Transcript: The Savvy Street Interviews Presidential Candidate Michael Rectenwald

Date of recording: January 8, 2024, The Savvy Street Show

Hosts: Vinay Kolhatkar and Roger Bissell. Guest: Michael Rectenwald.

 

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. Explanatory references are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

 

For those who prefer video, it is here.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Hello and good evening and welcome back to a new edition of the Savvy Street Show. We recommenced [our shows] last year in November, as you know, and this is our first podcast for 2024. Today I’m also again joined by my co-host, and we have a special guest, a returning guest, and my co-host is none other than Roger Bissell, musician, writer, and philosopher. Roger will introduce this special guest to you. Welcome to the show, Roger.

 

Roger Bissell:

Thank you, Vinay. Michael Rectenwald is the author of 12 books, including The Great Reset and The Struggle for Liberty, which was published in 2022. He’s also known as the “Anti-Woke Professor,” and he is a champion of liberty and free speech and a candidate for the Libertarian Party’s nomination for President in 2024. Congratulations on that, Michael, and welcome to the Savvy Street Show.

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Thank you very much, Roger and Vinay. Thanks for having me.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

You’re welcome.

 

Roger Bissell:

Now, let’s start off here with a kind of an umbrella question, and feel free to answer in general. We will get into specific issues and details later. What do you think is the greatest threat or perhaps cluster of threats to individual liberty? Is there one crucial leverage point for us in fighting for freedom, civil liberties, economic freedom, avoiding foreign intervention, or all of those? And what is the solution? Is the solution primarily political, like running for office or campaigning, or is it social or economic or educational or all of the above?

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Okay, sure. So, my campaign is focused on enlarging liberty for individuals in the country. And so the means by which I am working to do that is through education and expanding the scope of libertarianism to include people that either don’t know that they’re libertarians or are, but are sort of in the closet, and to bring them out and to expand the scope of libertarianism. And the means by which that is done is education, but then also a campaign that is more than a campaign. It’s a movement of decentralization. So, centralization, central government, the growth of this monstrosity of central government is the main opponent of liberty, and the means of resisting and restoring liberty to the people is through decentralization, vesting power at the local level and taking it away from the central government. And getting rid of the central authorities over us through a means of decentralization and nullification. This is all possible through the 10th Amendment. Nullification is the means by which we can nullify central government’s unconstitutional laws and mandates. This is a cultural revolution. It’s not simply a political revolution. That’s why it requires education. It requires expanding people’s knowledge about what liberty is, why it’s so vital, and what are the principles on which it’s founded. Why liberty? Why is that so important, and how is it that it’s attained? How are the impingements on it resisted, and just how do we bring it about? That’s what the campaign’s focused on. I think the centralized state is the real problem, inclusive of the Federal Reserve and all of its agencies, and all of its apparatuses throughout the corporate sphere, these kind of what I’ve called “governmentalities,” which are appendages of the state. All of this has to be resisted. That’s why the campaign slogan, as you can see behind me, is “Rec (wreck) the regime.” That means the whole thing. And my metaphor for the campaign is not the chainsaw of Javier Milei, but rather a wrecking ball.

 

Roger Bissell:

Yes!

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

That’s a good one. We might return to Milei toward the end of the show—and congratulations on becoming one of the nominees. You actually answered my question as to what the purpose of getting into this race was. But how did that actually come about?

 

Michael Rectenwald:

I’ve never had any political ambition in my life.

Well, I’ve never had any political ambition in my life. This was not something that I thought about. I never, shall I say, deigned to be a political candidate or be a state employee at all. And so, you know, this came about by virtue of the Mises Caucus of the Libertarian Party actually asking me to run and recruiting me as the candidate for President.

And given that our values and our visions align so perfectly, I’ve been writing about localization and, as you know, in my book, The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty, particularly, about decentralization and so forth. And that was the plan that the Mises Caucus was founded on. Part of the plan is decentralization. So, I took up the mantle because I thought it was something I had to put my money where my mouth was. I’ve been a vocal critic of the regime, but it was time to do something about it.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Oh, fantastic. Congratulations on getting an absolutely wonderful endorsement from the Mises Liberty Caucus. So, how does the Libertarian Party actually decide who wins? I believe it (the convention) is at the end of May, and they have a sort of a system similar in some respects to the Democratic and Republican delegates voting among themselves. But can you throw some light on the details of that process?

