 We're obviously at a crossroads right now. If I'm not a real libertarian, or if Mises is not a real libertarian, we've got problems. We have an incredible opportunity. I think what happened was it became frankly like somewhat intolerable that the people who were running the National Libertarian Party were such an embarrassment that something had to be done. The idea of becoming a smaller, harder, more angry Republican Party is not a good I think that we're way too internally divided. Congratulations, incoming chair, McCartle. I think the drivers of the division were the people who stood to lose, and now they have lost. The Libertarian Party is under new management, tweeted Angela McCartle shortly after she became the National Committee's new chair at its 2022 annual convention in Reno, which was attended by more than a thousand delegates from around the country. And I hate making promises because I sound like a scumbag politician, but I will move heaven and earth to make this thing functional and not embarrassing for you. We are going to change the country. McCartle is part of the Mises Caucus, which swept all the leadership roles and is now in complete control of the nation's third largest political party. Mises Caucus supporters say they want to make the Libertarian Party libertarian again and that it should no longer be concerned about offending progressives or Beltway establishment types and shouldn't be afraid to reach out to the coalition that elected Donald Trump. Despite the group's name, they're most heavily influenced not by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, but by a student, Murray Rothbard, who like Mises was a radical capitalist, but unlike his mentor, favored the complete abolition of the state. Rothbard also advocated forming strategic political alliances with the new left in the 1960s and then with paleo-conservative figures like Pat Buchanan in the early 90s. We stand for repealing the entire progressive era. That's what our movement is about. Every inch of it. Comedian Dave Smith is host of the popular podcast, Part of the Problem, one of the most high-profile and vocal backers of the Mises Caucus and a contender to become the Libertarian Party's 2024 presidential candidate. The priorities of the Mises Caucus have always been basically the priorities of the Ron Paul Revolution, which were being anti-war, being sound Austrian economics, which right now, particularly with inflation raging, I think is a really good time to be sound on that. And then of course, throughout the last two years, just completely opposing the rise of the COVID regime and all of the insanity that's ruined tens of millions of Americans' lives and many more people around the world. This is the beginning of the death of the Libertarian Party. I think it's going to become the lesser of three evils. Critics say they're shitposting edgelords who make controversial statements just to attract attention and that they have no real interest in running viable candidates for office. If Angela McCartle becomes chair of the Libertarian National Committee and makes the party welcoming two bigots, the National Committee that she is in charge of will shrivel and die. They point to the Mises Caucus's deletion of an explicit longstanding commitment to abortion rights, revisiting the party's traditional open border stance and stripping out language denouncing bigotry as irrational and repugnant, which delegates voted to replace with a commitment to uphold and defend the rights of every person regardless of their identity. Along with the emphasis on bold social media messaging, these changes, critics say, would amount to a Trumpification of the LP and send a welcome message to alt-right adjacent elements. Without guardrails, a movement is doomed. And this was national review in Buckley with the Birchers, which were kind of a predecessor and fellow traveler of the Ron Paul Revolution. Welcome to the Reno Reset. I think that we need to come back to being truth tellers. McCartle, a paralegal based in Southern California, won the race for Libertarian National Committee Chair with a resounding 70 percent of the vote. She says that the party face planted during the pandemic by failing to take a strong stance against lockdowns and vaccine mandates and that its messaging is far too tame and conventional to counter the power of the authoritarian state. If anything like a lockdown or a vaccine mandate happens again, we don't whiff the ball and humiliate ourselves and alienate everyone out there. Congressman Paul, I believe you are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq, who would bring the troops home as quickly as almost immediately. They attack us because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. When I talk about bold messaging, I'm thinking about two instances in particular that almost all Libertarians can relate to. Ron Paul's Giuliani moment. I don't think I've ever heard that before. And I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11. They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there. And the other moment that I point to was when Ron Paul was on the debate stage and people asked him about drugs. How many people here would use heroin for the legal? I bet nobody would put the handle. Oh, yeah, I need the government to take care of me. I don't want to use heroin, so I need these laws. The Mises Caucus has branded its effort as the Ron Paul Revolution to point out. That's what it is. These are the kids who came up, you know, in 2008 and 2012 inspired by Ron Paul. Now they've been to college, they've grown up, they've got their own lives and families and things and they're ready to move in and take the next step. It's not the first time that critics of the LP have looked to Paul to breathe new energy into the party. The former Republican congressman from Texas ran for president on the Libertarian ticket in 1988. It's time we, as the American people, woke up, led the charge, tell the American people that there is an alternative, there