004: How Libertarianism Went Off the Rails (w/ John Hudak and Andy Craig)

I'm Aaron Ross Powell and this is Reimagining Liberty, a podcast about the Cosmopolitan, a manspiratory, and forward-looking case for radical liberty. For years, I've privately called myself a libertarian because libertarianism best describes my commitment to robust freedom and my understanding of the threat government poses to that. But lately, I've found myself less willing to use the label when talking to new people, not because libertarian no longer accurately describes my political views, but because certain groups claiming the label have become louder and more visible and have, unfortunately, tarnished the term with an illiberal ugliness that most people, rightfully, find repulsive. I'm talking about the so-called paleo libertarians, those of the unfortunate libertarian to alt-right pipeline. They're ubiquitous in libertarian circles on Twitter, and lately, they've even managed to take over the libertarian party. To talk about these discouraging trends in libertarian activism and what it means for the future of the Liberty movement, I'm joined by Andy Craig and John Houdak. Andy is a staff writer at the Cato Institute, and until recently, was active within the libertarian party. John is co-founder of Faker Terrians, where he exhaustively catalogs and responds to the bad ideas and worse personalities among the illiberals calling themselves libertarians. We talk about what's changed in the years since Trump's rise, how so many have come to deeply misunderstand the animating values of the libertarian project, and what can be done to combat illiberal populism. I hope you'll enjoy our conversation as much as I did, and learn as much from it as I did, and be sure to stick around to the end for a preview of the next reimagining Liberty episode, as well as information on how you can listen to it right now, without any weight. If you run in online libertarian circles, it seems like things have taken a pretty grim turn over the last maybe five or six years in terms of a lot of people who claim to be libertarian, sounding awfully alt-right or worse, level of anger and disconnect from what feels like meaningful attempts at persuasion of new audiences and so on. John, is it the case that something has changed in the Liberty movement again over the last five or six years, or is this more just the same voices were always around, but, you know, say, Twitter has maybe made them more visible than they used to be? So I would say I do think something has changed, probably coinciding with the rise of Trump, but I would also say that you kind of, to get the full picture of things, you have to go back to the Rothbard Rockwell Paleo strategy of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which they basically called it, I think Rothbard referred to it as outreach to Rednecks. It was when they were endorsing Papu Cannon for president. They had these newsletters coming out where they were complaining about driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants. Lou was complaining about, like, there being minorities in the Mighty Ducks 2 movie. It was this weird, like, outreach basically to racist. I mean, that's the best way to put it. In Rothbard, it kind of changed his views on immigration at that point, because he used to be an open-border guy and he started talking about how he re-thought things and it coincided exactly with that strategy. And now Hans Hermann Hoppe was kind of Rothbard's disable at that point. He was basically his understudy. And I think he's a big part of the problem now, because a lot of so-called libertarians who oppose immigration go to Hoppe for their anti-immigration arguments. It's this whole convoluted thing about how net taxpayers own public property so we shouldn't allow foreigners and basically. That's basically the gist of it. But that's always kind of been hanging around. I would say that it did kind of take a backseat, like even looking at someone like Rockwell, I think he kind of moderated himself for a while, maybe even a couple of decades, until like right before the rise of Trump. And right when Trump was becoming popular, not even before he was nominated, but when he was becoming popular, I noticed a lot more anti-immigration sentiment in the libertarian community. I noticed people like Stefan Malinu, he did a total 180 on his immigration position. He started bringing on, as he used to be such a hardcore anarchist that he wouldn't even vote for Ron Paul. But when Trump came up, he started bringing on people like Ann Calturon to his show and talking about race and IQ and stuff like that. So I do think that it was kind of always hanging out in the background a little bit. But when Trump came under the scene, it really went forward. Andy, what do you think of this? Because like me, you have spent the last lot of years in the Washington, DC libertarian scene where this stuff is, it's not what most people are talking about. Most people in the DC libertarian scene are more focused on the national news media and who's getting media hits, who's appearing on op-ed pages and so on. And there's less of a focus on, say, the activist and the party wing of the libertarian movement. But what do you think of how things have changed over the last five or six years? I mean, that's definitely right. This is not the sort of thing, you know, what they would derisively call Beltway libertarians are necessarily focused on because, you know, we're at think tanks. We're doing real policy work. We're dealing with national media and members of Congress and stuff. And this is all pretty friend year relevant stuff to that. But I came up through the LP. When I was, oh, 2011 or 2012 or so, when I was living in Milwaukee, like