Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “The Man Who Defied Trump” with Justin Amash

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“The Man Who Defied Trump” with Justin Amash · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, humans! Welcome to the show that goes where others don't.
• 0:04
  The show that rejects partisan squabbling and tribal groupthink.
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  I'm Josh Zips. I'm your humble warrior princess,
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  hunting down the world's most fascinating minds to wrestle with one
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  provocative question each week. Much of modern culture and politics and media is
• 0:24
  tailor-made, especially social media, tailor-made to panda to what we already believe
• 0:31
  and distort what we don't to reinforce our biases and exaggerate our differences.
• 0:37
  But change doesn't happen in an echo chamber. It's time to leave the mental comfort zone
• 0:44
  to flex our minds and step on some landmines folks. It's time to have
• 0:50
  uncomfortable conversations.
• 1:00
  Today on the show, do you remember by any chance this?
• 1:04
  The only Republican member of Congress to call for President Trump's impeachment is leaving the
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  GOP. Michigan Congressman Justin Amash has announced his plan to become an independent.
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  He says modern politics is trapped in a quote, partisan death spiral.
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  President Trump called his departure great news for the Republican Party.
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  And now to a new twist.
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  Justin Amash is the first Republican to support the impeachment of Donald Trump during the muller inquiry.
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  And that made him something of a hero to the anti-Trump Republicans and needless to say,
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  a target of horrendous hate from Trump himself and all of Trump's followers.
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  And he had a front row seat, really, to seeing the total capitulation of the Republican Party
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  away from his libertarian ideals and towards this craven, Trumpy populism that we've seen since
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  2016. He became a libertarian. And to this day, he remains the only libertarian who's held
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  a congressional seat. He's not in Congress anymore. He didn't run again.
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  Some people said, including Trump, that that was because he didn't think he'd win
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  because he'd get primaryed by a pro-Trump Republican. Amash doesn't think that that's true.
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  He thinks he had a lot of support and he could have won, but he didn't want to be part of a party
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  that was going in this direction. He considered running for president as a libertarian himself in 2020.
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  In this conversation, he talks about his presidential ambitions prior to that, maybe even prior to
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  2016. Could things have gone differently, perhaps, if there'd been a charismatic libertarian-minded
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  Republican in the field instead of just Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump.
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  He hasn't ruled out running in 2024. A lot of smart money thinks that he may be the
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  libertarian candidate in 2024. I ask him about that, but really, I wanted to talk to him
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  because I think there's an interesting crisis of conscience among people on the right,
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  among conservatives. I'm interested in talking to people who find themselves stuck in this
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  intellectual space between ideals that they held about small government and what the new
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  Republican party has become. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with the first Republican
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  really to stand up publicly against Trump, just in a march.
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  Are you nostalgic for that time? I guess the world being run by the Mitt Romney's and
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  Brent Scocross of the world. I'm not really nostalgic for any of that time.
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  I mean, George W. Bush, I meant to say HW Bush, like I'm going back to the old school.
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  You can respect people like HW Bush and say, he was a statesman, etc. But at the same time,
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  I think there was a lot of indifference at that time to the troubles people were facing in society.
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  I'm not sure that Obama and Trump actually addressed the real problems people are facing,
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  but at least they made people feel like they were addressing those things. I think that's been
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  the difference in the new politics versus the old politics. Now, what I'd like to see is someone
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  who talks about addressing these things is talking about being an agent for change and actually
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  is an agent for change. That really hasn't happened. We haven't seen that yet, but
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  maybe we're moving in that direction where we start to elect people who are a little bit
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  more unusual. They're willing to challenge the system and they're willing to stand up for what's
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  right. I mentioned Trump not really presenting that. He talked about all these things, but if you
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  look at policies, really deep down the policies when you look at Trump versus Obama versus Biden now,
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  it's tweaking different things. These are not wholesale changes that you're seeing and there can
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  be a lot of excuses for why that is or justifications or whatever, but we haven't really seen
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  someone who's willing to challenge the system. When you talk about making real change in people's
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  lives and helping people normally the rhetoric around having big major radical change to the way
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  that we do things comes from people on the left who believe in a robust government intervention
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  into our lives and using things like social security to lift people up and providing benefits to
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  people and trying to do a certain amount of, it's an unpolite way to put it, but social engineering
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  to make sure that everybody is more equal. But as a libertarian, what does it look like to you
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  to have a big change that helps people other than simply stopping government from doing things that
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  you don't think it should be doing? Well, I'd like to see more self-governance first of all, but
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  at the very least when you look at something like the federal level, how about we just have an actual
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  representative system, one where people can go to Congress and actually vote on things and
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  represent people back home. Right now, you don't have that at all, and I think this is the most
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  under-reported thing right now in politics, and I've had conversations with major figures in the
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  media telling them, why don't you cover this at all? Over the past decade, we've seen Congress move
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  very far away from anything that represents democratic ideals or a representative system. Right
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  now, you have the speaker of the House. I can speak for the House because that's where I served,
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  and the Senate has similar problems, but I'm not an expert in Senate rules and the way the
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  Senate operates, so I can speak for the House. In the House, you have one person, the speaker of
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  the House, who essentially decides everything that comes to the floor, and decides what's going to
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  be voted on, decides whether any amendments will be allowed, and since 2016, there actually
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  haven't been any amendments on the House floor that are offered right on the House floor,
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  and I think to people from other countries, and I don't know how this feels to you,
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  for a lot of people from other countries who come from parliamentary systems and other types of
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  systems, they say, well, what's the big deal? We elect parties and the parties go and represent us
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  in sort of a coalition system, and I know when I've spoken to people from other countries,
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  they feel like, well, their own elected officials don't really have that much independence,
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  but here in the United States, we've had a long history and tradition of having representatives
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  in Congress, who stand on their own, who do what they believe in, who are there to represent
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  their own community, and aren't beholden to leadership, and they can offer ideas that
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  radically alter the system, ideas that shake things up, and in the past decade or so, we've moved
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  so far from that, where we basically have like all of the bad aspects of a parliamentary system,
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  but none of the benefits of it. And sorry, clarify what this change is for people who haven't
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  been paying attention to it. Are you talking about the aggressive posture of leaders of the House
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  about whether or not they're even going to bring bills to the floor for a vote? Is this to do with
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  not bringing up if it doesn't have majority support in the majority party?
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  Well, that's one aspect of it. I mean, these are rules that have sort of developed over time,
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  informal rules, that something won't be brought to the floor, for example, if it doesn't have
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  majority support, which is of course ridiculous. What's the name of that? Do you remember?
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  Well, they have the they have the hastered rule. And this is kind of just Mitch McConnell being a
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  dick, isn't it? I mean, like, yes, you're right, that in a parliamentary system, it's frequently the
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  case that the government, the party with the largest number of seats in the House of Representatives
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  is not going to bring legislation unless it suits it. But you can bring independent members
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  bills and people frequently do. And the minority party can bring bills in. And then the governing
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  majority party finds itself between a rock and a hard place about whether or not it's going to allow
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  a conscience vote from occasionally you'll have things that are so sensitive, whether it's about
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  abortion or euthanasia or gay rights or something like that, where the parties will just drop
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  their standard policy and allow each individual member to vote however they want to.