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Yes. So, the delegates, as in the Republican and Democratic parties, actually decide on the nominee. But in the case of the Libertarian Party, the delegates are not chosen by popular vote, which is the way the Democrats and the Republicans do it, according to their bylaws, anyway. Of course, there have been violations, and there have been prospects of violations in the Democratic camp. That’s why RFK Jr. decided to run as an independent because he said the superdelegates were going to override the delegates and decide the nomination that way. So he wanted out of that. So, I think there’s a difference here, and the difference is the delegates are nominated, but they’re nominated from within the party and not in a popular election, only [from] within the party ranks. And so there’s less democracy per se involved. This illusion of democracy has kind of reduced, and instead we’re looking at a selection process through the party apparatus.

 

Roger Bissell:

Well, Michael, you’ve talked in The Great Reset book about decentralization, and you are going to make it part of your campaign. I thought maybe you could go a little more into detail about, or just outline, maybe sketch some ways that decentralizing will protect us against the worst effects of the kind of policies that we’re living under right now.

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Well, let’s do a little retrospective and a hypothetical counterexample to what we actually lived. Counterfactual. That’s the phrase I’m looking for. A counterfactual. Look at the Covid regime and how these mandates were handed down. Some of them federal, especially for federal employees. Some of them state-level mandates to abide by these dictates like masking, social distancing, vaccination, and so forth. If we had local power whereby the local government could just say, we aren’t doing it, that would require, of course, libertarian-minded people, not necessarily Libertarian Party people, but libertarian in the small L sense, then we could have resisted these mandates to much greater effect. Now, some localities did resist state mandates and federal “suggestions,” which we know were really strong-armed, and CDC recommendations, and so forth. But, there would have been a greater extent, and maybe the whole economy wouldn’t have shut down. For example, we see now in Pennsylvania, there’s this farmer, Amos Miller, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of him, who’s being harassed by the state troopers and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture for selling agricultural products without following regulatory requirements. He’s selling raw milk, which is apparently not allowed. He’s selling different items, you know, so they’re coming down on him hard. They imposed a $250,000 fine on him. Basically, it’s going to crush his farming operation altogether. So if, in fact, we were able to get the local guns under our control, the local sheriff and police, such that they could bar these agents from even entering his property and taking his goods, which they did, then we might be able to resist this, and then he could keep operating. Because what’s the threat that they’re imposing? It’s not just the money, it’s the threat of guns coming down on him. It’s the threat of force that he’s under. If we had control of the local guns, then they couldn’t impose this regulatory regime on him. So, those are kind of examples. Of course, guns, gun rights, follows as most important here, and that is to be able to have an unfettered access to arms that is not regulated by the state or the federal government, all that is necessary. So, those can be resisted at the local level as well.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Yes, we have heard of Amos Miller. In fact, Savvy Street published a piece on him (by Walter Donway).

 

Roger Bissell:

Right. The way you describe it, and I’ve heard those stories, too, those accounts in the news, it just sounds so much like clubs and guns and heavy boots coming to crush whoever doesn’t follow the rules. And I know they have the problem in Canada. They’re pretty tough up there, pretty nasty. But, that’s one image that people have when they hear the word “fascism,” but there’s also this whole thing that we’ve seen for a few years now, a cancel culture, woke ideology, political correctness. And to us, that seems like a form of fascism, also. It’s like, well, if you don’t comply, if you don’t follow what we tell you to, then we’re going to hurt your job or your family or something. And it just seems like that’s another part of the heavy-handedness that comes down from the top or from whoever is holding power in, like, a university or a corporation. And how would you relate to that in your campaign?

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Diversity, equity, inclusion really means conformity, inequity, and exclusion.

