The Losertarian Problem

Act 1

Yesterday I posted something on Facebook about libertarians being losers.

A man named Joe showed up in the comments to defend the libertarian frame against my attack on it.

He didn't argue with my points. He didn't refute anything specifically. He just performed contempt for the challenge.

His first comment: "That's a compelling argument for totalitarianism. Very demoralizing. I guess we are locked in to the degenerative spiral. Good luck everyone."

Read it carefully... He wasn't conceding my argument was compelling. He was sarcastically equating "stop being prey" with "embrace totalitarianism", the standard libertarian deflection when someone suggests using power to fight back.

I replied... invited him to the list to hear me out... he came back...

"I'm not interested in hearing that trash every day."

I replied again... told him he can unsubscribe anytime... he came back again.

"Oh I'm here to engage. I'm not signing up for your email though. That is a waste of time."

Three comments. Three returns. Zero engagement with the actual argument.

Here's what Joe was actually doing.

Joe wasn't talking to me. He was performing for the other libertarians watching the thread. He was signaling to them that my challenge could be dismissed, that nobody had to take this seriously, that the collective frame was safe.

That's how the loser frame defends itself. Not with arguments. With public contempt. Performed by people who never actually have to engage.

I'm not telling you this to dunk on Joe. Joe is fine. Joe is normal. Joe is doing exactly what the libertarian frame trains you to do when somebody challenges it.

I should know... I did the same thing for fifteen years.

This article is for Joe. It's for me, fifteen years ago, when I was Joe. It's for every libertarian who's been trained to dismiss challenges instead of engaging them, perform contempt instead of building power, signal purity to other prey instead of doing the work that actually matters.

Today we figure out why.

Act 2

A long time ago, almost feels like another life now, I was a contract weather observer at an airport.

Not glamorous. I did METARs for a small aerodrome. If you're a pilot, you know what that is. If not, just picture me in a tiny office, telling local pilots what kind of clouds were in the area, how high they were, what the weather was doing. I worked for about five minutes every hour. The rest of the time I sat at a computer.

Mostly I watched The Sopranos and wasted time. I had no interest in politics. I was a default liberal who didn't even know he was a liberal. I thought socialized healthcare was good. I thought Michael Moore made great points. I was a fish swimming in water without realizing he was wet.

Then one night, between weather observations, a Republican primary debate happened to be on the TV.

I caught a moment that disrupted my entire world.

You have to understand the context. This was 2007. Post-9/11 America was still locked into the war on terror. Everyone with a microphone was on board. Democrats, Republicans, didn't matter. The narrative was settled.

They hate us for our freedom.

To question it was to side with the terrorists.

So there's this Republican primary debate... One of the candidates is a weird little old gynecologist congressman from Texas. Nobody takes him seriously... he's a curiosity. His name is Ron Paul.

The moderator asks: why do they hate us?

Everyone gives the standard answers. Then it gets to Ron Paul.

And Ron Paul says the unsayable...

He says maybe it has something to do with the fact that we've been bombing them for ten years. He says the CIA calls it blowback. It's not a secret. It's been their own analysis for decades.

The audience GASPS.

And Rudy Giuliani, the hero of 9/11, the man who walked through ash on the streets of Manhattan, jumps in like a knight defending the kingdom. He says he's never heard anyone suggest America invited the attack of September 11. He demands Ron Paul withdraw his statement.

The audience erupts. Standing ovation. The room is on its feet.

Ron Paul stands there looking like he's been punched in the face.

And then he doesn't back down.

He walks through the history. Carefully, piece by piece. He explains American intervention in the Middle East with the kind of coherent specificity nobody else on that stage could match. He's not saying we deserved it. He's saying we should understand what's happening to us.

He holds the line while America is screaming at him.

Shoulders back. Head high. Calm.

I'm watching this clip on the TV at the airport, between weather observations, and something cracks open in my head. Because somewhere underneath the screaming and the standing ovation and the certainty, I can see that the only adult in the room is the guy nobody takes seriously.

That was the moment.

Ron Paul demonstrated something on that stage I didn't have a name for yet. He was a predator. The only one. Everyone else was performing certainty for the cameras. He was telling the truth while the room turned on him.

That's what drew me in.

And though nobody knew it at the time, that moment was also where MAGA was born.