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  Traditionally, I'm just articulating this for people who don't really know the American system
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  that well, traditionally, as I understand, it's been the case that in the US House of Representatives,
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  everyone can vote on a bill and whatever whatever the largest number of people in the chamber vote for
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  is the way that it's supposed to go. But since what the past decade or so, Mitch McConnell has basically
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  said, I'm not going to bring, I'm not even going to allow votes on things that the House wants
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  to pass unless it also has a majority of people within my own party. So there's not going to be
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  an opportunity to enact the will of the people unless my tribe likes it. This is true of Mitch McConnell
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  and Schumer in the Senate. But again, in the House, we're talking about John Boehner, Paul Ryan,
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  Nancy Pelosi, people who have served as Speaker of the House on the House side and
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  and is the Hashtag rule just so that I don't get tied up in pretzel shapes? Is the Hashtag rule
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  the Senate rule or a House rule? Well, I don't know if it's, I mean, Hashtag was a Speaker of the House.
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  So we know it exists in the House. I can't, I can't, I can't tell you. I can't tell you.
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  I'll under a boss, perhaps on the field. But yes, we should, we should throw Mitch McConnell
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  under the boss anyways, but metaphorically speaking, people don't send hype mail.
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  Yes, not literally. But yeah, the Hashtag rule, I think originated in the House and at least as far
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  as I know it is a house sort of idea, but it's an informal rule, but it's only one aspect of the
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  problem. I mean, the way I view Congress as a libertarian is that it should be a place where
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  outcomes are discovered, not dictated. Libertarians believe in generally ideas of self-governance,
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  we believe in decentralization, moving as much away from Washington as possible and closer to home.
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  But where we do have governance at the federal level and you're going to have it on a lot of
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  issues like, you know, the armed forces is an example, right? National defense is one example or,
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  you know, there are obviously broad appropriations measures that might apply to the whole country.
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  Where you do have those things, there should be a discovery process. It shouldn't be dictated by
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  leaders. In other words, you put some kind of baseline legislation on the floor and leaders are
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  going to obviously somewhat determine what comes to the floor in that respect, you know,
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  what kind of baseline legislation, but then open up the process is what they should do. They should
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  say, after they put it on the floor, bring your ideas to the floor. Let's find out what the outcome
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  is. And if the outcome is something different from what congressional leaders envisioned, that's okay.
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  And if the bill comes to the floor and it's amended and then the final product doesn't pass,
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  that's okay too. I mean, that's all part of the process. And to libertarians, this is sort of
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  how we envision a system working where we can all live together, even though we have different
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  priorities. It's that you just have a set of rules that apply equally to everyone.
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  And you offer your ideas and we can discuss them in a peaceful way. And we may not get the outcome
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  we want. And very frequently we won't get the outcome we want. But I'll tell you what,
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  as a libertarian, I'm going to get the outcome I want a lot more under an open system than
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  under a closed system. When you say, Justin, when you say, when you say as a libertarian,
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  you've been a libertarian for three seconds in political time. You were a Republican up until
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  2020. I've been to clarify. I've been a libertarian party member for a short period of time,
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  but I was a Republican, but I was a libertarian Republican. So libertarian philosophically.
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  Got it. Which would be like, for those listening at home, it'd be more like classical liberalism
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  is, I guess, a way to think about it. Yeah, yeah, I think. And yeah, I don't know what the
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  term means to the typical Australian as an example. No, I think it would be the same. I think
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  it would be broadly the same. I mean, the term has become somewhat tarnished, I guess, in recent
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  years by being co-opted by a certain wild-eyed, kind of very aggressively gun-toting anti-government,
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  like conspiracy theorist-minded person, but I think most people still understand the pure term
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  of something like libertarianism. And so, when you got to Washington after having been in the
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  state house, were you expecting to find the kind of world that you're articulating because the
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  way you describe what you want the people's chamber to be sounds like Goldilocks skipping
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  through the woods, like having expectations of a kind of ancient Greek idol of democracy,
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  of the demos that just does not map onto reality. Well, admittedly, when I entered Congress,
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  I was 30 years old, so not, you know, particularly not that age different from Goldilocks.
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  All right, so I was a young member of Congress, one of the youngest. I think I was the second
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  oldest member at the time. So I did come in a little bit bright-eyed with these ideas about
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  how the system should work. You know, we all watched Schoolhouse Rock and we think about how a bill
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  is made. And you do come into a thinking, okay, I'm going to come in here and I'm going to talk
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  about ideas and I'm going to read all the legislation and I'm going to really understand this stuff
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  and I'm going to present my ideas to my colleagues and I'm going to persuade them. And I did come
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  in with that sort of sense. And I had some reason to believe it would work something like that because
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  I had served in the state legislature. And although the state legislature wasn't some kind of
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  utopia, it was a more open place where I could go as a Republican legislator and speak to the
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  Democratic leadership who were in control of the Chamber at the time and tell them I had an idea
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  and that idea could get onto the House floor for a vote. Or I could tell the Democratic leadership,
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  hey, I think there's something wrong with your bill. You haven't thought through the unintended
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  consequence of this provision. And I've had them hold up legislation in the Democratic-led
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  Chamber in the state house where they said, yeah, you're right. We didn't think about that carefully
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  enough. We're going to pull the legislation for a week or two to work on it. I offered amendments
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  in the state house and frequently had my amendments adopted. It was like almost half the time I think
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  my amendments were adopted in the state house. And that was in a majority Democratic chamber.
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  So I did come in with this idea that with, you know, principled persuasion, you could work with
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  people, you could bring them to your ideas and make a difference. And admittedly, when I got to
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  Congress, there was some sign that maybe you could persuade people because we were voting more
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  frequently on amendments. I remember when I first got there, one of the first pieces of legislation
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  we voted on. I'm not sure if it was the very first one, but it was one of the first ones.
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  We had, I don't know, hundreds of amendments if I recall correctly, that we could just offer
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  freely on the floor. We could just walk to the House floor, offer our amendments. And
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  and this was just to set this up in time. Yeah, this is 2010. You came in in the huge Republican
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  wave of the backlash against Obama after the financial crisis in 2010. Is that right? Yeah,
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  I suppose the Tea Party wave of that's right. So this would be 2011. And I was I was viewed as one of
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  the, you know, new Tea Party members of Congress. I was a libertarian, which there are
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  distinctions, but the Tea Party movement at the time had in many parts of it at least the very
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  libertarian flavor to it. And what did it mean? What did it mean to you, Justin, to be part of that
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  movement? Like what did you conceive of it as calling for?
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  Limited government, self-governance, free markets. And were you pissed at Obama at the time,
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  what was he doing that was aggravating you? Are you talking about the president of Obama?
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  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So spending too much, you know, Obamacare had been passed just before
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  then. So that was an example of the government intervening in our health system in a way that I
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  thought was not appropriate or ideal, not suited really to our system. I don't think they actually
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  fixed the problems with our health system by passing that. So it was just a general, a general
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  sense that the government was assuming too much power and spending too much money.
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  And we were losing a lot of our community autonomy, like as communities across the country.
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  You know, the United States is a big place with over 300 million people. And the idea that you're
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  going to have someone in Washington or a small group of people in Washington dictating everything
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  to the whole country is not something I support or believe in because it's I think it's harmful
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  to what makes America actually great, which is our diversity. You know, we have we have a diverse
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  country with people who have different ideas and different ways of living and different cultures.
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  And we should embrace all of that. And when you centralize everything in one place,
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  you're actually cutting against diversity. It's ironically something Democrats often talk about.
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  Like they love diversity. But the idea of centralization is anti-diversity by nature. Like the idea is
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  we don't believe in your diversity. We're going to decide everything in one place and dictate
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  it to everyone. And so I'm that really was something that I was against. That sort of centralization.