Oh yes, I mean, wokeness is a totalitarian ideology and regime, really, that’s being implemented all the way to the federal level and down. So, I oppose it altogether. And one of its mechanisms is DEI or diversity, equity, and inclusion, and all that. I would dismember that entirely. There would be no DEI in the federal government, no DEI for hiring. Anything like that is liberal fascism. They pose as liberal, but it’s really a totalitarian ideology and regime. And they put basically lipstick on a pig by making it sound [pretty]—and transgender overtones are not unintended here—so they’re looking to try to make it pretty, that it’s all for the “inclusion” and for the greater good and for the so-called beleaguered minorities that they point out. They use these so-called beleaguered minorities as a bludgeon to beat you over the head with. So that’s what these intersectional mafia, basically that’s what this is, the intersectional mafia, is a bludgeon to beat up the so-called majority and to beat them into submission and actually to beat them into subjection and to wrest their property rights from them because DEI is an infringement of property rights. Why? Because it forces employers, for example, to follow these guidelines in hiring, and so forth. So, that infringes your right to do with your property what you wish. And that imposes a kind of dictatorial property rights allocation that you wouldn’t maybe otherwise at all abide [by]. I would get rid of DEI at the federal level altogether. And I would oppose it in all its manifestations. Cancel culture is just a way of trying to destroy the deviationist, as I put it in my novel, Thought Criminal, the thought deviationist. Diversity, equity, inclusion really means conformity, inequity, and exclusion. That’s really what it comes down to. And I’ve been saying that for years, but that’s what it is. It’s to make you conform to this liberal-fascist regime. And this is why I oppose it in its many manifestations. It’s completely illiberal, but it poses under this guise of liberalism or even leftist, rainbow coalition-type nonsense. It completely infringes property rights. It completely infringes upon meritocracy. It attempts to destroy the majority of that society. That’s what its function is.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Okay, so we’ve spoken on the central themes of your candidacy, which would be decentralization, and opposing the woke culture and DEI. But, I noticed candidates this cycle that are out of the ordinary. I mean, RFK Jr. definitely isn’t anything like a typical Democrat. He’s no longer a Democrat for good reason. I thought Vivek Ramaswamy as well is unusual, [and] different from Trump as well. And even DeSantis is, he’s been very expressly anti-woke. Ramaswamy is for decentralization. And so, I wanted to ask you how your candidature differentiates from those two, let’s say, RFK Jr. and Ramaswamy, as well as within the Libertarian Party—they’re not all the same. Some of them go back to the old-fashioned libertarian ideals of open borders, for instance. So, what’s your distinguishing feature, and [your] policy on immigration?

 

Michael Rectenwald:

RFK Jr. was good on Covid, and he was decent on a few other things, but he’s a central government planner all the way.

