 The populism question is central to understanding it's kind of libertarianism right now in 2023. We had this conversation, we went into this topic with Dave Smith on the first episode of the show, and I wanted to just play a little bit of Dave's argument. He's very much in the pro-populism camp, and this is a debate that stretches back to kind of the beginnings of modern American libertarianism. Let's have, I want to have Dave articulate his case for libertarian populism, and then kind of delve a little more deeply into this. So let's roll that best. I'm a big believer in the Rothbardian kind of like populist idea that, and look I think you see this with Javier Malais, right? Like this is the way it can be done. Like this is the way to do it is to tap into this kind of populist streak, particularly at a time when the elites have so mismanaged everything, and kind of like talk to people about how they're being ripped off. Like how they're being ripped off and these guys are doing it to you, and then the problem with populism always is that it's completely devout of any type of theory. Trumpian movement in general, there's just no it's always like he's railing against everything that is pretty horrible, and then he's like, so what's your, and it's like good deals, make the best deals, only me, only I can, it's like there's nothing really there. But libertarians already have that. It's like libertarians have all the theory, but we're missing all of the like populism to make it like appeal to people. So what do you think of that argument that, you know, at the end of the day, there are, there is a sort of, you know, managerial elites or at least people who have that ambition to plan our society and that libertarians should be defining themselves in opposition to that agenda? I think a lot of things about that. One is that I should always preface that my job, my self-conception, is not about the wielding of political, the attainment or the wielding of political power. And so when I am asked about, you know, how should we attain and wield political power, I don't have great answers or at least you should take them with all the gray of salt. My job is to do journalism, libertarian journalism. A lot of that can be very righteous and angry and frothing and pointing out the just brutal mismanagement by the elite political class. It's a huge percentage of what we do at Reason and what I've done in my life before. And I ever worked for Reason or really knew much about the place. So it's part of it, yeah, but also journalism is just a different thing. It's gathering of facts. I would point to if we're going to be talking about Marie Rothbard's strategy as being something that is helpful, you should point out that it wasn't always helpful. The Marie Rothbard went to some bad places in the early 1990s. That is what happens when you go towards the attainment of political power and also power and also like this sort of attempt. And there's something elite about this attempt as well or at least not elite. It's a temptation that intellectuals and people who work in the knowledge class always are tempted by, which is that if I can just harness this populist feeling out there, I'm going to produce my intellectual ideological outcome. You see this with Marie Rothbard and Lou Rockwell in the early 1990s, with the Rothwell Rothbard report. They were talking about Senator Joe McCarthy, tail gunner Joe as being a role model. They were saying nice things about David Duke. They cozy it up to Pat Buchanan at the time as a kind of predictive element of where a segment of the population was going to go as a sort of John the Baptist figures for Donald Trump. They were onto something, absolutely. And they were onto something much more than I certainly expected. So hats off for sort of like describing a world as it exists, rather the world than I thought it was. But as a place where a person can go and hold on to one's libertarianism or one's ideology, it was corrupting. Those types of things are corrupting. It's going to lead you to positions like Lou Rockwell had of like defending the cops against Rodney King of writing just really horrible things. Like the early 1990s stuff that came, whether it's in the Ron Paul Newsletters or the Rothbard Rockwell report and all these kind of things, it's very noxious. It's very anti-libertarian. It went to a bad place. And you could say that admiring Rothbard for plenty of other things that he contributed in his life. But he was always kind of a political schemer. One way to look at this and take Rothbard and take libertarian politics out of this for a second is look at the difference between what Chris Ruffo does and what, for instance, the foundation for individual rights and education does. They are always at loggerheads, even though they frequently have the same kind of opponents in the world. It's just a different approach. Fire uses a sort of tethered to a set of principles, which they apply hopefully and in my view, usually very consistently across time. Ruffo is going towards power, political power like Ron DeSantis in Florida, and trying to influence it. I think both approaches are valid, by the way. And I think like absolutely Chris Ruffo has influenced American policy and debate more than a lot of private actors have for a long time. But I think it is also corrupting. You're going to lead to bad laws, which I think some of that has happened in Florida. I think libertarian is naturally populist in that sense. It is a position from which you critique the application of power and you correctly identify that, especially those people who say that, oh, we're just over here trying to solve problems, that that is actually ideological, even as much or more ideological or more influencially ideological than libertarianism is. And yeah, Javier Malay going off a bunch and ripping stuff off of a wall is awesome. I would love to see that as I would love to see someone articulate in the way that he has in those videos that we've all seen talking about economics and just rapid fire insane, you know, Nick Gillespie on on crank kind of mode. That's that's all thrilling and exciting. But let's also remember the conditions that brought him were so horrible. And I hope we don't live to see them in this country. Yeah. And there's a it's it's also it's also, you know, targeted at a the from a libertarian perspective, it's grounded. We talked about this with Dave, too, it's grounded in libertarian theory. And he is when he's, you know, saying off when and ripping things off, he's talking about dismantling unnecessary government bureaucracies, which all of us in this conversation agree with. And like, when I think about populism, I agree largely with what you're saying, Matt, that there's a sort of cynicism to libertarians embracing it, because populism can almost be its own ideology. It's like it is the belief that there is just that elites themselves are kind of inherently bad. And I think for libertarians, it's like, well, no, it's more like people who are using their elite status to infringe on others, liberties are bad. Like in a free society, they're, you know, we would have, you know, academics, and we would have, you know, titans of industry and so like, so there would be kind of like natural elite. So we're not against that necessarily, but we're against natural elites, Zach Weismiller. Well, we're