Is the future of the GOP more libertarian, nationalist, or, somehow, both?
Joining us today is Vivek Ramaswamy, entrepreneur, author, and former presidential candidate. He's been making a hard pitch for what he's called a "libertarian-nationalist alliance" for the past several months. He was at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention where he tried to convince libertarians to vote Republican. Reason's Zach Weissmueller also saw Ramaswamy at the Republican National Convention, where he was trying to convince MAGA supporters to be more libertarian. Reason's Stephanie Slade saw him make his case for "national libertarianism" at the National Conservatism Conference. That event was also attended by vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who has a different vision for the conservative movement. Those dueling visions are the subject of today's episode.
Note:This episode is plagued by technical issues due to a software malfunction. With the exception of an approximately nine-minute section (which is marked in the episode), the full conversation is intact.
Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Pictures of Vivek Ramaswamy, Donald Trump, Liz Wolfe, and Zach Weissmueller with the Reason logo, the Just Asking Questions logo, and the words "Libertarian or nationalist?" all in white
How did the Libertarian Party Convention become a campaign stop for candidates with wildly anti-libertarian views? This year's speakers included Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who once called for jailing so-called climate deniers, and former president Donald Trump, a rabid opponent of free trade who added $8 trillion to the U.S. debt.
It's part of a strategy to transform the Libertarian Party (L.P.) into a major force in American politics that's largely the brainchild of political strategist Michael Heise, who viewed the 2016 presidential candidacy of Gary Johnson and Bill Weld as a colossal failure.
"Gary Johnson, 4.3 million votes, highest vote total ever, no lasting movement, no return on investment on those votes," Heise told Reason in 2022 during the party's convention in Reno. "[Gary Johnson voters] didn't stay because they weren't what you might call 'true believers.' They didn't feel it in their bones. It didn't have that same animation to it [as did] the Ron Paul [movement]."
The primary goal of the new Libertarian Party isn't winning national elections, which Heise considers delusional, but to leverage its ability to draw enough votes to swing the election. Through its "spoiler status," the hope is that the L.P. can extract concessions and gain influence.
This year's convention, held in Washington, D.C., in July, was the first major test of the new strategy.
The change in strategy began when a group called the Mises Caucus took over the leadership of the L.P. at the 2022 convention in Reno, Nevada.
It modeled itself after Ron Paul's presidential campaigns by emphasizing a non-interventionist foreign policy that sets it apart from both major parties, as the podcast host Dave Smith told Reason.
"The priorities of the Mises Caucus have always been, basically, the priorities of the Ron Paul Revolution: being anti-war, being sound on Austrian economics."
The new L.P. invited in social conservatives by removing abortion rights from the party platform and attempting to do the same with open immigration.
"When you put open borders, plus pro-abortion in [the platform]…it kind of forms a cultural hegemony for one side that might not be indicative of the wider libertarian movement," says Heise.
These changes alienated libertarians who view social freedoms as core to the political philosophy, as did the L.P.'s brazen new approach to social media, such as when the New Hampshire L.P. gloried in a photo of Megan McCain, the daughter of Senator John McCain (R–Ariz.), crying over her father's casket.
The Mises Caucus leadership vowed to clean up its messaging and grow the party's membership and fundraising to unprecedented levels. But internal documents show that candidates, fundraising, and membership have plummeted since the takeover. And state affiliates have continued the online provocation.
But supporters predicted that in 2024, we'd see a turnaround.
"I think there's been there's been progress in a lot of ways," says Smith. "This convention represents something that never would have happened under the old guard, where we're making attempts to be involved in the broader political conversation."
A prime example of the kind of outreach Smith is referencing was the presence of former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who made the case for libertarians to ally with Republicans to support Trump.
Kentucky Republican House member Thomas Massie—a favorite of libertarians for his opposition to COVID-19 lockdowns, regulation, the Federal Reserve, and debt-financed federal spending—also attended the convention for a day.
"I think the Libertarian Party is really smart to invite other people to their convention. It's going to be probably one of the closest watched Libertarian conventions in years," says Massie. "Politics is about messaging, and you've got to get your message out. If you don't have an audience, you can you can preach to an empty room. But this will be a chance for libertarians to give feedback to President Trump and to RFK Jr."
The Mises Caucus' favored presidential candidate was Michael Rectenwald, a former self-described Marxist college professor and author of The Great Reset and the Struggle for Global Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda.
He views politics through a populist lens whereby elites seek total control over the population by leveraging or even creating crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic to achieve such ends.
