 I wonder how many people in this room happened to catch Peter Thiel. The entrepreneur gave a talk recently, just a few days ago actually, at the National Press Club, outlining some reasons why he was supporting Trump and why he thinks political correctness in this country has gotten out of hand. And he's a very interesting guy, obviously very high IQ, successful. And I really want to like him. He said some things that were egregiously wrong about trade for a guy with his IQ. But nonetheless, what really struck me about it was at the end, he said, well, like Donald Trump, I think America needs a new American politics. So he's groaned, like, you know, the last thing we need is a new version of politics. I mean, of all the things we need in this country and don't need, it's not more politics. So it's interesting that even a guy who's thinking outside the box like him, comes back and circles around at the same old tired, sloganeering. You know, we scheduled this event about a year ago and when we were doing so, we looked at the schedule and the availability of this building and some other things and we realized that the Saturday that was available to us would be right before the election. So we couldn't really avoid talking about it, the 800 pound gorilla in the room, namely presidential politics. But it's become increasingly clear, I think even over that year, it's accelerated that there's the serious structural problems we have in this country with respect to all created by the federal government, by the way. But with regard to spending and debt and entitlements and war, foreign policy, monetary policy cannot and will not be solved by politics. There's no political will in Washington to do so, to deal with the entitlement train wreck, to deal with these intractable wars, this reckless monetary policy. So in fact, I mean, these things aren't even much talked about by politicians, including those running for office over the last year. So while we're arguing about diversions, transgender bathrooms, ordinary people I think, I hope are beginning to understand and recognize the limits of politics. In other words, they're waking up to the reality that politics doesn't work. It doesn't produce anything like the results it promises, that oftentimes produces the opposite. It enriches this undeserving class of people who've installed themselves apparently permanently in and around the political apparatus. And most of all, people are waking up to the myth of democratic consensus that some cobbled together majority of voters doesn't carry any moral or legal legitimacy. We can't vote, tax, spend, borrow, and we can't legislate our way out of these problems. So that's really our theme for today, that the ends, or at least the limits of politics is a method for keeping peace, resolving disputes, and really organizing society. But as I mentioned, it's really astonishing to see how rapidly the political system is breaking down. A year ago, we couldn't have foreseen that Trump would be the nominee. We couldn't have foreseen that Bernie would give the Democrats and Hillary Clinton fits. We couldn't have imagined that Hillary would spend the last days of her campaign under this cloud of WikiLeaks and FBI investigations and indictment possibility. Well, maybe we could have foreseen that. But it's okay because Bill Weld is here to assure us that Madame Hillary is a fine and upstanding person. That, I sure as hell could not have predicted. But what's so maddening about all this, this thing over the last year, that what's so maddening about politics is that in every other way, America is this uniquely results-oriented country. I mean, we're the people who complain, you go into the grocery store and the line's too long, we're the people who complain right away. We're the people who stop buying Chevy's and Fords and started buying Hondas because the Hondas were better. We're the country that has a cable channel for every interest, a restaurant for every taste. We have Amazon and Uber and endless apps on our phones to satisfy our immediate needs. In a million ways, every day, the market gives us what we want in this country, better, cheaper, faster. So it's a mystery why we put up with such lousy government. And everything it touches, especially education and healthcare, I would say, gets worse and more expensive. Everything it touches is diminished, not just practically and pragmatically, but also morally. And it's run by and for the benefit of people who don't much like us. And this is really the truth that an angry populist electorate needs to hear in 2016. But I wanted to talk about some of the silver linings behind the election. And I think the most obvious one is this. The technology has really allowed us to override the media gatekeepers. And it's allowed us to challenge the official narrative, it consume news and facts as we care to. It's really threatened the political establishments grip on public opinion. I think the information genie is out of the bottle. It's not going back. And outside of mainstream media in the digital world, people are really having debates centered on topics outside what Tom Woods describes as the three by five card of allowable opinion. So we're having real debates without a media filter. And that's an enormous victory. It's actually possible now to get one's news from social media feeds tailored to one's own interests or tastes or perspective. So when CNN, for example, shows some polling results that suggests a certain trend that we're all supposed to accept as inevitable and as gospel truth, millions of people might just never see that. If CNN doesn't show up in your social media feed and you don't watch CNN, then it's almost as though the news report didn't happen. So the poll never happened, at least for you. And I know that there are more and more people turning off cable and going around the gatekeepers. So I think the bottom line is that the media and the parties have started to lose control of the approved narrative. So our challenge is not in getting information, it's sifting through all of it. This avalanche of 24-hour news and websites and social media creates so much white noise that the political class actually hides its criminality and plain view from us. They just hope it gets drowned out. Those of us who are old enough to remember, if you think back, the Watergate era, one simple story, a burglary, captivated and held the country in thrall for months. This was the news story for months and months and months. But today, every WikiLeaks dump contains the seeds of 1,000 Watergates. So it's not so much that we don't know what politicians