most of the country, if you want to go to a local meeting of self-identified libertarians and outside of student orgs, the LP is about the only game in town in most of the country. So I think there's definitely that kind of split. And I think the LP made itself particularly vulnerable the way its rules are structured because it's basically whoever shows up and pretty relatively small numbers gets to control and govern the party. And some of these cracks really started to come up in kind of the broader activist wing of the movement during the Ron Paul campaigns and their aftermath in 2008 and 2012. And you know, when I was in high school, I was a big Ron Paul guy. The '08 campaign was my senior year. And then the thing that really kind of set me down the path of trying to figure out what's going on here is the newsletters. The Ron Paul newsletters that came out, which are of the same period as John was talking about as the Rothbard Rockwell newsletters. They're all from kind of the early 90s. And here's this kindly old grandfatherly figure who I thought was anti-war and I knew was kind of socially conservative but didn't seem hateful or anything. It was a very different kind of Republican. And all of a sudden these newsletters are coming out where he's under his name. It was just virulently racist crap. And so that was kind of really what it took me a couple years after that of kind of reading into the history, finding out more about the ideas and the late turn Rothbard had taken. And then after that it was kind of well all right. I'm not so much of a Ron Paul fan anymore and I kind of moved on. I'm still very much a libertarian. And then I happened to work for Gary Johnson in 2016 and Bill Weld. And I enjoyed that a lot and they were very much in the kind of what I would call liberal centrist sort of strategy for the movement and what they tried to do. They were too moderate for a lot of people. You can argue if Weld was really properly categorized as a libertarian all and Gary in his way was certainly a kind of squishy pragmatic sort of guy. He wasn't a hardline ideologue. And that rubbed there was backlash against that. And that I think really kind of kicked things off and it was round. It was partly the rise of Trump. It's definitely the case that a lot of the movement got dragged along with the right when the rise of Trump E populism came along. And I didn't see it happening in the party so much until like 2017, 2018. That's when things really kind of kicked into high gear and it became this internal political war within the libertarian party. And that's split. You see it in other aspects of the movement too. I just happened to know the party best. And it became, you know, I mean, this is the most charitable version of it is that hey, we're all libertarians and this is a strategy difference about should we, you know, outreach to the center or should we try to outreach to the kind of far right and super anti establishment populists and they do have their serious argument for why that's the case. But in the process, they become basically indistinguishable from, you know, the the proud boys or the oath keepers and that whole, you know, conspiracy theory far right fever swamp sort of ideology and they adopt all the positions that like on immigration are necessary to make that work. So both of you have mentioned that there were certainly say predating kind of the rise of Trumpism and and the rise of the libertarian party and Mrs. Caucus and it's take over of the LP and so on and the rise of Dave Smith as a figurehead or popularizer of hoppy and ideas and so on that there were there were elements of this Rathbard's paleo strategy, Lou Rockwell, maybe keeping it more under wraps than he would later that the the Ron Paul newsletters certainly those newsletters were published before and he want any of this was happening. So they were perhaps indicative of where things might go. But how much of what we're seeing now is essentially that this stuff was already there and it's louder or it's or that the movement is bringing in people with these profoundly illiberal views for for various reasons versus there was, you know, some critical mass of libertarian activists, party members and whatever who over the last several years became essentially gave up the liberal cosmopolitan view of liberty and were persuaded into this nationalist xenophobic anti liberal perspective. You know, the same thing it's asked about like did Trump create his movement or did he find it? And so I guess that same question about about what we're seeing in in kind of the activists and party wings of the libertarian movement right now. I mean, I would say that I think I think there's a little bit of both. They're definitely are bringing in new people, which I'll get to in a second and there definitely are some people who kind of shifted their world view as they kind of saw the broader liberty movement shift go into the right. But even looking at the libertarian party, Mises caucus, a lot of what they've done has not been convincing already existing party members, although some that's happened a bit. A lot of it is bringing in all these new people and they did this whole basically podcaster drive at one point, maybe 2019 where they got all these popular non libertarian party podcasters to join who were in the paleosphere like Tom Woods, like Dave Smith. And they brought in a lot of people who weren't otherwise involved in the party. And that's what you see a lot now. It's these it's new people being brought in and you kind of you kind of see them talk about it too. They're saying like we're getting rid of the old leadership. They weren't doing things right. So we're going to bring in these new people. Obviously some of them some of them have