Just Asking Questions

Aaron Sibarium, a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon, whose work has been widely credited for exposing the plagiarism of former Harvard President Claudine Gay, joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to discuss Gay's downfall, as well as its implications for the Ivy League; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and writers and thinkers of all kinds who can now have their work subjected to AI-powered plagiarism detection.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

"Harvard President Claudine Gay Hit With Six New Charges Of Plagiarism," Washington Free Beacon

"Excerpts From Dr. Claudine Gay's Work," The New York Times

Bill Ackman on X

"Claudine Gay: What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me," The New York Times

Christopher F. Rufo on X

The post Aaron Sibarium: Did Harvard's Plagiarism Scandal Doom DEI? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

"To be a sane and happy parent, you need to be counter-cultural in our family-unfriendly culture," writes Tim Carney in his forthcoming book Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be.

Carney, senior columnist at the Washington Examiner, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the father of six children, talked with Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe about declining fertility in America and worldwide and why he thinks it's time for "governments, employers, and other institutions" to "abandon the idea of neutrality and instead take a side: the pro-family side." They also discussed how governments make it harder to afford large families by implementing counterproductive housing and labor regulations. The conversation delved into the role that technology might play in increasing fertility in the future, the enduring cultural relevance of Mike Judge's 2006 movie Idiocracy, and their reactions to clips about DINK couples ("double-income, no kids"). 

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

Americans' ideal family size is smaller than it used to be | Pew Research Center

Childstats.gov - America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2023 - Demographic Background

Building the New America: Urban Reform Institute, September 2023

World Fertility Rate 1950-2024 | MacroTrends

World Population Prospects - Population Division - United Nations

The post Tim Carney: Why Aren't People Having More Kids? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

When Russ Roberts, an economist and host of the podcast EconTalk, received a job offer to become president of Jerusalem's Shalem University, it seemed like "a no-brainer," he wrote in his 2022 book Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. Giving up his ability to work from his home in America on whatever interested him intellectually as a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution? "Only a fool would take the job," he wrote. But that was only if one considered the opportunity using a purely utilitarian pro/con checklist. For Roberts, this was a "wild problem," one that required him to consider "who I am and who I want to be." And with that in mind, he said, "It was a no-brainer in the other direction." He took the job and moved to Israel in 2021.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel here or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller spoke with Roberts about Hamas' October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and their aftermath. They discussed how the attacks have transformed Israeli culture and politics, what it's like to live within a 90-second missile trip from Gaza, how a free society should respond to openly anti-Jewish rallies and actions such as tearing down hostage posters, and what the relationship between the United States and Israel has been and should be.

The post Russ Roberts: Life in Israel Since October 7 appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Stella Assange—an attorney specializing in international law, a human rights activist, and the wife of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, with whom she has two children—joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on episode three of Just Asking Questions to talk about the toll that imprisonment has taken on Assange and his family. They also discuss the threat to freedom of speech that the United States' Espionage Act case against Assange poses, why she believes that the Swedish sex charges against him were bogus, and why many in the U.S. media seem hostile to Assange and WikiLeaks. 

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher. 

Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below. 

Zach Weissmueller: Julian Assange was arrested outside England's Ecuadorian embassy after his political asylum was revoked and moved to Belmarsh Prison in April 2019. That's a maximum security facility where inmates are held in small single cells. Amnesty International has drawn parallels to Guantanamo Bay. Reports and statements from doctors emerged quickly after that imprisonment, testifying to his deteriorating mental and physical health. How is he doing today?

Stella Assange: Well, as we film this, we're nearing his fifth Christmas in Belmarsh Prison, and he has been there for over four and a half years now because the U.S. has been trying to extradite him since April 11, 2019, and he hasn't left the facility to go to court since January 2021. That was the last time they allowed him to come to court for his own hearings. Since then, he's been participating remotely over video because they don't let him even go to the courtroom. 

His physical state has obviously deteriorated over that time. He spends a lot of time in his cell, but he is able to receive visits. So once or twice a week I can go and see him on weekends. I can bring the kids and that obviously helps him a lot. He can call me from Belmarsh Prison during certain hours throughout the day. So we are in contact during the day for most days, unless there is some kind of problem. And that obviously keeps him sane and helps us both feel like we're not so separated. 

Weissmueller: You're a mother, and you have kids together, how often are you able to travel to see him? And what is the personal situation like for you?

Assange: Well, it's obviously very difficult. Our children, the oldest one is 6 and a half, and the youngest one will turn 5 in February. All of their memories of Julian are inside this one big visiting hall inside Belmarsh Prison. And I reiterate that Julian is only there because there is this extradition request from the United States. He's not charged with any crime in the United Kingdom. They're just holding him on behalf of the United States which is opposing bail. And so we're forced to interact within this extremely harsh environment. And that's all the children know, visiting their father inside a big, loud, monitored visiting home once a week, more or less. 

Liz Wolfe: How do you explain that to your children? How much do they know about their father's situation?

Assange: It's really a mix of the two. So I've tried to introduce context as they grow older. I didn't want them to understand what a prison was before for other concepts like freedom and fairness. Actually, it was our eldest son, Gabriel, at one point, I guess he was around 5, when he asked if Julian was in prison. This place that we went to, was it a prison? And I told him yes. Before that I would say, we're going to the big building where Daddy is, and it's not Daddy's home. He's just being kept there. And obviously, they experience the whole process of going through the prison security, which everyone has to go through. Everyone, including toddlers, has to be searched by the dogs. They look inside their mouths and so on. They get patted down. They've seen that, and they live it. 

I explained that, yes, it's a prison, but that daddy hasn't done anything wrong. In fact, he's done good things, and he's being punished by bad people. I'm trying to explain it in age-appropriate ways and also trying to counter the immediate horror of the situation with the fact that lots of people support Julian and are fighting for his freedom. And sometimes I've taken them to protests and so on so that they actually see that there are a lot of people that support Julian and that there's something bigger going on. He's not just any other prisoner. And that's obvious from when you visit Belmarsh. There are huge banners saying "Free Julian Assange." At least once a week there's a protest. People go into the prison premises with loudspeakers and call for him to be released. 

This is a unique case, and I think they can sense that there's something special about their dad. And I've told them it's not the guards themselves, who they see and interact with, who are holding their father specifically. It's the people above them, the people who decide. And they're the people that Julian made angry because he showed the world that they had done bad things. And they're angry about that. 

That's generally how I try to explain it. And they understand. I tell them that Daddy's a hero. Millions of people around the world admire him. He spoke the truth. And sometimes it's difficult to tell the truth. And a lot of people will get angry and try to take revenge. 

Wolfe: You first met Julian, if I'm not mistaken, when he was fighting sexual assault charges in Sweden. And you initially joined his defense team. What made you interested in that case? And what's your perspective on that whole case?

Assange: I joined his legal team in February 2011, and Julian had started publishing the WikiLeaks publications that had been sent to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning in 2010, so a year before I joined his team. These publications from Chelsea Manning were the "collateral murder" video, the Iraq War logs, Afghanistan war diaries, diplomatic cables, and the Guantanamo Bay files. 

These are the same publications that Julian is indicted with now that had happened in the lead-up to me joining his legal team. And it had also started prior to any preliminary investigation being opened in Sweden. And actually, there were never any charges in Sweden. None were brought. And that's quite amazing because it kind of defies logic, right? Because there was a big extradition case, and Sweden would say, "Well, we haven't decided whether to actually bring charges against him, but we just want to question him." And then there was this question about, well, "Why don't you just question him?" 

Anyway, that Swedish preliminary investigation was dropped and resurrected multiple times. It was dropped four times, resurrected three. No charges were ever brought. It's quite extraordinary. The amazing thing about this case is that the prosecutor was refusing to question him. How can it possibly be that in a sex case where, of course, memories fade and it all depends on the recollections of the people involved, the prosecutor had to be compelled by the Swedish Court of Appeal, six years after the fact, to question him? The reason the Court of Appeal compelled her was that they said she had failed her professional duty to advance the case. And, of course, this is just one aspect of how that Swedish preliminary investigation was abusive. The reason it was abusive was because it took place in a highly charged political moment in which Julian was being actively sought by authorities because he was about to publish the Chelsea Manning leaks. 

He had already published the "collateral murder" video and the Afghan [Diaries]. And it was one month before WikiLeaks started publishing the Iraq War logs that he went to Sweden. There's actually a Daily Beast article that's archived in which the U.S. reporter says the State Department was contacting its allies in Europe and urging them to find a way to stop Julian in his tracks, to arrest him on whatever because by then they had arrested Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning, and they knew that WikiLeaks had more major leaks coming out. And so they wanted to stop him in his tracks. They contacted the Australians. The Australians were looking to cancel his passport. And then there was an investigation by the Australian police, and then the Australian police recommending not canceling his passport thinking it would be easier to track his movements. And ultimately Sweden initiated this preliminary investigation, which was condemned by the United Nations as an abuse against Julian's rights as a defendant. 

He was, in fact, never formally a defendant because he was never charged, which meant that he was never given access to exculpatory evidence of text messages that we knew existed. And so the U.N. special rapporteur on torture also did an investigation and in 2019 wrote to the Swedish and U.K. governments who refused to cooperate. He wrote a whole book about it. It's called The Trial of Julian Assange. And for any viewers who are interested in this kind of Swedish preliminary investigation, which also served to cast a shadow on Julian to treat him as an accused person without being formally accused, there's another book called Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies by Stefania Maurizi who is an Italian investigative journalist. Stefania Maurizi has done a lot of [Freedom of Information Act] work and obtained a bunch of correspondence, some of which had been destroyed by one party, which is the U.K. government, which is incredibly damning. And it shows how, in fact, there was a collusion between the U.K. and Sweden. The U.K. was telling Sweden not to question him, to extradite him, and that Sweden was going to put him in custody immediately and urging them not to progress the investigation unless he was extradited. This is extremely bizarre. Of course, denying a suspect the ability to defend himself is unjust. If you think this is just a regular case, then none of it makes sense. But once you understand the political context, then, of course, it all makes sense. 