are up to, it's that we know too much and that kind of fatigue sets in and entices us to just shrug and accept it. But consider another silver lining. The fact that progressives and Democrats have now fully and finally and irrevocably been exposed as the illiberal authoritarians that they really are. And they've always been, regardless of their stated policies or objectives, I think the election has really made clear and made plain their real character, their reactionary tactics and their now open agenda. The idea that conservatives exist or even participate in elections seems to be in the front to them. And the 2016 election has brought this reality home, I think, to many more ordinary people, average people in so many ways. But it's especially visible in this open hatred of and contempt for Trump voters. So whatever you think of Trump, I think this public unmasking of the left with regard to him is really something new and novel. Now people in this room already understand what real liberalism is, but the people who stole that word, today's progressives, they're not building a blue collar working class movement to put it mildly. These are not your grandfather's liberals organizing union halls or telling us to make love, not war. They don't care anything about civil liberties and as far as peace goes, we'll just look at the who's who of neoconservatives who are endorsing Hillary Clinton. We're not just talking about crazy college kids who will grow out of it or a handful of Marxist radicals. Mainstream Democrats, including Hillary and Obama, are directly responsible for using identity politics to further themselves and inflaming hatred and distrust. And as for the left sacred love of democracy, one man, one vote, they're now openly discussing abandoning democratic outcomes when the retrogrades have the audacity to vote the wrong way. We've seen this with the Brexit vote in the UK. We've seen it here when the New York Times ponders how to nullify votes from unwanted segments of the electorate. And if you'll notice progressives use a tactic of floating outrageous trial balloons and then retreating to a halfway position that by comparison sounds almost sensible or reasonable. So when a small group of people, private, start demanding that we all use 31 gender pronouns. We can laugh it off and say it's absurd but it plants a seed for the future. When a popular actress, apparently popular, posts an animated video that celebrates the extinction and the termination of white males, we can dismiss her as some sort of hateful lunatic but where will the conversation on that go? Where will it be in a few years? And let's not kid ourselves, progressives are very comfortable with the idea of using state power and state authority to advance their goals. They're not just doing this in society or through media. I'm sure many of you have heard about this University of Toronto professor who's found himself in very hot water for refusing to use those now in vogue gender pronouns. Now he may well lose his job but beyond that, he actually faces, he might have to go before a criminal tribunal and pay a stiff fine in Canada and if you think criminal speech codes are not coming soon to an American near you because of the First Amendment, I have to disagree. But even when there's no criminal sanctions forthcoming, progressives are very good at destroying the lives of people who disagree with them. In case and point is this NYU professor who started a Twitter account called Deplorable NYU Professor or something like that. And he did this to mock, to make some mocking criticisms of campus PC. Well he's been thrown under the bus by his administrators, put on leave, may well be fired and while he may never face criminal sanctions like he might if he were in Canada, he'll live the rest of his life in a jail cell of sorts. His academic career, his relationships with his colleagues, his finances undoubtedly will all shrink. So he'll be boxed in and his life will get smaller. So that's a lot like jail. And this is who progressives are today. They are the religious enforcers of an approved worldview based on their own ever shifting PC code. And one place where I think libertarians really go wrong is when they fail to understand that the overwhelming threat to liberty today is from the left, not the right. It's frankly silly to pretend otherwise, even as we correctly insist that we are not conservatives, the existential threat to liberty, it's not posed by five knuckleheads running around in the woods somewhere, wearing bedsheets and yelling seek highl. It's posed by millions of progressive authoritarians who are everywhere, they're all around you like the one teaching civics at your kid's school. But they've overplayed their hand in the 2016 election and I think they've awakened millions of Americans as a result. Now, if you're thinking I'm gonna go easy on our friends on the right and disabuse you of that, let's not kid ourselves. The right isn't any better just because they lack power. But talk about silver linings. I mean, we are witnessing in slow motion in front of us the death of the Republican party before our eyes. It's incredible to witness, even though it was always inevitable because of demographic changes. In states like Texas and Florida, these have already doomed the GOP to extinction as a national party, but Trump and the election have accelerated this. And today's conservatives don't conserve much of anything. And let's face it, the GOP is a party that never really stood for much of anything, except maybe war and banks. But the modern GOP is globalist, militarist, corporatist, anti-populist. You know, the right chose neoconservatism over non-interventionism. They chose Wall Street over Main Street, city over country, and the managerial state in D.C. over federalism in states' rights, which they abandoned. They chose the Fed over gold. They chose Lockheed Martin over Woolworths. They chose Goldman Sachs over your hometown savings and loan. They rejoiced in the 20th century rise of the imperial presidency. They chose supply side over laissez faire, Milton Friedman over Mises, tax cuts, and tax credits over constitutionalism. They embraced the welfare in regulatory states. Instead of making the optimistic case for capitalism and ownership and opportunity, they allowed the left to cast all of them, and sometimes us, as racists and reactionaries. They blessed entitlements just to keep their lousy seats in Congress and their political perks. And they chose to nationalize and go along with the nationalization of social issues and see huge amounts of power, illegal power to the