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  So I entered Congress as part of this Tea Party wave. But you know, there were other people
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  within the Tea Party movement who maybe had more nationalistic views of things. I'm certainly not
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  nationalistic in that sense. If anything, I'm be the opposite of nationalistic. You know, I don't
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  believe in centralizing things like culture or you know, sort of this identity of self.
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  I mean, that's an interesting, you know, side angle to the comment to your comment about diversity as
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  well, which I think is a good point. There's often a lot of hypocrisy on the left about what
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  diversity means. I mean, I've run into constant experiences in the media where there's endless
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  hand ringing and, you know, self-consciousness about making sure that, for example, a panel is
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  really diverse. And you frequently end up with people who look very, very diverse and they sort of
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  tick the identity and check boxes. And they're all saying the same thing. And they say,
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  kind of, you know, by what metric are we measuring diversity here? It's great that you've got a lot
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  of women of color and you've got a trans person and everything, but they all believe this basically
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  the same thing. Like, should we also consider diversity of opinion, diversity of thought? I mean,
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  I think the left wing pushback to your claim about central government, not respecting diversity,
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  is that amid diversity, one way to make diversity flourish is for there to be minimum baselines of
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  well-being that only a central government can assure. Now, that doesn't mean that the U.S.
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  government does particularly well, but in a lot of social democracies, you might say nobody's
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  going to go bankrupt after getting hit by a car. So we're going to have some kind of universal
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  healthcare system that may not be perfect, but it's going to provide this level of baseline.
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  Maybe a barnacare wasn't that, but something could be. And that something is something that you
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  would still object to as a libertarian. Well, I think it's important to think about the size of
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  the United States. So when you look at countries in Europe or if you look at Australia even,
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  they're much smaller countries. California itself would be a relatively large country
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  in other parts of the world. So we have these states in the United States, 50 different states that
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  are actually pretty populists. They're pretty large states. And one of the brilliant instincts
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  of the founders was to allow these states essentially to compete with each other to maintain their
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  own sense of how they're going to handle difficult issues so that you actually get a variety of
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  options out there, a variety of solutions, and they can learn from each other. And when you centralize
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  everything, you might end up creating a system that is bad and bad for everyone and then harmful
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  to everyone. And so I understand the argument for healthcare, for example, saying, well, we need
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  to have some kind of baseline. I understand all that, but I don't think the way to do it is
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  as through the federal government and having some kind of federal standard that cuts across
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  the whole United States. There are ways to do it through states acting on their own or through
• 23:45
  markets that I think would achieve many of the same outcomes that people desire without the
• 23:52
  drawbacks. But in any case, the idea of... Let me just briefly, as an aside, note my objection
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  to the size argument, which comes up all the time when I talk to Americans. I just sort of call
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  moderate bullshit on it in the sense that the European Union is 450 million people to America's
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  330. I know it's not the same country, but it's all... They have made figured out a way collectively
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  to provide extraordinarily complicated services. And everything, I think, is scalable. I mean, if a
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  country of one million people, there are certain things a country of one million people can't do,
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  and certain things that a country of 330 million people can do. But if you have 330 million people,
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  you have a much larger tax base to be able to fund things through. So it doesn't mean that you're
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  going to be able to organize and coordinate everything from a central planning committee,
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  because it might be too big to do that. But only the dumbest social Democrat in the world,
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  or a true communist, would be trying to do that. Most social Democrats and European style
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  welfare state people would say, of course, delegate to local communities and to states how they
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  distribute, how they get the job done, but provide centralised requirements that if you are living in,
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  you know, Australia or Denmark or Canada, then you're going to be entitled to X. And if you want
• 25:11
  to be a libertarian about how that X gets decided and delivered and managed and handled,
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  that can be as close to the beneficiary as you want it to be. It doesn't have to be coming from
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  some Pollock Bureau, but you can set baseline standards. And, you know, one example just to wrap up
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  this rant that I sometimes give to Americans is if you think that like, oh, America's just too vast
• 25:32
  and complicated for something like Medicare for all to ever work. There's no way. It would
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  just end up in a tangle. I say just imagine a parallel universe in which the US is not a military
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  behemoth and has a sort of Costa Rican military attitude with very, very low spending on the
• 25:49
  military. And someone comes along and says, you know, what the United States should have a military
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  that as a proportion of its GDP and its population is significantly larger than any other democracy.
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  Americans would say, what are you talking about? We're way too big for that. There's no way that
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  we could afford it. Can you imagine how much it would cost? What about the logistics? Well,
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  we put all the plants. And well, now we live in that alternative world universe where all 50 states
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  have massive military industrial complexes and trillions of dollars get spent on the military.
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  And it is possible because someone decided to make it possible. I'm not saying it's desirable,
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  but I'm saying that population and science has not proven to be an impediment.
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  Well, first I would say that the European countries have a lot of autonomy still. I mean,
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  they are part of a union, but they've maintained a lot of autonomy. And the ultimate conclusion
• 26:38
  of where going would be having a one-world government. I mean, if you're going to say that,
• 26:44
  well, it makes sense to have the United States decide everything as a whole or Europe decide
• 26:50
  everything as a whole, and I don't see what the argument is against a one-world government,
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  where the people of the United States and the people of Europe would actually be a small
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  percentage of the total population, and they'd have their lives essentially dictated by people
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  across the world, which brings me to another point that I think is often missed when it comes to
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  size, which is that people talk about it, but forget the political aspects. People don't like being
• 27:16
  ruled by people who are far away from them. They don't like the idea of someone far away deciding
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  things. So even if it were practical from the sense of, you know, we can actually do this,
• 27:29
  we can gather the tax base, and we can efficiently find a way to dole out the resources.
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  It's not practical from a political standpoint. It creates tension, and that tension is harmful
• 27:42
  to our system overall, and we've seen that actually ramp up in recent years. I mean,
• 27:48
  all of the fighting we're seeing now in the United States, between Republicans and Democrats,
• 27:53
  between the Trump people and the Biden people and people who hate Trump and people who hate Biden,
• 27:59
  has to do with how much power we've put in one place, the federal government. And if that federal
• 28:05
  government didn't have all that power, a lot of this stuff would dissipate. You wouldn't have all
• 28:09
  of the political tension. So I think we can't just think about it in terms of, you know, what could
• 28:15
  actually work? Like could it, you know, just from like ignoring human nature, what could work just
• 28:20
  on paper? You have to think about human beings being involved, and humans just don't like to be
• 28:27
  ruled by people who are far away from them, or super different from them, just like, I think
• 28:32
  Europeans or Australians or Americans would not like to have a one-world government where maybe Asia
• 28:40
  is in control of it because they have just a massive population.
• 28:43
  No, I think that's a good point. And I guess the extent to which people resent being ruled from
• 28:51
  Washington DC would have to be greater than the extent to which they feel resentful and disrupted
• 28:59
  by the circumstances that are beyond their control, that they feel that nobody is doing anything
• 29:04
  about. And that frustration, I would argue, sometimes comes from a failure of leadership.
• 29:11
  And so there are two things, there are two potential factors that could cause the kind of
• 29:16
  disruption and partisanship and hate that we're seeing in American politics at the moment. One,
• 29:22
  I'll grant you, could be that power is being wielded by abstract forces too far away from them.
• 29:28
  And the other could be that government just isn't doing anything very constructive.