It even says in this correspondence that Stefania Maurizi discovered literally the sentence, "Please do not think that we are treating this as just any other extradition case." That's the words of the U.K. prosecution authority who was communicating with the Swedish authorities. And then when Sweden tried to drop it in 2013, the U.K. responded by saying, "Don't you dare get cold feet telling them not to drop it." So it's pretty clear. But of course, as soon as that was dropped, it was revealed that there was an indictment that had come under the Trump administration, and Julian has been in Belmarsh in relation to that extradition request from the U.S. since 2019.

Wolfe: These are not the traditional circumstances under which most people meet their spouses. What was this like for you emotionally? How did you feel signing up to work on this case and then getting to know Julian, like what was swirling around in your head?

Assange: Well, I was steeped in the documents surrounding this Swedish preliminary investigation, and there was no case to answer. From the beginning, it was pretty clear that the administrative use of the extradition request from Sweden was a way to trap him, basically to bury him in a legal quagmire in order to interfere with his publishing work. In Sweden, as I said, like the initial prosecutor who looked at the case said there, there is no crime of rape involved in these allegations. The Swedish conduct in this case also responds to local dynamics. The person who took on the case within days was also running for general elections in Sweden. He was tipped to become the new justice minister. Julian's case was in the media. There were a lot of motivations. It wasn't just the likely nudge from the State Department at the highest levels. 

Julian's name was leaked to the press, which should never happen in the case of a preliminary investigation where the person hasn't even been formally accused. And as I said, he was never formally accused in those nine years. The U.N.'s working group on arbitrary detention, which looked at this case from 2014 onwards, saw the underlying investigation material. It was an adversarial process in which Sweden and the U.K. were unsuccessful in convincing this group of U.N. experts on arbitrary detention that they had conducted themselves in a lawful manner. They had, in fact, violated international obligations concerning arbitrary detention when it came to Julian, because, as I said, he was neither convicted nor even charged in relation to Sweden. And so it was this extraordinarily abusive nature of the Swedish allegations that was immediately obvious to me, as a member of his legal team. And so I could directly access the material of the case that we had access to to see that this was absurd. 

And my own experience, I mean, as I got to know Julian, was to see how he was persecuted and maligned in all sorts of ways. Of course, the Swedish aspect was just one. It was an effective one because Julian had a lot of support from the left initially because these publications concerned, of course, the Bush wars and so on. And a sex case, even one without a formal accusation or a conviction or anything, obviously is going to alienate a portion of the left and a big portion of women. And there was a deliberate strategy as these FOIA documents show, to keep him in this position of not being able to defend himself, with not being able to clear his name because they refused to question him. Sweden refused to give him a guarantee that he wouldn't be extradited to the United States. Sweden, in spite of its reputation, was a participant in the CIA rendition program, it branded al-Zari and Agiza, two asylum seekers who were in the process of applying for protection, and instead they were taken on a CIA flight and tortured in Egypt. And this was one of the most obvious and one of the most shocking cases of CIA rendition.

Since 2001, Sweden, I don't know if it's still true, but while Julian was still facing potential extradition, Sweden has not once rejected an extradition request to the United States. And this is different to the U.K., which has rejected extradition requests to the United States. So this was also a factor in Julian's decision to resist extradition to Sweden, which is a very small country and views itself as a very small country, certainly in relation to the U.S. 

Weissmueller: There are people who were or are friendly to the WikiLeaks mission who say that Julian Assange is a problematic figure. It's a theme that you see in multiple documentaries produced about him, including Risk by Laura Poitras, who's sympathetic but takes this position that Julian's personal troubles are intertwined too much with WikiLeaks' mission. What do you make of that kind of criticism?

Assange: It's really a dated criticism because that kind of criticism came about when the extradition case in relation to Sweden was alive. So a lot of people at the time were saying, "Well, he has nothing to worry about. The U.S. doesn't want to extradite him. This is all about Sweden, etc." And unfortunately, Risk fell into that trap. It's very dated now when you watch it, because obviously what happened was that Julian was indicted in relation to the Afghan and Iraq war publications and so on. 

Look, a lot of these portrayals came about in the immediate aftermath of these publications. So what happened in 2010 and 2011 was that WikiLeaks came onto the scene and broke more significant stories than the legacy press had in 50 years combined. And of course, WikiLeaks had partnered with The New York Times, The Guardian, and three major European papers as well in Germany, Spain, and France to maximize the coverage of these big databases. And so they would publish the cables, the war logs, and so on, in coordination, doing joint investigations and so on with these big papers. Once the big papers had published together with WikiLeaks, then there wasn't much utility in that partnership, and they just distanced themselves. Julian was also a critic of the way that these major papers reported on the WikiLeaks publications, the way they redacted information that exposed them to lawsuits from oligarchs. WikiLeaks had already published on their website, so there was, from that perspective, no serious legal threat. 

So Julian has been critical of the major media players. And of course, he was an outsider. He's Australian. This is an internet publisher, an internet publisher that attracted very high-quality sources who entrusted WikiLeaks as the vehicle with which this information could reach the public. And the reason for that was that WikiLeaks has a very high-grade submission system which has since been copied by the mainstream. There's a very interesting paper by Jack Goldsmith, who was the former assistant attorney general under a Republican administration, I can't remember which, called the "WikiLeaks-ization of the American Media." And what he argues is that the American press adopted the innovations that WikiLeaks had pioneered by the mid-2010s. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, etc. all have the same or similar technology. They adopted the technology that WikiLeaks invented for using encryption to be able to protect sources when they communicate, and also the submission systems so that you don't necessarily, as the receiver of information, know who the source is. And so this became adopted by the mainstream press. 

Another innovation that WikiLeaks brought was to create partnerships between media organizations. It was WikiLeaks who basically forced The New York Times to cooperate with The Guardian, to cooperate with Le Monde and El País, and so on. It had never been done before. It wasn't easy. And part of the reason why there was a distancing from Julian Assange was because they didn't like to work in a way that was not on their own terms, even when it was with other major media partners. And so when Julian came onto the scene, he was seen as a competitor, but also as a threat to the mainstream media's economic model. 

This is like 2010. The major papers were publishing online, and their advertising revenue was down. People weren't buying papers anymore. Lots of people are being fired and so on. And here comes WikiLeaks. That has a completely different business model, which is it's small, has a lot of volunteers, and it's reader-funded. And of course, now we see reader-funded publications quite a lot. But at the time, apart from some bloggers perhaps, this was a real reader-funded publication that was unfettered by advertising restrictions. And that at the same time was having such high-quality sources come to them and having high impact and enabling it to enter into partnerships with the biggest media organizations, the biggest media houses, and basically being able to call the shots because WikiLeaks was the one that attracted the sources. And of course, once the legal trouble started and the financial blockade, Bank of America, PayPal, Western Union, and so on blocked the donations to WikiLeaks as soon as WikiLeaks had started to publish the State Department cables. This was also the time when Julian was arrested over the Swedish allegations. This all happened within a week, so it all came down at the same time. And then these major media organizations who had partnered with WikiLeaks then turned against Julian. And basically, I think the objective was to try to kill off WikiLeaks because it was a competitor, because it had such an important impact and was a newcomer. And a threat to the gatekeeper function that we all know.

Wolfe: There is this line drawn between these people who are journalists over here, but these other people surely don't qualify. And therefore, their First Amendment protections ought to be different. How do you feel when you see MSNBC hosts treating Julian Assange in this way? 

Assange: It's a bit disappointing because the criticisms that they use are just simply not true. You had Maria Ressa there. She was a CNN presenter. And then, of course, she's a Nobel Peace Prize winner and has herself faced political prosecution because of her journalism. And it's really disappointing that she says something like WikiLeaks dumping. This is one of the major distortions concerning WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks does privilege the publication of archives, but it doesn't just dump it. It provides context. It writes up context. It writes up analysis. It has redacted information and states the criteria for redactions and so on. 

But even so, I mean, all of this is really irrelevant whether Julian's a journalist or not. The question is, is Julian accused of journalism? And he is. It is the activity that has been criminalized. Not whether he falls into a category or not. It's the category of the activity that is being criminalized. Receiving, obtaining, and communicating information to the public. 

The use of the Espionage Act, it's very interesting because you see kind of lazy journalists, lazy reporters, talking about Julian as if he is being accused of being a spy. You enter into the realm of absurdity when you start talking about the allegations against Julian, because the first point is that Julian is Australian. He's not American. He's never lived there. And the use of the Espionage Act allows for this categorical laziness. And that's because the Espionage Act is a very broadly worded, indeterminate piece of text that was adopted in 1917, and that has been interpreted in an increasingly expansive way, and especially under the Obama administration. The Obama administration really ramped up the use of the Espionage Act against journalistic sources. Under the Obama administration, three times more people were prosecuted as sources of news stories than all previous administrations in the 100 years preceding it combined. And so this expansive crime that started under the Obama administration then continued and became even more extreme under the Trump administration. 

So it actually took the U.S. eight years to bring an indictment against Julian, and it came under the Trump administration. I just found this quote that was really interesting. There was a case called the Morrison case in 1984, and this was a source who was indicted and convicted under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified photos to a British military journal. That was Judge Harvie Wilkinson, who in his concurring opinion, said that this would be limited to the role of the source because press organizations are not being and probably could not be prosecuted under the Espionage Act because of the political firestorm that would follow. So, in other words, he was saying that what limits the Espionage Act is political safeguards. It is the outcry. It is the reaction to the preposterous use of the Espionage Act against the press. And so what has happened is that the Espionage Act has been used in that way. It's been used against Julian. It's precedent setting. And the supposed outcry that was supposed to limit this kind of use of the Espionage Act has not followed.