kind of shifted with the tide and become Mises caucus members themselves. But a lot of it is these right wing populist coming in out of nowhere. And on that point, one one thing I would emphasize is the scale of this thing. So with you know, it it seems like to us and we were kind of getting overwhelmed because these state conventions normally have 30 people at them and they show up with 50 new people. And that kind of overwhelms it. But nationwide, we're talking about two or three thousand people. And maybe kind of the broader sympathetic, broadest definition, you know, maybe it's 10,000. This is not in the scheme of real world politics. This is not some huge mass movement. But it's definitely the case that they, you know, they would talk about, for example, going to turning point USA and bringing bringing them to show up. We've seen evidence that they got their hands on and we're working some kind of either GOP or Trump mailing list and telling those people to show up. So that happens and kind of like the practical foot soldiers are new people being brought in. But it's absolutely the case that this largely, you know, I don't want to pin this as some kind of outside conspiracy because I don't think that's it. The predicates for it and the ideological strains were absolutely there in the movement and had been kind of swept under the rug and looked the other way for a long time. And if it hadn't been for that, there wouldn't have been that core who were able to kind of start organizing and then, you know, call in reinforcements from Trump supporters basically. Back when Trump was, it was clear that he was going to become the nominee. There was this very small cottage industry of articles from pundits, thought leaders, talking heads who had been Republicans saying, you know, I can't this doesn't this isn't my party anymore. This doesn't look like the Republican party that I, you know, that I signed up for. And and that some of them were saying it's time to join the libertarian party that the libertarian party is the place where, you know, those of us who care about free markets and limited government, but aren't xenophobic nationalists who engage in racist dog whistles can, you know, have our views expressed. And I had published a op-ed in the Washington Post back, I think before Trump became president about saying, you know, the libertarian, libertarianism isn't just conservatism light. It's, you know, it's a, it's own perspective that in, I think in important ways is fundamentally incompatible with the conservative worldview and certainly conservative politics. But there was something about libertarianism that made these, called them like the liberal conservatives, I think as they get called by the, by the post liberal and intergralist crowd, the liberal conservatives thought libertarianism is like a place for my liberalism. And that's always how I have, I have looked at it like this is, you know, the, the movement for radical liberty is about dramatic emancipation of people from relationships of domination, including state relationships, but that extends that it's about, it's about tolerance and it's about embrace of difference and then the way that markets can supercharge our self-interest in ways that create wonderful positive expertalities and, and break down cultural barriers. And so what like there's, it is a cosmopolitan worldview. I think that that kind of inevitably falls out of a commitment to strong political and economic liberty. And so it seems odd that these alt-right liberals who want to organize society along lines of race or ethnicity or traditional, I say, in quotes, gender roles and so on would be attracted to libertarianism at all. It just seems like just that it's diametrically opposed to their entire worldview. And so what is it that why are they ending up here? You know, there are, there are lots of other like little political parties that you could take over and there are lots of other labels that you can attach to yourself. Why do they feel like they have a home in our movement? Well, I think part of it is that, and this is a failing of libertarians and more broadly over the years. You know, we're, it's precisely because we are very radical. We want big radical change. We want to basically tear down in a lot of ways the existing status quo. You know, if you want to talk about the establishment kind of the, you know, we're very much against the kind of Bush era, neo-conservatives, the hawkish foreign policy establishment, the, you know, drain the swamp, it has its kind of appeal to libertarians. But the downside of that is then you can end up with people who want to tear down the status quo and replace it with something worse. And that kind of became the thing is if you're a kind of, you know, radical alt-right type, I think that's how it can get conflated is that the word libertarian kind of came to connote, "I'm a radical, terrible, down sort of guy." And if you're opposed to kind of the, what we could call in the broadest sense, liberal consensus, that is kind of the operating system of America as much as we disagree on a lot of policy issues with basic Republicans and Democrats, you know, they basically operated within the constitutional system and its classical liberalism and its fundamental rights, in way, you know, they crossed those boundries in ways we opposed, but they weren't fundamentally against it. And so, you know, I think that very much goes back to Hoppa and Rothbard's reason for the paleo strategy, which is, you know, "Hey, we want to kind of radically replace the existing state, and these people want to radically replace the existing state." So, well, we must be natural allies, even though the direction they want to move in is really diametrically opposed, is