Supreme Court. And most damning of all, twice, they chose John McCain and Mitt Romney over Ron Paul. So ladies and gentlemen, this is a movement that deserves to perish. I mean, if deserve is the word. Conservatives and their Republican Party vehicle have lost any claim to the mantle of liberty or private property. They exist solely to be less progressive than progressives, and they accept the underlying principle that the state runs our lives. The only question is how it does so, to what degree it does so, and toward what end it does so. So where does this leave us? Where does this leave libertarians? What's the silver lining for us? Well, we can celebrate the decline in the fall of the media and the two parties, and I do. But we also have to recognize, ladies and gentlemen, we've been given a gift with this election, a gift of clarity as the facade of democratic elections cracks. We've been given a gift of dissatisfaction, of animosity toward the state and the political class, and most of all, a gift of populism with all of its inherent opportunities and dangers. So our job is to unwrap this gift and make hay of it, to turn the nation's contempt for politicians into contempt for politics itself. But I will argue today that to do so, we need to have the courage to rebrand libertarianism. Now, I won't say that we need a new libertarianism because there really is no such thing. Liberty is simply the negation of state power in society. It's not a political third way that lies somewhere between left and right, and it's not some sort of hybrid ideology. Now, what we need is a new libertarian brand because the current one isn't working. We need better sales and marketing, not a new product. We already know liberty works. History and theory prove this. But liberty hasn't endured, it's never been widely understood or accepted, and it's always under assault. So we have to ask ourselves, do we even need to reconsider the term libertarian itself, much as it pains me to say it? You know, as Mises predicted, socialists successfully hijacked our rightful label, which is liberalism, and I'm not sure we have decades in front of us to reclaim it. As a brand, libertarianism, at least the milk toast version, being peddled by, very unsuccessfully I might add, by Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, desperately needs a makeover. We're not low tax liberals. We don't impress people by parroting meaningless progressive slogans like social inclusion, and we don't advance liberty by claiming to share progressive ends. Our winning message is not Democrat light, it's not Republican light, and it sure as heck isn't libertarian light. So I'm afraid that the Johnson-Weld approach has resulted in a huge wasted opportunity to reach out and win this election's single biggest prize. Millions of disaffected conservatives ready to abandon the GOP for a candidate as unlikely as Trump, all because of some masochistic need to convince progressives, no, we're not heartless, mean, right-wingers. And yet how many angry Bernieites or Occupy Wall Street types will actually vote for Mr. Johnson instead of Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein? I wonder, not too many. But it's not just the current libertarian campaign. I mean, libertarians have had this problem for decades. We've made the enormous mistake of appearing hostile to family, to religion, to tradition, to culture, to social institutions. In other words, to civil society itself. But civil society is by definition the very means by which we organize human affairs without the state. And how do we not understand that family is the first, last, and most important line of defense for the individual against government? I venture that the strategic cost of this has been incalculable. Liberty has been sold as some sort of ideology for atomized individuals, for soulless economic actors concerned only with getting rich in the gig economy for drug and sex and gun obsessed libertines, for people without any allegiance to anything other than their own immediate self-interest. And what a mistake this has been. If we know anything about human nature, it's that the desire to be part, we all have the desire to be part of something bigger than ourselves. And just because we as libertarians don't want that something to be the state, doesn't change this. Yes, nationalism, when it goes hand in hand with statism and militarism is dangerous. And to be condemned. But we can't wish away this entirely human and natural impulse to form in groups and alliances in a dangerous and unpredictable world. How far should we go with this as libertarians? Should we denounce Cherokee nationalism? Should we shut down Oktoberfest in St. Patrick's Day? How many times have we heard, well, collective guilt is a bad thing and so is any sort of collective pride in achievement? And it may be a little silly to think, well, I'm proud of my ethnicity because of what some Germans did 300 years ago. But how far do we want to take that? And how much do we want to divorce ourselves from human nature? Liberty shouldn't separate us from our families or the fabric of our communities. On the contrary, it should enhance community. I look forward to the day when being a libertarian is unremarkable. Like having green eyes or being Catholic or having particular taste in music. It's just something you happen to know about your neighbor. Liberty should offer the binding glue of cooperation, not some unnatural hyper-individualism. So let's promote a different vision of liberty, a robust muscular pragmatic vision that accords with reality and with human nature. One that is not at war with culture or tradition, family, religion, community. One that fits the world as it is. Hard-boiled, pragmatic, results oriented, focused on issues and market solutions. We should be proudly pro-property, pro-ownership, pro-opportunity, pro-trade and anti-welfarism. We should be unapologetically anti-state. Even when it feels uncomfortable to be so. We should be anti-fed, anti-globalist and maybe most importantly, we should be anti-war. We should be supportive of decentralization and secession and localist movements. We should be unafraid to appeal to populism and bourgeois materialism. And we should be welcoming toward religion, tradition and family. In other words, we should rebrand libertarianism to fit the world as it is. To sell it in the marketplace of human action. This is the moment that liberty-minded people have been waiting for. The biggest political and social upheaval since the 1960s. The way forward is right in front of us if we only choose to see it. Thank you very much.