I do believe you have to have those minimum frameworks.
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Unknown A
But, yeah, that's where I'm at.
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Unknown C
I think my mom said, if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all. Like these little idioms. Yeah, for the culture stuff, it's like, if you don't. If you don't like it, just don't Be near, who cares? One of the things you mentioned earlier is kind of like this balancing act between like staying true to yourself, staying true to your principles, staying true to being a Libertarian versus kind of like making compromises that are pragmatic and necessary but maybe is a step in the other direction. Or like the, the libertarians they get, they become Republicans because they have the R next to their name. But then balancing that, I guess I'm curious, would you view it as a betrayal to the party if there was a Libertarian candidate who was reaching RFK levels of fame where he was hitting that like double digit popular support, but it was obvious he never had a chance in winning and the Republican or Democrat candidate said, listen, you can be either my vice president or at least like a big cabinet position if you join my campaign.
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Unknown C
Would you view something like that as being like noble in purpose and good, or would that be like a betrayal to the party and bad or.
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Unknown A
Yeah, I'd really like to think about it, honestly. Like, it's something that has obviously not come up to Libertarian Party candidates yet, but like, it's something that you would have to really think about, like what is the value of doing that? You know, there's a lot of things to weigh about that. Like when I ran for president, there's certain states that if you don't hit the threshold, you lose ballot access in the state for the party. And so it's like you could be doing real harm to individual states by doing that. But there could be an advantage, you know, and if RFK were an actual Libertarian, I guess we'd be having that discussion right now. We didn't have to really parse out. But yeah, I, I do think it's something that I don't dismiss out hand, I don't off the hand. I don't think it's something that is immediately terrible or immediately great.
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Unknown A
I think it would have to depend on the, the conditions, the candidate that they would be, you know, quote, unquote, selling out for? I don't think Trump would be worth it, you know, if I were pulling at 11% and Trump came and said, hey, you can be my vice president, I'd be like, that sounds miserable being your vice president. In fact, I really, really feel bad for J.D. vance right now because he's going to have to be that person's vice president. So I don't know, I don't necessarily toss that, you know, out just and say it's a bad thing. It could be a good thing. Okay, yeah, I am trying to be as pragmatic as possible there, of course.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown B
How does the Libertarian Party deal with the heterogeneous nature of libertarians? As you said, there's conservative and liberal ones. The big thing that I think of is the Mises Caucus. Obviously, that's a really big deal. A lot of people have labeled it as, like, far right and been very concerned with it since you were running for president. You're kind of the face and leading of the party. So I guess you have the really difficult job right now to talk to me about these parties without making them too mad that they want to branch away.
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Unknown C
Let me just play real quick for the Mises Caucus.
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Unknown A
Caucus. So the Mises Caucus is a group formed in 2017 by a guy named Michael Heiss. It is a caucus with the Libertarian Party. It's also a PAC as well. And it was kind of created around. They felt that our messaging was, quote, unquote, too milquetoast, that Gary Johnson and Bill Wald were not libertarian enough. That also, I know our chair had chastised the head of the Mises Institute post Charlottesville for using the words blood and soil, which, you know, has a lot of connotations to that language. And so people got upset. They created this caucus to be a response. And a lot of times their messaging can be very, very. What I would say is bold, antagonizing sometimes. And I don't think it's like, the best message for growth because, again, you want to have a happy warrior. Like, one of the things that Ron Paul did really well running in 2008 and 2012 is, you know, the Ron Paul revolution.
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Unknown A
Remember, love was part of that. Like, he flipped the words around like, love, because he was a positive person. He overall said, we can have a better world. We can do a better thing if we do this, if we fight for this, as opposed to kind of social. Social, you know, social war. You know, social warfare, this kind of culture warfare stuff. Like, I don't find that to be very useful. And it created this kind of internal schism the party. So much so that even running, I had to be trying to. While I'm also trying to introduce libertarianism to people who never heard from it, I'm also simultaneously having to try to explain to people, like, I don't hate you. I. You know, I have differences with your leadership. I obviously think a lot of the things that has come out of the Mises Caucus leadership, I don't agree with in terms of tone, in terms of policy, but I'm not trying to hate you.
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Unknown A
I am trying to focus on bringing people into Libertarian Party, but I still had to deal with that. And it was, it was definitely a handicap in the race. And for me, like, I, I don't think that the strategy is really growing. Our party, the Mises Caucus, took over in 2022. Like every position at national leadership, they, they ran the gamut at our convention since then, we've had a 40% drop in membership. We've had huge drops in donor numbers because people are turned off by the message. And it should not be an insult to you when someone says, hey, we're heading in the wrong direction. The message isn't working. We have to change the message. Oh, well, you just hate me and everything I'm about. That's not true. But the message is not working and we have to change our party if we want to grow.