Weissmueller: A lot unfolded in 2016 between WikiLeaks and the U.S. government during the election. How do you think that changed the tenor of the conversation and the way that people view WikiLeaks? And what do you say to people who think that there's some weird relationship between Julian Assange and Russia? 

Assange: I don't think there are any Russians who have worked for WikiLeaks. Well, Julian had a talk show that was licensed to a number of channels and Russia Today at the time, this was 2011. This is a long time ago. These allegations have never been substantiated because there is nothing to substantiate. The Mueller report, of course, came up with nothing. The national security directors in January 2017, already during a congressional hearing, said that in relation to the 2016 election material, they had no evidence of anything untoward concerning WikiLeaks. It's all been speculation. It's all basically coming down to Julian licensing a show to Russia Today in 2011. It's weak, to say the least. 

Of course, in relation to the 2016 publications, there was a strategy by the Hillary Clinton campaign to talk about Russia as allegedly interfering with that election and so on. But when you look at the WikiLeaks publication specifically, they had nothing to do with this other stuff, the D.C. leaks and I don't know what, which others did publish. WikiLeaks published the [Democratic National Committee] leaks and the [John] Podesta emails. And earlier in the year they had also republished the Hillary Clinton emails that had been put up on the State Department website, which were not easily accessible. 

So there were actually three Clinton publications. So the DNC ones revealed how the Hillary Clinton campaign had rigged the Democratic primaries and basically defrauded the Democratic donors who were being misled. The Bernie ones who were being misled because the candidate that they were supporting actually had no chance of becoming a nominee. The Hillary Clinton campaign, of course, afterward, when [it was] found out in Donna Brazile's book there was a secret agreement between the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign, and there was even a written agreement. They were colluding to basically undermine and ensure that Bernie Sanders did not get equal access to the media and so on. 

And then the Podesta emails, which came in October, showed how the Hillary Clinton campaign had also basically rigged the Republican primaries in the sense that they had this thing called the "pied piper" strategy. They would get their mates at MSNBC and so on to get Trump on the airwaves, because according to the Hillary campaign, their view was that Trump and a couple of other Republican candidates were extreme and unelectable and would alienate the swing voters and so on. And if they gave Trump airtime and if they convinced their allies in the press to give Trump airtime, then Hillary would win. And of course, we know what happened after that. So these were, you know, incredibly important publications. 

In fact, there was a court case that many people haven't even heard about. The DNC tried to sue WikiLeaks and Julian personally in the Southern District of New York in relation to the DNC publications. And that case was thrown out by the judge on First Amendment grounds. And in fact, he said that this was the type of publication that enjoys the highest protection of the First Amendment because you cannot think of a more important publication than that concerning political candidates in the lead-up to an election. That's a really important and strong judgment. The New York Times afterward gave an interview to the BBC saying, well, if they had received it, they would have also published it. 

I think it raises important questions about whether it's really possible in the U.S. media landscape to be truly independent. Can you alienate Democrats and Republicans and still enjoy protection even under the law? Like the political heat on you, and on WikiLeaks, having published damning information both about Republicans and post-2016 about Democrats, has placed Julian in an extremely vulnerable position. Vulnerable in the sense that if the First Amendment protections are not robust enough, if the political climate is such where there is a push for censorship, a push for propaganda, for repression when it comes to speech, then this political restraint on the Espionage Act becomes ineffective.

Wolfe: I want to take us back in time to 2010 for a second, which was when WikiLeaks made its first big release with the "collateral murder" video. It really exposed some of the horrors of war to an American audience for the first time. What was the impact of that video? And what is the broader impact of the WikiLeaks releases on the world?

Assange: Well, it really marks a before-and-after concerning the Bush wars. It's 2010, right? This actual event depicted in the video is from July 2007. The war had started in 2003, and it had been going for seven years by the time "collateral murder" was released. And by then there wasn't much interest in the media anymore. There were embedded journalists traveling with U.S. convoys and going to press briefings by the Pentagon and so on. But there was no real insight. There were just body bags coming back from Iraq. There was real newsworthiness, let's say, in reporting about Iraq. And then suddenly this came down, and it had such an impact because it really contrasted with the curated information that was coming through the media. And it depicts a war crime. That's what you see. It's not just the gunning down of these individuals, to begin with, where two Reuters journalists are on assignment and get killed. One of them crawls to cover and then a van pulls up, and two good samaritans come out of the van and try to pick up this journalist and then bring him into the van. And then it gets shot down and everyone dies, except for two children who are shielded by the body of their father. So this is a truly horrific video. And it's horrific not just because you're watching it, but because you're listening to the conversation and the kind of jokey, casual conversation around war. 

I think Chelsea Manning has said that in just 30 minutes you see the Iraq War in its essence. And it really captured the international imagination. And in December 2011, the Obama administration had the U.S. military removed officially, at least from Iraq, in big part because of what WikiLeaks had published. 

WikiLeaks had a major impact on the way U.S. policy developed after that point of the publication of the "collateral murder" video. Also with the Afghan War, it took another 10 years or nine years for that to finish. And we all know how that ended. But it didn't just show the carnage in Iraq but the senselessness of sending soldiers to fight this war in Iraq and die and get injured. And of course, the epidemic of suicides that has followed and is ongoing.

Weissmueller: For me, Julian Assange is a figure of world-historical importance because of what he unlocked with WikiLeaks. He demonstrated undeniably that the strategic use of technology like encryption would be shifting the entire global power structure. And he ushered in that new reality. He showed a whole generation that maybe resistance to these powerful super-states actually isn't futile. And if you have the right tools and you know how to use them, you can really change the world. And I think that might be a big part of why he's a marked man. But is there anything else that you want to say as we're wrapping up about his significance or his place in history?

Assange: Well, I think Julian is a visionary and a pioneer, as you say. Many of his writings and his speeches have gone viral on the Internet. In relation to Ukraine, for example, he was talking about Afghanistan, but his kind of big-picture analysis and criticism of the drivers of war have currency now. And in fact, you know, I often go back to the things that he wrote 10 years ago because they have stood the test of time. He is a global figure and a thinker of our times and the type that is direly needed. Julian has to be freed not just because this is an enormous injustice and the precedent it sets affects journalists everywhere in the U.S., but also globally. It's an extreme overreach. It criminalizes the publication of true information of the highest public importance, but also because of Julian's position as a public intellectual and as someone who promotes truth and is a critic of war. 

There's a House resolution that is being pushed but has been tabled. It expresses that regular journalistic activities are protected under the First Amendment and that the U.S. ought to drop all charges and attempts to extradite Julian Assange.

The First Amendment is something that is quite unique in the world, and it defines the political culture of the United States, which is much more open and dynamic than other parts of the world. The vast majority of politicians who look at this case seriously will understand the dangers of this case, that it should never have come to pass, that the case should be dropped. I'd ask any viewers to contact their representatives and ask them to support any efforts to drop the case against Julian. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

The post Stella Assange: Why Isn't Julian Assange a Free Man? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

"I have a history of being the only vote that was a 'no,'" says Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). "I've developed some trust with my constituents on those lone votes."

In the second episode of Just Asking Questions, Massie joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe to talk about his recent votes against aid to Ukraine and Israel, as well as a controversial meme that he posted on X (formerly Twitter), which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted as "antisemitic, disgusting, dangerous."

Massie says charges of antisemitism are "simply not true" and that his objectives are to avoid "open-ended support" for Israel's war and resist encroachments on free speech.

They also discussed Massie's attempt to force an in-person congressional vote on a $2.2 trillion COVID-19 relief bill in March 2020, a move which prompted former president Donald Trump to label Massie "a third-rate grandstander" and demand he be kicked out of the Republican Party. Massie defeated primary challenger Todd McMurtry 81-19 less than three months later.

"I was just trying to get people on record," says Massie. "The reason I was trying to get people on record is I knew this was one of the worst votes in history and nobody was going to be accountable for it… Here we are three years later, every bad thing that I said would happen as a result of [passing the $2.2 trillion relief package] has happened."

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher. 

Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below. 

Zach Weissmueller: I want to talk about something that's unfolding in D.C. right now, which is a vote on the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act. As part of that, the reauthorization of something called Section 702, which essentially allows the government to surveil communications between American citizens and foreign targets without a warrant. Though, after some resistance, a clean reauthorization of that is unlikely to happen. They're attaching it to the National Defense Authorization Act, which is kind of like the defense budget for the year. And they're trying to slip a more temporary extension into that. Could you tell us what is at stake for Americans with this issue?

Rep. Thomas Massie: So we're not trying to eliminate the FISA 702 program. It was established to allow our intelligence agencies to spy on foreigners without a warrant. In order to qualify to be spied on without a warrant, you have to be outside of the country and you have to be not an American citizen. If you're inside the country, or if you're an American citizen outside of the country, you can't be spied on by this program. Sounds great, right? But we've got 250,000 people on that list that we're collecting information on.

If you talk to a businessperson in France, for instance, your emails and stuff may get caught up in this data collection. Well, what they've been doing is going into this giant ball of data and they put in your name. They can put in Zach's name and search it without a warrant, without reasonable suspicion or probable cause. They are using this not to investigate suspects, but to create suspects.

Let's say that you and Liz are at a protest and they develop some nexus. They say, "Well, we think these protesters were inspired by Russia. We're just going to run all the protesters' names through this database." Now, even though the Intel community doesn't concede that they need a warrant for this, they've admitted that they violated their own protocols hundreds of thousands of times when they searched for U.S. persons data in this haystack. They say, "Well, it was created legally, so we don't need a warrant to go search it."

There are two proposals to reauthorize this program. By the way, the only chance you ever get to reform these programs is when they expire. So it's important that they do expire occasionally, and this one expires in January. And in the Judiciary Committee, which Jim Jordan chairs, and on which I serve, we've marked up a bill that would require them to get a warrant. It would create criminal penalties for people in the executive branch who abuse the program. Because there's never any culpability or blowback for anybody that's abused this program.