the opposite direction. But that kind of gets lost in that discussion. And the Rothbardian paleo strategy sort of strain was an influence kind of not exactly within the libertarian movement, certainly not the people who were in the party at that time. But in kind of, you know, online spaces as the alt-right started to gel together and became a thing, it's absolutely the case that some of them, there's a lot of people who forthrightly call themselves "ex-libertarians" among it. But there's a fair number who, you know, basically thought, "I can do this and still call myself a libertarian." I think a big part of it, like Andy was saying, is the whole anti-establishment thing. Like they see that we don't like the status quo and they don't like it either. They want something radically different, but they still call themselves "libertarians." And I think some of that has to do with the whole conservative libertarian fusionism, where they kind of saw libertarianism as basically just being like Republicans who smoke weed. I also think they have kind of a different, especially people like Hapa. They have kind of a different basis for their libertarianism than a lot of others do. Like rather than saying that libertarianism stems from cell phoneership or self-atonomy or freeing people, I see a lot of them like to say that just libertarianism is about property rights. Like that's just the one line description for it. And if those property rights aren't about promoting freedom, they kind of turn it into this whole neo-reactionary feudalism almost where property rights are a way for people to be excluded rather than a way to actually bring freedom to people. The property rights thing is interesting because it seems like there's an odd move going on there which is to take individual property rights and collectivize them as a way to exclude or to say, you know, like if I own a piece of land, I essentially my right to that, my property right in that land is I can do what I want with it, but also that you, John or Andy, can't come on and mess with it. You can't like change the nature of my land by digging it up or putting a building on it or some other way that destroys my use of it. And so it's that my property is subject to being prevented from having external forces change it in ways that I dislike. And it seems like what a lot of, you know, like there's the really dumb anti-immigration argument that you hear all the time which is, well, would you let anyone just come into your house? You know, like you get to say who comes into your house and so why shouldn't we be able to say who gets to come into the country? And there's this weird, like, what does we mean in that, you know, like you can say you don't want immigrants coming onto your house. I mean, I think that's weird and you should probably welcome them because immigrants are great people, you know, and you probably benefit from hanging out with more of them. But you can do that, but like your house is not the nation. You don't own the nation. And why do you get to decide for the rest of us? But there does seem to be this odd. It's not that we have individual property. It's that we now have a property in the culture. We have a property in the demographics. We have a property in the values and that we can protect those via violence from via coercion from people we disagree with, whether that's cultural liberals or its immigrants or its people of different religious groups, changing the nature of the culture, which is deeply bizarre and doesn't make any sense from a property rights standpoint. But it seems to be like the fundamental move, but it's also like, as I said, it's like a betrayal of the nature of, I mean, like, I don't think libertarianism is just about property rights. But even if you say it is, it's like a rejection of the libertarian conception of property rights. Well, it's interesting, too, because a lot of these types actually call themselves anarchists, even though they're for immigration restrictions. Well, they say that they're actually against immigration restrictions in the future and they want private property borders. But they say that while the state exists, it's, they say something like open borders is just as bad as close borders because it's a compulsory opening. They have this whole mental gymnastics thing with the net taxpayers, too, which basically says that if you pay more in taxes, then you receive back from benefits, which I don't even know how you could actually really calculate that if you're talking about like use of public roads and things like that. But they're saying that if that happens where you're a net taxpayer, then you are the rightful owner of public property and someone who's not a net taxpayer, like they never, they never really talk about like someone who's not an act net taxpayer who's actually in America. They're actually talking about like someone who's not a net taxpayer who's in Mexico. They say that the libertarian thing to do there is to, unless they're an invete or I know they have this whole thing where if you invite someone to the public property, you have to like be responsible for any damages they cause or like pay a bond or something like that. But they say that if you're not a net taxpayer and you're an immigrant, the libertarian thing to do is to exclude you, which it's just this whole convoluted. It seems like they came up with immigration restrictions and then wanted to figure out a supposedly libertarian way to get there rather than actually letting libertarianism guide them to their position. And one thing about how they make that leap is it is very much a vision of what, and they sincerely believe this, what an anarchist, stateless society would look like. And you know, I've somewhat flippantly, but