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Unknown A
And I do think we have huge potential to do so. But you're right, there's always that balancing act. And for me, I've always tried to say, listen, if you're not, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything about it until you're challenged directly. And if someone says something in my face, I will challenge them directly. And in fact, there are certain people in this party that have said really rude things about me, very homophobic things. And trust me, the next time we're in a room, there will be words about it and I will be standing up for myself. But when you're running for president, you can't focus on all that noise necessarily at that time. But you're right, it's been a struggle.
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Unknown C
Something that's very frustrating is for the United States of America. You said it was core to libertarianism. I would say it's core to liberalism just in the concept of like democracies and liberal society. Not liberals and Democrat, but just concepts of liberalism, classical liberalism, things that lead over into libertarianism. Obviously, that you have to have room in your society for people that you really disagree with. And it can't be like, like people will say, oh yeah, yeah, like I believe in a 15 an hour minimum wage and I'm okay with this guy and he's only okay with a $12 an hour minimum wage. And I'm like, no, no, no, you need to be like, this guy wants like a 15 hour minimum wage and this guy thinks that there should be an, like an abolishment of Medicare. You have all of these people have to be able to be together in society.
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Unknown C
And you might need to be somebody who is pro or anti legalization of marijuana, but you have to accept that it could go the other way without society schisming. And I feel like as we've moved away from policy, I'm going to say almost completely because of the Republicans and the conservative party moving in these in very wild directions, but because we've moved almost entirely off of policy, the only things that we talk about now are these cultural issues. And it makes it impossible, I feel, to have these conversations anymore. Because if you're trying to talk about, like, what is the appropriate role or function of government in some economic or financial sense, or how it integrates schools, whatever, the conversation will almost immediately bleed to, like, well, are there, you know, are trans people going into the right bathroom? Or how do we feel about this?
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Unknown C
Like, whatever conspiracy nonsense is going on, or if everything has gotten so polarized. I hate that word, saying it, but, like, you have to come down hard on one side or the other. And the idea of people even being in the same room that can, like, deal with these things and be okay with each other has gotten impossible. And I feel like this would bleed over a lot into the libertarian camp, where as the rest of the country moves away from policy, it feels weird to talk about policy because now nobody else cares about policy. But then if you talk about social issues, like you said, there are socialist libertarians, there are conservative libertarians. Like, libertarianism doesn't necessarily connotate any or denote, like, any specific personal moral beliefs.
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Unknown A
So, like, I can tell you right now, like, I got a lot of pushback from libertarians because of my policy on trans young people by saying, you know, I don't know all the science. I don't know everything. I'm more inclined to let parents who have unconditional love of their kids and their doctor who takes the oath of do no harm to really properly, like, handle this as opposed to some random bureaucrat who's being pushed because of the culture war by one part or the other and one thing. Same thing, you know, across the board. You know, I think we should leave this to parents, doctors and patients even. And that's one of my. And I'll get it from the left when I say, no, I don't think schools should keep the fact that a child is questioning their gender from parents. I think that's something that a parent should maybe know so they can go through the proper mental health care and regular, you know, physical health care for their child.
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Unknown A
But to deny that to them just leaves the parents in the dark. You know, I would Want to know if my kid had any other things going on. And so, and I say this as a gay person who had. Was terrified of my parents finding out I was gay when I was young. And if I had been outed by my school, I would have probably hated them for it. But philosophically, I do have to believe that let parents and kids and their families lived through these things. And when I said that, so many people were like, he's a groomer. He. He just wants to trans all the kids. I don't want to translate it. First off, most kids aren't trans. Most kids are not. Like, it's. It's. It's a minuscule number of people that we're worrying about. And the fact is, is that if we're worrying about protecting children, this is what I always try to tell people.
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Unknown A
You're coming at me about protecting children, about trans kids. If you're worried about protecting children, how about the half a million kids who are in foster care in this country who are far more likely to be abused, far more likely to be sexually or physically abused by somebody, an adult in their life? How about kids who are abused at Sunday school? How about that? How about we talk about those things that's actually protecting the kids. But to worry about a few thousand kids out of millions and to make that the biggest culture war issue, which is exactly what they. The Republicans did that because they knew no one was caring about policy. They knew it was all gonna be about vibes. They were very smart to do it. Doesn't make it right. But for me, I had the plum libertarian position of, you know what?
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Unknown A
Leave the government out of it and let adults deal with raising their kids the way they want to. And for some people, that was a bridge too far. I was a child abuser. All these things, it's like, listen, I'm just saying maybe, just maybe, the department of Whatever the F. Shouldn't have to have control over every medical decision a family makes. And for that, I was labeled by some people as some sort of, like, radical. It's like, no, dude, like, trust me, there are certainly much more radical trans activists than me out there. I'm just somebody who says, let people live as they want to live and let families raise themselves and not have the government do it.
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Unknown C
No.
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Unknown A
And. And it just created a whole thing.
