Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won applause at the Libertarian National Convention by criticizing government lockdowns and deficit spending, and saying America shouldn't police the world.
It made me want to interview him. This month, I did.
He said intelligent things about America's growing debt:
"President Trump said that he was going to balance the budget and instead he (increased the debt more) than every president in United States history—$8 trillion. President Biden is on track now to beat him."
It's good to hear a candidate actually talk about our debt.
"When the debt is this large…you have to cut dramatically, and I'm going to do that," he says.
But looking at his campaign promises, I don't see it.
He promises "affordable" housing via a federal program backing 3 percent mortgages.
"Imagine that you had a rich uncle who was willing to cosign your mortgage!" gushes his campaign ad. "I'm going to make Uncle Sam that rich uncle!"
I point out that such giveaways won't reduce our debt.
"That's not a giveaway," Kennedy replies. "Every dollar that I spend as president is going to go toward building our economy."
That's big government nonsense, like his other claim: "Every million dollars we spend on child care creates 22 jobs!"
Give me a break.
When I pressed him about specific cuts, Kennedy says, "I'll cut the military in half…cut it to about $500 billion….We are not the policemen of the world."
"Stop giving any money to Ukraine?" I ask.
"Negotiate a peace," Kennedy replies. "Biden has never talked to Putin about this, and it's criminal."
He never answered whether he'd give money to Ukraine. He did answer about Israel.
"Yes, of course we should,"
"[Since] you don't want to cut this spending, what would you cut?"
"Israel spending is rather minor," he responds. "I'm going to pick the most wasteful programs, put them all in one bill, and send them to Congress with an up and down vote."
Of course, Congress would just vote it down.
Kennedy's proposed cuts would hardly slow down our path to bankruptcy. Especially since he also wants new spending that activists pretend will reduce climate change.
At a concert years ago, he smeared "crisis" skeptics like me, who believe we can adjust to climate change, screaming at the audience, "Next time you see John Stossel and [others]… these flat-earthers, these corporate toadies—lying to you. This is treason, and we need to start treating them now as traitors!"
Now, sitting with him, I ask, "You want to have me executed for treason?"
"That statement," he replies, "it's not a statement that I would make today….Climate is existential. I think it's human-caused climate change. But I don't insist other people believe that. I'm arguing for free markets and then the lowest cost providers should prevail in the marketplace….We should end all subsidies and let the market dictate."
That sounds good: "Let the market dictate."
But wait, Kennedy makes money from solar farms backed by government guaranteed loans. He "leaned on his contacts in the Obama administration to secure a $1.6 billion loan guarantee," wroteThe New York Times.
"Why should you get a government subsidy?" I ask.
"If you're creating a new industry," he replies, "you're competing with the Chinese. You want the United States to own pieces of that industry."
I suppose that means his government would subsidize every industry leftists like.
Yet when a wind farm company proposed building one near his family's home, he opposed it.
"Seems hypocritical," I say.
"We're exterminating the right whale in the North Atlantic through these wind farms!" he replies.
I think he was more honest years ago, when he complained that "turbines…would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard… Nantucket….[They] will steal the stars and nighttime views."
Kennedy was once a Democrat, but now Democrats sue to keep him off ballots. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls him a "dangerous nutcase."
Kennedy complains that Reich won't debate him.
"Nobody will," he says. "They won't have me on any of their networks."
Well, obviously, I will.
I especially wanted to confront him about vaccines.
In a future column, Stossel TV will post more from our hourlong discussion.
Climate unintended consequences: The Olympic Games, which start at the end of this week in Paris, were supposed to be some of the most environmentally friendly in the organization's history. The organizers had opted out of supplying air conditioning for athletes' rooms in the Olympic Village as a means of reducing the event's environmental footprint. Just one issue: Nobody wanted that, and many of the teams will in fact be bringing their own A.C. units.
The event organizers had constructed an Olympic Village equipped with geothermal in-floor cooling systems. But highs in Paris at the end of July/beginning of August average about 79 degrees Fahrenheit during the day; most major competitors have decided the in-floor tech won't cut it and that their athletes need real A.C.