The Ron Paul revolution started in that room. The energy Ron Paul unleashed by telling the truth on a hostile stage eventually found a different vessel. Nine years later, Donald Trump came down an escalator and picked up the same fight. Different fighter. Same lineage.

It started with a gynecologist from Texas refusing to lie about the war on terror.

I got the entrepreneurial bug shortly after that airport job. I also started reading. Mises. Hayek. Rothbard. Bastiat. Hoppe. Rand. The Objectivists, the Minarchists, the anarcho-capitalists, the Left Libertarians, even some of the anarcho-communists. I consumed it. I bought gold coins. I got into Bitcoin early. I built one of Dave Smith's first fan pages on Facebook back before he was Dave Smith. Got him hundreds of thousands of views on clips before Rogan, before he blew up.

I have receipts in this movement...

I've been a hardcore libertarian for the better part of twenty years. Full traverse. Started as a minarchist, ended up an anarcho-capitalist. There are very few people on this planet who have spent more intimate time with libertarian ideas than I have.

And I'm struggling with them now...

The first big rupture happened the year I made real money for the first time. I was a young entrepreneur. Didn't know about taxes. Didn't incorporate. Didn't understand what was coming. I had a great year, and then tax season arrived, and I owed a huge amount. More money than I knew what to do with at the time. More money than I'd ever seen in my life. And when tax season hit, I was in the highest bracket.

I had to write a check to the government for an amount that was greater than every asset I owned. Greater than the rusted-out Toyota I was driving. Greater than anything in my account. I'd never seen that kind of money before, and the first time I did, the government took it.

And while this was happening, do you know what was on the news?

Bailouts.

GM. The big car companies. Begging the government for taxpayer money. And I knew people who worked for those companies. They had nice new cars. They had homes that were paid off. They had pensions and benefits and the kind of stable middle-class life I was years away from being able to afford.

And those people told me how hard done by they were. How they were entitled to government money... while I was writing that check from my bachelor apartment with a noisy neighbor.

That hurt. And then, when I would bring this up to them, they would treat me like I'm being the selfish and greedy one. Like I'm the one 'trying to take from society'.

That made the libertarian arguments stop being arguments and start being lived experience.

Taxation is theft? You're goddam right it's theft! I only paid because they would put me in prison if I didn't. And I don't believe for a second they're using that money wisely.

Dave Smith once said the state is just the mafia pretending to be a human rights organization.

That sentence resonated with me so strongly I've never gotten over it.

Harry Browne said the government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and tell you that without the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.

That's it... That's the whole game... The Libertarians are correct... nothing had ever resonated with me as hard as these kinds of quotes did.

And Rothbard synthesized all of it with Machiavellian precision in Anatomy of the State. If you haven't read it, go do it right after you read this. It's a legitimate upgrade you can install in your brain in one afternoon.

Rothbard explained that the thing that makes the state different from every other organization in society is the monopoly on violence. Not healthcare. Not roads. Not welfare. Not 'public service'. Not the 'collective good'. Not any of the polite fictions we tell ourselves. The state is the institution that gets to decide when violence is legitimate. Everything else is downstream of that single fact.

Healthcare backed by taxation is healthcare backed by violence. Roads backed by taxation are roads backed by violence. Pay or go to jail.

This is the fundamental libertarian insight.

And it's all true. Every word of it.

It is logically airtight. You end up looking silly if you try to argue against it.

Act 3

But there's a problem.

I started noticing it slowly... It took years... decades even.

The libertarians were correct about almost everything... and we kept losing.

Not occasionally. Not on the margins. We lose everything. Every fight. Every decade. Federal Reserve grew. Federal budget grew. Surveillance state grew. Interventions abroad continued. The country got less free every single year of my adult life despite the fact that we had won, on paper, every intellectual argument worth having.

Not just losing... that's not the right word. Not even in the game. An embarrassment. Libertarianism was something you keep to yourself, like Scientology or some crazy religion.

I would sit in The Ron Paul forums, libertarian Discord servers and Facebook groups and watch people get angry about this, then explain to each other why the average person was just too brainwashed to see the truth. Why the educational system had failed. Why the corporate media had captured everyone.

It never occurred to anyone that the problem wasn't just downstream of bad ideas in the public...