Let me start with, before I go to the immigration question, let me start with these two candidates from these other parties, Vivek Ramaswamy, and No Party, I guess, [for] RFK Jr., running as an independent. They have some gestures and rhetorical flourishes that sound like libertarianism. And that’s good. It’s good that their rhetoric is trying to mimic or mirror libertarianism, etc. because that’s a sign that it’s actually gaining popularity. So, we look forward to that. And eagerly await to appropriate their followers, because we’re going to show the people just why they’re not libertarians. In the case of RFK Jr., yes, he was good on Covid, and he was decent on a few other things, but he’s a central government planner all the way. He wants to have a guaranteed three percent mortgage program backed by the federal government or backed by federal bonds, which he says…it’s like having a rich uncle, in this case, I guess Uncle Sam, cosigning on your mortgage loan. But there is no rich Uncle Sam. That’s the problem. Uncle Sam is $34 trillion in debt and cannot legitimately cosign on anything, except perhaps his own internment, because he doesn’t have any money and he’s a thief. So, I would say, first of all, that I’m not going to go into DC like a white knight and try to dismantle the state from the top. That’s not going to work, it’s never worked. It’s always a ruse, and it turns out to be just another centralized-government authoritarian in the end. Vivek Ramaswamy also sounds libertarian, and I think he probably is a little bit more libertarian than RFK Jr. He’s making good sounds about that. They talk about war and the funding, and that has to be cut in the case of Ukraine, but they leave out Israel all the time. Both of them basically acquiesce to this idea that we have to keep giving Israel $3.3 or $3.4 billion every year. Now, in Israel, we’re talking about to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, plus daily shipments of arms and access to a cache of weapons that are actually conveniently stored in Israel but happen to be the property of the United States. That is the citizens’ [property], it was stolen from them and put in there. So, I’m consistently against funding and arming other countries all over the world, no matter what they are, whether they’re Israel, whether they’re Ukraine, whether they’re Taiwan, all of this has to stop. And I am not making any concessions to the centralized state. In the case of Ramaswamy, he said, well, we’ll cut off Israel’s aid whenever they tell us they don’t need it anymore. That is absurd. They’ll never tell us they don’t want it. Who’s going to say, no, please don’t send me your money? That’s not going to happen. In the case of…DeSantis, if you don’t mind…DeSantis is anti-woke and all that, but he’s just as authoritarian on the other side. I don’t believe in actually banning certain things from the curriculum, for example. I think that is censorship. He’s just imposing a different right-wing sort of anti-woke authoritarianism that is just as bad as what he’s opposing, and that’s not principled. And, you know, he personally saw to it that these arm shipments from Florida itself were sent to Israel. This is unbelievable. So, there’s some contradictions in these candidates. And the problem is they’re political animals who are not principled. Their policies are not principled. They’re not based on a strict, principled outlook. They’re based on a political appeal. And that’s a problem. I’m not saying that I’m not going to be a populist. I’m a populist who’s trying to arouse people to a principled outlook and to follow a principled outlook that is actually beneficial to the people rather than selling them down the river. So… now, as far as open borders and immigration and all that, yes, the standard received notion of libertarianism with reference to borders is there are no supposed borders. They’re all artificial and state imposed, and all that. Well, I’m a private property-rights libertarian. That’s the premise of what I hold. So, I think that immigration should be treated from a property rights perspective. If we had nothing but a private-property society, the only borders that would exist would be the boundaries around your property, and nobody could trespass on your property. Nobody could come into your property unless you invited them. And this would be nothing like an open-border society. In fact, it could be closer to a closed-border society in which, basically, people don’t have the right to come on your property unless you tell them it’s fine. That’s the principle I think should be [practiced]…despite the fact that we don’t live in a perfectly private-property society, we have so-called public or state property. But, that property is really rightfully the property of the citizen or the taxpayer. So, those people should have a right to decide who can come into that property. So, I think an invitation-based system is what is necessary. An invitation-based immigration policy, in which the invitee becomes the legal, or I should say more like the financial, responsibility or, at least, they have to vouch for them. The person that’s doing the inviting, they need to vouch for these people financially with some sort of liability insurance, so that if they undertake theft or other problems or whatever, that is accounted for by somebody who vouches for it and is liable for it. I’m getting grief from some of the libertarian movement, not the [whole] movement, [not] the Libertarian Party per se, but there’s a good contingent, and I think it’s the majority that favor my view, although, you know…open borders is like virtue signaling in the Libertarian Party, and I’m not doing anything to virtue signal. I won’t say anything that I don’t believe, and I don’t think open borders is actually the right perspective;in fact, I think it violates the non-aggression principle by virtue of the fact that you’re saying people have a right to infringe on other people’s property. I don’t see why that’s [not] the case. And there’s a difference between free trade and the free movement of people. One, trade goods are invited by virtue of the fact that they’re purchased, so they’re invited across the border into places. People are different. They have free wills. They’re not goods. They can move on their own and often [are] not invited to do so. So that’s why you have to treat them differently. That’s why this is not a perfect analogy, goods and people. They’re different things. So, to treat a person like a commodity is really debasing to the individual, but it’s also a potential infringement of property rights.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Thank you. [Hans Herman] Hoppe actually did publish the invitation-only thesis, and I think it’s quite popular anyway.

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Yes, basically, I’m a Hoppean on that line (issue).