So we created this reform bill. And then the Intel committee has created a bill which is less than ideal. It doesn't have a warrant requirement. It doesn't have many of the reporting requirements back to Congress that the judiciary bill has. And in fact, it expands their ability to collect information. For instance, if you had free Wi-Fi at a cafe, that service provider would be treated like Google or Verizon now. And they would have to create a direct pipeline to the intel agencies for any of the communications that go through that. 

So you've got two proposals out there, and we're running out of time. What Speaker Johnson has proposed and some senators have proposed is "Let's just keep the old program in place for a little bit longer." Your basic congressional kicking the can down the road exercise that's going to be passing the Senate probably today unless Mike Lee and Rand Paul can stop it. Then it comes to the House probably tomorrow. 

Now, an interesting thing here is I serve on the Rules Committee, and Chip Roy and Ralph Norman do as well. And we told the powers that be that we can't go along with this. So they couldn't pass a rule to combine the FISA program with the NDAA. That's how they're going to try and get it through, attach it to must-pass legislation, the National Defense Authorization Act. Well, we said, "Nope, this shall not pass the Rules Committee." So they're going to try and do this on suspension. There's a House rule that says if you want to suspend all of our regular rules and expedite something, you need a two-thirds vote of the House. So this is going to be interesting to see if they can get effectively 290 people to vote for it.

Weissmueller: It is interesting because if you think back to when a lot of Americans were first awakened to this with the Snowden revelations about a decade ago, there were some lonely dissenters and most people just rubber-stamped this stuff. It does seem as if now there's more resistance. I assume some of that has to do with the way FISA was used against the Trump administration. Do you feel the political tides have shifted somewhat to the advantage of people who care about privacy and government surveillance?

Massie: The tides haven't just shifted, the stars have aligned. We've never had a chairman of either the Intel Committee or the Judiciary Committee who made reforming this program one of their priorities. So with Jim Jordan, we're very lucky to have him as the chairman of this committee. And one of his signature agendas is to get this reform, because we have seen abuses that have been used against President Trump. 

So a lot of conservatives have woken up to the fact that this program is being used against them. You have liberals who are upset about the program. Obviously, the FBI's using this against Black Lives Matter as well. 

So you do have this coalition of the left and the right. It used to be a coalition of a dozen people, Right? It was me and Justin Amash, Zoe Lofgren, and Tulsi Gabbard, maybe who were concerned about this. We used to come together and we would offer amendments to try to fix this in the funding bills. We would try to defund some of this stuff, which is a really blunt instrument. It's a lot easier to write legislation that affects the laws than it is to just defund something. And they would pat us on the head and say, "Well, you know, we appreciate the sentiment, but this isn't the time or place to do what you're doing. And you shouldn't be mucking around with the funding." But now is the time and place, the program is expiring. We've got a chairman who's sympathetic to the cause. You know, this reported out of the Judiciary Committee 35 to 2. There were only two dissenters. 

Liz Wolfe: Congressman, I want to ask about foreign aid. This week, Zelenskyy came to Washington and made his pitch for why the United States, in his eyes, ought to be funding Ukraine's war against a horrible invasion by Vladimir Putin. There's also obviously a terrible foreign policy situation in the Middle East right now between Israel and Hamas. You have called funding Ukraine and funding Zelenskyy, "economically illiterate and morally deficient." Make the case for why you oppose this form of funding. 

Massie: Well, the "economic illiteracy" is in reference to a letter that the White House sent to the House of Representatives last week. And in two or three of the paragraphs of the letter, they espouse the virtues of spending money with the military-industrial complex and sending that to Ukraine as a job creation program. That it would reinvigorate our military industrial complex. You've got to believe in the broken window fallacy to think this will be an economic stimulus for the United States. 

Meanwhile, the moral deficiency comes from some of the senators who have said that this war is a great deal for America because all we have to do is supply the weapons and Ukraine supplies the soldiers and that we're grinding down the Russian army. We're degrading their capacity to do this elsewhere or to commit war against us. The problem with that is the number of people who are dying. Zelenskyy allegedly told the senators that he's raising the draft age to 40 and admitted that they are running out of soldiers either through attrition on the battlefield or from people who've defected and left the country. 

You would think if this were a war about the existence of Ukraine and protecting a democracy and such a fine government that people would sign up, would volunteer to fight for their country. But the reality is hundreds of thousands of them had the means and the money got out of the country. Some are dying, trying to escape over mountains and through rivers to get out of the country. And far too many have died on the battlefield. We can keep supplying them with weapons. We can keep depleting our treasure, but they're going to run out of fighting-age males pretty soon.

Wolfe: Do you take that as an indictment of Ukraine's democratic system or more of a sense of leaving the country because they see it as a war that is totally unwinnable? How do you look at that situation? And more broadly, how should libertarians look at parallels, or lack thereof, between the U.S.'s involvement in funding Ukraine and the U.S. funding Israel?

Massie: Well, to your first question, I think it's both. They lived in a country where they know that bribery and corruption are part of the culture and the current government isn't immune to that. And so if you're fighting for your country, that's one thing. But fighting for the government that's in charge of your country is another thing. So I believe that's part of it. Obviously, self-preservation is going to be part of it as well. 

When it's over, there's going to have to be some negotiated peace settlement. And nobody, I think, believes Crimea is going to go back to Ukraine. So why spend all their lives when the lines are going to be where they were when it started? Just realism is a third factor. 

Weissmueller: Let me pick up on Liz's second point there, which is about Israel, because you've been kind of on the lonely end, certainly on the Republican side, of several votes pertaining to Israel. Could you explain your stance on Israel, where you're coming from, and what you think some of these critics might be missing about your position?

Massie: Sure. That was the first of 19 votes. Today. We're going to take our 19th virtue signal vote here in Congress. But I guess I got off on the wrong foot early and have been voting consistently ever since. The title of that bill is wonderful. I have no disagreement with the title of that bill, but there are 4 or 5 pages that go after that title.

The first objection I had was that there is an open-ended pledge of military support for Israel. We never declare wars anymore. The administration just kind of goes and does it. And Congress keeps funding it, but they find the imprimatur for their activity right there in these resolutions. So the open-ended guarantee of support for that war that's contained in the text of that bill, but not the title, could have implied boots on the ground. And that may be the only vote we get to take in Congress on whether we're going to do that or not. So, number one, I don't support that notion. 

Number two, in that resolution they mentioned Iran. In the very first resolution, they're already trying to expand the war and incorporate as much of the Middle East as they can. There's some people that just can't wait to attack Iran, and they want to use this as the nexus to get there. So that was in the resolution, a condemnation of Iran. I think we should be trying to constrain the conflict, not to expand it in the first resolution of support that we passed. 

Part of that resolution wanted stronger sanctions on Iran. And I don't support sanctions, never voted to sanction a sovereign country in the 11 years that I've been in Congress. I think it leads to war. Sanctions actually create crimes only for U.S. citizens because we're not going to put somebody in jail in another country who trades with Iran. What we're proposing to do when we pass a sanction is to make a federal law that would result in the imprisonment of a U.S. citizen who trades with Iran, and it hurts the people who are in the country. I think it actually edges us closer to war instead of getting us out of war. Even though I support Israel and I condemned Hamas, I did that on my own. I put out a statement. I support Israel's right to defend itself and I condemn these attacks. But that wasn't enough. 

Weissmueller: You've taken more heat for what you would describe as a "virtue signal bill." It's essentially the House reaffirming the state of Israel's right to exist and recognizing that denying Israel's right to exist is a form of antisemitism. Where are you coming from on these sorts of bills that aren't even really directly tied to any sort of military aid?

Massie: Well, I recognize Israel's right to exist. I have to preface all of this stuff with that because people would imply from a vote that I don't. But when they passed that, I said, "You're basically saying that anti-Zionism is antisemitism." And people argued with me about that.

What's interesting is the next week they passed almost the same resolution and they replaced Israel's right to exist with Zionism. So maybe I'm just giving them clues for how to write their bills more directly because the next resolution said that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who disagree with that statement. In fact, Jerrold Nadler, who's the most senior member of Congress, who's Jewish, went to the floor and gave a five minute speech, which is a long speech in the House of Representatives. But, he gave a five-minute speech on why that's untrue, to say that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. 

There are a lot of people who are antisemitic who are also against the state of Israel, but you can't equate the two. And I think these 19 votes, after today, are sort of part of the war effort for Israel to make it hard for anybody in the United States to criticize what they're doing. 

Every two or three days here in Congress, we're taking these votes that a lot of what's in the resolution is just obvious and doesn't need to be stated. It's kind of like Black Lives Matter. You have to say "black lives matter." They're doing the equivalent with Israel. Now Israel matters. And so I agree that Israel matters, but we don't have to take all these votes. And some of them are going into campuses and trying to limit free speech by withholding federal money. 

I've been called antisemitic for merely not supporting the money that goes to Israel. American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent $90,000 in my district running ads implying that I was antisemitic and then in a tweet, said that I was "antisemitic for not voting for the $14.3 billion to go to Israel." Even though I've not voted for foreign aid to go anywhere.

Weissmueller: Chuck Schumer has accused you of being antisemitic. He's blasted you on Twitter. Here's the tweet, he said: "Representative Massie, you're a sitting member of Congress, this is antisemitic, disgusting, dangerous and exactly the type of thing I was talking about in my Senate address. Take this down." And what he is referring to is the Drake meme, where you're saying, "No to American patriotism, yes to Zionism, Congress these days." What was your reaction to this? 

Massie: Well, we ratioed him on that pretty soundly. I quote tweeted him and said, "If only you cared about half as much about our border as you care about my tweets." 

It's just simply not true. By the way, in the replies to him, you'll find somebody who pointed out that of all 535 members of Congress, this cycle, he received more money from pro-Israel lobby according to Opensecrets.org than any other member of Congress. So it rings hollow when he says that. He's even in disagreement with Jerrold Nadler.