Maybe the problem was upstream.

Is it possible that we, the libertarians, were doing something wrong? Is it possible we didn't have it all 'figured out' like we thought? Maybe there's something missing?

Let's fast forward to 2015. Donald Trump came down the escalator. And something shifted. The whole world changed that day. The main character of this grand story we're all living through emerged onto the scene for his final chapter.

Here's the deeper truth...

I sort of became a Trump guy almost immediately... but I was ashamed of it as a libertarian, so I kept it quiet. I constantly criticized Trump from a libertarian perspective to show the other libertarians in my life how pure I was. I did this for years. I'm ashamed of it. I was a losertarian.

That's the loser frame in real time. Performing purity for an audience while my actual instincts pointed somewhere else. I was the exact thing this article is about.

The slow march wasn't me coming around to Trump. The slow march was me slowly being willing to admit publicly what I'd already privately decided. Only in the last two or three years have I admitted, fully, to myself and to others, that I'm done with libertarianism as a political project.

But the seed was planted in 2015.

Because Trump on a debate stage was doing something I had only ever seen one other Republican primary candidate do.

He was just like Ron Paul that night on the stage with Giuliani, but even more dangerous... not nearly as polite and well-mannered.

Ron Paul on that 2007 stage was an honest good natured man telling the truth as he saw it while the room turned on him. Trump on the 2015 stage was something different... Trump knew exactly how the cameras worked. Trump knew exactly how the audience worked... Trump knew exactly how the moderators worked... And Trump used all of it to his advantage. A masterclass in persuasion, as the late great Scott Adams would put it.

Ron Paul behaved like a predator who had no interest in eating his prey... he's much too gracious.

Donald Trump is a predator in the same way that progressives are predators... He collects scalps and keeps them as trophies...

...but he decided to join our team. And he told us he was going to teach us how to win. Then he went on to humiliate the Clinton and Bush dynasties in one fell swoop. It was magnificent!

This is the line I keep coming back to... Progressives have been the apex predators in American politics since at least FDR... Their entire culture is predatory. They name enemies. They take territory. They institutionalize their wins. They dominate every institution that grants social legitimacy. They don't apologize for using power because using power is what they do.

Conservatives have been prey for ninety years. Articulate, well-funded, perpetually losing prey. They play by rules nobody else respects, then act surprised when they lose. Then they write lots of strongly worded letters.

Libertarians are below prey... if there is such a thing... Libertarians refuse to play the game at all and then act like they're above it. They're not, they're tax livestock just like the rest of us.

And then Trump showed up and demonstrated, on a national stage, that you could fight progressive predators in their own register. That you could name enemies. That you could mock them, and have the audience erupt in laughter at them. That you could refuse to apologize... that you could actually win.

Finally, the right had a predator of its own!

No more Mitt Romney. No more Jeb Bush. No more Polite Losers...

Now there's someone with some teeth.

And a lion's mane for a haircut...

There's a debate moment from the 2016 primaries that I keep coming back to. Rand Paul and Donald Trump on the same stage. The Trans-Pacific Partnership came up. Trump attacked it as a deal "designed for China to come in through the back door."

Rand Paul, Ron Paul's son... the libertarian guy on the stage, the only candidate up there with a coherent libertarian platform, jumped in to correct him. China is not part of the TPP.

Rand was 100% factually correct... didn't matter.

Trump didn't engage on the substance. He attacked Rand's poll numbers. He attacked Rand's appearance... he went personal. The audience went with Trump. Rand Paul, who was right, got steamrolled by Donald Trump, who was wrong.

Dave Smith called it hilarious and tragic. His takeaway: "Oh, I guess Trump just won that moment. That's where we're at."

Dave saw it clearly. We are in a system where being right doesn't win the moment. Being effective wins the moment. Trump was effective. Rand was right. Trump won. That's the diagnosis.

The libertarian framework rewards being correct. The actual political environment rewards being effective. Those are not the same thing.

Now let me tell you about a moment from 2011 that I think captures everything.

It was CPAC. February 2011. Trump had just started hinting that he might run for president... This was effectively his first major political speech. The crowd had a heavy Ron Paul contingent. They started chanting Ron Paul's name.

Trump didn't lie to them.