 

Roger Bissell:

We didn’t really have a question about foreign policy, but we managed to get some of your views on that anyway. You mentioned the money cost and the US property that’s over there in other countries, and it is an enormous burden on the taxpayers, any part of foreign aid, let alone military foreign aid. But, there’s also the prospect of being drawn into a war. Whether we’re doing it by proxy or actually, I see considerable danger there. So, I think sounding the alarm before we get sucked into a real war in which we have our own soldiers, men and women, would be an important issue. When you talked a little bit ago about the cancel culture, and so on, and how these people are assaulting property rights, basically telling you what you can or can’t do, or maybe even trying to undercut your job or your business, and so on, with their policies, I think you managed to make a tie-in between economic rights and freedom and civil liberties or free speech, and I think free speech is also essential. But, back to the economic issue which you brought in a few minutes ago. You’ve spoken out against cronyism between government and business interests, and a lot of people want to call it crony capitalism; Karl Marx used “capitalism” as kind of a pejorative and we’ve been trying to live it down for the last 200 years…

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Yes, he did. As a matter of fact, just let me interject one second, if you don’t mind. I’ve done an etymological examination of the use of the word “capitalism,” and from the very start of the use of the word “capitalism,” it’s been used as an epithet from day one.

 

Roger Bissell:

Right. So the question is, is there an effective way to—well, one problem is that when you tell people that heavy control over the economy and this revolving door between the politicians and the businesses is fascist, and they look at you like you’re talking some other language, that all they think of fascism is a bunch of people goose-stepping and clubbing their opponents and stifling their free speech and their private behavior, but they don’t even understand what economic fascism is. And would that be part of your educational efforts?

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Fascism is really about the collusion and the kind of conflation between the state and private corporations.

Absolutely, yes. Economic fascism is something that people don’t understand and that fascism is really about the collusion and the kind of conflation between the state and private corporations. In fact, the whole fascist regime in Italy was revolving around the idea that you had private property, but it was directed by the state. The state basically told what you could do and what you couldn’t do. And that’s really where we’re headed. In fact, the ESG and the DEI—these are all fascist programs. So, in fact, I would say the way to do it is to parse it out and to show people that, for example, in the case of RFK Jr., he’s always talking about “regulatory capture.” The problem with regulatory capture is that you have regulators. The only way to get rid of regulatory capture is to get rid of regulatory agencies. Otherwise, they’re always going to be captured. So, the problem is on the state side, but not the corporate side in the first place, and they’re always talking about “these corporations, they’re all monopolies,” and this and that, but they never point to the one obvious, real monopoly, which is the state. The state is the only real monopoly that exists. It’s the only monopoly over force and over law, and so forth. So, I would get people to understand how to parse out the idea of the difference between [the] real free market and corporatism or economic fascism, that is, the collusion between the government and the state, and show them, in fact, that regulations are what create monopolies, if anything. Nobody wants regulations more than the largest players in the field. This is how they make the cost of entry impossible to overcome. In the case of social media, Facebook and other social media companies want the regulations because the regulations they can meet will keep other competitors out of the field. So, it’s very much inverted. You know, you’re looking at the idea that most of these people have been indoctrinated into an ideological box in which they think in an inverse manner. They have an inverse picture of the truth, which is actually what Marx called the function of ideology. You see through a camera obscura, it’s upside down and inverse, inverted. But, they’re the ones that have it. Marxists were the ones that actually exhibited what Marx complained of. And a lot of people are unconscious Marxists, and we have to show them why that is, and what are the flaws of it. You know, the premises are completely false. So, knocking those out was really important. And that’s a big part of what I’m about doing.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

The screenwriting tutor said everybody’s favorite villain is the big bad corporation.

Thank you, that’s excellent. I remember when I did a screenwriting course, the tutor said that. One of the first things he said was everybody’s favorite villain is the big bad corporation, and it’s very true that some corporations are big and bad, but they became bad because the government allowed them to become bad, or actually enabled, yes, facilitated [it].

 

Michael Rectenwald:

By the way, I just want to remark, since you mentioned your writing (the piece on Amos Miller was actually by Walter Donway), but what an amazing writer you are. Your novel is just incredible. The one I read. I forget the title exactly, but what a writer you are.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Thank you. A Sharia London. The other one’s almost based on your story just now, The Frankenstein Candidate. It’s about a libertarian billionaire who runs for the presidency as an independent and disrupts both major political parties.

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Oh, that’s great. Except I am not a billionaire. But, I know that I was supposed to blurb one of your books, but you know, things get so out of hand that I wasn’t able to, it’s too much on for me right [now], so I wasn’t able to do that. But I’m sure I will appreciate the [other] book when I get to it.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Thank you very much. Which reminded me, one candidate, a Libertarian Party candidate, said he changed his mind on open borders when he met with border control people.