And I'll admit memes are not the most precise way to convey a point. But they can be effective. There's nothing in that meme that implies those two things are mutually exclusive. And that wasn't my intent. It's okay in Congress to be patriotic for Israel, but you can't be patriotic for America. That's considered nationalism, which American nationalism is a dirty word. And I know it's loaded. There are a lot of people that have attached themselves to it. But if you take it in the generic sense, it's pride in your country. Pride in America is looked down upon right now. It's out-of-fashion. But pride in Israel is something we have to vote on two or three times a week now in Congress.

Weissmueller: You have this reputation in your own district and nationally as the guy who's willing to make the meme and take the unpopular vote. I think that one of the prime examples of that is back during the depths of COVID, in March 2020, everyone was pushing for this $2.2 trillion COVID relief bill, including the president of the United States. And it was Representative Thomas Massie who was saying, "If we're going to have a $2 trillion vote here, let's follow the Constitution and have everyone come back to D.C. and actually do it in person." 

And for that, going back to Twitter, President Trump's response to that was "Looks like a third-rate grandstander named Representative Thomas Massie, a congressman from, unfortunately, a truly great state, Kentucky, wants to vote against the new Save Our Workers bill in Congress. He just wants publicity. He can't stop it." He goes on to say that "the Republicans should win the House, but they should kick out Thomas Massie." What was that like having the Eye of Sauron on you for insisting on an in-person vote in March 2020?

Massie: I'll have to write a book someday. But those tweets happened about 60 seconds after a phone call ended between me and President Trump, where he basically burned my ear off, screaming at me for probably three minutes and said he was coming at me, he was going to take me down. That's a sobering proposition when you've got a primary election eight weeks away and you've been trying to keep the president out of your race. The person running against you says you don't support the president enough. And the president had a 95 percent approval rating among the primary voters who were going to vote in my election. But I just stood strong. I said, listen, if truckers and nurses and grocery store workers are showing up for work, then Congress should show up for work too. And that was, I think, an unassailable message. Because, ultimately, I was just trying to get people on record. 

The reason I was trying to get people on record is because I knew this was one of the worst votes in history and nobody was going to be accountable for it. Here we are three years later, and every bad thing that I said would happen as a result of doing that has happened. And even my colleagues here in Congress, a lot of them admit to me that they were wrong about that. They won't say it too loudly lest anybody hear it.

The reporters came up to me as I walked out of the chamber that day and said, "Your own president just called you a third-rate grandstander. What do you have to say?" And I said "I was deeply insulted. I'm at least second-rate." And they didn't ever come back to that.

Wolfe: How much COVID policy remorse is there among your colleagues in Congress? 

Massie: Not enough. Not nearly enough. The policy isn't just the spending, the vaccine mandates, the shutting down of our economy, the compulsory masking, the way people were treated like cattle. There should be far more remorse. But frankly, that's a reflection of the voters as well. If you poll this, most people have moved on. Even a year ago, most people had moved on. 

I mean, look at Ron DeSantis. That was part of his signature issue. But he most famously opposed a lot of this COVID nonsense after it became obvious what we were dealing with. And he rode that wave and he was polling better than Trump. But I think people have moved on and they've got other issues to think about now. People have just moved on and so have my colleagues. And I think it's really unfortunate. And I wished that I had been able to get that recorded vote that day. We'd have a lot more people who wouldn't be back here in Congress perpetrating bad ideas like FISA. 

Wolfe: You were elected during the era of the Tea Party reining in government spending. We care about our fiscal health. And so as a result, we can't just have the money printer constantly print money forever more. We have to be prudent because the bill always comes due. Do you think that message has any hopes of having any sort of revival in the coming years, especially given the runaway inflation that we've seen? Or do you think it's just a totally lost cause and we're all screwed?

Massie: Let me assign a 95 percent probability to that last proposition. I'm here with a 5 percent chance that we can save it. And in the 30 percent chance that if it all goes to hell in a handbasket, I can still be here and have some credibility to put it back together. 

I think what's starting to curb the appetite for spending and bring some realism into the discussion is the only thing that was ever going to curb our appetite for spending, and that is our creditors are starting to balk. The rates at which the government can borrow money now aren't what we want them to be. When we go out to do an auction or a sale for treasuries or bonds what we're finding is the appetite isn't there, even at 4.5 percent, you know, to get a guaranteed 4.5 percent return on your money from the government backed by the U.S. military? That's not enough to loan that money to the government. They want 5 percent. That's an indicator that when the private sector and the other countries, the sovereign funds, usually have the appetite for our debt when they're losing their appetite, that's a sign that things are going south. 

I wear this debt clock that I built in Congress to remind people of it. And one side effect of me wearing this is the rate at which the debt is increasing is going up. So for the math nerds, that's the second derivative. And today, the debt per second is $78,000. I don't think people realize. It feels like we're going over Niagara Falls right now. The rate of these bad things happening is increasing now. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

The post Thomas Massie: Why Not Vote 'No'? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

In this inaugural episode of Just Asking Questions, podcaster Dave Smith joins the show to tackle a fundamental question: "What is a libertarian?"

Smith spearheaded the Mises Caucus takeover of the Libertarian Party (L.P.), telling Reason's Nick Gillespie at the party convention in 2022 that the new L.P. needs "a game changer," someone capable of "re-sparking the Ron Paul Revolution" in the lead-up to the 2024 election. 

In this episode, Smith discusses what has transpired in the Libertarian Party since the convention, his past and present disagreements with Reason-style libertarians, whether politicians are incompetent, evil, or both, and his greatest libertarian "white pill" for the future.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher. 

Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below. 

Liz Wolfe: So for our first question: What is a libertarian? What beliefs are disqualifying for libertarians to hold today?

Dave Smith: To me, libertarianism is the belief in self-ownership, private property rights, and the non-aggression principle. I think that's the best philosophically sound definition of it that isn't circular. It's not just a definition like someone who believes in freedom or maximum freedom or something like that. So a libertarian would be someone to me who believes in that. And I would argue that almost everyone who calls themselves a libertarian, whether they would agree with my definition or not, whenever they're arguing for a libertarian position, it's completely consistent with all of that. 

Now, what beliefs are disqualifying to you is tough to quibble about, because, I don't know. Gary Johnson wanted to legalize pot, but not any other drugs or not any harder drugs. I'm not going to say he's not a libertarian, but I would say he's not a libertarian on heroin, if that makes sense. That just completely contradicts what libertarians believe. So I don't know exactly. 

Although I will say there are certain things, to me, like war and peace is the biggest issue. And people who support wars, I really do not consider them libertarians. I just think that if you are for freedom and against the government, there is no worse government policy in the world than war. There's not even a close second. And that tends to violate more freedom than any other policy. 

Wolfe: Where do you encounter pro-war libertarians?

Smith: If you want to listen to Ted Carpenter, who just left Cato, he gave like a 45-minute speech on how much there is at some of these libertarian organizations. I just had a debate with Austin Petersen, who was an L.P. candidate for president years ago. I mean, I think they're out there. Certainly, during the Ukraine war, there were a lot of people who called themselves libertarian who were very quick to say you are a Putin propagandist for bringing up the fact that us giving a blank check to this war has done nothing but kill hundreds of thousands of people. So they exist. 

Zach Weissmueller: But there can be wars that libertarians would support, right?

Smith: Yeah. I think the American Revolutionary War would be legit, yes. If you're invaded by an army, you have a right to violently try to get them out. But not too many of those.

Weissmueller: That's where it starts. You put the non-aggression principle at the center of libertarianism, and that's where it starts to get a little murky for me because I think that there would be legitimate wars of self-defense. But how would you square that with the non-aggression principle?

Smith: If there's an invading army, I think that, by definition, they are the aggressors. I think it's reasonable. Am I going to split hairs down to the point that like this other soldier in that uniform hasn't fired a shot yet, so is he fair game? I would say, yes. You rolled in with an invading gang and you've given up your rights.

Weissmueller: With the Ukraine-Russia war, for instance, the libertarian-type people who were siding with Ukraine in that war saw Ukraine as repelling an invader. I presume your objection to that is more so about America's involvement, not necessarily the Ukrainians?

Smith: To be clear, I think that Ukrainians have a right to self-defense and they have a right to stay and fight for their territory if that's what they wish to do. But there's a lot more to that picture. 

My problem is American involvement and NATO's involvement going way back for decades. This intentional policy of trying to needle the Russians over and over again and then finally being surprised when it resulted like this. 

Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves. If someone pulls a gun on you and asks for your wallet, you have a right to fistfight that guy. It's not necessarily a good idea. And so that's more been my thing with Ukraine. You're fighting a fight you can't possibly win. This was blasphemy for me to say for the last couple of years, but now everybody has come around to acknowledge that even with the blank check from America over these two years, they just have no shot of winning. So now we're right back to negotiating time. And yeah, I'd be against Americans being forced to fund a war which both armies are being forced to fight because these are two conscripted armies, after all. So there's nothing libertarian about that. 

Weissmueller: Where it starts to get complicated for me is when you're talking about the role of America's military. You and I share a libertarian genesis. I became a libertarian a few years before Ron Paul made his run. But Ron Paul's 2008 run was certainly energizing for me. However, there are times when it seems as if some libertarians automatically choose the side that America is not funding like in the case of Ukraine. However, there is a self-interest for America's defense to make it costly to Russia. Is there not something to that? 

Smith: That is the thinking in D.C., at least for the most part. Putting some type of penalty on Russia for invading is in America's interests. Let's just be really brutally honest, the cost of that is hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives. If that's a cost you're comfortable paying, fine, but maybe take that Ukraine flag out of your Twitter bio because you're really the most anti-Ukraine person. 