He looked at the room and said: "Ron Paul cannot get elected. I'm sorry to tell you."

Ron Paul supporters booed him.

Trump leaned in.

"I like Ron Paul. I think he's a good guy. But honestly, he has just zero chance of getting elected. You have to win an election."

Another round of boos from the Ron Paul section. The rest of the room cheered.

That last sentence is the whole argument I'm trying to make to you today.

You have to win an election.

Trump understood the predator-prey dynamic in 2011, before he'd even formally entered politics. He honored Ron Paul. He paid the man real respect. And he refused to flatter the supporters about whether their movement, in its current form, could win.

The Ron Paul faithful in that room booed him for telling them the truth.

That's the loser frame, captured live, fifteen years before I sat down to write this.

They wanted to be told they could win even though they couldn't. Trump refused to flatter them. They booed. The rest of the room cheered.

Trump has always understood. Most libertarians never have and maybe never will. I might be a rare exception. I hope that's not the case.

Act 4

Here's the thing libertarians refuse to see.

Power is what makes ideas matter.

Without power, you don't have ideas... You have a hobby.

I want you to sit with that sentence for a second. Because it's the spine of everything I'm going to say next. Libertarianism is a hobby, not a serious political force.

How is it that libertarians have been right about almost everything for the last fifty years and have less control over the country than they did fifty years ago?

If ideas mattered on their own, libertarianism would have won by now. The Mises Institute has been publishing for decades. Reason Magazine has been around since 1968. Every economic argument libertarians make has been made, beautifully, in books, journals, conferences, podcasts, debates. They have been winning the intellectual war for half a century...

And taxes are higher. The federal debt has crossed 39 trillion dollars... the Fed prints money like someone printing junk mail. None of the things libertarians warned about got better... all of them got worse.

So the ideas, by themselves, don't matter. Something else is doing the work.

Here's how it works:

America is ruled.

Not by elected officials. Not by laws. Not by the Constitution.

America is ruled by a class... a class that controls the universities, the media, the foundations, most of the courts, the public schools, the regulatory state, the credentialing systems, the major NGOs, and the corporate HR layer that polices behavior in every Fortune 500 company. They share an ideology... they credential each other... they reward each other. They punish dissenters together. They function as a single organism even though no one is officially in charge.

That class has been the apex predators in American politics since at least FDR. They've held the slot for ninety years. You live in their country, that's the truth. They set the rules for the land you live on.

Most of what your elected officials do is theater... kayfabe as the kids call it... They control symbolic levers. The apex class controls the actual levers. Regulatory rulemaking. Media narratives. Academic credentials. Institutional gatekeeping. The censorship layer... Industry capture.

The libertarian map is wrong...

Libertarians treat "the state" as the apex predator... The state is downstream. The state is just a tool that the apex class uses. Reduce the size of the state and the apex class just rules through different channels.

Look at how they enforce speech. The First Amendment legally protects you from state censorship. So the apex class doesn't censor through the state. They censor through banks debanking donors. Through employers firing wrongthinkers. Through tech platforms deplatforming dissent. Through universities credentialing only the ideologically aligned. Through corporate cancellations driven by advertiser pressure.

Cut the IRS in half tomorrow and the apex class would still own the country. They didn't need the IRS to enforce ideological conformity... they have a thousand other tools and can create new ones on the fly.

Your libertarian principles have become cope... they are your excuse for losing. You're not fooling anyone other than other libertarians.

Free speech, property rights, due process, sound money. All of them have been chipped away or eliminated while libertarians wrote books about why those principles matter. The books didn't save them. Power could have. Libertarians refused to seek power, and they pull down anyone who does like crabs in a bucket... no one is pure enough.

Want a concrete picture of what apex class power looks like? Donald Trump was prosecuted four times across multiple jurisdictions in the years he was running for president again. Civil fraud trial in New York. Federal Jan 6 case. Federal classified docs case. Georgia election interference. Different jurisdictions. Different prosecutors. Different theories. All targeting the same man at the same time.

Do you think that's a coincidence? It's not.

That's coordination across institutions that share an ideology and a target. The state apparatus mobilized against the only candidate with predator instincts on the right. That's the apex class flexing through its institutional infrastructure.

And the fact that Trump survived it is a pretty critical sign that he's your best shot. Your leader.