against like, you know, the cloud swabs of the world, who is himself defining himself against libertarian. He said, you know, libertarians, these anti system people are the enemy. And so, you know, I have no problem being kind of like creeped out by like the dastardly plans of the World Economic Forum, even though I don't think that, you know, they're out there, you know, eating babies, but they want to, they have a vision, they have the kind of, you know, technocratic vision of the world. They have this idea that, you know, we're going to kind of meld public and private, and we're, you know, we're going to have stakeholder capitalism. We're going to kind of go the China model. That is something to be alarmed about and worried about. And to the degree that, you know, resisting that is quote, unquote, populism, fine, but this kind of unmoored populism and appealing to just like a vague sense of the elites are controlling everything. I think that is where we start to run into big problems. Well, wouldn't libertarian populists counter to both of you? Because I do want to sort of play devil's advocate for a second here. I think I agree with what you guys are saying, but wouldn't the libertarian populists, if one were in the room with us, counter, Zach, they shut you inside your house in Los Angeles for, you know, a really long time to the point where you felt the need to move your entire family to Florida to ensure your kids didn't grow up masked. Matt, you know, same for you in New York City. I mean, you have basically been betrayed by the state that has locked you inside your houses for many months on end and basically removed public schools as an option available to your children. What has the state done for you? And Liz, and Liz, they blocked you from going to church, right? Well, yeah, I mean, legitimately, people from going to church. That is such a radicalizing notion. I mean, a long time, they did all of this to us. And then they basically said, you know, Matt and Liz, in order to possibly enter a New York City restaurant with your family, you have to show proof that you've gotten the vaccine a bunch of times at a certain point, right? Because they required multiple doses. Oh, and then by the way, Zach, those questions you had about the origins of this whole virus and whether or not there was a lab leak, well, actually, we're going to censor and suppress a whole bunch of information, journalistic information that attempts to get to the bottom of this, even though it's all happened in China, you know, where the CCP, sorry, I did my best Donald Trump-esque China, but like where the CCP, we know it's not generally transparent with us, right? Like, so when you, when you tally up what they've done to us over the last four or so years, not to mention every single year, they take hefty, hefty chunks of our paychecks, how could you not hate the state? Like at a certain point? Well, it's not, yeah, it's not about that. And let me just give one counter that. And I'm curious to hear Matt weigh in on this, but, you know, when you talked about they locked me down in Los Angeles, it was basically one person named Barbara Ferrer, who was the public health authority for L.A. County, who was like a, you know, a master's of public health or something like that. And then who was it that ultimately declared that, you know, locking people out of their churches was unconstitutional? It was a bunch of robed elites from Ivy League, from the Ivy League, sitting on the Supreme Court. So it's not as simple as like the elites versus the non-elites are on your side or not on your side. And that's, I guess, my point is like, we should be looking more at what is, what are the mechanisms for these infringements, rather than like, what kind of strata of society or culture is it coming? But I do think it is worth pointing out that like Barbara Ferrer and, you know, big city mayors, whether Garcetti or de Blasio, were all taking their cues from Anthony Fauci and then the teachers unions and Randy Weingarten, whom Matt has written about extensively, right? Like to some degree, there was a level of coordination, maybe not in the sort of sense that people envision of like, well, the deep state is conspiring against us. But there is certainly, well, the CDC says one thing and Anthony Fauci says one thing. And then all of these big city mayors take their cues from that and so on and so forth. Matt, what do you make of all this? That is, I mean, I've always used the phrase political class in that in many cases. And this is absolutely true. And it was an actual conspiracy in that people met together and made decisions. I mean, the classic case is the February 2021 new Biden administration guidelines at the CDC about distancing in public schools, where the new CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, made a recommendation that was counter to her own personal recommendation of the summer previously, when she was a private citizen, because she had Randy Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in on those scientific discussions. And since a huge swath of the country, the one run by Democrats for the most part, basically followed CDC Dictat on these things, that meant that sentenced kids to further time in halftime or remote schooling. And there was a revolt that happened in Massachusetts and elsewhere. And they had to scramble and revise those calculations a month later. But it showed that that thing was corrupted from from root and branch. And yes, the the elites and this and I would include here of the journalistic class too, as part of the political class right now, you have a large swath of journalism dumb, who are cheering on censorship by the Biden administration, like we have to combat COVID misinformation. And if that means, you know, taking Joe Roganoff spotify, well, darn it, that's just what we've got to do. It's insane. And we should have contempt towards that. I would just say in my own little hippie corner over here, we just had Martin Luther King day here. And I'm always glad to see people look up his various writings and speeches about everything. And I've always been, I think the perhaps greatest or certainly, you know, top five pieces of American political writing and rhetoric is letter from Birmingham Jail, which has the four steps essential steps in his position or his point of view, towards creating a nonviolent campaign of non violence resistance. And two of those steps are always kind of overlooked. But one of them is the gathering of facts, right, not fictions, but facts. The other one is self purification, which is to say, if your heart is filled with hate, you're going to do bad at doing persuasive convincing protest. So I have contempt for a lot of the actions that you described, Liz, and even you bringing them up again makes the blood pressure kind of go up and get all prickly. And I try not to be governed by hate. I don't think encouraging people to hate the state is going to lead to great outcomes. But that's just me personally. And again, I'm not in the power wielding business. I know that if I'm governed by hate of, you know, the protesters blocking the Williamsburg Bridge when I want to cross it, that I'm probably going to get to some bad policy ideas. So I try to not do it. that happens. Or should the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other pod catcher?