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Unknown B
I think one of the grossest things for me right now that I get frustrated with in society, that I'll be there. I don't actually think this is a left and right problem. I think that this Is like kind of a social malaise. And I don't know why it's happening, which is this kind of like performative virtue signaling feels like it's become. It feels like virtue signaling. And maybe, maybe this is just like a sign of aging. I don't know. Was a. There's always been virtue signalers, but I feel like it was especially like locally and community wise, you'd like know who they are and you'd be like, yeah, Jan, she says, she goes, she doesn't care. She's just like saying this because it sounds good. So I feel like maybe it's with the nascents of social media, virtue signaling is like the most important thing across the board, right?
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Unknown B
Where you have to say like, I really care about homeless people. And I'm like, great, so are you informed on like any policy that could help homeless people? And they're like, no, I just like really want to give them like housing. And I'm like, do you have any idea about like why people are homeless? Like, oh, you have no idea. You don't understand, like mental illness and addiction and how just because you give them housing, it doesn't actually mean that they'll suddenly just not be addicted to substances and whatnot. Like, or that their mental health conditions will be treated. Like, these aren't actually simple, simple problems with simple solutions. And I feel like increasingly the way that people engage with any of these ideas is just like this surface level performance of I care about this thing, but in every single way. Pragmatically, most people don't care about most things.
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Unknown A
That happens a lot. And I would say it's not just virtue signaling. I also say that happens a lot with vice signaling too. Deport them all. Okay, well, how are you going to do that? What legislation you're going to pass to do that? How much is that going to cost? How are you going to actually, actually facilitate? Or do you just want to yell at Brown people? Like, right, like vice signaling happens just as much as virtue signaling. And you're right. A lot of times it's just empty air. Nobody has a real solution. It's all about the feels and the vibes. Even whether they're good vibes or bad vibes. Whatever it is, it's all based on vibes. And like, I think that's something we need to get away from. We need to ask that follow up question to people. Okay, you care about the homeless.
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Unknown A
What are we going to do about it? We're going to give them homes. How are we going to give Them homes, Who's going to pay for those homes? Like for instance, like one of the things I, you know, I'm interested in starting to do this is long term. This is kind of pie in the sky. But I really want to start a non profit one day that helps people who are either elderly or disabled maintain their property, mow their lawns, clean up their, you know, clean up the outside of their house, make their property look nice. Why? Because it helps people in need, but also it keeps property values up in the neighborhood. You actually have a vested interest if you live in that neighborhood of, hey, give that guy 20 bucks to go mow the old lady's lawn so that it doesn't look bad in the yard, you know, it doesn't look bad in the neighborhood.
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Unknown A
And then you can push that out to more and more things, but ultimately if you're not doing something, you're just saying shit. And just saying shit isn't enough. Because when you do that, other people control your life.
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Unknown C
I remember the I had an argument with a guy that dragged in a week ago on my stream who was a conservative. And I was talking about how like all of these issues somehow became like national level issues for every single person. It was strange that, like people that are nowhere near impacted by an issue have really, really, really strong opinions. Like, is it driving their vote? And we got to the topic and I brought up like, well, there are people, you know, like everybody around the country cares so much about illegal immigration, even though nowhere near the border. I don't even know what's affecting. It's like, no, I think this affects me. He's like, I think illegal immigration has affected me. I was like, well, where do you live? I mean, you're from Texas. He's like, I'm from Washington. And I'm like, how many illegal immigrants do you even engage with?
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Unknown C
And he's like, no, like there's a company. And like I like, I see there was a company and I lost a bid for a job or whatever and it was illegal immigrants working at. I was like, how do you even know they were illegal immigrants? And he's like, I think they were.
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Unknown B
I'm like, why would you ask for.
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Unknown C
Their fucking your visas or their cards or their Social Security? Yeah, it's just like so funny. And I'm like, man, how do you have these people? Shane Gillis does like a bet on this and his Austin stand up. We have like these people in Pennsylvania who are convinced that like Mexicans are coming for their jobs. Like, bro, nobody's going to go all the way up to the rough world.
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Unknown B
Point at, like, the Filipino worker. Like, see, the Mexicans are taking it, and you're like, that person's not even Mexican.
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Unknown A
And then when you flip it around and you actually just start talking realistically, you will meet people. I met them when I ran for Senate in Georgia. We're a huge agricultural state. There are people who vote red till they're dead. You know, they're Republicans, but they'll be the first to tell you, I need immigrant labor. I need it. We need immigrant labor. We've tried to do it without immigrant labor. It doesn't work. We need people to come here and do this. And for me, it's crazy that that person will then go pull the lever for somebody who wants to deport everybody, who wants to deport his labor force and the people who are allowing us to have, you know, plentiful food, homes to be built. And you're right, macroeconomic, you know, it might affect one person. Hey, I lost a job on this. But houses are still being built and businesses are still being started.
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Unknown A
And it's not a fixed pie. That's the biggest thing we have to get with people is this economy is not a fixed pie. And adding immigrants to it doesn't take pie slices away from you. It just puts more ingredients to make a bigger pie. And, you know, for me, I'm love immigrant labor. I live near Beaufort highway here in Georgia. They call it International Boulevard. Why? Because there's, like, dozens of restaurants and businesses that are owned from people all over the world. I worked in maritime logistics in my own office. We had people from 40 nations working in my office. Why? Because it might be a good idea for somebody who's doing trade in Latin America to speak with somebody who speaks Spanish and knows the colloquial, you know, the dialect of Latin America. Right. Like, I don't know if that's the right word I use, but anyway.