 

Michael Rectenwald:

That’s what it takes, I guess.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

And you were last here on our show in March [2023], and not just so much from March as, maybe over the last few years, after becoming libertarian, have you had to rethink any libertarian issue at all, like cronyism or Ukraine or, more particularly, we had a few hypotheses about exactly how the Deep State functions, and which are not about principles, they’re about facts that are not easy to find. Have you had to rethink anything at all in terms of these hypotheses?

 

Michael Rectenwald:

I had a massive gestalt shift eight years ago, from Marxism to libertarianism.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve had any revisionism in terms of my views. It’s just become more penetrating in terms of the scope and depth of the beast. I’ve just had different angles that I’ve thought about, you get flashes of light about just what’s going on. And then you expand your knowledge base and the penetration of your thought regarding these issues. Not so much revising…since I had a massive gestalt shift eight years ago, from Marxism to libertarianism, which was a complete reorientation, which is really quite astounding actually for me, I haven’t had that many changes except for getting more and more anarchist actually, sort of towards more anarcho-capitalism, not some sort of a black flag, anarchist nonsense, you know, like Antifa who are actually agents of the state, ironically.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism.

.

Michael Rectenwald:

Yes. Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, [a term] which he coined. I think it’s always an asymptote, it’s not achievable probably for real, but it has to remain a goal in order to get rid of the state as much as possible. So, you have to keep that kind of imaginary goal in mind and try to approach it, though knowing you’ll never actually reach it.

 

Roger Bissell:

Sure. How can you have a movement if you don’t have a goal, right?

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Right.

 

Roger Bissell:

How serious an issue do you think democracy [as the opiate] is?

We were talking a little bit ago about Karl Marx and he had this phrase called “the opiate of the masses,” and he regarded religion as one of the obstacles to, socialist, communist, goals, and religion was one of the ways that people were kind of sedated into being cooperative and compliant with the way things were, which is basically business and labor, and just go along with it and don’t protest, everything will be fine. And he said that if we could shake them out of that, then get them…awaken them up, then they would throw off their chains. Well, now it seems like the neo-Marxists, the ones in more recent times, they’ve kind of flipped that whole thing on its head. And they love this opiate that they’re using to keep everybody kind of blissfully thinking that everything’s okay, as long as we have “democracy.” And the idea…if 80% of the people’s wishes actually…could be put into effect, that wouldn’t be ideal because there can still be the tyranny of the majority. However, we don’t really have that. We don’t have anything like that. What we have is a whole bunch of “experts” who are not elected, who are sitting there in Washington, and everybody thinks that they are playing a vital role when they go and pull the lever on election day. And what happens is, you have largely a bunch of people who go to Washington or go to the state capitol and they pass more laws rather than less laws. And there are these unelected people in the bureaucracy who are enacting all these regulations and they come out with their clubs and their guns and they take away our freedom. So, the question is, I guess it relates to: how can we get people off of this drug, this drug that democracy, as they understand it, is such a wonderful thing? When…we know what happened to Socrates. That wasn’t very good. You know, here, here’s your hemlock. So, how serious an issue do you think this about democracy [as the opiate] is?