But then again, maybe it would have been in America's best interest if democracy had swept the region in the Middle East. And then they were all like Jeffersonian Republicans or something like that. But that plan doesn't seem to be working out too well. I think that the U.S. dollar as the reserve standard of the world is probably in more jeopardy right now than at any point in my lifetime. This has driven Russia and China to be much closer allies. You've seen almost a real crack to the unipolar world, where it's not even clear that we really are in a unipolar world anymore. 

My perspective on the Russia thing is that obviously that Vladimir Putin is wrong to invade and the war has been horrific. I do think that not living in a libertarian universe, living in the real world, and trying to have some type of reasonable modern expectations for what governments are going to do, is the idea that Vladimir Putin said for years, "You cannot expand your military alliance to Ukraine, that is off the table. That is my red line." And they knew this. I mean, there's that great memo. If you've never read it, "nyet means nyet", where the current CIA director privately writes to Condoleezza Rice and is like, listen, this is for real. This is their red line. And there is just no way America would tolerate that. I mean, can you imagine if Russia was like, "We're bringing Mexico into our military alliance?" What do you think the reaction from Washington D.C., would be? "Absolutely, you are not." And we would send troops there in a second if that was the plan. 

Just before the war broke out Vice President Kamala Harris was over there saying we're still bringing NATO in and it's still the plan. There is no powerful country that would have reacted differently. That doesn't mean it's good or it's right, but my takeaway from that is like, why would we be so stupid as to keep doing this for no benefit other than, like, world domination?

Weissmueller: Look at what just happened in Israel, what did the U.S. do? The U.S. sent one of our largest aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean to prevent all these other players from getting involved. The idea is to stop this from escalating into a regional war. That would seem to be in America's self-interest, to stop that escalation. And it's relatively low cost—we're just going to park this carrier here. Would that fall within your definition of conforming to the non-aggression principle?

Smith: Well, I mean, no, not really. I'm a complete noninterventionist on all this stuff, so I don't support that. It's not the most egregious thing that the American military has ever done on the scale of things to be outraged by. But look, you're looking at one tiny little element of this huge conflict and being like, "Well, look, this one thing here was done, you know, that could prevent a wider war."

The whole thing only exists because the U.S. has been propping up this status quo for 60 years. And the fact that we think we're going to maintain this thing where we say, "We're going to prop up Israel, we're going to make it so that the entire global community, which has been outraged about the treatment of Palestinians since 1967, we'll veto everything at the U.N. We'll ignore all of these global human rights organizations. We're going to prop up dictators in Egypt and Saudi Arabia." And then it blows up. The takeaway to me isn't we do have to sometimes prevent these wars from happening. The truth is that none of this should be America's business. If you're anything that considers yourself a libertarian, or you 70 percent agree with me or whatever, that doesn't come with being the world empire. 

There is no such thing as a restrained, constrained constitutional republic that is also the empire of the world. War is the health of the state. War always grows the government for other purposes other than just the war. Civil liberties are lost the most during times of war. 

Wolfe: These are themes that we were touching on in a recent stream where we interviewed Russ Roberts, who I think comes at this issue from a very different perspective than you do. But the thing that I wish more libertarians would grapple with is the difference between the aspiration of the role America plays and figuring that out from where we currently are. What is the appropriate approach to get to where we want to be? 

I think we can all recognize that the U.S. has been funding Israel and supporting Israel for a very, very long time. And I think many good libertarians would say, "Hey, you know, it's long past time to cut Israel off and allow them to really stand on their own two feet. They have the ability to do that." But realistically, that's not something we can do right now. We can't just fully cut off funding right now and expect there to be no awful ramifications that would stem from that. So the thing that I always struggle with is, how do you get from point A to point B?

Smith: I think I kind of reject the assumption that it would be some type of disaster if we were to cut off aid to Israel right now. It would put enormous pressure on them to negotiate. That's really what they'd have to do. This isn't 1948. Israel isn't in a state of war with all the Arab surrounding nations.

Wolfe: This is the precise argument that many people make for why we should have cut them off from U.S. funding and support before. But if we do that right now, surely that does have ramifications beyond what they would have been had we done that in 2019, right?

Smith: No, I agree it has ramifications, but I'm just saying that like they might be very positive. Israel has been at peace with Egypt since the 1970s. They're at peace with Jordan. They're at peace with Saudi Arabia. They bomb Syria constantly. Syria never responds to them. It's not even like an issue. Iran might funnel some money to Hamas, maybe some to Hezbollah. Israel, if they didn't have the backing of the United States of America, would be heavily incentivized to actually deal with the Palestinians to actually work out a real peace process, not this pretend one, to grant them their independence, and to stop occupying their areas. 

Part of the reason Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are so willing to be provocative is because they know they have the baddest bully in the world that has their back. And if they didn't, they might be like, "Okay, well, look, we really got to think about this." Maybe we shouldn't just bomb the hell out of Gaza right now because that might actually piss off the world, you know? And so, there's this tremendous moral hazard that we create when we, as the strongest country in the history of the world, are like, "We have your back."

Weissmueller: Israel is making very tough moral choices right now and they're making choices that I don't always agree with. And to have us being perceived to be joined at the hip with every bomb that they're dropping is a very bad situation. So I would like to see us get disentangled. On the other hand, I think that at the moment, they have my moral support. It's not a war crime to root out Hamas to the degree that that's possible.

Smith: I don't think there's reason to believe that Israel is going to really take the gloves off if America stops backing them. I think it would be much more reasonable that they would be more concerned coming from a slightly more vulnerable position. Israel won a war in 1967 and they've been holding these people ever since. And they just don't have a right to do that. 

Wolfe: You mean the West Bank. It's worth noting also that the situation in Gaza has changed in the last 16 or 17 years. 

Smith: Yes, absolutely. But I'm just saying, they won the war in 1967. They have literally not granted these people their independence since then. If you want to talk about what's happened over the last 15 years or so, they then took on an intentional goal of supporting Hamas specifically so that Palestinians could never get their independence. So they could never get their state.

In their own words, Benjamin Netanyahu and all types of top government-level people said "This is our plan." And for this reason, we are going to support Hamas because no one will ever grant them statehood as long as Hamas is in control. 

Wolfe: If you are making a case that the Israeli government errors and fucks up in a million ways, I totally agree with that.

Smith: I'm coming at it from the point of view of being like, "Oh, well, listen, I do kind of root for them and they do have the moral right to do this." But we're talking about the guys who had an intentional policy of propping up this terrorist organization to use them so that they could never grant the Palestinian people who, just like the Israelis, are separate from their government, so that they could never grant those people their own independence and autonomy. And then it blew up in their face. 

If you look at the numbers, they've dropped more bombs than we did in a year in Afghanistan, in Gaza over a few weeks. And so, no, I don't look at that situation and go like, "Oh, well, they do have the moral right to root these people out." The people who did October 7 all deserved to die.

But I'm sorry, when your plan was to prop up a terrorist organization so that the people in Palestine never get their autonomy, and then you use that as an excuse to then just start slaughtering them. 

Wolfe: I do want to stifle some of my greatest Zionist shill thoughts and move us back in the direction of actually what libertarians should aspire to be. I think we have established that libertarians aren't generally war hawks and we are not generally Hamas shills or even Zionists. Zach, how do you look at this question of what is a libertarian defining yourself totally independent of Dave's or perhaps in response to it?

Weissmueller: There's a lot of overlap. Unsurprisingly, I see libertarians as extreme skeptics of state power. And the reason for that is that we are against violent monopolies and for voluntary association to the degree that it's possible. And that is because of self-ownership. We believe in the idea of self-ownership, self-authorship, you control your own destiny, and you write your own story. 

The way I like to think of it is this phrase: "right to try," like you should have the right to challenge monopolies. And that is something I think libertarians across the board recognize. The state is a monopoly on violence and they use that monopoly to create other monopolies. We've got Elizabeth Warren out there always talking about monopolies. I think she was just tweeting about a sandwich shop monopoly that she's going to break up. But the real monopolies are created by governments. 

I think where the differences come in is that we have different reasons for thinking that monopolies are bad. But my reason for thinking monopolies are bad is because I believe that experimentation and competition create progress and prosperity.

Wolfe: I agree. And my definition is perhaps even simpler. Libertarians don't look to the government to fix what ails us. I think libertarians ought to have and generally do have a high degree of comfort with voluntary action existing in civil society outside from government. Libertarians, I think, frequently gravitate toward voice, but also I love the strain of libertarians that gravitate toward exit, trying to exist outside of government institutions.

I look at people living off the grid and people choosing to homeschool. There are so many ways that people can just kind of prove out the idea that we actually don't need the government to take care of us in a gazillion ways. We sometimes prosper far, far, far outside of the purview of the state. And in fact, people can be so much freer to live better lives that way. 

Obviously, the non-aggression principle is pretty core to all of this. But I think libertarians just positionally tend to be people who take incentives seriously and second-order impacts consequently unintended consequences. And I really appreciate how libertarians are so frequently asking this question of government policies. Well, what are the alternatives or what are bad incentives that could possibly be created by this? I love how libertarians focus on tradeoffs, and it drives me absolutely insane that so much of the left and the right seem to never entertain the possibility that a government policy could actually lead to awful unintended consequences.

Smith: I pretty much agree with what you guys are saying. The definition I give is the core of the philosophical belief. But I agree with everything both of you guys said. And I just think that the fundamental libertarian insight is that what the government is, as you said, a monopoly on violence. I don't even know if that's the perfect way to say it. 

They have a monopoly on the legal initiation of violence. They can do it legally. To me, it's like, if you believe in morality at all, which almost everybody does, and there are some people who just reject it entirely, but almost everyone in the political realm agrees. If you listen to Bernie Sanders, he'll say it's immoral that there is this income inequality.

But if you believe there is such a thing as right and wrong, then I would say inherently morality has to transcend what organizations we create. In other words, if you think murder is wrong, and you were on a deserted island and there's no government and there's no rules and someone murdered somebody, that would be just as morally wrong there as it is here. There just doesn't happen to be a legal system or police or whatever. But the morality has to be the same. Otherwise, we're not really talking about morality.