"I'm the only candidate in the race that's actually talked about the new threats to liberty that we face," says Rectenwald. "Agenda 2030, the climate change tyranny, and what's been called the Great Reset, which is really just the project of the World Economic Forum and the U.N. to institute this new stakeholder capitalism model and to control and regulate the population through all kinds of climate change regulations and restrictions."
It's a similar message to that of RFK Jr., who threw himself into the ring for the Libertarian Party nomination at the last minute before being knocked out in the first of seven rounds of presidential nomination voting.
Although Trump was ineligible to seek the party nomination because of a GOP ban on running with multiple parties, that didn't stop him from opening his headline speech by proclaiming himself a libertarian and asking for the party nomination to a chorus of boos.
Trump did garner some applause later in the speech when he began to address some of the L.P.'s demands. He promised to commute the life sentence of Ross Ulbricht, founder of the black market website the Silk Road. He also offered to appoint a libertarian to his cabinet in exchange for the party's endorsement and to protect bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from federal regulation.
Post-speech, three Libertarian presidential nominees delivered a response but most of the crowd and media had cleared out by then. Rectenwald walked out in the middle of the post-speech press conference and later admitted he was high on a gummy edible.
The Mises Caucus has adopted a strategy of using the Libertarian Party's spoiler status as a bargaining chip. With Smith's encouragement, their Arizona senatorial candidate dropped out and endorsed Republican venture capitalist Blake Masters—who once said "libertarianism doesn't work"—in a special election on the grounds that he was the lesser of two evils. Masters lost the race anyway.
But on the third day of the convention, a central pillar of the Mises Caucus' professed strategy would crumble beneath them.
In a surprising twist for a party controlled by the Mises Caucus, which had just reelected McArdle as chair the previous day, Michael Rectenwald was knocked out after six rounds of voting, leaving Chase Oliver as the last remaining candidate.
Oliver, who rose to prominence within the party after forcing a crucial Georgia Senate race to a run-off in 2022 by drawing 2 percent of the vote, had clashed with candidates from the Mises Caucus faction when he defended free and open immigration during the presidential debate.
In the final round of voting, Mises Caucus members attempted to whip votes for "none of the above" to ensure the party ran no candidate this year, but Oliver won with 60 percent of the vote.
Since then, Smith and several other Mises Caucus members have made clear that they will not vote for Oliver, whom they believe didn't do enough to resist COVID-19 restrictions. Oliver concedes that the pre-Reno Reset Libertarian Party should have opposed lockdowns and government vaccine mandates—both of which he publicly opposed—more vociferously.
"I could say that there had been instances during COVID when [the party] maybe erred on the personal responsibility side as opposed to fighting mandated lockdowns. We should have been maybe a bit more forceful there," says Oliver. "My message is pretty simple to those voters out there who have not heard from Libertarian: It's that if you're not committing force, fraud, coercion, theft or violence, if you're just living in peace, your life is your life. Your body is your body. Your property is your property, and your business is your business."
Oliver's victory complicates the Mises Caucus' strategy. They control the leadership positions but not the face of the party.
Following his nomination, Oliver was attacked online by Mises Caucus members and Trump supporters for his alleged weakness on COVID policy, his view that parents and not the state should decide whether puberty blockers can be prescribed to minors, and because Oliver, who is openly gay, has appeared at pride events holding a rainbow flag.
McArdle responded a week after the convention by hosting a livestream with rainbow imagery and donning a red clown nose. She gave Oliver the party's official endorsement and pledged to help him mostly in blue states where he'd be more likely to take votes from Biden.
The Libertarian Party grabbed attention and obtained promises from Trump—but if elected, will he follow through?
Can a Libertarian Party so deeply divided on questions of strategy and ideology make a difference?
"I think the most important thing that we need to do as a party to build our foundation," says Oliver. "I want to double our party's membership and hold it for the next four years."
Who, exactly, is Chase Oliver? And what does he really stand for?
Oliver is the Libertarian Party's 2024 presidential nominee, selected after six rounds of voting at a contentious party convention in Washington, D.C., this weekend, which featured speeches from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, and former President Donald Trump, who suggested himself as the nominee to a chorus of boos. Oliver was not the preferred candidate of the Mises Caucus, who remains in control of the Libertarian Party, and several of their higher profile members, such as Dave Smith, have said they will not vote for him, with several accusing him of being too woke, too pro-immigration, and too soft on COVID restrictions. We'll ask him to address all of that today.