I think it's accurate, described it as homeowners associations with the death penalty for thought crime. It's the idea that if we had the kind of ideal, totally free society, people would naturally form themselves and there's the desire, and this is what people would want to come together in these communities with, you know, racial restrictions and in some cases that are theocratic and have a very, very conservative. And you know, I think that's just a pretty objectively wrong estimate of what people want in large numbers. I mean, it's certainly, you know, it's true. Yeah, you might have your theocratic racist compound out in the woods and Iowa or something. But all evidence, as you mentioned, is that freeing up markets and having free exchange and property rights and, you know, kind of our ideal system is culturally liberatory. It pushes things in a more tolerant direction. Markets make us more moral, in a sense, is a point a lot of libertarians have made about, you know, if you look at the history of gay rights, for instance, that's very much been the story. And because they imagine they kind of work backwards. So our ideal would look like this. And so the second best thing we can do as things stand is to get as close as possible to that. And what they end up with. is it becomes functionally identical to non-liberitarian alt-right, you know, it becomes all the same policy prescriptions. They just go through these extra convoluted steps. It's tyranny with extra steps, as the meme would go. And but once you're there in that place, where kind of like I'm imagining my quote unquote free society would be all these terrible, repressive things, then you can think that moving towards the repression is somehow a step towards liberty. And it's repulsive, but it has its internal logic to it. - I mean, it sounds almost like a Marxist dialectical thing of we need to move towards state communism in order for us to then eventually achieve the withering away of the state and, you know, and genuine freedom. - It actually kind of reminds me of something that a guy who's kind of disappeared off the face of the libertarian earth in the last few years, but there was this guy named Chase Rachel's. And he's a, he went really hard down the alt-right pipeline. He actually had a book called White Right in Libertarian, that which was basically an alt-right book, in which actually Hans Hermann Hoppe wrote the forward for. But that's another story. But he had this article and the title is just absolutely ludicrous that goes to exactly what Andy's talking about. It was fascism is a step toward liberty, where he thought that if you basically created an authoritarian state, you could mold the state in a way and mold the people in a way that you'd get libertarianism. So it is kind of tyranny with extra steps. - I think it is true. It's weird how much these people overestimate the broad support for their cultural values that, you know, that like if we lived in an anarchist state where everyone was free to choose, we would end up with ethnically pure theocracies where everyone lived according to traditional values. But he's clear, like Andy said, you know, the market pushes us in a, the market creates moral progress by pushing us away from those kinds of views. But it also just seems very clear that the market demonstrates that there's not a lot of people who share those views, that the cities keep growing. And part of that is people moving for work. But a lot of that is because lots of people that turns out actually enjoy living around a diverse population that's dynamic and, you know, is culturally shifting and exciting. And there certainly are people who don't. There's people who score low on the big five personality trait of openness. But I've joked that like it would be beneficial if we built mega reservations. Just carve out parts of the country where you can, you know, you can live that mega lifestyle and the rest of us will leave you alone. You know, because the Amish figured out, and the men and knights figured out, this is like, they're not, they're not mega. But like they figured out they can have this and they can build it the way they want to and then live the lifestyle they prefer. But there seems to be this outward facing, like it's not just enough that I get to live my lifestyle. It's that the rest of you need to be compelled to live the lifestyle and that there is a, if you don't want the lifestyle, then there's like a false consciousness created by liberalism and the elites and so on that's making you drift away from like where you would really be happy, which is also kind of a Jordan Peterson kind of argument. - There's the thing there too, their whole, the whole thing about how the left controls all the institutions, that's something they like to repeat a lot and they like to see everything that's culturally liberal basically as they call it cultural Marxism. They think it's this, they think it's this plot by the left to, I don't know, turn everyone gay or something, I'm not even sure what they're talking about. But a lot of that comes from this guy named Mention's Mold Bug, I think it's named, I think that's his nickname, he goes by Curtis Yarvan and it's the whole thing, the idea of the cathedral, which is the like leftist, leftist who run society and actually I noticed that a lot of these types, the paleo libertarians, Dave Smith, Hans Ferman Hopper, those types, they use this cathedral language a lot. Like they'll even, they'll bring Mention's Mold Bug on their shows to talk about it. So I think they fundamentally had just have that weird neo reactionary worldview. - I would just say that another aspect of this is kind of everything I don't like is the state, cultural liberalism is kind of this elite plot