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Well, let me just go back to the Marx statement, the Marx quote about “the opiate of the masses.” When he talked about religion, I kind of want to show off my Marxist bona fides, that I know what I’m talking about with reference to Marxism. He said, he went on to say that it is “the soul of the soulless world,” etc. Now, he said that first, the opiate of the masses was kind of like the last line. The line that precedes it was it was “soul in a soulless world,” etc. So, in the otherwise, he was saying it was like a necessary anodyne under capitalism. It wasn’t the thing you had to remove. He was not Feuerbach who said that you had to get rid of religion, that would liberate people. He was not an idealist. He said, first, you’ve got to get rid of the conditions that make the ideology possible or necessary. I’ll just take an analogy from that. I think it is true that there is a ruling class, but the problem is, it’s not the capitalist class. It’s not the so-called exploiters in business, and so forth. It is actually the state. So, that’s the ideology we need to break—statist ideology. And that is very, very widespread, pernicious, and very, very, very widely diffused, and also very pervasive and intense. How do you get rid of statist ideology when the state has every interest in disseminating it at all times? And that’s what they’re doing with democracy. Democracy is a statist ideology that they use to promote their own power. And they, as Hoppe put it, actually, the democratic state is actually more pernicious in a sense because it gives people this idea—illusion—that they have power, and it justifies, it rationalizes state power by virtue of the fact that it suggests people have actually selected it. That has been their prerogative to have these people in power, so it legitimizes state power. Democracy functions as an ideological apparatus to legitimate state power, and that’s the problem. So, we must first go after the statism that makes that idea possible. That’s the way to counter it, by talking about the state as the actual parasite of society, by showing people that the state is the only entity that can take your money, without an agreement, at the end of a gun, that they have the power to wrest your wealth from you without your consent. When you go to buy something at a store, like even a soda or candy bar or meat or whatever, you’re consenting. It’s agreed upon…it’s a contract. There’s an implicit contract there. It’s not so with the state. So, this is what we have to get across. And the state is the only entity that won’t let you out. You can get away from your family, even. You can get divorced. All these other relationships are soluble, but not the one with the state. Of course, you could move to a different state, but even the state of origin may chase you there. They don’t let you out too easily. So, yes, that’s the point that I like to get across, how the state is the real exploiting agent and statism is their ideology. Democracy is a kind of flavor of statism, and it’s the way that they rationalize, justify, and legitimate their own, the state’s power.

 

Roger Bissell:

Right, this illusion of democracy point that you just made. I just recently heard that also in a course I took online from Hillsdale about progressivism and how they use democracy in just the way that you described. I think that’s an excellent course that people should go check out. It’s free online. And I know you’ve had some association with Hillsdale College, too. Just wonderful stuff. And it’s part of the educational challenge that we have.

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Yes, that’s right. We have to really shake people up by showing them just how this operates, and the only way you can get people loose of ideology either is trauma or severe shock to the brain, it’s kind of like a shock to the system that really shakes it loose. It takes almost forcibly removing the scales of the ideology from their eyes.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Okay, a casual question, if I may. It leads on to a more serious question. Have either of you ever either thrown a boomerang or done a kick serve in tennis, which, as a former tennis coach, I’m sure Michael has?

 

Roger Bissell:

Now you’re getting serious!

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Yes, very serious. What about you Roger, ever thrown a boomerang?

 

Roger Bissell:

Yes, I actually have.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Oh, and Michael?

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Bucharest Boomerang, in tennis, it’s called because it was made famous by the great tennis player, I forget his actual name, you probably know, Vinay, he called it the Bucharest Backfire. So, you go back and flip the ball back, hit it backwards, like the ball’s out here, you’re chasing it going away from your opponent, and you’ve got to flip the ball over your head like that. Bucharest Backfire.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

No, I haven’t heard of him, but when I first tried a boomerang, it obviously didn’t work. And it’s almost like an initiation, a coming-of-age rite for all Australians. And you take a few lessons, and you throw it a bit up in the air like a kick serve. And the first time I did get it to come back, it came back very dangerously and almost took my head off. I had to use my ducking skills.

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Nastase was the guy, by way. Ilie Nastase…

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Oh, Ilie Nastase, I remember him. So, I thought democracy can be as dangerous as a boomerang, [even] as they’re controlling it. But now, all of a sudden, we see when Argentina, from being one of the most prosperous nations on Earth, has gone to a state of being the King of Defaults, as it’s called, with 40% of the people living under the poverty line. So, it’s actually gone backwards, and the rest of the world mostly has gone forward in the last 50 years. You have [others]—besides Milei—in Italy, Meloni, and Wilders in the Netherlands. Now, these [others] are not exactly libertarians, but they’re not traditional. Is that our great hope, like the boomerang effect, where things go so bad, then the very outlier candidate, and hopefully it’s a Milei rather than a Hitler, suddenly comes in?

 

Michael Rectenwald:

I think this is actually used even by some libertarians, “accelerationism,” the idea that you accelerate the problem so much that it has to end faster.