If any other group of people did what the government does, we wouldn't know what to call it right away. You would just be like, "Oh, this is the Mafia or this is a criminal" like taxation is theft, or you're just forcing someone to give you their money. You know, wars are mass murder campaigns. If anybody else, any other group of people decided like, we deem ourselves the regulators and we're going to go around and start regulating these businesses, you'd be like, "Oh, no, you're a gang." Like you're a criminal organization. And so if you believe in morality, I think it has to be the same whether the government does it or not. And that voting doesn't somehow change the moral characteristics of what a group of people do.

Weissmueller: We don't know if the absence of this legitimate monopoly on violence is a stable situation, like it's something that is yet to be seen. I'm open to the possibility that everything could be privatized one day or something. That's why I favor this definition where it's a little bit more experimental and you're saying, let's try to not have the state do this thing that we're all used to the state doing. 

Smith: Fair enough. And I'm not even like, I don't want to do a whole anarchy versus minarchy thing because, in today's day and age, it seems so crazy because we're so far from both. So then it's like you're completely against monopolies and you recognize that monopolies just lead to these terrible results. Why is it just writing laws and courts and police and military or things that have to be run by a monopoly? If we're saying that monopolies, especially violent monopolies, are really bad at producing things, then why would it be that they are really bad at producing things in every other field, but the most important things must be run in the worst way to produce things? Otherwise, we'd all be living in a dystopia. 

Wolfe: I like what you're saying and you surely will not find this to be satisfactory or something particularly earth-shattering, but I do believe in a little bit of the unique power of the U.S. Constitution and some of the structures outlined in it. I think many a liberal who did their Trump hysteria op-ed piece and acted like American democracy was horribly imperiled during the Trump years, don't place very much faith in our Constitution and don't place very much faith in our court systems or in federalism or in the abilities of this very complex system of checks and balances. 

And I think we're libertarians, right? There are lots of things that we could sit here and point to and say, well, surely the Constitution has failed us and X, Y, and Z ways. However, with that massive caveat, I do think constitutional limits have done a pretty good job of ensuring some of these state institutions have actually done a decent, but imperfect job of serving their intended function. 

Smith: I'm not saying that there are examples here where some unconstitutional policy has been struck down. But if you want to zoom out and just look at how good the Constitution has done at limiting government, I mean, we're the biggest government in the history of the world, by far. The biggest organization in the history of the world is the U.S. federal government by any metric.

Weissmueller: Just saying that it's the biggest government in history doesn't really capture the fact that this is not the most tyrannical government in history. 

Smith: I would bet we have more federal employees in D.C. than China has. I don't know for sure. But look, in terms of how much money it spends and how many bases it has abroad. And so if you're going to judge America, you can't just judge America based on, like, "Hey, it's kind of nice to live in Brooklyn." You have to judge it on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. We have killed millions of innocent people just in the last 20 years. I'm not even going to go back to Vietnam. 

Weissmueller: This is foreign policy where we have a lot of agreement. America is not living under tyranny by historical standards. America has a flawed foreign policy, to say the least. That does not justify throwing out all of the constitutional protections, all the pro-liberty aspects of the U.S. government, and saying we're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is where I think we butt heads a little with your camp. 

Smith: The goal should be a thousand Liechtensteins, you know? There are positive qualities that different countries have. 

Weissmueller: Let me pick up on the Liechtenstein point because this is essentially the strategy of the Mises Caucus that took over the Libertarian Party. Nick Gillespie interviewed you in Reno during the Mises Caucus takeover of the Libertarian Party in May 2022. He asked you what you want to see the L.P. doing in the years leading up to the 2024 election, which are now rapidly approaching, and this is what you said: "If we're ever going to get to a free society, we're going to need a lot more people who desire a free society. And what we need here is a game changer, unlike, say, Bill Weld." So do you think that the new Libertarian Party is poised to deliver a game changer?

Smith: Well, I hope so. That's what I try to do, right? I'm always trying to do that. I think the Mises Caucus taking over the Libertarian Party was necessary for there to be a chance for the Libertarian Party to do that. We're still fighting a very uphill battle. Anybody who believes in liberty is fighting an uphill battle. 

You could say that big donors have walked away from the Libertarian Party since they came in. The truth is that there was basically a civil war within the Libertarian Party. And no matter what happened in Reno, believe me, if we had lost in Reno, we represented like 80 percent of the party. I mean, tons of people would have walked away from the party.

The truth is that when lockdowns came, the old Libertarian Party basically rolled over and took it and didn't want to say anything. And in fact, the only comments they would make would be like, "Well, we do think you should stay home." If they're not even going to try to stand up for liberty, then I don't care if some big donors will support you and are alienated by us.

And again, the Jo Jorgensen campaign. I mean, this is like a total embarrassment. Jo Jorgensen would go to give speeches where a crowd full of people in masks were forced to be socially distanced in a park where a father had been arrested a week earlier for having a catch with his son. And talk about the drug war or how socialism is bad or something like that, and not even want to touch the moment that she was living in. So in terms of like, can the Libertarian Party spark like the next Ron Paul movement? Well, no, not if it's doing that. It has no chance. 

Wolfe: When I look at Angela McArdle and Michael Heise and the Mises Caucus takeover and Jeremy Kauffman, I don't really see champions for the things that I value.

Smith: So first of all, I hate the Twitter edge-lording and posting that stuff. I just hate it. I hate all of that. I've been on record about this for years. 

Now, there's one state affiliate in New Hampshire where that is their entire thing. And they've basically been at war with the Mises Caucus. But there's also been on the other side, non-Mises controlled state affiliates that do like a ton of this just engagement farming, shock-value stuff. And I just don't like it. I just don't like any of that. What got people excited about libertarianism to me was Ron Paul giving history lessons and this stuff is just lame.

Weissmueller: There was this awful messaging that existed before, this very out-of-touch messaging, during one of the most insane years in modern history. And so this new leadership came in. They came in pretty hot. And now they've dialed it back a little bit. 

I looked into some of the numbers coming into this, some of these were compiled by the Mises Caucus' enemies, the Classical Liberal Caucus. What they compiled here is that revenues are down historically when you adjust for inflation and not only big donors, but monthly donors are down. And I looked into the actual reports behind the numbers and it's all accurate except the Libertarian Party did not adjust for inflation, which seems like something you should do.

Smith: Well, what do you mean? Raise prices? So what's your takeaway from that? 

Weissmueller: My takeaway is that revenues are down monthly.

Smith: But that's if you have a job where you're making a hundred grand a year and then you just keep your job and someone's looking at that and says, "Dude, your income is way down from there." I mean, yes, that's true. If you're blaming the Federal Reserve, then I'm with you. But if you're blaming the Mises Caucus for that, I don't think that is correct. 

Weissmueller: Well, I'll leave it for the audience to judge whether that is good or bad. But what do you think is going on here internally?

Smith: Just to be clear, I have no position in the Libertarian Party. And if you talk to Angela or someone like that, I'm sure she could give you a much better answer than this. I just do stand-up comedy and podcasts about this stuff. But from what I understand, there was this major problem with this software thing. I don't exactly know the details of it. This is something that started before the Mises Caucus took over… A big basic disaster of transferring data. So I think that hurt them a little bit. 

But regardless of any of that, I think that the state of the Libertarian Party, no matter what happened at Reno, was going to be rebuilding. There's a lot of people who were very turned off by the Mises Caucus in the Libertarian Party. And there were a lot more people who were willing to go to fight for them and that's why we won. 

There are these storms that come in where things are very sensitive to talk about. Like right now it's the Israel-Palestine storm that we're living in where it kind of takes a little bit of courage to talk about these things because you're going to get this backlash, the storms end and then it's like no one cares, like lab leak theory. And for me, libertarians have the most value when, in those storms, we're willing to stand up and say the courageous thing. This is what Harry Browne wrote When Will We Learn? on September 12 is the most amazing thing ever, because the day after 9/11, he had the courage. The only way this Libertarian Party thing is ever going to work and grow is if in those storms we have the courage to say things.

Wolfe: If you actually put any of these people in power, I'm not sure they would know the first thing about what to do with it or how to actually craft any sort of policy. 

If you can't run an extremely small, speaking candidly here, political party and you're not able to keep your supporters in any way, why would anybody trust your competence overall? I mean, who's even running for president this year, Right? It's important not to draw overly broad conclusions about that, but say you wanted to take your argument seriously and you wanted to look for these small green shoots that are poking up through the dirt as to the ways in which the Mises Caucus takeover has been successful, where would you tell us to look?

Smith: There have been local elections that they've won. And that stuff does matter. There are people we've gotten on school boards and on city councils and mayors. And I think a couple of sheriffs.

The Mises Caucus has launched this project, Decentralized Revolution, which I think is a really great template for how the Libertarian Party should run. And it's very different from the way it's been before. This is now targeting winnable elections with nullification powers. The idea is building this thing where the national party is kind of messaging and then trying to funnel that into like the local winnable elections with nullification. 

I'll take responsibility, in some way, that a lot of my guys on Twitter can fly off the handle and say some wild shit. But the one thing I will say about my guys is they don't compromise on the libertarian stuff and they're not going to be afraid to say the thing that will get you a lot of backlash when it really matters.

Wolfe: I am so in favor of being bold and aggressive and courageous and truth-telling and saying that unpopular thing at an important time. I felt very riled up in the COVID days. I'm in favor of all of that. I'm in favor of that sort of boldness, but I don't see that in what the L.P. post-takeover is doing. And that's something that gives me pause. 