that's imposed by, I mean, edits, edits, most virulent it veers into kind of, it becomes the protocols of the elders as I am. It's a very, it can be re into kind of anti-Semitic, or at least anti-Semitic echoing conspiracy view of the world, which is ironic as libertarians 'cause we know that's not, you know, we know it's millions, billions of individuals each making their own decisions, et cetera. But one thing about the fact that there's not much demand for their views. So Ludwig von Mises has a chapter in human action where he's tearing into what he calls racial polylogism or polylogism, not quite your argument, it's a bit pronounced. But it's his spiel against racism and at his time the Nazis. But he makes this point that's very relevant and is kind of classic to all kinds of the illiberal populism, where he's actually mocking Hitler because he cannot define who is in or out as a German, except by, well, I announce my program, my agenda and the people who rally to it, they're the true people, they're the real vote. And you see that a lot, Tom Palmer wrote a good article about illiberal populism that made the point. This is kind of, it's essential defining element is that it defines, it defines its supporters in a kind of circular way as the real people. So I don't think even to the degree, there may be not in denial about it. I think they have this way of discounting anybody who does not share those cultural views as well, they don't count. And what we're doing is we're building this core of the kind of higher, upper, better than class of better people and they all agree with us so they should get what they want and the rest of you are wrong and awful and don't count. - How do we begin to push back against this? I mean, let me first ask this. These people are in the process of or have taken over the libertarian party, some of the libertarian or traditionally like libertarian student organizations have fallen into either this kind of thinking or trumpest thinking. But the larger like the mainstream libertarian organizations and say like the think tank in public policy world and academic world haven't largely haven't fallen into this. So does it matter? I mean, Andy said this is a few thousand people. Like why should those of us who just care about the project of political liberty and want to see the world move in a more pro-liberty direction and whether we want to do that through public policy or persuasion or direct action or whatever. Like why should we really care about a few thousand people and a political party that has never really, it's never one national elections, it's never scored particularly high in them and is on the broader political scene remains kind of irrelevant. Like should we just ignore them? - To a large degree the fight over is over, do we, how much do we care about keeping the word libertarian? Because the word libertarian is itself kind of not to the same degree the LP is fringe and marginal, but it's still a kind of niche thing that a lot of people don't even know what it means and if not coherently heard of it before. So do we, I guess the question is is the libertarian brand salvageable and coming from where I am and I know you do too. I mean we think of ourselves as very much having libertarian views in the libertarian tradition, led by major libertarianism. and thinkers like Mises and Hayek and two degree even Rothbard. And I go back and forth on this myself. I think there's a case for reviving the use of liberal, and that's one way to disentangle, and you're seeing that happen to a degree, that the word liberal is coming to mean something closer to what we mean, when we speak of liberalism. But you know, that has its own downsides and pros and cons. And like I said off the top, if you're a self-identified libertarian who wants to go hang out with other self-identified libertarians, and you are not outside of maybe academics and college students or you live and work in DC, the only place to go is still going to be the libertarian party. And so I think that has problems for kind of the feeder for our sorts of, you know, in 10 years, if you're a 20-year-old today, and you know, where are you going to be, who, in 10 years from now, if you self-identify as a libertarian, are we going to have for our own movement, which is itself kind of small? I'm not quite sure if there's a good way to handle this. There's kind of bad choices in both directions, and we've got to weigh those pros and cons of to what degree do we want to kind of fight them to be king of the ant hill in terms of the word libertarian and its brand. Yeah, I was going to say too that even if the party isn't powerful so much as elections go, it can still be very loud and it can still define the movement itself. And if there's someone who might have otherwise become a good brand of libertarian, they might fall into the whole paleo brand, if the, if it's the paleo's that are running the libertarian party. So it's a question of whether we want them to basically ruin libertarianism or not. It's tough to say what's going to happen. I think as far as the party itself goes, things are probably going to get worse before they get better. I think basically they're going to have to have any chance to salvage the party itself. I think we're going to have to basically let them run it into the ground first, which obviously is not ideal. But when you have libertarian party state affiliates that are Mises caucus run and they're tweeting out things like it was something along the lines of black people, oh America, and it was on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and another tweet from another Mises caucus run affiliate saying bigots rights are human rights, which was in response to a non-Mises caucus affiliate