Earlier this month, The Washington Post compiled a list of the top 20 largest competing nations; of the eight that replied to this inquiry, all of them planned on bringing their own portable A.C. units for their athletes. One of the nations that has not responded yet—China—is likely to follow suit, as roughly half of the world's total A.C. units are used in China.
"According to the International Energy Agency, fewer than 1 in 10 households in Europe has air conditioning, and the numbers in Paris are lower than that," reports NBC News. "The study said that of the 1.6 billion AC units in use across the globe in 2016, more than half were in China (570 million) and the United States (375 million). The entire European Union had around 100 million." So it's a bit of a cultural difference. But it's still incredibly rich that the organizers' environmental efforts will be sabotaged to such a degree, and you have to wonder what the total environmental toll of shlepping massive A.C. units halfway across the globe to use temporarily in the Olympic Village will be (though some teams do intend to procure the units in France).
"It's a pity," said Georgina Grenon, the Paris 2024 director of environmental excellence, in response to The Washington Post's question about other countries making less environmentally conscious choices. Still, organizers touted their plan to transform the Olympic Village into apartments for some 6,000 Parisians following the games and say the geothermal cooling tech will be used for years to come.
Locked out of the debates: The first presidential debate will be this Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., despite high polling, will be excluded from the stage.
Normally, the Commission on Presidential Debates hosts the presidential showdowns (and chooses which candidates qualify for inclusion). This time, however, CNN is hosting, moderated by anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. As is tradition in American politics, which seems so frequently filled with antipathy toward non–major party candidates, the highly polling third candidate—RFK Jr.—will be excluded from the stage, per CNN's rules.
The network set a requirement that a candidate's name must appear on enough ballots nationwide to plausibly be able to win 270 electoral votes. The candidates must also reach 15 percent in four national polls selected by CNN in order to qualify.
RFK Jr. does not qualify for the first (having secured ballot access in just California, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Utah so far, though another dozen states could also end up putting his name on the ballot) yet comes quite close to the second: He's been hovering at around 9 or 10 percent, even cracking 15 in some polls (including one of CNN's very own).
By keeping Kennedy off the debate stage, CNN is depriving viewers of the opportunity to see both Donald Trump and Joe Biden taken to task for the COVID-19 policies they supported—lockdowns that deprived kids of their educations, mask mandates that ended up being almost entirely pointless, funerals and weddings conducted via Zoom, padlocked playgrounds and skate parks filled in with sand, not to mention stunning levels of government spending that sank our economy into deep inflation from which we still haven't fully recovered. We need more people challenging the political duopoly, not fewer. But leave it to the major parties and major networks to fear competition; all incumbents fear competition when they can sense they're in decline.
Scenes from New York: The weed crackdown is underway. Unauthorized dispensaries and bodegas have, for the last year or so, outnumbered licensed shops 20 to one, but New York's law enforcement and regulators have now decided to take action. Signs like these are commonplace, and represent a stunning admission on the part of the pot regulators: They totally botched the legal weed rollout by doling out a paltry number of licenses to applicants on the basis of "diversity" and "equity" but disallowing the vast majority of shops to obtain legal licenses. (More from Reason's Jacob Sullum.)
"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said intense fighting with Hamas will soon be paused and some forces redeployed to the north of the country, where violence is escalating with Lebanon-based Hezbollah," reportsBloomberg.
"Did anyone ever hear of Dana White?" Trump asked, referring to the UFC president, during a speech at a conference in Washington on Saturday. "I said, 'Dana, I have an idea. Why don't you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters, and then you have the champion of your league—these are the greatest fighters in the world—fight the champion of the migrants.' I think the migrant guy might win; that's how tough they are. He didn't like that idea too much." He also talked up how he would "begin the largest deportation operation in American history" if elected to a second term.
Over 1,300 people died this month while attempting to complete their hajj to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia.
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."
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have agreed to participate in two presidential debates—one in June and one in September—after both candidates bucked the Commission on Presidential Debates, the nonprofit organization that has managed such affairs since 1988.
Biden had a list of demands regarding the terms of this debate, such as the elimination of the traditional live audience and inclusion of mics that immediately cut off when the candidate's time has elapsed and the other person is speaking. Apparently these terms were amenable to Trump, who nevertheless complained that Biden is afraid of crowds.