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Unknown A
But the point is, is it's good. Immigrants are good. And this idea that, like, they took our jobs, I cannot stand that thinking because it's just not based in reality. Yes, they might have taken one job from one person, but they're creating more jobs. And if you own a restaurant, you want more immigrants. Why? Because you want to serve more food to more people.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Oh, and we have Patreon questions.
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Unknown C
Yeah. Okay, cool. Just kidding. I was about to ask a really stupid question. Who did you vote for? Trump or. But I would hope you voted for yourself.
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Unknown A
I did vote for myself. It is it is surreal seeing your name. So I got the question. Probably my most viral clip of me was when at the convention I was asked, all right, gunned your head. Joe Biden or Donald Trump, who do you pick? And without like any hesitation I was like, the gun would go off. And that became a viral sound on Tick Tock. And the way I knew about it is because my niece sent a text message, my brother going, uncle Chase, is TikTok famous?
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Unknown C
Oh no.
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Unknown A
And so my brother had to be like, I don't know. But for Some reason my 14 year old niece is hearing her voice in her TikTok for you page for some reason. So.
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Unknown B
So you'll be real sad to see TikTok go.
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Unknown A
I am actually really sad to see Tick Tock go. I like Tick Tock. I think it's a fun, it's a fun social media platform and you know the, the talk of, oh well, the Chinese government's going to take your metadata and know that you like kitten videos or whatever and this X and meta do all the time anyways for our government. So like par for the course, man. It's just, just because China created a more addictive social media app than American entrepreneurs could, it's no reason for us to ban it from the marketplace.
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Unknown B
How do you feel about it?
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Unknown C
Yeah, the legal arguments are pretty compelling on both sides. I think the government will probably win insofar as if we agree that Congress has the right to regulate that particular thing that has passed.
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Unknown A
Yeah, it's, it's.
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Unknown C
The legal argument is actually really challenging. But yeah, yeah, I think I'm generally anti protectionist when it comes to like trade and stuff like that. I think that the United States has the collective talent and ingenuity to crush anybody, put like you know, to the metal to actually work on things. And the idea that we would have to be like so pathetic and scared that we have to tariff everybody or we have to block everything else from being competitive with the United States, I think is a huge indictment on somebody's belief in this country.
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Unknown A
We're talking about VPNs too. They're just gonna get a VPN and sign into TikTok from Canada. They'll still use it.
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Unknown C
It's just, it's more insulting like when I hear these things about I. It gets so triggered when it used to be progressives and sometimes the left would trigger me because it feels like they're demonizing so much about America. But now because of the populist, I would say brain rot that's become so Popular in part and parcel of the Republican Party. I hear them say things like, you know, illegal immigrants, they're coming to this country to. To, you know, they want to steal our welfare and take over apartments and blah, blah, blah. Is that really all that America has to offer for you? You think they just come here to, like, do crime and shit? You don't think they come here to, like, work and do. Which they do.
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Unknown B
Wouldn't it be to do crime in a place that's less.
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Unknown A
Or culture like, or. Or.
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Unknown C
Yeah, or material? I'm glad people are trying to illegally immigrate to my country. My country's fucking awesome. Everybody should be trying to get here, you know.
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Unknown A
You know what tore down the Berlin Wall? It wasn't Ronald Reagan telling material on the wall. It was Wrangler jeans and Coca Cola and McDonald's and Rock and roll music and, like, the things that were slowly permeating into the Soviet Union beyond the Iron Curtain. That people were like, I want more Wrangler jeans. I want the Big Mac. You know, I. I want to listen to the rock and roll music, you know? And that's what tore down that kind of authoritarianism. Oppression is because they were so walled off from everything. We exported our culture. It wasn't bombs, it was Burger King.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And. And yeah. So, like, that's. That's. For me, I think that's actually one of the great things about American culture is that we kind of blend in from everywhere else. I want immigrants to come here because then we take the best things from where they're from. We make it part of our melting pot, and then we export that culture right back out. It's like, look at, like, you know, the way Harajuku and anime culture has come into the United States. Right. It came in the United States, became popular. Now it's even bigger than it ever was in Japan. Why? Because America absorbed it. It re exported it back out. And that's what we do with culture all the time. That's a good thing. That's a great thing. We. We are so blessed and, like, privileged to be that cultural touchstone in the world. Why anybody would want to get rid of that. It's crazy.