Oliver, a 38-year-old sales executive, rose to prominence in the party as the 2022 Libertarian Senate candidate in a highly competitive race in Georgia, where he pulled 2 percent of the vote and forced it into a runoff, which ultimately resulted in the Democratic candidate winning, tipping the balance of the Senate in their favor.
Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
"Today, the superrich control a greater share of America's wealth than during the Gilded Age of Carnegies and Rockefellers," said Gabriel Zucman in a recent New York Times opinion piece entitled, "It's Time to Tax the Billionaires."
Zucman is an economist at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, and a frequent collaborator with superstar economist Thomas Piketty, author of the extremely influential book on wealth inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
But today's guest, Phil Magness—an economic historian, author, and the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute—says the work of Piketty and his circle of inequality-obsessed colleagues is deeply flawed and sometimes outright deceptive. He points out that billionaires do pay taxes…a lot of taxes. And the inequality literature is riddled with errors and bad statistics.
Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
What should colleges do about pro-Palestinian encampments?
College students across America are camping out to demand their universities divest all investments with Israeli-linked companies that they claim profit from the occupation and oppression of Palestine. It's gone on for weeks, and even administrators at schools known as bastions of progressive activism are finally getting fed up. Harvard's president is threatening "involuntary leave" for protesters. Columbia announced on Monday that it canceled its main commencement ceremony for safety reasons. The University of Southern California has, too.
Congress has continued to interrogate Ivy League presidents, and a bill to explicitly define antisemitism for civil rights law enforcement purposes just passed the House with overwhelming support last week.
Joining us today to talk about the protests, the backlash, and what it all means for free speech on campus and the wider world is Nico Perrino, executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and host of the free speech podcast So to Speak.
Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
The Department of Justice indicted the creators of an application that helps people spend their bitcoins anonymously. They're accused of "conspiracy to commit money laundering." Why "conspiracy to commit" as opposed to just "money laundering"?
Because they didn't hold anyone else's money or do anything illegal with it. They provided a privacy tool that may have enabled other people to do illegal things with their bitcoin. But that's not a crime, just as selling someone a kitchen knife isn't a crime. The case against the creators of Samourai Wallet is an assault on our civil liberties and First Amendment rights.
What this tool does is offer what's known as a "coinjoin," a method for anonymizing bitcoin transactions by mixing them with other transactions, as the project's founder, Keonne Rodriguez, explained to Reason in 2022:
"I think the best analogy for it is like smelting gold," he said. "You take your Bitcoin, you add it into [the conjoin protocol] Whirlpool, and Whirlpool smelts it into new pieces that are not associated to the original piece."
Smelting bars of gold would make it harder for the government to track. But if someone eventually uses a piece of that gold for an illegal purchase, should the creator of the smelting furnace go to prison? This is what the government is arguing.
Cash is the payment technology used most by criminals, but it also happens to be essential for preserving the financial privacy of law-abiding citizens, as Human Rights Foundation chief strategy officer Alex Gladstein told Reason:
"The ATM model, it gives people the option to have freedom money," says Gladstein. "Yes, the government will know all the ins and outs of what flows are coming in and out, but they won't know what you do with it when you leave. And that allows us to preserve the privacy of cash, which I think is essential for a democratic society."
The government's decision to indict Rodriguez and his partner William Lonergan Hill is also an attack on free speech because all they did was write open-source code and make it widely available.
"It is an issue of a chilling effect on free speech," attorney Jerry Brito, who heads up the cryptocurrency nonprofit Coin Center, told Reason after the U.S. Treasury went after the creators of another piece of anonymizing software. "So, basically, anybody who is in any way associated with this tool…a neutral tool that can be used for good or for ill, these people are now being basically deplatformed."
Are we willing to trade away our constitutional rights for the promise of security? For many in power, there seems to be no limit to what they want us to trade away.
In the '90s, the FBI tried to ban online encryption because criminals and terrorists might use it to have secret conversations. Had they succeeded, there would be no internet privacy. E-commerce, which relies on securely sending credit card information, might never have existed.
Remember when the Canadian government ordered banks to freeze money headed to the trucker protests? Central Bank Digital Currencies would make such efforts far easier.
"We come from first principles here in the global struggle for human rights," says Gladstein. "The most important thing is that it's confiscation resistant and censorship resistant and parallel, and can be done outside of the government's control."