Now ask yourself something.

Who does the elected president take orders from when he tries to do something the apex class doesn't want?

Why was Trump prosecuted four times across multiple jurisdictions for things no other president has been prosecuted for?

Why do all the major corporations fly the same flag during the same month?

Who's coordinating that?

Nobody is. They share an ideology... that's enough. It's a decentralized network of apex predators carrying institutional power.

The libertarian thinks the state is the threat. The actual threat is a class that uses the state, the corporations, the foundations, the universities, and the media in coordination. You cannot defeat that class by writing essays about taxation.

You defeat it by becoming a predator class of your own and seizing the state.

Or you don't defeat it... you submit to it. Admit you are prey and move on with your life... There's no shame in it. For many, it's the right choice. You don't have what it takes for this whole politics thing. You're going to get yourself and others hurt. Find your champions and support them. Do not try to lead until you have earned it. You need scars.

Those are the only two options. You don't get to invent a third. Predator or Prey, which are you going to be? Decide now.

Act 5

Now let me tell you the most important political story of the last five years that nobody has told you quite this way.

In May 2024, Donald Trump walked into the Libertarian National Convention in Washington, D.C., and gave a speech.

He was the first major-party candidate in history to ever speak at the LP convention.

He knew he would be booed. He knew the crowd was hostile. The Ron Paul wing was there. The anti-war wing was there. The hard-money wing was there... even the libertarian socialists were there. Many of these people had spent a decade calling Trump a fascist, a statist, a war criminal...

Trump showed up anyway... for the real ones, this counts for something. For the jokers... keep screaming into the void.

He was booed throughout the speech. Heckled. Some attendees threw punches at his supporters. Security pulled people out of the room... it was chaos.

In the middle of the chaos, Trump made a promise.

"If you vote for me, on Day 1, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served."

Ross Ulbricht is the founder of the Silk Road. He had been in federal prison since 2013, serving two life sentences plus forty years for running an internet marketplace. Libertarians had been calling him a political prisoner for over a decade... Nobody expected him to ever walk out of prison.

Trump promised to free him.

That was one of the only lines in the speech that got unanimous cheers.

Behind that promise was a deal... a real one. Brokered by a libertarian operator named Angela McArdle.

McArdle was the chair of the Libertarian National Committee at the time. She was the one who got Trump invited to the convention. She built the bridge between the Mises Caucus wing of the LP and the Trump campaign.

The Mises Caucus, by the way, did not get the candidate they wanted in 2024. The convention narrowly nominated Chase Oliver. Chase Oliver is a progressive libertarian. Pro-LGBT, pro-immigration, anti-war from a left-coded angle. Nobody in McArdle's faction wanted him.

McArdle lost that fight.

What she did next is the cleanest demonstration of predator-class behavior I have ever watched in real time...

She didn't pout... she didn't undermine the nominee... she made a strategic pivot and turned the loss into a weapon...

She told her people: "One of the best ways to stop a second Biden term is to go hard in the paint for Chase Oliver in blue states."

That's the move. Chase Oliver was progressive on social issues. So in blue states where libertarian voters lean culturally progressive, Oliver's name on the ballot would peel votes from the Democrat, not Trump. McArdle directed her party's energy: campaign for Oliver where it hurts the Democrats... make him the new Ralph Nader.

She also said her goal for the LP that year was, in plain language, to ensure Trump won.

The libertarian movement was furious. Petitions for her resignation. State affiliates refused to put Oliver on the ballot. Most of the movement couldn't see what she was doing.

She was playing power.

Trump won the election.

On January 21, 2025, on his second day back in the White House, Trump did more than what he had promised... he didn't just commute the sentence. He signed a full unconditional pardon... Ross Ulbricht walked out of prison a free man.

Trump called Lyn Ulbricht, Ross's mother, personally to tell her.

Then he posted this on Truth Social: "I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross."

In honor of the Libertarian Movement.

He named us. By name.

Then he added: "The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me."

The scum. The lunatics. The weaponization of government.

He aligned himself, openly, with the libertarian movement against the apex class. He didn't owe libertarians anything by that point. The election was won. He had no political need to honor the movement.

He honored it anyway.

There are libertarians who get this.