tweeting that trans rights are human rights. Things like that are just going to ruin the libertarian brand. So I think we at least need to try to push back on it. It's, it's unsure exactly how much that's going to work though. Yeah, I think my view is this stuff is a relevant in the like national policy making arena in the sense that like these people aren't getting meetings with members of Congress, except for maybe the fringiest weirdos in Congress. They're not getting media appearances. They're not getting op ads. They're not getting taken seriously by journalists or opinion makers and so on. But given how online our world is, and then especially how much the kinds of people who become political leaders, not in the running for office sense, but in the, you know, like have influence in political discussions and become future leaders of the movement as Andy mentioned, like given how much of that happens online, like if you're a politically engaged young person, you're going to find online circles to talk about your political obsessions with your friends and to learn more about them. Like that's where it really matters. And that's also where the brand matters because you're, you're looking at what's the label that describes me. And then you see like libertarian libertarianism sounds pretty good in that I'm, you know, like generally pro entrepreneurship and socially liberal. Let me look at that. And then you just like, you know, see a little bit of it. See the tweets that you mentioned, John, and back the hell away. You know, and the number of times that I've had people say like to me, they'll, they'll say like, oh, I thought all libertarians were these guys. You know, I'm surprised that you are defending transgender rights or seem to be so pro immigration because I thought libertarians opposed it. And that's like a real damage that, that this is made. You know, and that was when, when I started libertarianism.org at the Kato Institute 11 years ago, part of that was a lot of young people who are interested in these ideas end up at meces.org because it's a very popular website. It has a lot of, like it has a good library of classic texts and so on. Like we should start something that provides that kind of learning resource, but doesn't take you down these dark pathways, doesn't lead you to Lou Rockwell.com or Tom Woods or so on. And, and that we need, I think it's, it's easy to forget how much this stuff matters for those future generations of the movement and how much what's going on now, even if it looks like it's limited to one political party and some Twitter circles is determining who those future leaders are going to be, both in terms of who could potentially be leaders in healthy directions, but are essentially being forced out or being turned off before they even really, you know, start developing because of the ugliness of it or they're getting turned into this kind of stuff or we're attracting the very people who we don't want to be future leaders of the movement. And so it's easy to ignore it now, although it's, it's harder to ignore it now than it was five or six years ago, but it's going to be even worse when basically every mainstream libertarian is having to start every conversation with, I'm not a xenophobic theocrat, you know, and I know, indeed, you're point about keeping the term, like, it's tough because I don't want to lose the term. I think it's an important term with a valuable legacy, but I know that when I'm having conversations with people who aren't, who are like new to these ideas, I don't use the libertarian term to describe my views anymore. I talk about radical liberalism or radical freedom or free markets or emancipation or in my more anarchist moments like abolitionism, but I don't tend to use that term because whether it's been lost or not, it's like, it creates kind of an unnecessary barrier and a conversation that I don't really want to have that gets in the way of like what I think can be communicating, but I hope are still like powerful and important ideas. There's a good example. So in fact, just a few days ago, speaking of things born on Twitter, kind of crossing into real world movements, the neoliberal project had its big conference in DC. And, you know, I, as a libertarian, have my quibbles, I don't consider myself a neoliberal. I think they're too ambivalent on foreign policy. I think they go too far in a technocratic direction, but they sell themselves as kind of broadly pro-market social liberals. And that was supposed to be our appeal. And I see a lot of both people who were already in the libertarian movement and new people coming in who I wish were coming into the libertarian movement are instead being drawn towards that kind of label and those sorts of politics. And it's because it does not have any of that baggage. When you say I'm a neoliberal, nobody thinks you're a racist weirdo who wants your compound out in the desert that doesn't allow black people or gaze. And I think that's an example of how our branding has gone wrong and we're losing to another upstart movement. A lot of the sort of people that in the past 10 years ago would have been coming down the kind of our sort of libertarian pipeline and they're not anymore. And I worry a lot about what that's going to mean, you know, 10 or 20 years ago. I'm a relatively young guy I play and I'm having a career as a libertarian for a long time. to come and I don't know if that's going to be possible if you can't have those conversations without without it starting that way without having to explain, oh I'm not one of them, I'm the I'm the different kind of good libertarian. Yeah I was going to say I've definitely experienced the whole I'm the good kind of libertarian just just talking with people I I don't