This means the candidates have officially killed the proposal put forth by the commission, which wanted three debates somewhat closer to Election Day, in September and October. There is nothing sacred about the commission, and these new debates may well be an improvement over last cycle's. Preventing the candidates from interrupting each other would be a significant win for the viewing public and everyone involved.
That said, Biden and Trump have utterly failed—unsurprisingly—to agree to the most desirable change, which would have been to include more candidates. The commission infamously restricted its debates to just candidates polling above a 15 percent threshold. In 2016, this meant that Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson was excluded despite polling as high as 13 percent in some surveys. By mutual decree, Biden and Trump are sticking with this arbitrary limitation.
In a statement, the Biden campaign said the purpose of the debate was "to compare the only two candidates with any statistical chance of prevailing in the Electoral College" and not to waste time "on candidates with no prospect of becoming president." That's a rather direct rebuke of independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is currently polling at about 10 percent in battleground states.
RFK Jr. is not currently in a position to win the presidential election. But he could have a major impact. Polls show that he is currently pulling votes from Biden and Trump in somewhat equal measure. He has also attracted a following among anti-establishment, populist, and even some libertarian voters. If either Biden or Trump were to make an appeal to previous supporters who have decamped for RFK Jr., and win them back, it could be the difference on Election Day.
Of course, both major party candidates are probably more worried about the opposite thing happening: RFK Jr. winning an even greater number of their voters. Their present actions betray them; the Biden campaign is doing everything in its power to undermine RFK Jr.'s ballot access drive, while Trump is desperate to remind his base of RFK Jr.'s decidedly nonconservative views on guns, environmental regulation, and abortion.
RFK Jr. holds an eclectic mix of views, some of which appeal to supporters of limited government: He opposed COVID-19 mandates, is worried about federal efforts to suppress dissent on social media, and does not want to continue sending billions in foreign aid to Ukraine. Yet he remains a progressive liberal on a range of social and economic issues. He recently expressed support for both student loan debt forgiveness and affirmative action.
He is keen to join the debate stage. He recently issued a challenge to Trump to debate him later this month at the Libertarian National Convention, where both candidates will be speaking. (Hopefully the party will make time for its own prospective candidates as well.) Trump does not seem likely to take him up on this offer; like Biden, Trump wants a presidential debate safe space, where the two presidents* only have to face each other.
Leave Maggie Alone
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, well-known for her coverage of Trump, was excoriated by liberals on social media this week because of a wrinkle in the Trump hush money case. One exhibit in the trial was text messages between Haberman and former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, the purpose of which was to establish that Cohen was well-accustomed to doing Trump's dirty work.
"Please start writing and I will call you soon," read one message from Cohen to Haberman.
On X, liberals treated this as proof that Haberman was somehow in cahoots with the Trump campaign. But the exchange is perfectly benign; sometimes a reporter is only interested in writing a story if they can get comment from the source. It looks to me like Cohen was merely acknowledging to Haberman that she wouldn't be wasting her time—he would, in fact, provide whatever statement she needed. This is perfectly common journalistic practice.
Of course, many Democrats have decided that The New York Times should be working full-time to help reelect Biden to the presidency, a notion that Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn unequivocally rejects.
This Week on Free Media
I'm joined by The Spectator's Amber Duke to discuss MSNBC's horror over independent voters seeing Biden as a bigger threat to democracy than Trump, quarterback Aaron Rodgers stumping for RFK Jr., CNN reacting to Cohen's testimony, Vice President Kamala Harris dropping an f-bomb, and The Simpsons killing comedy with European Union propaganda.
Worth Watching
Amazon released a trailer for the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. I thought the first season was OK, but not great. It felt like very generic fantasy and was missing some of the light-hearted whimsy and magic of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. (As well as the Hobbit films, which I found delightful; whenever I hear someone say "they should have been one movie," I stop listening.) Like everyone else (except for Galadriel, sadly), I guessed that the mysterious castaway from the second episode was actually Sauron; the fake-out with the Stranger did not fool me for one second.
This trailer makes it look like the second season will depict Sauron's corruption of Numenor, which is definitely an interesting aspect of the backstory. We shall see if they manage to make it compelling.
*CORRECTION: This article has been edited to clarify the descriptions of Trump and Biden.
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