• 29:33
  And so they feel like they're adrift. And if there was a good competent central government,
• 29:40
  if there was, you know, I don't know what the example would be right now, but I suppose maybe if
• 29:46
  you appeal to like, I don't know, 1980s or 1990s style governance in the United States,
• 29:51
  then perhaps arguably people would feel like their lives were more on the right track,
• 29:55
  and that resentment would soften their hatred somewhat. But I, this is all getting a little bit
• 30:02
  accurate. Yeah, maybe, maybe, but we live in a different world because of social media. And I
• 30:06
  think there's no way to go back to that time. You know, people want to go back to that time,
• 30:12
  and I hear that a lot. If only we could recreate those days because it seemed more peaceful,
• 30:19
  and people got along more and all that. But part of the problem is social media has connected us all
• 30:26
  across the country. And now people are arguing about things that have nothing to do with themselves.
• 30:31
  Like, you know, like something happens in some far off city, and you're complaining about it.
• 30:36
  You know, people will see on the news that someone was shoplifting in San Francisco,
• 30:40
  and they'll lose their minds. Even though like, you know, you live in some other part of the country.
• 30:45
  You live in, you know, Georgia or something. Like, what does it have to do with you?
• 30:50
  So now we're like in a world where we fight over some obscure mayor from some city,
• 30:56
  or some obscure, you know, police chief somewhere. Because I don't know. We just want to be mad
• 31:01
  about things. And I don't think there's a way to really go back. I think the only thing we can do
• 31:08
  to reduce the tension actually is to embrace sort of decentralization. And that doesn't mean
• 31:16
  I think some kind of radical, you know, hands-off approach where like nobody is connected to
• 31:24
  anyone else anymore in the country. If anything, I think it means more diversity, more embracing
• 31:31
  of other cultures and other people. Because you start to develop a respect for people when you don't
• 31:35
  feel like everything's being shoved on your throat. And I think that we can move to a better place
• 31:44
  if we would just stop being involved with each other over every minuscule.
• 31:50
  It is, I mean, it is terrifying. It's like the nationalization of all conversation.
• 31:56
  It's, yeah, I mean, it's becoming international too. Yeah, totally. Look at all the people
• 32:02
  in the United States, whether it comes to Australia or Canada, like everything is like now
• 32:10
  making everyone mad. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. No, I mean, yeah, the Canadian truckers are, you know,
• 32:16
  a global story. The Australian lockdowns were a global story, you know, and you know,
• 32:21
  the culture wars in America have managed to piggyback on America's success as a cultural empire
• 32:28
  and sort of infiltrate all of the way that we talk everywhere about things like race and, you know,
• 32:33
  transgenderism and things like that. These rather arcane conversations that generally inhabit
• 32:41
  a university educated white progressives in Brooklyn and like the Bay Area of California.
• 32:50
  These are now the way that people talk about things everywhere in the world. And yeah, I don't
• 32:54
  know how, I mean, I share your desire for greater diversity, greater localism, greater expressions
• 33:00
  of sort of local sentiment and can do attitudes that actually fix local problems.
• 33:06
  So let's get, I mean, one of the things that's interesting about your worldview and the way
• 33:10
  that you're talking about things here is, I can't remember when I first noticed you, but
• 33:16
  one of my problems with the the wave of opposition to the Obama administration that you were part
• 33:22
  of when you came in was that a lot of your colleagues and supporters, I felt were just being
• 33:28
  hypocrites about which bits of government they wanted and which bits they didn't want. Like,
• 33:32
  there was a lot of like, oh, Medicare is fine. And like, you know, the military budget is fine.
• 33:40
  But, and, you know, even public education is fine. And all these other things that strike me as
• 33:46
  being somewhat arbitrary that a government would be doing, like, it's not, it wasn't inevitable
• 33:51
  that old people should get free healthcare. It wasn't inevitable that schools should get public
• 33:57
  funding, but hospitals shouldn't. Like things, things are contingent. They've gone other ways
• 34:02
  in other countries. I mean, imagine if in America instead of there being public schools,
• 34:07
  there were public hospitals and everybody paid for school. And then a, you know, a president came
• 34:13
  along like Obama who wanted to do Obama schools instead of Obama care and provide public funding
• 34:18
  for schools and everyone would be going crazy. Like, it just, to me, it seemed like there was no
• 34:23
  underpinning principle except for, except for a, except for fury, except for just a sense of like
• 34:30
  this far and no further. Was that, but then I get a sense when, I don't remember when I noticed
• 34:36
  you, but I did notice that at least you seemed to be more reactionary. And I mean that in sort of
• 34:42
  a good way in the sense that you were like, no, it's not just that we are going too far right now.
• 34:46
  It's actually that the whole edifice of what we have sort of outsourced to the government to do
• 34:54
  has to be rethought. Is that a fair way of putting it? Like, should we start? Like, should
• 34:57
  Medicare be abolished? I think that you should move away from systems like that. When you ask
• 35:05
  things like, should it be abolished? I think people get the impression that you're going to
• 35:12
  introduce a bill that tomorrow gets rid of Medicare without thinking through the consequences.
• 35:16
  And I don't think libertarians who are serious about that, about libertarianism operate that way.
• 35:23
  In other words, it would be a whole process working through how are we going to address the shock
• 35:29
  that would happen. There would obviously be a shock to the system when you change things that
• 35:33
  have been built up over many years. So I do believe in having a very different system from what we
• 35:40
  have. And I believe that you can get there through localism, but I do not believe that it would
• 35:48
  entail the types of shocks that people think they would face because you would do it incrementally
• 35:54
  and you would do it through states acting up where the federal government loses power. So,
• 36:03
  for example, you might reduce federal taxation, but increase taxation at the state level.
• 36:10
  I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that if the people of that community decide
• 36:16
  that they want to do that. I do think that there is something inherently wrong with continuously
• 36:22
  moving everything toward the highest level possible. I think that's dangerous for our country
• 36:27
  and dangerous for individuals. So I would love to see a system where we move taxation as close
• 36:33
  to home as possible. You might, for example, have the local government having the highest level of
• 36:39
  taxation and the federal government having the lowest level of taxation, which is the opposite
• 36:44
  of how it works right now, but it doesn't necessarily mean no taxation whatsoever.
• 36:49
  Because I look at this stuff all as a sort of scale. It's not like there's government or no
• 36:59
  government. There's just governance at different levels. And we all form governing organizations to make
• 37:08
  decisions. Sometimes they're very small organizations. Sometimes they're not voluntary. You're born
• 37:13
  into a family that makes decisions, right? It's another form of governance. You might tell my
• 37:20
  four-year-olds that. Yeah, they're fully aware. This is a tyrannical dictatorship that I'm running
• 37:26
  in my household. Right. And you might run your house like a dictatorship, and that's a lot of
• 37:30
  parents do. That might be how it works at home. But as you get to higher levels of governance,
• 37:36
  like the federal government, you obviously want to have less control at that level,
• 37:43
  where they have less control over your daily life. And more, and you naturally have more of an
• 37:49
  ability to, or you have, you have less of ability when it's at the federal level to get away.