Angela McArdle is one of them. She is now the chair of the Mises Caucus PAC, recruiting Bitcoin and MAHA coalitions for the next phase of the project.

Jeremy Kauffman is another. When two FBI agents showed up at his New Hampshire home in 2024 to question him about a tweet, he didn't cooperate. He turned the camera on them. He demanded their badges. They refused to identify themselves. He kept recording. He published the video online. The agents walked away with nothing. It went mega-viral.

That's a man who knows what game is being played and refuses to lose frame.

Kauffman also literally held up a "MAGA = Socialist" sign at a Trump rally in 2024. Three months later, when the LP nominated Chase Oliver, Kauffman publicly posted: "Yesterday, I held up this sign calling Donald Trump supporters socialists. Tonight, the Libertarian Party nominated a gay race communist for president. With those choices, I'm standing with Donald Trump."

That's a predator. You criticize when criticism is earned. You ally when the alternative is the apex class. You stand on your rights when the state comes to push you around. You don't perform purity at the expense of your country.

But here's what most libertarians did with Trump's gift.

They turned on him.

Trump showed up at their convention when they were calling him a fascist. He kept his promise to free their political prisoner. He honored their movement publicly when he didn't have to. He aligned himself with them against the apex class hunting them both.

Many of them turned on him over a single foreign policy disagreement.

That's the loyalty problem in its purest form... Trump fought for libertarians. Libertarians won't fight for Trump.

That's the betrayal... the losertarianism.

Now I want to honor another libertarian, before I deliver some hard truth.

Dave Smith.

Dave Smith built the bridge.

There is no Mises Caucus victory at Reno in 2022 without Dave Smith. There is no Angela McArdle as LNC chair without Dave Smith. There is no Trump appearance at the 2024 LP convention without Dave Smith. There is no Ross Ulbricht pardon without Dave Smith. That's the truth.

Dave Smith spent over a decade hosting Part of the Problem... He built the cultural mass that made the Mises Caucus politically possible. He took libertarian ideas onto Joe Rogan, Greg Gutfeld, Fox News. He pushed the post-Ron-Paul movement's voice into audiences nobody else in the libertarian world could reach.

Angela McArdle stood on Dave Smith's shoulders to win the LP. Without him, none of it happens.

I owe Dave a debt. So does every serious libertarian operating today. So does Ross Ulbricht.

And he's fucking up right now...

After Trump took office and made certain foreign policy moves Dave disagreed with, Dave hardened publicly... He started calling for Trump to be impeached... he pivoted, on a single foreign policy disagreement, from "build alliance with Trump" to "Trump must be removed."

That's the loyalty problem... in a single move.

The man who diagnosed libertarian failure for fifteen years is performing libertarian failure in real time.

He couldn't hold the alliance the moment it required swallowing something he disagreed with.

This is hard for me to write because I respect Dave Smith deeply. He's a big reason I went deeper into libertarianism. I built one of his first fan pages on Facebook long before he was ever on Rogan. I have a bit of history with the man.

But the truth is the truth...

Dave Smith built the bridge. Angela McArdle walked across it. And then Dave Smith turned around and tried to burn it down. That's my read on it.

He couldn't make the transition from cultural influencer to political operator. That's a different species jump than most people realize. McArdle could make it. Dave couldn't.

Dave has the platform to be a force the apex class genuinely fears. Right now he's using that platform to attack the only counter-energy that could displace them.

So here's the categorization I want you to take with you.

There are three kinds of libertarians right now.

Serious libertarians. Predators. They recognize the moment, ally with the counter-energy, and build power. Angela McArdle. Jeremy Kauffman. The operators in the Mises Caucus PAC. They are imperfect. They make mistakes. They are still the most important people in this movement.

Jokers. Performers. They cope through purity worship while the progressives take everything. They don't help anyone. They protect their own self-image as ideologically clean. Dave Smith is currently playing this role, sadly. So is most of the libertarian commentariat. So are Joe and countless other Libertarians in my comments yesterday.

Enemies. Functionally allied with progressives, whether they realize it or not. When the choice was binary, they chose against MAGA. Which means they chose with the apex class, by default... They might still call themselves libertarians, but they're auxiliaries for the class that wants you eliminated. Bill Weld endorsed Biden in 2020 as a former Libertarian VP candidate. Justin Amash spent years attacking Trump from positions indistinguishable from progressive talking points. Reason Magazine's editorial line during the prosecutions was often more critical of Trump than of the people trying to remove him.