Yes, I think that under Marxist terms, and I think this is actually used even by some libertarians, “accelerationism,” the idea that you accelerate the problem so much that it has to end faster. I think it could backfire in a good way, such that the problem that you’re trying to address where actually the thing that’s causing the problem actually fires the ball back in your face…and therefore you recognize it much more…it’s more eye opening and yes, I think that’s true. There is a sense of that happening. I don’t want it to get that bad. I don’t want to see collapse before we start piecing together a decentralized system. I’d rather the decentralization happen first so we can withstand the kind of civilizational and economic collapse that’s very possible. So, I think trying to build these local networks and local communities and, by the way, with parallel currencies that are not, you know, the centralized monopoly over money that the Fed holds, but rather parallel currencies that people can use, will withstand the shock of the interest-rate boomerang that we’re likely to get any time now. The point is that we’re going to be paying interest with interest. It’s almost inconceivable what’s happening in terms of this. Once the interest rates start an exponential curve, really high, you know, a really sharp exponential curve that becomes like a wave that’s going forward, but comes back over your head like that, that’s going to be very serious. So, we need to have a system of structures—I don’t want to say system—structures, local parallel structures in place in advance.

 

Roger Bissell:

I think that’s vital. It’s almost a form of prepping or preparation in case the worst does happen. You said about how shaking them loose from their complacency or unawareness about statism…I think the other side understands very well about trauma and shock and crisis and emergency. Rahm Emanuel, one of Obama’s guys, said, never let a good emergency go to waste. And I think that they understand those opportunities for pushing their agenda. I think one of our challenges is to be very alert to that ourselves and, like you’re saying, to set up the parallel structures and not just to be complacent and say, oh well, everything will be all right. The boomerang will flow, the pendulum will swing back, and we don’t have to do anything. We have to do plenty.

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Absolutely, we have to do plenty. And I think Vinay would relate to this. I think they create this Hegelian dialectic, right? Where they actually create a system where you have the problem—it’s the thesis and antithesis—and they’re looking for a third term to come out of that. So, they create the problem, then they pose the antithesis, all in advance of trying to get to this certain synthesis. One of these antitheses that I think they’re going to try to use is the central bank digital currency as an antidote to the collapse that might be on the way. And that’s going to result in the total control system that they’re looking for. So, we have to watch out for their solutions because when their solutions come, that’s when we get another thesis or a different problem. And that problem will be tyranny. That would be total financial control, so that you won’t have any control over spending, savings, and possibly even debt, and the money will be owned by the Fed. Your transactions will be transparent to them, and they could cut off certain types of transactions just like that. You don’t have to go raid a guy’s farm. You just make it impossible for him to sell anything because nobody can [buy]… he’s not allowed to accept digital currency, they’ve shut him down. They’ve blocked it digitally. That’s the kind of thing we’ve got to watch out for. They’re going to bring it along as the proposed solution, but it’s really the antithesis that leads to the third term, the synthesis that they’re looking for.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Well, that’s kind of a dismal note, so let me try and end on a more affirmative note. May you succeed in May at the Libertarian Party nomination, and we’d love to see you debate Trump and Biden, which won’t happen unfortunately, very unlikely, but you may well share the stage with RFK, Jr. and Marianne Williamson.

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Yes, I am actually going to share the stage. There’s already a debate scheduled for February 24th, in which I will be sharing the stage with RFK in a debate.

 

Roger Bissell:

Great.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Fantastic. Any concluding comments from you, Roger?

 

Roger Bissell:

I think it was a very rich discussion, and I wish you the best. Keep up the good work.

 

Michael Rectenwald:

I have a more populist version as well. So that idea is simply wrecking ball, wreck the regime.

Thank you. Yes, I mean, I pitched it at a high level for you guys, because I know you’re brainiacs. But you know, I have a more populist version as well. So that idea is simply wrecking ball, wreck the regime, go after the whole, you know, take a wrecking ball to this edifice, this monstrosity of the government that is absolutely out of control. So, that’s it. I’m going to go ahead and turn it off. I’ll leave it on that note. Go to rectheregime.com. That’s my website. That’s R-E-C, theregime.com.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Thank you, Michael, for coming in again and that’s all for today. Good night and good luck.

 

Michael Rectenwald:

Thank you so much.

 

Roger Bissell:

Thank you.