• 37:55
  So you want to make sure that it's limited and it's, it's scope. When you have a local government
• 38:01
  or something very close to you, you have more of an ability to escape it. Yeah. And we're seeing
• 38:06
  that at a state level, I mean, and there's been a huge exodus over the course of the pandemic from
• 38:11
  states that people fail were, you know, mishandled it to states that people failed to better. I know
• 38:16
  about four friends who left California to move to Texas. And it's a good thing that we have a
• 38:21
  country still where you can do that, where someone can move from one part of the country to another
• 38:26
  part of the country, because they believe that the system they have in their own state is not
• 38:32
  the best system. They prefer some other system. I think that's a good thing. If you make it all
• 38:36
  uniform, I think that's a problem where the whole United States has one system and you can't escape
• 38:41
  it. And then it's just like an all-out fight for who has control of whoever's. So Justin, what
• 38:47
  would the federal government do? I understand your reticence in sort of throwing bombs on yourself
• 38:52
  that you're going to have to then clean up by saying something that sounds like you want to
• 38:57
  detonate Medicare right now. But let's let's park the how we get there and just talk pure political
• 39:03
  philosophy for a second. What's the what's the proper role of a federal government in a state like
• 39:09
  the United States? Should it be just about securing the borders and basically having courts and
• 39:14
  things to resolve contractual disputes and a police force to enforce the law and all welfare
• 39:20
  food stamps, public schools, hospitals and things like that that Medicare for all people should
• 39:26
  be should not be part of it to purview? Well, the the Constitution provides the blueprint. The
• 39:32
  federal government should be focused on things that actually have national scope. In other words,
• 39:39
  something like a defense of the country like the armed forces has national scope and that
• 39:44
  doesn't matter whether you're in a state of five people or a state of five million people or
• 39:50
  50 million people, you you want to be protected against foreign invasion or foreign attack. You have
• 39:58
  a similar outlook on the on the issue. So where there's a lot of cohesion where there's a lot
• 40:07
  of similarity in how people view the issue, you'd have the federal government involved and I think
• 40:14
  framers of the Constitution did a pretty good job of figuring out where that is and it's primarily
• 40:19
  in areas of national defense. To some extent they were concerned about commerce and they
• 40:27
  they sort of established the United States as a free trade zone and so they gave the federal
• 40:34
  government some supremacy to ensure that goods could flow freely across the states. So there are
• 40:41
  a few areas where I think they rightly thought hey the federal government could have a role here
• 40:49
  to ensure that there's something that benefits the maximum number of people where you're getting
• 40:55
  where most people are going to agree on the issue. The average person will agree but then when
• 41:00
  you get into details about people's lives and this could include health care because the way people
• 41:08
  live their lives in a rural part of the country is not the same as someone in an urban area like
• 41:15
  New York City. So when you get into sort of these sorts of issues and there are lots of issues
• 41:20
  besides health care of course but when you get into these sorts of issues you want local governments
• 41:26
  to make more of the decisions or states or individuals. You just want to bring it to the to the
• 41:35
  lowest level possible where they can you know do something that is that has like a majority or
• 41:44
  some kind of consensus for the issue and and I don't see that at the federal level you don't really
• 41:51
  have a lot of consensus on most of the things we're fighting about. You certainly don't and I mean
• 41:56
  that would be an argument for keeping the the things that you try to do at a national level as
• 42:02
  as universal as possible right I mean I think I think you're one thing that you're pointing to
• 42:07
  that I noticed that noticed as a non-American living in America was how delusional the American
• 42:13
  left is about what they think other social democracies are like like they think they really think that
• 42:18
  it's milk and honey and like free everything for everyone in Denmark and Canada and I've lived in
• 42:25
  Denmark I went to university there for a semester and I've lived in Australia which is basically
• 42:29
  Canada and you know it's not the if you could not if you wanted to create Medicare for all in
• 42:37
  America the way that American progressives think that you would you would bankrupt America because
• 42:41
  the health system is so unrestrained and incredibly over overly opulent in the states I mean
• 42:52
  not in a good way I just mean that so much is covered by private health insurance there I mean
• 42:58
  I had an experience where I was I was working at Huffpost in New York and there was like some company
• 43:06
  that gave like spinal back sort of massages and like orthopedic type analyses and they came in
• 43:14
  for a free at one lunch time got me to sign up for like a weekly massage I did like 10 weeks of
• 43:21
  this weekly massage with this little machine that would go boom boom boom boom boom down my back
• 43:25
  and felt really nice and when I finally saw the invoice that they'd invoiced to my private health
• 43:31
  insurer it was something like $15,000 for 10 weeks and there was no diet there was no like clinical
• 43:38
  reason for this thing there was a copay that I had supposedly been paying that I hadn't been
• 43:43
  paying but they don't mind not taking the copay of course because they get the money from the
• 43:47
  and like I just found this again and again and again that there's there's a system where there's
• 43:51
  really no there were no none of the normal cost controls that either a private system or a
• 43:58
  well-run public system should have in place it's this crazy sort of hybrid and I think a lot of
• 44:04
  American leftists think that they could just have all of that and it would be free the reality is
• 44:09
  in a you know in a well-run free healthcare system like Australia has which is the one that I
• 44:16
  know the best which is also called Medicare and I have a Medicare card everyone has a Medicare card
• 44:20
  you don't get just whatever you want like you know you talk to your doctor and the doctor will
• 44:26
  prescribe things any specialist you see has to go through your family doctor your primary care
• 44:32
  physician which means that there are gatekeepers inside the system to make sure that costs don't
• 44:36
  balloon I can't just go and get an MRI because I'm I'm scared of it and a lot of Americans I think
• 44:41
  would feel like that's an imposition on there on the way that they've come to understand healthcare
• 44:47
  they should be able to get some get a procedure done just because they're worried about it and
• 44:51
  doctors should be working in the service of the patients and the patient's consideration should
• 44:56
  be the only consideration there should never be a financial consideration that's not the mindset
• 45:00
  of doctors who work in a publicly funded system of course they want to look after their patients but
• 45:05
  not at any cost not out of the cost of like bankrupting the state so I yeah I'm taking I'm sort of
• 45:11
  granting you that the the complexity of the of a centralized public system is you know the more
• 45:20
  complex it gets the more deranged it becomes from a practical application to people's lives at
• 45:26
  at a granular level I just don't think that that means that you you can't do it at all I just
• 45:30
  think it means that you have to agree on on simple baselines like okay well you know emergency
• 45:35
  public hospital care you know the very least let's make sure that anybody who is in an in an
• 45:39
  emergency gets treated for free for example it doesn't have to pay it back yeah no you're you're
• 45:45
  you're absolutely right I think a lot of people do not realize um you know what are the trade-offs
• 45:51
  and and people there are people who might say those trade-offs are just fine but I think a lot of
• 45:56
  Americans would say no that's not fine and when I look at the United States and I you know I'm on
• 46:03
  Twitter and I see them the more extreme end of it when you when you're on Twitter um you could say
• 46:08
  that again you see people who are so diametrically opposed on a lot of these things that I'm not sure
• 46:14
  how you would ever create one system that works for all of them um the the left when I'm when I'm
• 46:24
  on Twitter when they think about um the right I I feel like they think these people are you know
• 46:34
  like horrible people who shouldn't exist I mean now this is these are the comments I get on
• 46:40
  on Twitter and the stuff you get from the right similarly like the they think the left are you
