 Well, thanks everybody for coming out on such a beautiful Saturday. We really need people in this country who are interested in intellectual pursuits because I'm afraid that a lot of our society is going the opposite direction. So we are we appreciate your time with us this morning. I'd like to just introduce my friend Cliff Maloney who is president of Young Americans for Liberty is going to be joining us in our conversation earlier this afternoon before the Judge Napolitano arrives. Cliff is someone I've known from actually I believe an internship in Dr. Ron Paul's office when he was still an undergraduate living in Pennsylvania. So it's great to be reunited with him. He's somebody I've known for a long time someone for whom I have a great deal of affection and respect. But the question before us which Cliff and I would like to discuss and also hopefully discuss with you as well is whether it's too late for politics. Are we too far gone in America? In other words there's a divide in this country and I'm sure you're all aware of it. We all feel it especially if you spend much time on social media. Now is it overstated? Are we really at each other's throats and coming apart like no other time in our history even the Vietnam era the Civil War era. I don't know that's hard to judge but nonetheless there's obviously something very very wrong and I think a lot of people feel that and I think it results in things like Bernie Sanders coming to the fore in a populist manner as the potential Democratic nominee. There is a PBS firing line series going on right now called America's Great Divide which attempts to grapple with this problem or this topic and I saw one recently with Steve Bannon who is an advisor to the Trump campaign and he's talking about how the cost of getting information about politics or whatever it might be has never been lowered because we all have these cell phone devices in our pockets. He says we live in post-persuasion America according to Bannon. There's no more sort of convincing the other side or sides about our viewpoint of the other. It's just about who wins and who mobilizes. I thought that was a pretty interesting statement. For my part and speaking on behalf of the Mises Institute of course we'd like to see a less political world. It feels like we live in a highly politicized era where everything even your food choices your choices of a partner in life that sort of thing become highly politicized and we would like to move towards society that is less politicized. In other words a society where politics and government are not the central organizing feature but rather markets and civil society are. So are we doing so and if not what should we do about it because we live today really in a lawless country. And when I say lawless I don't mean that society that you and me get away with being lawless on the contrary. What I mean is that we have a lawless central government. The federal government in this country is comprised of men and women who basically do what they want to do without restraint or constraint either from the Constitution or from supposedly the other branches of government or from us voting or whether occasionally one of us has the temerity to sue them in their own courts. That doesn't seem to be working out too well either. So we live in a lawless country of sorts. And what I'd like to talk about with Cliff is whether or not there is still time to use politics or political activism to do something about it or whether in fact we're too far gone. So taking the affirmative in a sense that yes political activism still has merit and can still yield some sort of tangible benefits for us is my friend Cliff Maloney. So come on up Cliff. Well good morning debating Jeff Deist and he's going second is never a spot you want to be in. But I want to thank you for having me today. Jeff was my boss back in 2011 and 2012 right before Ron retired. And as I like to say he was the first libertarian I met that was normal and I sadly mean that he was a professional a guy that really had it together to communicate. And I've always looked up to him for that. So appreciate everything you've done Jeff. Let me start by saying this. I think you might be surprised. I'm not up here to say that political action is the answer. I want to share some of my experience just over the last five to six years. I'm newer to the movement of 28 years old. So you can laugh at me. Don't don't kick me off the stage. But let me just talk through some of the ways that I have seen us as a movement. And I talk about the broader libertarian movement throw away millions and millions of dollars in political action in a way that I think has been just absolutely it's just been a huge mistake. And so let me start by saying I think that we have this assumption that when we go out to talk about the ideas of liberty people are listening but they're not accepting them. I completely disagree. I don't think anyone is listening. Right. You brought up Steve Bannon and what he said about just trying to mobilize. I don't think that folks out there are actually hearing and that we have an audience they're taking in the issues and then saying oh you know that's fringe you know we're not libertarian we believe in this or we believe in this. I think most people are having a beer at night. They're trying to pay their mortgage when we work with college students you know they're trying to find a girlfriend or boyfriend. I mean people are just busy living their lives. And so in 2016 I took a job working for Rand Paul when he was running for president. And I was his national youth director. And I'm a fan of Rand Paul. I hope he would not take this as a shot. But after that campaign I spent about two weeks just kind of thinking about how much money did we spend on these races. You know what's the purpose when you're running for these big offices. And I just realized that the movement for so many years we've kind of been just taking shots in the dark. If we're talking specifically about politics. Now one of the premises I want to start with is I don't see political action as let's get 51% of politicians to be hardcore libertarians. I need everybody in the room. I'm going to ask Jeff to be with me on this. So I I'm not saying that 51% of politicians will believe in the libertarian philosophy vote that way and stay principal. What I'm looking for is is there a way for us to utilize political activism to educate to get the message out to have a platform similar to what Ron did in 2012. Getting on the radar of so many individuals to get them interested because he had that platform. So Rand Paul's campaign wraps up. I'm sitting in room with him and my predecessor Jeff Frazey and we're talking about where the movement should go from here. And it was a pretty blunt conversation because I said no offense but you know we just spent like 10 million bucks. A couple months later you know Trump's in the what like what are you looking at that is exciting about hey let's do that again in terms of Rand 2016. And so I kind of sat down and I said well have we really ever thought about putting a system together where we can play against the powers that be and actually win. Yeah we got Thomas Massey. I think half the room will boomies half will cheer if I say yeah we got Justin Amash. There are people you can point to that have a strong principled libertarian philosophy that are serving in the federal government but we're talking about millions and millions of dollars. And so if you're with me at least for the sake of this argument and saying