The most important thing about bitcoin, and money like it, isn't its price. It's the check it places on the government's ability to devalue, censor, and surviel our money. Creators of open-source tools like Samourai Wallet should be celebrated, not threatened with a quarter-century in a federal prison.
Music Credits: "Intercept," by BXBRDVJA via Artlist; "You Need It,' by Moon via Artlist. Photo Credits: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/Newscom; Omar Ashtawy/APAImages / Polaris/Newscom; Paul Weaver/Sipa USA/Newscom; Envato Elements; Pexels; Emin Dzhafarov/Kommersant Photo / Polaris/Newscom; Anonymous / Universal Images Group/Newscom.
The number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria has surged in recent years. In America, diagnoses have almost tripled from about 15,000 to more than 42,000 from 2017 to 2021. In the United Kingdom, the number of minors referred to the national Gender Identity Development Service grew from 51 in 2009 to 1,766 by 2016, leading to yearslong waitlists for care within the government-run health system.
This surge caused England's National Health Service to commission an extensive study of youth gender treatment. That study is known as the Cass Review, and its results dropped on April 10. The review's author, former head of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health Hilary Cass, concluded that modern youth gender dysphoria interventions are informed by "remarkably weak evidence" drawing on studies "exaggerated by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint" and that "we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress." The science, it turns out, is not settled—or anywhere close to it.
NHS England opted to stop routine prescriptions of puberty blockers following the review's publication, as have NHS Scotland and the Welsh government. Major American medical groups such as the American Psychiatric Association, American Medical Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics, all of which endorse prescribing puberty blockers for gender-dysphoric kids, have yet to officially respond.
American media coverage of the Cass Review, which could throw the entire youth gender treatment paradigm in this country into question, has been remarkably muted. But today's guest is never muted. Jesse Singal has been covering this topic—and taken a lot of heat for it—for years in the pages of publications such as The Atlantic, The Dispatch, and on his Substack, Singal-Minded.
Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Last Saturday, Iran launched hundreds of armed drones and missiles to attack Israel in retaliation for an airstrike on an Iranian consulate in Syria that killed seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, including a general. Israel and the U.S. report that they intercepted most of the drones, and the sole known casualty was a 7-year-old girl critically injured by falling missile shrapnel. Israel has not retaliated…yet.
In the wake of all that, today's guest had something to say about the way some American activists loudly defended the Islamic Republic of Iran after staying conspicuously silent during protests against the regime and crackdowns that began almost two years ago.
That was Elica Le Bon, a first-generation Iranian immigrant born in the U.K. and currently living in Los Angeles, where she practices law and runs several large social media accounts that bring attention to the plight of the Iranian people. On the latest episode of Just Asking Questions, she talked to Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe about the Iranian attack, the state of the protest movement and how social media has affected it, and her recent televised exchange with Dave Smith.
Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
In a special edition of Just Asking Questions recorded before a live audience on the Honduran island of Roatán, Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe talk with Mark Lutter, founder of the Charter Cities Institute, and Patri Friedman, founder and board member of Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in charter cities.
The conversation took place at the Alternative Visions for Governance conference sponsored by the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason. The conference happened within the jurisdiction of Próspera, an autonomous zone for economic development—known as a ZEDE—made possible by a 2013 law passed by the Honduran National Congress.
They discussed lessons learned from the launch of Próspera, which has expanded despite a hostile presidential administration, the proliferation of biohacking and medical procedures within the zone, the history of self-governing cities, the relationship between charter cities and democracy, and where in the world prospects are best for future experiments in privatized governance.
Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Bryan Johnson made his fortune when he sold his company Braintree to PayPal for $800 million, netting about $300 million for himself. He spends about $2 million a year creating a system to reverse his "biological age." He's 46 years old, chronologically, but claims he's de-aged himself following a program he's branded "the Blueprint protocol."
"I wanted to pose the question in this technological age: Can an algorithm, paired with science, in fact, take better care of me than I can myself?" Johnson tells Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions.
They talked with Johnson about his daily routine, the results he's published including measurement of his nighttime erections, the transhumanist philosophy he outlines in his free e-book Don't Die, the role that artificial intelligence is likely to play in prolonging human life and health spans, and the value and limitations of self-experimentation in an era of pharmaceutical stagnation.
Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
In this week's TheReason Roundtable, Katherine Mangu-Ward is in the driver's seat, alongside Nick Gillespie and special guests Zach Weissmueller and Eric Boehm. The editors react to the latest plot twists in Donald Trump's various legal proceedings and the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
00:41—The trials of Donald Trump in Georgia and New York
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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