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Unknown C
It's like our number one strength. And then I, for all of the. Cancel culture and everything from the wacky, like the very far left on social media and everything, it's like, it's. I feel like I live in a surreal world sometimes. I hate that we always take these very small steps towards, I'll say, authoritarianism. We take these Small steps, and it's not noticeable. But, like, when I think of, like, what is impacting my life the most, it's hard for me to find. I don't know. Unless my son has, like, crazy radical trans teachers that he just hasn't told me, but I'm not aware of. But, like, the fact that in fucking Florida, okay, a referendum. And now maybe this is me being naive. A referendum is like a popular vote. How do we feel about a thing? The fact that in Florida we voted to bring back abortion at 57%, but the Florida legislature found a way to make it so you need a 60% of the votes.
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Unknown C
Like, there are states that brought abortion back to being legal again with less vote than what Florida voted for it, and we still have it. Illegal. Or the fact that I. This happened last night. I think a friend DM me or whatever. There was a. There was a. It's a. It's a stupid meme having to do with pornhub. But somebody sent it to me and I was like, oh, I can't open this. Or whatever. And the fact that I said that and I couldn't, because in Florida, if you try to open a pornhub link, the lady comes up and it's like, they are requiring to do this, blah, blah, blah. And I could open it here. And I was like, wait, why the fuck is this even a thing? How have, like, conservatives blocked in, like, seven states the ability to even go, wait, what the fuck is happening?
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Unknown C
Yeah, it's just like, this crazy to me that this is the party of, like, small government and, like, maximum freedom. And it's like, what's going on?
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Unknown A
Yeah, it's very much about, like, I don't know. It's kind of. And that's why. And I, you know, I laugh at people, too, kind of when they're like, oh, we're five years away from the handmaid still. We're not five years away. Maybe 15.
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Unknown C
Sure.
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Unknown A
Like, we're definitely moving into this kind of more moralistic thing. Or like, the government is, you know, particularly on the right, they want to be the arbiters of what is morally right and morally wrong. And so do the left. They want to do it, too. But theirs is all about, you got to be accepting of everybody. If you're not, you're just the devil. And so there's. There's a lack of nuance. That's what I think is the biggest problem with the Tea Party system. That's one of the reasons why I operate outside of it, is because there is no nuance. Because anybody who's nuanced gets ignored and steamrolled. When you're within those two parties, you can't have a nuanced position. I'll go right back to Thomas Massie, very libertarian Republican. How often does he get listened to by the other Republicans? Never. Never. They just, okay, he's this quirky little guy over there in Kentucky.
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Unknown A
We can ignore him. He's one of 435. We don't care. And that's the problem. That's the problem with our culture. We lack nuance.
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Unknown B
Question for you. If my understanding of how nuance can be built into the two party system is through caucuses within the Republican Party, if libertarians just got a larger caucus within the actual Republican Party, wouldn't the party just have to play ball with them? More like, I think of the Democrats that have kind of the Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus, because there's so many members and increasingly so, particularly in the Black Caucus, they just have to listen to them fairly often to get bills passed and whatnot, because they can kind of unify for their kind of select interests and advocate it for working with the greater party on different bills and whatnot. Isn't that where the nuance in a two party system can come from?
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Unknown A
Sometimes. But I think really right now the Republican Party has lost all of that nuance. Like, they don't really have that same division that you do. Like you used to have like the three stools of conservatism, like, like national defense, you know, moral, the Moral Majority folks who are really, you know, the really religious folks. And then like the business people. Like that was the three stools of conservatism. Those three legs have whittled themselves away to where now it's this kind of. That MAGA has kind of like become an amalgamation of all of them in their own way. And it's like there's no. And the other thing about it is there's no, there's no like definite philosophical principle to maga. It's really whatever Trump is liking at that time. It's one of the. So I debated Art Laffer of the Laffer Curve about Trump being a good president or not.
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Unknown A
And his thing was, well, when, when I talk to him and when I advise him, he does this, I'm like, well, what about all the other times when stupid people are advising him, Art? Like when people who have ideas very different from you, he really operates on whoever sells the last thing to him that sounds good in his ear. That cannot be A governing principle, and that's the real problem of the Republican Party is they don't have those nuanced. They have a few. They have, like the Freedom Caucus, Liberty Caucus, but they're very small. And overall, the largest caucus of that party is the Donald Trump caucus. Whatever he wants goes. They have fallen into a cult of personality. Yes, that would be a good thing in the Republican Party if it were to exist, but I think right now, as it's constituted, we're not seeing that.
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Unknown A
We certainly saw that in the 90s when you had the Contract for America and enforcing Clinton to cut government enough to have those surpluses. Like, it was done in conjunction with the Republican Congress that the surpluses came out of is because there are people who focus on, like, the economic stuff and solely the economic. That doesn't exist anymore. It's this weird social club thing that MAGA is. And then there's the remaining Republican glommers who are still part of that old establishment, who are still there. I think, Honestly, the next 20 years, the Republican Party is not going to exist. It's going to be. It's going to fracture into something else.
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Unknown C
Once Trump is gone. It's really hard to see because, like, I don't think his kid has it. I think that people were looking at. People were kind of looking at, like, policy stuff. I was a big, like, I think Desantis maybe could win the primary right up until I saw him talk to the first voter ever.
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Unknown A
And I was, like, being awkward. Yes.