• 46:46
  know beyond stupid or naive or gullible or whatever it might be um and I'm not sure how you resolve
• 46:53
  any of that through some kind of one-size-fits-all system like I don't I don't know how you get
• 46:59
  anywhere with a system like that I don't know how it doesn't just increase the tensions overall
• 47:05
  because people have such different ways of living in the United States and such different
• 47:10
  perspectives on things that you know I I think people are sort of naive about this yeah and
• 47:17
  part part of that naivety comes from when you look at a lot of people in on the left in the
• 47:26
  United States they tend to live in very concentrated areas like urban centers New York City San
• 47:34
  Francisco Los Angeles Chicago they live in areas where they run into people who are like them
• 47:40
  every day who agree with them on things politically um so when they hear about someone who has a
• 47:48
  different perspective they don't even they can't even relate to it at all they don't even know
• 47:53
  anyone who has that perspective I think actually there's some sense in which people on the right
• 47:59
  have a better understanding of people on the left than people on the left do I think that's true
• 48:04
  I've said that for a long time yeah and I and I say this is someone who I mean I don't have
• 48:11
  um you know much affection for what the sort of hard right does in the United States and the
• 48:17
  politics of it and all that you know I've been very much against um trumpism and this national
• 48:24
  populism that's arisen out of it and at the same time I recognize because I've been at the
• 48:30
  receiving end of so much of the animosity from both the right and the left I I can see that the
• 48:37
  people on the right tend to think that I'm just stupid or naive when they criticize me and the
• 48:45
  people on the left tend to think I am evil or I have some kind of ill motive well sometimes
• 48:54
  will be accused of racism like whatever the case may be there is this view on the left that if
• 49:02
  someone doesn't share their values that person is a bad human being yeah or even if a person
• 49:09
  has a different idea about the means to get to common values I mean that you know I think you
• 49:14
  can test you can actually test this by just asking people to articulate the worldview of their
• 49:20
  opponent and see how well they do yeah yeah right I mean and if you if you ask most conservatives
• 49:26
  I think I'm not talking about you know far right people but if you ask most conservatives what a
• 49:30
  progressives worldview is uh they're likely to do a fairly good job of saying that the progressive
• 49:36
  thinks that government should be used to help people and to lift people up uh and that you know
• 49:43
  that conservatives are mean and that uh that progressives care about people and want to make life
• 49:48
  easier for people who have been traditionally sidelined or something like that yeah which is a
• 49:52
  broadly true um not caricature but like characterization of the progressive worldview but if you
• 50:00
  ask a progressive what a conservative thinks I don't think that they will be able that they're
• 50:04
  less likely to be able to say uh that the conservative feels that that attempt to use government
• 50:11
  to fix problems are likely to cause more problems than uh progressive believe that they will that
• 50:17
  the the best arrangements over the course of you know over the long arc of history have tended to
• 50:22
  be ones that allowed people to make more localized choices for themselves and to to feel
• 50:28
  free uh even if that comes with uh you know certain the trade-offs of individualism or whatever it
• 50:33
  might might be the progressive is likely to say conservatives want money for rich people and uh
• 50:39
  you know they're mean and they don't care about poor people which of course is not the way that
• 50:42
  conservatives think of themselves so you know you've got to you've got an impasse there between
• 50:46
  what you even think that you're you're in opposition to but I want to talk uh since we're talking
• 50:53
  you know I mean I don't even know where to get into Trump why don't we start by just talking about
• 50:58
  what you so you're in congress you know it's not functioning necessarily the way that you think
• 51:03
  that it ought to in the second term of Obama let's go to there so 2012 2013 14 15 as the
• 51:08
  republican primaries begin did you think about throwing your hat in the ring and running in 2016
• 51:14
  by the way yeah I actually did I something I don't really talk about I've never I'm not sure I've
• 51:20
  ever talked about it but I did think about um at that time even running as a libertarian um and
• 51:28
  um you know I talked it over with family and a few people a few friends and ultimately decided
• 51:34
  against it and actually it's it's maybe one of my biggest regrets um in my life not running as a
• 51:40
  libertarian or not running as a republican uh not running as a libertarian I think that um
• 51:48
  by the time I had I felt really strongly about it you know that I should jump into this thing
• 51:54
  uh the republican primary had already moved I hadn't really thought about you know jumping into
• 51:59
  it initially but as I started to see that this was headed toward um maybe a Hillary Clinton
• 52:05
  Donald Trump matchup where you had two people who were so um you know disliked by the public
• 52:14
  generally I mean we we had polling on this just in my district and the polling was astonishing to
• 52:20
  me like my approval rating was way above water you know like it was it was quite high my disapproval
• 52:27
  was low then I would poll on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and the approval was like 20%
• 52:34
  for each one and 60% disapproval and I was like what is going on here like how could two people
• 52:41
  so reviled by so many people be the nominees for the party and so I did um I did have some inclination
• 52:51
  at that time like maybe I should jump into this race um and ultimately decided against it but
• 52:58
  the the only reason I would have done it at the time is because I was ready to
• 53:01
  starting to see that congress was headed in the wrong direction you know even even a few years ago
• 53:07
  like you know say 2015 2016 I was already thinking about getting out of congress like you know
• 53:14
  this is not the this is not the type of body I envisioned um when I entered congress you know
• 53:22
  it's not really a place of legislative activity anymore it's more just you know pushing a button
• 53:27
  that someone tells me to push and then I pushed the other button and then they get mad at me um
• 53:33
  and and so there wasn't really much there for me like you couldn't actually offer led
• 53:38
  offer amendments you couldn't get your legislation on the floor so I was already thinking about
• 53:42
  maybe I need to try something else um to shake this up because ultimately what I'm trying to do is
• 53:49
  um improve the system I'm I'm an introvert by nature like politics is actually not what I would
• 53:56
  naturally want to get into at all um I I I got I got into it um with the understanding that this
• 54:05
  was not my forte this was not what I was um comfortable with and the the country was too important
• 54:16
  you know I I'm the son of a refugee and um the son of an immigrant my dad's Palestinian refugee
• 54:23
  and my mom is a Syrian immigrant and so for me keeping the American dream alive is so important
• 54:31
  and I I convinced myself that I need to get into this even though it's not comfortable for me
• 54:38
  even though I don't like politics even though I don't um you know like all this
• 54:45
  stuff where I have to go give speeches and be in large crowds and I like because I'm an introvert
• 54:49
  by nature I said I'm gonna do it anyways um and I felt you know around 2015 or so 2016 hey
• 54:59
  congress wasn't really turning out to be what I thought it would be you know I'm not able to even
• 55:04
  though I've I've sacrificed a lot by coming here because I don't it's not like my cup of tea
• 55:10
  um it's not turning out the way I thought and I was about to maybe take another adventure and say
• 55:15
  like well maybe I have to run for president even though I'm I'm also not comfortable with that
• 55:20
  I gotta tell you Justin if faith the reason you don't like politics is because you're an introvert
• 55:24
  who doesn't like giving speeches in front of big crowds then going from the house of representatives
• 55:28
  to the presidential political campaigning is uh yeah I know I could I could talk to you about
• 55:33
  career choices young man well leave me I know and being a being being a libertarian also like is
• 55:39
  a part of that right like libertarians are all about privacy and yeah individualism and you know
• 55:45
  living living free and all that and like when you run when you run for office especially if you're
• 55:51
  ran for president you lose all of that like I can't go out to dinner anymore I can't you know so
• 55:56
  like I really am you know and so just naturally put me in your head then Justin it's 2015