is another option, the option is voting for liberty. The vote for liberty this year is to vote for the Libertarian party. Thank you very much. At the time, Murray Rothbard wrote that the LP had become increasingly flaky, libertine and culturally leftist. He saw Paul's campaign as a last desperate attempt to save the party. But it ultimately failed, in his view, leaving the LP spiraling downward into oblivion. Paul ran for the presidential nomination again in 2008 and 2012 on the Republican ticket, generating huge crowds and interest in libertarianism, especially with regard to ending foreign wars and the Federal Reserve. Paul himself was on a hand in Reno, headlining a Mises Caucus event the night before McCartle took control of the party. I think bolder messaging is important, but we don't need edgelording, we don't need posting stuff just to troll people or saying outrageous statements just to get attention. Justin Amash was a Republican congressman from Michigan, once described by Politico as the new Ron Paul in Congress because of his willingness to buck party line votes on principle. He switched his affiliation to the LP in his final term, making him the party's highest office holder since its founding in 1971. He explored a run for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination in 2020 before changing his mind, paving the way for a run by longtime Libertarian Party member Joe Jorgensen. There are some people within this party who think that if you just say the most outrageous thing possible and you get a lot of attention for it, that that's a positive thing. Like it's almost like any news is good news for you, it doesn't matter. Any publicity is good publicity. And I don't agree with that. On Martin Luther King Day this year, the New Hampshire Libertarian Party, whose leadership are members of the Mises Caucus, tweeted, Black people in America get special access to essential drugs, receive special funding due to race, and are first in line for every college and every job. America isn't in debt to Black people. If anything, it's the other way around. The tweet was later deleted. Jeremy Kaufman, who's running for U.S. Senate, helps to run that Twitter account. I think anyone who knows me or has spoken to me, like, I'm not, I'm not a hateful person. I'm like, I do, I am, I've got a bit of a wit and sometimes I'm trying to make jokes or whatever. You've used the N word on occasion. You've applauded the death of John McCain, you know, in an official capacity. Is that the kind of messaging you want to see the national party kind of take on? Not necessarily. So I do think they should be stronger in their messaging and some of that stuff, even, what, said the N word. I've never called anyone an N word. And I think the idea that, that, like, there's going to be just one word that's tabooed that you're not allowed to say, I think that's a ridiculous idea. So here's a tweet that you did. If 1000 trans people were murdered every year, but there were no taxes, we'd live in a substantially more moral world. And that's because the state is much more evil than 1000. I don't think I got the wording perfect on that, but I would stand by that statement if you put Jews or whatever in. Yeah. What, yeah. Who are you trying to reach with that kind of formula? I was not trying to reach anyone with that. That was a reply to someone. It's she deleted it. So you can't see it. But that was a reply to a member of the Libertarian Party who said that that trans issues are a bigger issue than taxes. And I was trying to make an example of how not that many trans people murdered in a year. It is not some epidemic. As a result of this organization, I've had plenty of threats. Rihanna Coyle, who quit the party after the Mises Caucus takeover, was the author of the transgender related tweet that Kaufman was responding to. They've used the Meats of Fundraise before because obviously I'm a communist or a child groomer because I don't want queer kids to be abused. Obviously, a lot of people read that the wrong way. So empirically, I'm not going to affect. If people are misreading what you tried to say, then you've got to accept that and say I didn't say that the right way. I think this notion of like appealing to the middle and this kind of stuff. And we can never say anything offensive. That'd be a great strategy if we were at 30 or 40 percent. If we were closing the gap and we were closing for the middle, we're 2 percent. We've got to be something that's motivating. McCarty says she negotiated behind the scenes for the New Hampshire Libertarian Party to take down its Martin Luther King Day tweet and told reason that the National Party won't be emulating its inflammatory style. But like Kaufman, McCarty and the leadership of the Mises Caucus see the LP's approach of trying to appeal to the political center as a colossal error. What they've tried to do is play it safe, appeal to the middle and say, you know, I'm fiscally conservative and socially liberal. I'm the best parts of this, you know, of the liberals over here with my social stances and I'm the best parts of the conservatives when we're not. We're our own thing. We're our own paradigm that we need to push forward. We need to push forward our own culture, our own vision, our own language, our own narrative. Michael Heiss is the founder of the Mises Caucus, which he started after the 2016 presidential campaign of Gary Johnson. I guess I'm having an Aleppo moment. We were fiscally conservative. We were socially liberal. No drugs legalized outside of marijuana. So Joe the baker should have to bake the cake for the Nazi wedding. That's that would be my contention. Yes. I think Mrs. Clinton, no matter what you might think of various economic policies, is very well qualified to be president in the United States. I would not say the same of Mr. Trump with all respect. What many members of the Mises Caucus found particularly disappointing was Johnson's selection of former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld to join his ticket in the 2016 campaign. They say I have some purity test. Like I like I think the libertarian nominee should be a libertarian. That's my purity test. I don't think they should be a war hawk. By the way, Bill Weld was a fucking lobbyist for Raytheon. Didn't you guys know that? Yeah, Bill Weld, a lobbyist for a weapons company. Is that I know it's a purity test. I don't think we should put that guy up. Who are the Supreme Court picks you're going to make? Well, I'm going to I'm going to turn this over to Bill. Merrick Garland, I think, would have been a very good pick. And he's nominated by Obama. I'm here vouching for Mrs. Clinton and I think it's high time somebody did. Johnson served two terms as a Republican governor of New Mexico and got 3.3 percent of the national vote when running on the libertarian ticket. Gary Johnson, 4.3 million votes, highest vote total ever. No lasting movement, no return on investment on those votes. They didn't stay because they weren't what you might call true believers. They didn't feel it in their bones. You know, it didn't have that same animation to it that the Ron Paul thing. You know, why is there no cultural Rand Paul movement that last? Why is there no cultural Gary Johnson movement that is last? But there is a Ron Paul revolution that last to this day. I think we need to learn from that and learn what the implication from that is. Heist says his strategy is working, pointing to the 37 state party affiliates that the Mises caucus had taken control of prior to the convention. We have a joke that we talk about amongst the board here in the caucus. And that is that every state that we have fucked ends up loving this dick. What do you mean by that? Well, it means that, so, you know, you're espousing the narrative of the people who have opposed this and saying that we're this or that and we're helping Trump or we're Republicans or this or that. And that's the counter narrative to try to stop us. We are the people who are getting the signatures in these states. We're the people who are showing up and doing the work and creating new counties and all of this stuff, injecting money through the membership. We are doing those things. So when reasonable people see that, who maybe were not Mises, they end up thanking me later. Is it a good idea for the leader, you know, the thought leader? You are now the eminence gree of the Libertarian party to be using rape metaphor. So I mean, you made it a rape metaphor, but I think it's funny. OK. And I think they think it's funny. And I think if you're I think the party's been very humorless for a long time, and that's part of the problem of the negative culture that we're trying to fix. The convention was buzzing over an article that had just been published by the Southern Poverty Law Center titled Mises Caucus. Could it sway the Libertarian party to the hard right? And McCartle gave Adam Mock, failed grifter of the year award to the SPLC Adam Mises Caucus event. The Southern Poverty Law Center or the Soviet Poverty Lies Center, as Tom DeLorenser calls it, is. The Southern Poverty Law Center is the ideological enforcement arm of the regime. And I would want to repel anybody who is clueless enough to treat it as a source worthy of a moment's attention. To kick off the convention, the Mises Caucus booked as a speaker, the writer and historian Tom Woods, who is the host of his own immensely popular podcast, prepared to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion. Your daily dose of liberty education starts here. The Tom Woods show, former party chair, Nicholas Sarwar, counter-programmed Woods by booking Edward Snowden to speak in a different room at the same time. I came to the conclusion that there is no magic combination of words I can ever utter that will take somebody who would, for example, who would put Snowden against me and suddenly make him say, oh, I've been wrong about you my whole life. That's just, unfortunately, it won't happen. And it's a, you just have to get over that. What is the biggest misconception about you floating out there? The thing that most bothers me, probably, because it's the one that sounds the most plausible, is this claim going all the way back to the League of the South days from 1994. Because, look, the League of the South these days is not an organization I or anybody I know would join. And it changed. In 1994, Woods attended the founding meeting of the League of the South, a group that he maintains only later became a neo-Confederate white separatist organization involved in the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. Woods says that in 1994, it was a group of, quote, nerdy academics, unquote, like him, and that he had no idea what the League of the South would later turn into. I've never apologized for it, though. The easiest thing in the world for me would be to say, I'm so sorry I joined an organization, or I was at the founding meeting of an organization that is outside the allowable range of opinion. I'm not sorry, because I didn't do anything wrong. Yeah, yeah, it was edgy to be in that group, but we never meant any harm to anybody. There is a tendency for outsider groups to attract other outsiders. That's the nature of entryism into political movements and the reason for the open letter against fascism in 2017 after the Charlottesville massacre. The only way to stop entryism is to put up clear signs that say no bigot's allowed. Well, if it does need to be said, here's the truth. And I speak for everybody in the Mises Caucus when I say this, we reject racism. It's collectivist toxic garbage. That's what Dave Smith told a Mises Caucus audience in May 2021, but some party delegates were alarmed that at the convention, the caucus wanted to strike a sentence from the LPs party platform condemning bigotry as irrational and repugnant. Why is that something that should be taken out of the Libertarian Party platform? What is a bigot? No one can agree. People think I'm a bigot because I have certain friends they don't