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Unknown C
Yeah. I was like, oh, no. Yeah, this is not it. And it's like, it really does come. But even the fact that I thought that I was like, well, what does that say about, I guess, our political leaders, or at the very least, like, how we feel about the president, is that it has to be like, I guess, the funniest guy or the most comedic guy. And there's. I don't think there's anybody that can step in and take. Take Trump's job, like, his role as being, like, the cult leader.
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Unknown A
He's unique.
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Unknown C
Yeah. So I don't know, like. Yeah. So, like, what are the, like, if you had asked about it, what are the policy positions of the Republican Party? It's like, well, we reject, like, you know, like, the billionaire big donor, mega business owners. No, you don't. Not now with. With Mar a Lago having more collective wealth walking in and out than the totality of, like, all of, yeah. Congressional wealth in the whole history of.
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Unknown A
The Congress, most billionaire cabinet that's ever existed. So you can't say that the party of the working man or the average guy anymore, because who's representing them?
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Unknown C
A billionaire who has the richest man in the world, like, whispering in his ear all the time? Yeah.
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Unknown A
And so for me, it is this confusing thing, but I think part of it is, is that. And Trump is very unique. That's part of it is that you're never going to find somebody replace him because he's kind of. He's irreplaceable. He's so unique. He's so great. He's the. No, but he's, he is irreplaceable. He's irreplaceable. And I think that that's what the Republican Party is going to struggle with after this next four years. If Trump had lost this election, they would have already worked on finding their way. Right now, that's what they would be doing. But right now they basically have given themselves a four year buy to have to figure themselves out. But in four years, I'm telling you, there's going to be major struggle in the Republican Party. And I think the people who are going to get pushed out the most are the old school establishment types, the Mike Pences of the world.
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Unknown A
They're going to get shoved to the side and they're going to have nowhere to go but the Democratic Party. Why do you think Cheney. I think Cheney was endorsing the Democrats this time because they're getting shoved out of their own party and they don't have anywhere else to go. And that's going to mess with the Democratic Party too. I think that was also one of the reasons why Kamala Harris lost. You spent more time on stage with Cheneys than you did with the members of your base that could have brought your base out. And nobody, no Republican goes out and votes for a Cheney. Like, they just don't like this. Just, they're not exciting people.
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Unknown C
Yeah, yeah. It's hard for having people like, being mindful and keeping track of like where the voters are on the parties because the neocon stuff is definitely aged out. Like, I think it was kind of turned on its head eight years ago in 2016. So there is no appeal there in terms of, I don't even know if those Republican voters exist anymore.
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Unknown A
I mean, you still have the, you still have folks like, I mean, you're gonna have a neocon Secretary of State and Marco Rubio, you know, he's very pro. He's very much a neocon. They're not, but they're not the only driver of the party anymore. Like they were during the Bush years. During the Bush years. It was very easy. And I could say this because I was a Democrat during the Bush years. I was a forest libertarian. It's very easy to be a Democrat in those years because they are clearly the war party. We're clearly not. And then Obama got elected and all that went out the window and that kind of got muddled. And it's why I'm here as a libertarian. It's why it's what helped me discover it is going, oh, shit, the Democrats are full of it too.
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Unknown C
Yeah. Even on that war position, though, it was very obnoxious that, that the Republicans are supposed to be the anti war party. But something that Ben said the other night when we were talking to him is the idea that we've, like, become completely divorced from any factual world. And there are so many, like, slogans and things that Trump says where it's like, like, Trump will be like, there were no wars in my presidency. He's like, what are you talking about?
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Unknown A
That's. Tell it to the people in Syria that you had drone bombed. Tell that to the people in Afghanistan that were fighting Yemen.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown B
There's so many.
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Unknown C
There are so many conflicts. And now that Trump has been elected as like, the anti war president, now he's talking about, like, invading our allies everywhere. It's like, what do we.
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Unknown A
What. What happened invading Panama, like, you know, like, let's do this. And for me, it should have been realized. Like, Trump upped drone bombing more in four years than Obama did in eight. Okay. You can't say you're a peace president if you do that kind of st. Say you're a peace president if you are selling huge amounts of arms to the Saudis that are then being used against the people of Yemen and it's causing a million people to die of starvation or malnourished or just not having a home or just whatever this stuff. It's serious. And for me, I never understood whenever somebody says no new wars were started under Donald Trump, the first thing I will always say is, did any wars end under Donald Trump? Because if they didn't, Joe Biden ended Afghanistan. So by his very nature, Joe Biden ended more wars than Donald Trump did.
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Unknown A
Joe Biden's a pos. I don't like him. I don't have any love for Joe Biden.
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Unknown C
I have lots of love. My American hero, Steven loves him.
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Unknown A
We'll have differences of opinion on that. But, you know, I think ultimately, you know, foreign policy wise, there's not really an anti war major party anymore.
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Unknown C
Sure you want to do Patreon questions?
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Unknown B
Yep.