• 56:03
  I guess I guess Jeb Bush is going to be the the nominee uh and there's Marco Rubio and then
• 56:10
  you know there are a few other people we had you know Herman Cain and you know some people like
• 56:15
  that I guess we're floating around you know Ted Cruz I don't think anyone I don't know about you
• 56:19
  but I don't think anyone serious thought that Ted Cruz was going to be a be a popular politician
• 56:23
  at a presidential level um and then there's you know Trump is just this crazy side show that
• 56:29
  clearly is who clearly is not going to get the the nomination at that point do you think to yourself
• 56:34
  I can probably I can probably give Jeb Bush a run for his money no no I wasn't gonna you know I
• 56:41
  for I I wasn't supportive of Jeb Bush but I also wasn't thinking let's let's jump in against um
• 56:47
  Jeb Bush like I didn't know how it turned out but I didn't feel like he had the the juice really
• 56:53
  to get through it and I wasn't sure how it was gonna go um at the time I was supporting Rand Paul
• 56:58
  right of course who was who was a friend and ally and um and certainly more on the libertarian side of
• 57:06
  things especially at that time and so I was supportive of of him um and from my perspective
• 57:14
  look he was claiming the libertarian republican lane there and um right to jump in would have been
• 57:23
  to screw him right yeah so you know I think that we can't have too many people in that lane if we
• 57:29
  want to be successful let's let's let him pursue it um he was obviously interested in pursuing it
• 57:35
  long before I was so and as he now had to basically abandon that lane and become a sort of
• 57:41
  Trumpy boot liquor and you've had to exit the party well I don't want to I don't want to frame
• 57:47
  it that way but I would say he's definitely um jumped onto the Trump bandwagon I mean I mean
• 57:54
  do you talk to him about that I guess if he's back in town I've spoken to him a few times um not
• 57:59
  since I've left Congress I have not but um but you know in the later days of of my time in Congress
• 58:05
  and you know he was we've always had a friendly friendly relationship and um and I don't have
• 58:12
  I don't have anything bad to say about him in that respect you know like our relationship has been
• 58:16
  good I I've always been a bit disappointed and it's it's a strategic issue right like he he made
• 58:23
  a strategic call about how to proceed and I don't agree with it and I'm sure he doesn't agree with
• 58:28
  my strategic approach on on the whole thing but there came a point where he decided that going
• 58:35
  with Trump was more fruitful than going against Trump and I to this day do not believe that I think
• 58:42
  that's a mistake for libertarianism um it's a mistake for spreading our ideas and I think I've
• 58:47
  been proven right on all of this I mean unfortunately Trump has been associated with libertarian thinking
• 58:56
  without any justification because a lot of libertarians jumped on the bandwagon and said yeah he's
• 59:02
  you know I'm with him and I think that is hurt libertarianism because now there's this caricature
• 59:07
  of libertarianism that it's something like Trumpism and I think that's very damaging to the brand
• 59:13
  because it's nothing like Trumpism so you get the worst of all worlds you get
• 59:17
  Trump who wasn't libertarian in almost any respect from uh you know uh uh governance standpoint
• 59:25
  and then now you you're tying libertarianism to it and he's also a guy that is generally
• 59:30
  disliked by a lot of people um his uh his mo is to divide people rather than bring people together
• 59:38
  and the libertarianism to me is about human cooperation so so yeah I was I was disappointed um and
• 59:45
  especially because Rand Paul in the early days one of the ironies I think is that when he was running
• 59:50
  against Trump in the um debates you know I would tell Rand I think you're focusing too much on Trump
• 59:59
  because he would take shots at Trump all the time he'd go into the debates and he take a shot at
• 1:00:04
  Trump I'm like Rand they're only giving you like a minute or two to speak and you're spending
• 1:00:09
  it all taking shots at Trump you got to like cool it a little bit you know focus on what
• 1:00:14
  what um you want to get across you know what's the message you want to get across it can't just
• 1:00:19
  be Trump is bad so the irony is I was telling him that at the time and um then as soon as he became
• 1:00:28
  the nominee I mean at least shortly thereafter things really changed like I was um I was never
• 1:00:36
  supportive of Trump but I at least understood why in the debates you might want to focus on your
• 1:00:43
  own message and stop worrying about Trump but then as soon as you became the president you know the
• 1:00:49
  nominee and then the president you've got to stand up for what you believe in you just because
• 1:00:54
  it's a Republican doesn't mean we're just gonna you know walk away and let him do whatever he wants
• 1:00:59
  and yeah I did so many people I think he I mean he captured the imagination of the Republican base
• 1:01:08
  and then there was no fighting it right um for for basically any of them well yeah I mean you
• 1:01:15
  were the first you were the first Republican congressman to to call for his impeachment yeah but I
• 1:01:21
  also I also was someone who from the very beginning in my district had really prepared them for
• 1:01:29
  this like nobody in my district was really caught off guard that I might support impeachment of
• 1:01:36
  a president for executive overreach I mean it's like I've been talking about it for I've been talking
• 1:01:42
  about this stuff for years and would hold lots of town halls people knew pretty well where I stood
• 1:01:48
  on executive overreach and abuses of power it wasn't like I was going to be like well he's a
• 1:01:54
  Republican and so we're good to go I mean I'd been criticizing my own party for many years already
• 1:01:59
  I criticized Republican leadership so many times and I I had been hoping that some of my sort of tea
• 1:02:05
  party colleagues who were also willing to criticize Republican leadership would would be willing
• 1:02:11
  to criticize Trump and a lot of them said they would be willing to I mean I remember during the
• 1:02:15
  during the um presidential race where a lot of them after he became the nominee would say
• 1:02:22
  you know if Trump wins we'll have the chance to prove that we'll stand up against someone from
• 1:02:27
  our own party who does the wrong thing but then as soon as he became president at least shortly
• 1:02:32
  thereafter um that all fell apart and it was pretty gradual in the first uh a couple years and
• 1:02:39
  fell apart very swiftly um toward the end of 2018 I would say but it was um yeah it was it was
• 1:02:48
  tough but nobody should have been surprised by my take on it no but I mean I guess there was a
• 1:02:53
  there was a backlash there of some some kind in the sense that you left the Republican party and
• 1:02:57
  you didn't run again yeah but uh to to me it was less about could I be successful in my district
• 1:03:05
  as a Republican I believed I could um because I had been very active in the district in terms of
• 1:03:13
  holding town halls being engaged with people answering their questions explaining my votes
• 1:03:19
  I'd been very engaged in that stuff for many years I think it would have been a tougher race than
• 1:03:23
  I faced before but I I think that's one I could have won as well if I had run for a re-election as a
• 1:03:28
  Republican but I really lost interest in being a Republican at the time well also I mean when you say
• 1:03:34
  if you'd run as a Republican wouldn't you have to have won a primary in order to run in the general
• 1:03:38
  as a as a Republican and wouldn't you have gotten primary from some Trump uh who I was already going
• 1:03:43
  to be you know people already lining up as soon as I said Trump um you should face impeachment
• 1:03:49
  if the people are already lining up uh to jump in and even before that you know there are people
• 1:03:53
  who thought I was not sufficiently supportive of Donald Trump who are who are probably going to
• 1:03:58
  jump in even if I didn't support impeachment but I believed in my district I believe the people
• 1:04:04
  know me understand me and that I could have won that primary again um but there are a lot of people
• 1:04:10
  throughout the country who had not prepared their district for this like if if you were very
• 1:04:17
  partisan from the beginning you were not your district was not prepared for this like you were
• 1:04:23
  not prepared for what for Trump or for the returnation of the Republican party to Trump the no I'm
• 1:04:29
  saying elected officials members of the Congress who didn't prepare their district for the idea
• 1:04:36
  that there could be a bad Republican were not in a position then to tell their district okay now
• 1:04:42
  we have a bad Republican we have to stand up against him right um they they were so partisan for
• 1:04:49
  so many years that to do so would have been um like a political suicide right I can I can actually