like. I think a bigot is probably somebody who talks about Martin Luther King Day says blacks have nothing to complain about. But no one agrees. All it leads to is everybody in the party pointing fingers and calling each other a bigot. I believe in freedom of speech. I prefer when people don't say horribly racist offensive things. I think that it's not well met. It's pointless. It's senseless. It's not a good position to take regardless of your political affiliation. But there's room for that in the Mises Caucus Libertarian Party. Can you explain what you mean when you say there's room? Is the Mises Caucus position that you can be a bigot and be a member of the Libertarian Party? Yeah, I think that that is absolutely the position because we don't agree on what being a bigot means. I suspect that what they're driving at here is that this is more of an attempt to sort of curry favor with people who are never going to like us anyway. I mean, if you look at the key issues the Libertarian movement has focused on, the way I see it, they all disproportionately benefit non-whites. The drug war, which we can't shut up about. We talk about that constantly. Libertarianism isn't about wrong think. It's about non-aggression, self-ownership and property rights. Heist believes that the platform's previous anti-bigotry condemnation fed what he calls a woke or cultural Marxist agenda. What is happening nowadays with the woke wokeism is people are using language as dialectics along cultural lines to push for collectivist ends. So back in the day when you had cultural revolution, the Marxist revolutions, they had their dialectics of the rich versus the poor and the owner versus the worker and they were pushing towards collectivist ends. It's the same ideology that's happening now, but they're pitting, you know, cis versus, you know, straight and male versus female and trans versus whatever. I don't think it makes sense to get rid of denouncing racism and bigotry. Is it an essential element in any party platform? It's not necessarily a position on legislative policy, for example, or governmental policy. On the other hand, removing it makes some kind of statement about what your values are. And I don't I don't think there's any benefit to removing that, and I think it will probably hurt us with a lot of people who might otherwise say this is a party that endorses that. The line condemning bigotry was ultimately removed. But on the initiative of former Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate Spike Cohen, a new line was added, stating that the party would uphold and defend the rights of every person, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or any other aspect of their identity. Most of the people within the Mises Caucus are young activist types. And I don't think they're coming here because they're nationalist or bigoted or any of that stuff. That's not to say that there aren't people within the Libertarian Party, just as there are within the Democratic Party and Republican Party and throughout the whole world who are bigoted and racist. There are people like that. And I think we should call out people like that, and we should denounce those kinds of statements. But do I think that the Caucus as a whole is like that? I don't think so. During his speech at the convention, Amash read from a book on the subject of political liberalism. Anarchism misunderstands the real nature of man. It would be practical only in a world of angels and saints. Libertarianism is not anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism. Or I'll read you some more quotes. Every single one of those quotes is from Mises, one of my heroes. In this book, liberalism, that's just one book. Amash says he read the excerpts not because he agrees with every word or to criticize anarchists, but to point out that to compete on the national stage, the Libertarian Party needs to appeal to more than just purest Libertarians. If Ludwig von Mises or Justin Amash or pretty much anyone in this room is not libertarian enough for you, it's not going to work. At the end of his speech, Amash received a standing ovation. I just wanted people to see that, hey, we're too quick to jump on each other. Here's a guy we hold up as a hero within our philosophy. And yet if he were here today, he might be called a woke leftist or, you know, ridiculed or rejected, or they might call him blue-pilled. The Mises caucus did succeed in removing the party's pro-choice plank. People feel that they are at a crossroads now where it's an irreconcilable difference and we should remove it and have no comment on it as a national party because there are members on both sides of the issues who are arguing in good faith. We tend to push out people who are a little bit more socially conservative. And I think that there's room in the party for people who are libertine and socially conservative. And I would like them to feel that way. The Mises caucus leadership also says it's a mistake for the libertarian party to take an unequivocally open border stance on immigration. When you put open borders plus pro-abortion in there, again, it kind of forms a cultural hegemony for one side that might not be indicative of the wider libertarian movement. Along with Rothbard, one of the biggest influences on prominent members of the Mises caucus is the political theorist Hans Hermann Hoppe, who disagreed with the pro-immigration views of Ludwig von Mises. He wrote that politicians have a perverse incentive to let in unproductive parasites, bums and criminals, and that the power to admit or exclude should be stripped from the hands of the central government and reassigned to the states, provinces, cities, towns, villages, residential districts, and ultimately to private property owners and their voluntary associations. Hoppe advocates for the Swiss model where local assemblies, not the central government, determine who can and cannot become a Swiss citizen. I don't think that anybody inherently has a right to go some to an area that they