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Unknown C
I love you Sulac. I'm trying to avoid the sun right now. We move the chairs forward a bit, but the sun is moving. It's trying to get us.
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Unknown A
So what's up Patreon people?
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Unknown B
All right, so for those of you who are unawares, we have a Patreon and if you join even at the lowest tier, you can send a question that is basically guaranteed to be answered by the guest unless it's deemed inappropriate. Like I won't ask Dogwarts questions or anything like that.
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Unknown C
Which is patreon.com bridgesstudio Correct number one.
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Unknown B
This is from Real Viscoff. What does what do you think about the Libertarian Party becoming significantly more pro Russian? One example in particular is a so called Rage against the War machine rally in D.C. which from my understanding was organized by the Libertarian Party in which always features many pro Russian people alongside the Libertarian Party. The first event also featured Jackson Hinkle.
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Unknown A
Yeah, so just to put it in perspective, as far as I know the Libertarian Party itself was not officially funding any of that. That was done by our Libertarian Party chair. And I think that they should have had better speakers if they want to have an anti war rally because it ended up becoming a pro Russia rally. Here's the thing. I'm anti war means I'm anti authority means I'm anti imperialism means I'm anti Russia. I'm anti also United States wartime government too. It's very easy. Here's how easy it is to say as a libertarian who's a non interventionist, I don't believe we should be putting money into Ukraine for military arms. But also, Vladimir Putin is a terrible person. He should have no reason to be invading his neighbors. It's very easy for me to say that and that should be very easy for libertarians to say.
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Unknown A
But I think far too many gotten this idea that this whole thing was some sort of giant boondoggle to like destroy Russia by supporting Ukraine. I don't know, there's a lot of different things that go into it. But yeah, at the end of the day, I don't support conscription on either side. I don't support the United States funding either side. And I think it's stupid for somebody to cross their borders into another border and attack them. And that's exactly what Russia did. And the idea of, well, they were going to join NATO and Russia was going to have NATO on their border. Russia already has NATO on the border. It's called Finland, they're already there. And so this idea that this, the whole reason why Vladimir Putin did this is because he was forced to do this, if that's the case, then we have military bases all over the world.
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Unknown A
Does that justify every nation on world attacking us because we have bases? I don't think it does. I think we need less bases around the world. I think we need to stop being less imperialistic. But I don't think it justifies a war on the United States just because our government's doing shitty stuff. And so, yeah, it's very easy for me to be anti Russian. In fact, I was saying earlier, I met two men in Minnesota who fled conscription into Russia's army because they were anti war protesters at the outbreak of this. And they were some of the nicest people I ever met.
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Unknown B
All right, this question is from Mitty. Do you believe that most Republican voters are truly disposed to be Libertarian voters, or do you think that these beliefs are a necessary reform of the right that lost its way?
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Unknown A
Do I think most Republican voters today would just very easily just jump right into being libertarian? No, because a lot of them don't know about libertarianism. They don't really know the philosophy itself. So for them to just comfortably jump would be a really hard thing to do.
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Unknown B
And a lot of them are pro abortion as well.
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Unknown A
That's true.
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Unknown B
There's single voter issues on that.
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Unknown A
Yeah. So I don't know if it would, you know, it's not a seamless fit, but I think honestly, no political party should be a seamless fit for you 100% of the time. You know, there are times when even as a libertarian, a hardcore libertarian, I think maybe that's more libertarian than I am today. Right.
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Unknown C
Oh, I'm reminded of the Gary Johnson and the driver's license question.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown C
Oh, no.
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Unknown A
So here's the answer that he should have given. I want to see safety exhibited on the roads. Is the government the best people to determine that? I don't know. I've seen 90 year olds with driver's licenses who are terrible at driving. So maybe we could find a private organization that could better test people to see if they're safe on the road and get a license that insurance will say that gives them the right to drive under our insurance policy, there's a way to have licenses without the state. Of course, he got booed as soon as he was like, I want to see some competency on the road, then that was pretty dumb. I, you know, I think that was a great example.
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Unknown B
Right. Anonymous said there is plenty of room for you in either party, whether you're more Sanders or Kennedy. Why a third party, realistically?
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Unknown A
Well, for me, I cannot justify being part of any party that supports the military industrial complex, which is both of the major political parties, United States. If one or the other stop doing that, that it might make it a little bit easier for me to think about pulling the lever for one of the major parties. But up until that occurs, it's an. Absolutely. It's a non starter for me because if a party supported the military industrial complex as it currently exists, I cannot support them. So that's why.
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Unknown B
Gotcha. I know that you're decently anti welfare, makes it sound like you hate poor people like we already talked about, but in general it sounds like you don't want welfare as a government institution. So this person asked how would you end Social Security? Isn't there a problem for people who have paid into it, for example, into like Social Security, but have not yet been paid out?