that having a microphone is a good thing to be able to educate others to be able to reach people. Throwing or having to spend you know 10 or 50 million dollars the Senate race in Texas they spent 150 million dollars on that race. I'm not here to advocate for that but what I said is do we have enough resources do we have a way that we can take soup to nuts the full plan of actually going out and using political activism to buy microphones to reach individuals to get a platform. Somebody said to me once cliff the problem with libertarians is they're throwing bombs from the sidelines are not even on the field and the bombs aren't even reaching the stands. And it's when they first say OK but they said no really they said we are not playing on the field. So we sat down and we said all right if you had minimal resources and you wanted to figure out a way to excite the movement and figure out a way to get people to take action. What do you do and I'm telling you the story because I want you to kind of see how we got to where we are young Americans for Liberty has always been an educational entity 501 C3. And so if we were going to make this shift we talked through where could we actually make an impact. So I'm a middle school math teacher by trade and I sat down and we literally map this out. We said OK what's the tactic you would use if you want to get somebody elected. It's Iran Paul what's the tactic you would use to be able to combat the establishment or the powers that be or the big money. Well there's certain tactics you can use in politics. You can send mail. You can do TV. You can do radio. Or you could do something that's more grassroots like knocking doors or making calls. And we realize very quickly you know somebody wants to write Jeff a check today for 20 million dollars. They can have a TV ad up in about five hours. But what you don't have are activists who are principled and passionate about the ideas that we love. The establishment can't buy that. You can't buy young people especially but that energy because we believe in something to go out and talk and do the work nobody wants to do. So we landed on door knocking as the tactic we would try to test for this program. And then we said all right well what do we want to do. We said we don't want to burn money on presidential races and these statewide Senate races. And so we landed on doing this impact score I put together where we said how many votes does it take to win each of these offices. We had about 20 offices listed everything from dog catcher up the president United States is how many votes does it take to actually win that seat. Then we said OK how many doors would we have to knock to move the needle in that race about 10 points. The reason that's important is you want to be able to control the race enough. We'll get to this that the politicians will fear you right that you have control over the race. If you get involved with grassroots you're knocking doors in a race where they're going to spend 150 million dollars. You're not faking them out and getting them to think that all you're the reason that we won this race. So then we took how many doors we have to knock. We figured out the price and then all of a sudden you do a plot of the price versus the impact of that office. Meaning we had an impact score of what does it mean to liberty to the principles of libertarianism. What does it mean to get somebody elected to president. It's subjective but put a number on it. Let's say you say a thousand OK what does it mean for US Senate. What does it mean for Congress. What does it mean for state legislature. Mayor school board city council and you compare the cost to the actual impact for liberty and it slapped us in the face. We need to focus on the state level. So we got together with a team we said OK. Should we be doing this. Should we be putting this together. And the idea was if we went out and we knocked doors. We thought we launched this program in 2018 and called it operation went at the door. If we could elect how many people we have to elect to make an impact across the country. If I said how many Ron Paul's do you want to have in state legislators throughout the country. It's a pretty interesting conversation. And where we landed was we think that we can win 250 of these races by the end of 2022. Now I want to get to my point here and we can talk details later we've done 107 races we've won 56 of them. Our rules are pretty simple. They got to be principal. They got to be viable. I don't care what political party they belong to. Republicans hate me for that libertarian party Constitution party independent. They all hate us for that. They all hate us for that. We don't we don't care about political party. I care about the ideas. So if you show us that you're principled and you can win we will send students in anywhere from 6 to 10 put them on the ground for 30 days. Win the race. 56 wins so far. So 56 Ron Paul type legislators now serving in state houses throughout the country. Does it matter. Like I said in the beginning the premise here is I want to buy microphones. Now let me say this and I probably shouldn't say we're recording. Most voters most individuals you know don't care. I don't want to say they're stupid but they're not paying attention. If a local activist or somebody that's very involved wants to make a statement to the media where people's eyes are right. We're trying to get an audience. We're trying to get people to listen. Local schmuck weighs in on tax policy. But you get 6000 votes and get elected state representative. Now the headline state representative Smith weighs in on tax policy. It's legitimacy. It's credibility. We're trying to beat them at their own game. And so what we've built at YAL is this opportunity. We look at it to buy microphones by having a program from soup to nuts to go in. We deploy knock doors after we vet viable principle candidates from there. This is the part the politicians don't like. We have a coalition. We call it the haslet coalition where we actually hold the politicians accountable. People ask me all the time what happens when somebody gets in and they go south. We've wasted millions of dollars at the federal level. We got somebody elected. They said they were a libertarian Republican. They get in. They're horrible. We keep them accountable. So we have literal staff members day in and day out tracking votes, getting ahead, providing model legislation, but working with them to figure out how we can keep them accountable. And when they screw up, guess what? Guy in Vermont out of our 56 wins, we only have 55 left. Made an example of them right away. Voted for a $21 million tax increase. He's gone. So my argument today is if you can build a system where you can buy microphones to actually get out there, and by the way, this is the state level. Most of us do believe in states rights or at least God forbid, you know, pushing back on the federal government. If we can buy those microphones, if we can get people that now have a platform to speak to call out the craziness, one person in a lot of these state houses is all it takes. You get one libertarian in just one person that can stand up for property rights that can stand up and say, this is absolutely insane. You can call the circus what it is a circus. And so our objective of 250 Ron Paul's, we think that political activism of buying those microphones could make a tremendous difference in the country for people finally hearing the principles of liberty. And that's what I want to talk about today. Thanks everybody.