Tell me where a libertarian stands on Trump and I'll tell you whether he's serious, useless, or actively hostile.

Trump is the signal, libertarians are noise.

When the choice was Trump or the apex class that wants you eliminated, what did your libertarian friends choose?

That answer tells you which category they're in. We don't have time to waste with the jokers anymore.

The test is coming.

The midterms are six months away. The progressive establishment is going to throw everything they have at retaking Congress. If they take it, Trump's agenda gets stalled. The apex class re-grips the institutional levers. Everything you just won goes back into the box.

The libertarian test is the simplest possible question.

Are you going to help Trump in the midterms or not?

Are you going to swallow your pride and vote Republican in your district? Or are you going to perform purity, vote third party, sit it out, and let the progressives take Congress back?

That is the test. The jokers will fail it. The serious libertarians will pass it.

Which one are you?

Act 6

So what do I want from you?

Grow up.

There is a reason people criticize libertarians as childish. It's not that the ideas are wrong. The ideas are mostly right. The problem is the BEHAVIOR. The way you carry yourself.

You don't understand power.

We know this because you don't have any.

You have a hobby.

Stop debating people who don't care if they win the argument.

Next time someone shows up in your Facebook comments, your DMs, or your family group chat spewing economic ignorance, don't get angry. Don't spend three hours of your evening explaining marginal utility to someone who isn't going to change their mind. That's prey behavior. You just got caught in a trap.

Recognize the trap.

The people who pick fights with libertarians are not students seeking truth. They are predators using your time and your emotional energy to extract from you. They want to keep you busy with arguments that go nowhere so you don't have time for anything that matters. You think you're educating them. You're not. You're being extracted from. The power flow goes one direction, and it's not toward you.

And here's the worst part. The other libertarians watching the argument, the ones nodding along on the sidelines, the ones liking your comments... they have no power either. They might vote libertarian once every four years. They might donate twenty dollars. That's the size of it. You're performing principles for an audience that can't reward them.

Prey performing for prey.

If you want to be serious, follow the operators.

Look to Angela McArdle. Look to Jeremy Kauffman. These are the people who understand framing. Who understand how to drag opponents into battles they can win. Who understand that winning a small battle now beats losing a big one later.

They are imperfect. They make mistakes. They are going to mess up. I'll probably write an email about them too one day. I'm not perfect either. They might find flaws in this very email... They are still the serious ones.

Dave Smith can be a force beyond recognition from what he is right now. He just has to grow up from his current posture. I hope he gets there.

Now you... my dear reader...

Stop being prey.

Stop performing ideas for people who can't reward them.

Stop defending principles in spaces where the opponents only respect power.

Stop debating commenters who only want extraction.

Stop voting for Polite Losers who fight by your rules and lose every time.

Vote Republican in the midterms. Especially if it hurts your pride. That's the immediate test. Not the abstract question of whether you support MAGA. The concrete question of whether you'll show up in November and pull the lever for the only candidate on the ballot who can hold your district for the alliance.

If you can't do that, you're not in the fight... you're just performing.

Recognize the predators... Ally with the ones that don't hate you. Become one yourself, if you have it in you. If you don't have it in you, find your champions and back them. Do not lead.

That's the project.

I'm not going to lie to you about whether we can win. The apex class has held the slot for ninety years. They are very good at what they do. Trump is the first counter-energy with predator instincts in living memory. The fight is real... The outcome is uncertain.

But I'll tell you this.

If we don't fight in the actual environment, we lose for sure.

If we fight in the imaginary debate hall libertarians pretend exists, we lose for sure.

If we play by the rules we wrote in our heads, while the apex class plays by the rules they wrote in our institutions, we lose for sure.

The only way out is through the recognition that being right is not the same as winning. And being right while losing is not honorable. It's just losing.

Stop being prey.

I'm going to be writing to you every day until I'm dead. I'm building a book called Stop Being Prey. I'm starting an audio version of these emails. I'm building a community of people who get this. It's all coming.

If you got this far, you're probably one of us.

stay close,

~ Clay