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Unknown A
Yeah. So the plan that I had when I was running for president basically would say that if you're like my parents and grandparents, we're not going to change your benefits one bit. You're already living off that fixed income. You don't have the ability to get back into the workforce and do that from there. You would start scaling back the amount of benefits you would get up until you get to somebody who's like my age, in their mid to late 30s. In which case you would remove the employee contribution from Social Security, allow you to put that money into a mutual fund and save it for yourself and get a better return. You keep the employer contribution long enough to keep the system solvent to retire that last generation and then you weave yourself into a fully privatized system. So it is a. It's not a flip off the light switch kind of thing.
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Unknown A
In fact, I got chastised as being a socialist because I didn't want to just flip the light switch off by one of my libertarian opponents when I was running for the nomination. But I think something like that you have to untie. You know, if there's a thousand knots, you have to untie 999 of them first before you can fully separate yourself. So that'd be a transition period.
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Unknown B
Gotcha. And last question, this is from Eucharist. What one argument would you give to someone to try to persuade them to become more libertarian than they already are?
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Unknown A
Well, the one argument I would give somebody to become more libertarian is when you stop worrying about what other people are doing with their Lives in peace. You have more time to focus on yourself and your own business and your own life, and you can make better success for yourself. Because when you're more libertarian, you are more focused on the things you are doing, living in peace, as opposed to what other people are doing living in peace. And that just gives you a lot more time to focus on building yourself up and building your own life up. So, yeah, gives you more time for you.
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Unknown B
Gotcha.
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Unknown C
All right, Cool.
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Unknown B
Great. Well, where can people find you? What should they be looking for? Do you have any plans for the future?
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Unknown A
Yeah, you can find me. All my social media isforliberty on X meta, you know, Facebook, Instagram, and then on TikTok as well. Votechaseoliver.com is my website. It will still be around for a little while. It will probably be turned into something else eventually, but you can find all of my political positions there. I encourage you to check it out. And going in the future, I'm looking to build a Libertarian Party up for the next few years. People always ask, will I run again? Hey, if I run in 12 years, I'm still younger than Kamala Harris was this past election. I got plenty of time to think about that. But in the meantime, I'm going to build up a Libertarian Party so whoever runs in the future has an easier go of it.
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Unknown C
Cool. Awesome. Thanks a lot for joining us.
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Unknown A
Thank you.
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Unknown B
Remember, guys, if you enjoy Bridges, you should like and subscribe. Leave a comment down below. Tell us what you guys think about libertarianism. Did Chase change your mind on anything in this episode? And if you want to support the show, join us on the Patreon at Bridges studio. We have a ton of different incentives and a discord with unique access and content, so join us there.
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Unknown A
So what are the odds that Trump wants Greenland because he's seen a mercator projection map?
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Unknown B
100%. I bet you he saw it on Twitter. Same with the Canada Annex map.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
And just went just.
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Unknown A
The Mercator projection makes Greenland look bigger than Africa.
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Unknown B
Wait, why don't we have Canada and Greenland?
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Unknown A
It's actually an episode of the West.
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Unknown C
Wing where they go on to do that presentation.
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Unknown A
Yeah. And they're like, the map needs to be flipped over so that the south is on the top because otherwise we're being north centric.
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Unknown C
It is kind of weird if you think about it. There's no reason for north to be north and north and south to be south. Like, you could flip it and theoretically our whole solar system could orbit counterclockwise instead of clockwise. There's no real reason why, like, up is up or down is down in our solar system.
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Unknown A
Yeah. We just decided it one day and, you know, let's not redecide it.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown A
I'm sure they. I'm sure there were people who advocated for south supremacy back in the day. You know what? Map makers won.
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Unknown C
So it's also weird to think this is stupid. Where the equator is on the map is, like, very unintuitive as well. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I'm American. I would imagine, like, the equator probably runs through, like, the Panama Canal. It's, like, way further south or like. Like the equator is, like, between, like, Europe and Africa, but it's like. It's way further south.
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Unknown A
Yep.
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Unknown C
But, you know, such as maps, such.
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Unknown B
As life or, like, how Africa is, like, way bigger than it looks on any world map.
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Unknown A
On the Mercator projection for sure. Now, when you do the meridian projection, where they have the curve stitch stuff, that helps a lot. But that wasn't the maps I used when I was a kid. It certainly wasn't the map Trump used as a kid either. He probably grew up thinking Greenland is gigantic.
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Unknown C
Yeah. Or it's the only thing I ever knew about Greenland or remember about Greenland is if you ever played Risk, it was an important property to have.
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Unknown A
Yeah. That's what somebody said is like, it's great for the board because you get. What is it? 5.
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Unknown C
It's a plus 5 because you only have four territories on the thing that included, I think, Greenland to get bonus.
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Unknown B
Greenland and Australia were the best.
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Unknown A
The thing I remember about Greenland is from the movie Mighty Ducks 2 when the lady says Greenland is full of ice and Iceland is very nice because it's the reason. I don't know. It's always stuck with me.
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Unknown B
Iceland is, like, way more warm and, like, not tropical. I was gonna say tropical. Not really tropical, but, yeah, it's very nice.
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Unknown A
Springs and everything.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown B
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