Smith: I think to some degree you might be a little bit guilty of the same thing that I think the New Hampshire guys are guilty of. The truth is that there are 50 state affiliates and a whole bunch of them are doing exactly what you're saying you'd like to see done, but you're totally fixated on the one because they're saying this wild shit, even though everybody at the top of the Mises Caucus leadership has totally called them out for it and been like, "Hey, we think this is stupid and unhelpful." So I'm just saying that like there's a ton of those guys, there's a ton of the state party affiliates. 

Weissmueller: I think we spent a good chunk of time there talking with the Libertarian Party, but for libertarians, what do you think libertarians should be doing differently to win?

Smith: So I'm a big believer in the Rothbardian populist idea. I think you see this with Javier Milei, right? This is the way it can be done. This is the way to do it—to tap into this kind of populist streak, particularly at a time when the elites have so mismanaged everything and talk to people about how they're being ripped off. 

And then the problem with populism always is that it's completely devoid of any type of theory. You know what I mean? Like, that's basically the issue with the New Right in general, there's just no theory there. It's just everything they're against. But libertarians already have that. It's like libertarians have all the theory, but we're missing all of the populism to make it appeal to people. 

Ron Paul really is who our blueprint should be. And Ron Paul had a lot of things going against him. He's the greatest living hero in America to me as far as I'm concerned. He wasn't the best public speaker. He wasn't the most charming guy. He was older when he really got very popular. He had a way of connecting ideas and knowing what's going on in the world right now and then connecting it to the average person and how this is screwing you over. So that to me is always like my blueprint. 

Libertarians are way too removed, just in theory, and that's not what anyone except us cares about. To me that was the most impressive thing about Ron Paul was that this guy was a country doctor who just knew more. 

Weissmueller: Looking at the motivations of why government actors are doing what they're doing, I think that saying that they're all a bunch of goofballs is not the right way. But also saying that people in government are particularly nefarious or evil isn't helpful. I subscribe to just basic public choice theory where they're driven by the same incentives that the rest of us are. 

Smith: But to your point about the same incentives that drive all of us. There's some truth to that. But that's almost like if there's some young man out there who's incentivized to get laid so he tries to charm a girl and take her out on a date. And then there's another 25-year-old who rapes a girl. They may have had the same incentives to some degree, but those are not the same type of people. 

By the way, did you ever hear Hillary Clinton on tape laughing about getting a child rapist off when she knew he was guilty? Laughing about it like she just thinks it's hilarious. These people at the top level of government are horrifically evil people who will knowingly put in place a policy where innocent people will die, they'll lie through their teeth to sell the policy, and their buddies will all get rich off of it. The top levels of our government are permeated with violent sociopaths who are very comfortable doing very evil things. 

This is true in media too. That woman from ABC who was caught on the hot mic talking about how she broke the Jeffrey Epstein story, but they pulled it from her. One of the crazy things about that hot mic is that she was upset about not being able to break the story. If you listen to her, it's not what you think any normal person should be upset about.

Wolfe: A hefty portion of the media class is obsessed with their own bloated and frequently wrong sense of moral superiority, as well as this just astonishing self-importance that God made them journalists. And they're God's gift to man.

Smith: Think about how evil that is. She didn't even quit. You didn't quit and go break this story anyway. You just stayed there. What? Because of the paychecks. Good. So you're telling me you had a story about a child rapist ring with the most powerful people in the country implicated in this story? I'm not saying she goes home and kicks her dog in the face every day, but I'm saying what she is doing in her professional life is something morally repugnant. And that's how I feel about the highest levels of government and media. That there's just this mass compliance now. I'm not trying to get all Alex Jones on you here. And I don't like to jump down to conspiracies that I can't prove. But it is totally reasonable to look at something like the Epstein thing, to look at Bohemian Grove, to look at these things and go, yeah, there's something going on here that's pretty weird. 

Weissmueller: What I'm saying is it's structural. Hayek even had an essay about why the worst get to the top. And it's because the incentives of power do tend to draw certain personalities. So you might even be right that there's a disproportionate amount of sociopaths or psychopaths in government, just like there are in corporate America. 

Smith: Yeah, that's why there's so many pedophiles who are baseball coaches or little league coaches. That's why there's so many abusive people who are cops because these positions draw in those types of people. Right? That's part of the natural cycle of it. 

Weissmueller: But the reality is that it's the power structure itself.

Smith: But both can be true at the same time, right? I think both of those things are true. I think, yes, power corrupts. The mix of democracy and big government draws out the most dumbed-down slogan to play to the most uninformed voter. This is why Donald Trump did so well, because Donald Trump is like, "I'll do you one better. I'll talk like a kindergartner." And but really, it's not as if any of the others are much better than that. 

Look, by definition, politics is going to attract people who want to rule over other people. That's what the magnet is there. The problem is this mix of big government and democracy, which are very related. So you have to appeal to a population who, by definition, aren't going to know much about politics, because that's true about everything. Only a small percentage of people have expertise in any field. Right? So then you have that. And then because the government is so big there is so much power being wielded that it's inevitably completely corrupted. I mean, what is our federal government going to spend this year over $6 trillion, isn't it? If you're spending $6 trillion, somebody is going to be actively lobbying to get that power. 

Weissmueller: This right-wing that you mentioned does exist, the natcons [national conservatism], or whatever we want to call them, they just want to install their version of a virtuous leader to impose their vision of the world. We have these corrupt degenerates running the government and we need, good, virtuous Caesars running the government. I worry sometimes about that populist strategy. This is a pattern you see throughout history; the socialists wreck things and then the right-wing, the fascists, or whatever form they take, come in and impose right-wing dictatorship or whatever. 

Smith: I basically think you're almost exactly right. That tends to be like this pattern that's played out over time. You could see this where there'd be these awful right-wing movements as a response to communism like all throughout the world in the 20th century. I think, almost to me, that's why you need this libertarian populism even more, because it's one of the most important components to put out this right-wing fire.

You got to try to harness that populist energy, but in an explicitly libertarian way. The only answer here, and this is the great libertarian insight, because fundamentally, we're kind of like a compromise that's almost like a truce. Like you don't get to impose your view on them and they don't get to impose their view on you. But you both get to do what you want to do, right? 

Weissmueller: Do you think that most people at their core are more libertarian or authoritarian?

Smith: I don't really know the answer to that. And I don't spend too much time thinking about that. What I know is that I was totally compelled when these ideas were introduced to me and I know that we're not at our ceiling. You know what I mean? Everywhere I go, and I travel a lot, every single city I'm in, every single town, every single show, somebody comes up to me and goes, "You're the reason I'm a libertarian. You introduced me to this, and then I found this and then I found this and then it all made sense."

I want to introduce this line of thinking to as many people as I can. But I never, in my mind, think we need to get 51 percent of the population to be libertarians because then we can win some elections. Because the truth is that like, nations are never moved by 51 percent of the population. Let's say there's a few million. Could we get that up to 20 million?

The truth is, if you talk to the average person on the street, you just go stop a random person right here and you ask "What do you think of Ron Paul?" Most of them won't know what you're talking about. At best, they think you're talking about Rand Paul, and they definitely would not be able to really articulate and explain to you what the libertarian position is. There's still so many people who have never come in contact with a lot of these ideas. So my thing is like let me try to say it in the most compelling way on the biggest platforms that I can get on and try to get as many new people on board as we can.

Wolfe: The related question that I have for all of us, not just Dave, is what is your libertarian white pill? What's the thing that makes you the most optimistic about where things are headed?

Smith: Let me give the Gene Epstein case for radical optimism, which I always love. This just speaks to my soul. But what he said was, "If you were sitting around in 1845 and you said to your buddy, I think in 20 years slavery is going to be abolished. They'd be like, you're out of your mind. The slave trade is at the height right now, like slavery is right. It's just been an institution for all of human history." In what world could you imagine that in the next 20 years, across the West and in the United States of America, there's just not going to be slavery anymore? But that crazy guy would have been right. 

There are moments like that where things that were seen as just inevitable institutions are just gone and they don't come back. Look in the year 2002 and I remember the whole year of war propaganda leading up to the war in Iraq. And like, that was just it. It didn't matter if you got your news from Fox News or The New York Times or MSNBC or anything, it was just unanimous. They sold the story and there was just no one else. There were other people, but they didn't have a platform. But now it's like you have Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson and then just like a million different shows that have their shows that we don't even know about with half a million followers. There's probably 50 shows that we all don't know about with half a million people watching that show all the time. And so much of that, those dissident voices are getting out there now. I think for the first time maybe in human history, the monopoly of governments over the receiving of information has been broken. I think they're freaking out about that. I see this as an enormous white pill. I have kids. There's no option for me to be a pessimist. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

The post Dave Smith: What Is a Libertarian? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

For the past several months, Reason Associate Editor Liz Wolfe and Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller have co-hosted a show on Reason's YouTube channel and on The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie podcast feed called The Reason Livestream.

The show has featured discussions with economist Russ Roberts about life in Israel after October 7, Rand Paul on his Senate investigation into the origins of COVID, journalist Josh Barro on the state of the GOP, sex worker and data analyst Aella on state crackdowns on online porn, and multiple conversations about the rise of Javier Milei.  

Next week, Liz and Zach are launching a new version of the show with a new podcast feed and a new name: Just Asking Questions.

On Just Asking Questions, Zach and Liz will continue to bring you more long-form conversations diving deep into a single topic for an hour or more at a time with data, media clips, and guests who can teach, challenge, and have fun. 

New episodes will air on Reason's YouTube channel every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern and Fridays on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed.

Subscribe now to Just Asking Questions on Apple, Google, Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts to get notified about full episodes going forward. If you prefer to watch a day early on YouTube, subscribe and turn on notifications.

The first episode of the new version of the show will go up next Thursday and will be a special in-person taping with podcaster Dave Smith. Given Liz's and Zach's past interactions with him, you're not going to want to miss this one.

The title question of the episode: What is a libertarian? 

Join us on Thursday to get some answers. 

The post Just Asking Questions: A New Reason Podcast! appeared first on Reason Magazine.