don't own or are not invited to. And so I think that probably my ideal situation under the current paradigm would be something like a sponsorship system, an invitee system, where you basically have to get an American citizen to vouch for you and financially kind of, you know, like back you in order to come into the country. Hoppe has also suggested that Democrats and communists will have to be physically separated and expelled from a libertarian society. Open borders and private borders are not the same thing, but they're both libertarian canon. So again, by taking a side on this, we're we're representing one side and basically pushing out another side or making them feel not represented. And my proposed solution is I'm I'm I'm looking for the smallest libertarian thing possible. I'm not I don't want to take your socialism away from you. A lot of people are earnest socialists. And so like, you know, but yeah, for Montes. Yes, what you're saying is you can be in New Hampshire, you can be a Vermont. Yeah, right. And so like, but yes, I think if you're going to have certainly if you're going to have a democracy and you're going to you're not and you're going to have a libertarian society, you people who are going to come and use democracy to take away liberty. Right. I don't want those people as neighbors. I'm not calling for anything specifically. And I would like to enforce that belief through libertarian principles. But yes, I do not want socialists in my neighborhood. I do not want communists in my neighborhood. Like the Mises caucus. Amash often talks about the decentralization of political power. But he's also insistence upon the central importance of liberalism or the protection of individual rights, even at the hyper local level of government. He says this idea is foundational to the United States and should be one of the libertarian parties core messages. I think that the emphasis should be on getting us back to our roots as a country. What do we believe in as a basic set of principles and really what this country is about is liberalism in the classical sense. The idea that people should be able to free should be free to make their own decisions about their lives and government to the extent possible should just stay out of it. On the first day of the convention, guest speaker Edward Snowden made a similar point. Freedom from permission. That is what liberty is. It is the ability to act without asking to speak and to write and to do and to be yourself without getting a paper stamped without submitting yourself and the completed form alongside it to some central authority. While Mises Caucus endorsed candidates swept all other leadership positions that were up for grabs. There remains a discontented minority within the party. And McCartle says that about 40 members quit after the Mises Caucus took power. Can you explain why you resigned from the party? Yeah, I I saw the numbers. I've been thinking about this for a while. You know, the party has been an embarrassment to libertarians for a very long time. I think quite frankly, it's going to be even worse than it used to be. This is the paleo strategy happening yet again within the LB. This is, you know, people like Lou Rockwell behind this. And, you know, it's a shame to see there's a lot of bad actors that are, you know, not condemned. Others are taking a wait and see approach. I think it's going to be interesting. I I I welcome new membership. I welcome change. I think that change is good. I think progress is good. I think right now there's a lot of complicated feelings from a lot of delegates. And I'm hoping that the people who who get elected are willing to work with everyone. And if they are, I think that there could be good things. We'll see what happens if they do take over. Either they're going to be a smashing success and we'll all be able to cheer for the for the victories that we're getting or it will fail and we'll learn from that or it'll be somewhere in between. We'll maximize on successes and learn from the failure. Amash, who is sticking around and is a rumored 2024 presidential candidate, says that he hopes the energy from the Mises caucus can be channeled in a positive direction that grows the party. He says it should prioritize supporting candidates committed to protecting individual rights. Do you feel comfortable in the Libertarian Party as the Mises caucus takes over? Yeah, I do. We have to see how things go. I don't think that we're going great under the previous administration or previous ones before that. We have a lot of work to do as a party. That's not to say I don't respect and appreciate a lot of the work that was put into it. But we have a lot more work to do and it's not going to be easy to to get this party on track. So it's an uphill battle. I want to give them the opportunity. They know there's something wrong with the way this country is being managed at the governmental level. They don't like what's going on in the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and they're here because they want to bring that energy to something. It's about channeling that energy in the right direction. We should be happy about the fact as a party, at least, that everything does seem to be revolving around Donald Trump because I think he alienates so much of the country that that is a real opening for us. And the Democrats have such a weak team that that's an opening for us. I think we need to be pulling from the right and the left. I mean, I don't view libertarianism as a right or left philosophy. It can pull from both of those sides. We're a full spectrum philosophy. And I'd like us to bring in people right now. And we have that opportunity. This is maybe the chance of a lifetime over the next couple of years to bring people into the party. Angela McCartle won with, you know, 70 percent of the vote or something like that. But 300 people out of, you know, the thousand or so who talked or who voted voted against her. What's your message to those people? By our fruits, you'll know us.