even want to use because I don't consider myself left or right. I mean part of me wants to kind of say like oh more on the left side but I don't even think I'm really on the left side I think that'll kind of convey a message I'm not going for but at least it at least kind of separates me from the the hoppians and like Andy was saying the the problem of people being repelled from the movement it's not this future thing we're going to have to worry about it's it's already happening today like like you see with the people going to the neo liberals or people leaving the party or the libertarian movement all together because if there are bigots in the libertarian circles the targets of those bigotry are not going to want want to share spaces with them. What then can we do as people who want to see this movement be more healthy think these ideas are valuable maybe aren't ready to just abandon the title or the term and start over with something new and and think that you know these or that that that institutions like the libertarian party are worth trying to fight for or worth trying to persuade people in the right direction like what how can we be helping to correct this ship now whether tactically perhaps but also just rhetorically as advocates for these ideas. Well I think that's a large part of the issue is we have to just be out there articulating it we have to kind of show our example of what we feel this should be and you know in my experience having been out this and talking about this for several years is there are some people who rally to it when you do that when you are out there kind of very openly explicitly making the case for libertarianism as part of the liberal tradition as cosmopolitan as egalitarian in ways that you know there's there's no there's no way to just shut them up we can't stop them from talking we have to be out there presenting our own message in ways to help define the term and shape the perceptions of it but I I don't think that we can go back to the old days of sweeping it under the rug and ignoring it because that was that was the mistake the libertarian movement made for so long most libertarians weren't like this but we all knew it was a thing over in that corner of the room and and we just you know we don't talk about it in polite company let's pretend it's not real they're fringe nobody's noticing them it was a lot of a lot of that dynamic but they are getting noticed I mean I think as of right now to the degree non libertarians and people outside of movement spaces have an impression and opinion about the word libertarian it is it is already more defined by this kind of right-wing illiberalism I mean there was I don't know if you you've watched the show Peacekeeper which is very it's funny it's a superhero spoof but there was a line at the end of it that made perfect sense in context where one character referred to another character is having a libertarian sort of proto-fascism and that's you know that's a mainstream popular production that's that's using the word in that sort of way and it it made sense it wasn't some you know nasty lefty pot-shoted libertarians in bad faith it was it was drawing on these connections that really do exist out in the world yeah I think Andy is right there and that we can't keep we can't keep sweeping this under the rug we have to attack the problem head on we need to speak out loudly about our ideals and when we we have to show exactly how we differ from people like Dave Smith their stuff on Malony or Hans Hormann Hoppe we have to show that we're not anti-immigration we're not for unleashing the police to dull out instant punishment which is a late Rothbard quote that's been brought up by people like Dave Smith we have to show that we don't hand her to alt-writers and when we see these terrible things that we don't think represent us I think it's very valuable to loudly speak out against them and not just not just ignore them like oh they'll go away we need to show people that there is a brand of libertarianism that doesn't support this kind of stuff I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Andy and John next time on re-imagining liberty I talked with the story in Paul Manska about the evolution of the American right and what that history tells us about whether the GOP can ever become the party of Reagan again or if Trumpism will remain its core nature here's a preview so the narrative is that out of a kind of encoing stew of concerns about the New Deal in the 1930s concerns about anti-communism post-World War II came together this coalition of sober responsible intellectually respectable thinkers that forged together these different strains of concern and built the tripod that is the new right limited government anti-communism and foreign policy lots of interventionism and then social conservatism and that's the tripod out which is built a responsible sober serious conservative movement the problem with this story is that it is a story and that story leaves out a lot the extent to which the right was very much involved in the racial politics of the mid-20th century support for segregation later on support for South African apartheid opposition to the free speech movements of the 1960s all of that is as much a part of the story of the origins of the right as the stuff that goes into the tripod if you'd like to hear my conversation with Paul right now without waiting you can become a reimagining Liberty supporter it's just five bucks a month and you'll get access to all episodes as well as new essays two weeks early if you're an Apple podcast user you can sign up right in the app otherwise click the link in the show notes or head over to reimaginingliberty.com/subscribe to join and listen in your favorite podcasting app. you