• 1:04:56
  understand that tribal party loyalty rather than yeah ideas and government they had they had
• 1:05:01
  essentially trained their voters like if if you think about it in my district for years I had
• 1:05:08
  been saying to my voters I represent all of you I don't care if you're a Republican a Democrat
• 1:05:12
  I was willing to challenge my own Republican leadership um I was willing to support democratic
• 1:05:17
  positions that I thought were right I taken on on immigration is a good example where I take
• 1:05:22
  in positions at times that upset the Republican base um or some civil liberties issues including
• 1:05:30
  things like um you know challenging uh police abuses so I'd I'd taken positions already that showed
• 1:05:39
  I was willing to challenge my own party so my constituents knew where I was coming from and they
• 1:05:45
  were electing me every year both in the primary and in the general by overwhelming margins so
• 1:05:50
  they knew where I was at but if you look at another Republican they had been training their district
• 1:05:56
  for several years that Democrats were the total problem Republicans were not so bad Republicans
• 1:06:03
  were good we're not going to criticize Republicans um when they talk about who they represent they
• 1:06:09
  talk about representing Republican voters they would ignore the Democrats they had a very different
• 1:06:14
  view of representation than I did and so their whole base was just Republican voters if you pulled
• 1:06:22
  their district the democratic support for them was very low whereas in my district I always had
• 1:06:27
  pretty good democratic support I had pretty good crossover support and certainly very strong
• 1:06:32
  independent support but for my colleagues in the Republican Party the vast majority of them
• 1:06:37
  they're basically getting all of their votes from Republicans and none of their votes
• 1:06:41
  from anywhere else right so if they turn on their own base if they say hey our Republican is a bad
• 1:06:46
  guy they're not winning over the Democrats those people are not coming over um at least not in
• 1:06:52
  large numbers and either in the are the independence and the Republicans are gonna be like hey what
• 1:06:57
  this is not what we signed up for like what is the who's this guy when we signed up for the guy
• 1:07:01
  who's partisan Justin when you declared your independence and uh and said that you were leaving
• 1:07:06
  the Republican Party and said that you were disenchanted with party politics uh the president
• 1:07:11
  Trump in all of his magnanimity and graciousness uh tweeted uh new he couldn't get the nomination
• 1:07:17
  to run again in the great state of Michigan already being challenged for his seat a total loser
• 1:07:22
  great news for the Republican Party as one of the dumbest and most disloyal men in congress is quitting
• 1:07:26
  the party uh Trump tweeted uh about about you um did that surprise you did that lead to any
• 1:07:33
  subsequent you know backlash or social media storm from his followers against you what was the
• 1:07:38
  aftermath of that experience like it didn't surprise me um i i don't know that it led to any
• 1:07:45
  additional backlash i from my perspective the biggest backlash was more of a national one then
• 1:07:53
  anything local and that was when i took a position on the Mueller report uh in favor of impeachment
• 1:08:00
  and that got me a lot of people calling the office um a lot of messages a lot of very hateful things
• 1:08:08
  were said and i had a lot of um frankly racist things said to me as well i mean a lot of things
• 1:08:14
  that i had never experienced in my life um you know i i mentioned earlier that i'm uh Palestinian
• 1:08:20
  and Syrian ancestry yeah and there were a lot of things that were said to me that throughout my life
• 1:08:26
  i had not heard um you know and i certainly didn't hear it in my community growing up
• 1:08:32
  that suddenly came out where people were saying things to me on the phone or uh via email
• 1:08:40
  and i took the position that i wasn't going to publicize all this stuff i think it's a mistake
• 1:08:47
  when you're an elected official to go off and say like how um at risk your life is and like how
• 1:08:53
  many people hate you and all this kind of stuff i don't know why elected officials say that stuff i
• 1:08:57
  think it's a mistake um they just make themselves a bigger target so my view is just to keep moving
• 1:09:04
  move along and you know not make a big big deal about it um and you know i knew what i was doing and
• 1:09:12
  and felt confident that i was right in what i was doing so it didn't bother me um and doesn't bother
• 1:09:18
  me to this day but as i've said i the the backlash i get from the left now for criticizing Biden
• 1:09:25
  it's basically similar um without a lot of the uh racial slurs it might be the other way where
• 1:09:33
  i'm just called a racist you know it's like so in one case the Trump people will call me uh you
• 1:09:38
  know you use some racial slurs some of them not most of them and then the other way the democrats
• 1:09:43
  will and some again some of them will say that i'm racist for holding a position so i get hit
• 1:09:48
  on i get hit every which way i'm both the uh i'm both the you know subject to racism and the
• 1:09:55
  cause of racism or something so like yeah i'm i'm i'm a white supremacist for not being
• 1:10:01
  woke enough and then to the uh you know to the to the alt right i'm uh i'm an authoritarian
• 1:10:05
  bootleaker right having some respect for uh you know for for government for governance for good
• 1:10:11
  governance i you'll enjoy this tweet Justin that i got uh uh yesterday i tweeted there was a
• 1:10:18
  journalist in Australia who interviewed the prime minister who's facing re-election in the next few
• 1:10:22
  months and uh they did the usual gotcha question of how much does a loaf of bread cost and how
• 1:10:27
  much does uh like a pint of milk cost you know i don't know if that has a long history in the states
• 1:10:32
  but it's the sort of the thing that people get asked and i tweeted like what is the journalist
• 1:10:38
  do exactly here like why has this become a popular thing like as far as i'm concerned and
• 1:10:42
  if you're unless you below the poverty line you're buying milk and bread regardless of what they
• 1:10:47
  cost and it's just going into your shopping cart and then you're not paying any attention to it
• 1:10:53
  like why yes if you're poor then you know what milk costs but is anyone under the impression
• 1:11:00
  that the prime minister is poor are they like like is the journalist thinking that they're going to
• 1:11:04
  be a lot of viewers going oh i thought the prime minister was you know right just scraping a bite
• 1:11:09
  like what's the point of this question and my point was just like if you want to see whether or not
• 1:11:13
  the the prime minister is in touch then you could ask like what does the average grocery
• 1:11:19
  cart cost you know like what's the what's the average family's grocery budget or you could ask like
• 1:11:25
  what maybe what does steak cost or something like that something where the average person actually
• 1:11:29
  does make a decision about whether or not to buy it or not buy it on the basis of the price
• 1:11:34
  and the amount i've had tens of thousands of tweets in the past 48 hours just and talking about
• 1:11:40
  oh and this could only come from a place of tremendous privilege and like i'm you know i don't
• 1:11:45
  understand what it's like and i don't care about food price inflation but i thought this one
• 1:11:49
  was particularly good this is from someone who says what such vile evil insensitive creature at
• 1:11:55
  geoseps so just like the disgusting evil racist eugenics you want to get rid of the poor black
• 1:12:01
  and so-called undesirables geoseps you're a cancer in our nation you are a evil seed that must
• 1:12:06
  be uprooted hashtag racist zips hashtag you know oh man so this looks like you're getting it
• 1:12:12
  yeah same thing i get it this is the forum in which we are like adjudicating and coming to
• 1:12:16
  agreements about what do you think that do you think do you think someone who says something like
• 1:12:21
  that is is a real person or i think i was one of that i don't know like sometimes i get stuff and
• 1:12:27
  i'm not because increasingly people aren't using their real names you know it's anonymous accounts
• 1:12:32
  and they say stuff like that and you don't know whether it's just someone trawling trying to
• 1:12:37
  get a reaction i mean there are too many i think well who knows but like there are a lot like and
• 1:12:42
  some of them are blue check marks like uh you know so one blue check mark person retweeted me saying
• 1:12:48
  spoken like a man with true privilege is this tweeted joke and so then i think that uh you know
• 1:12:54
  that's someone who knows that they're intentionally throwing red meat to their followers
• 1:12:59
  even if it is nice steak a filet minion red meat to their followers because they know
• 1:13:04
  that i'll be taken out of context like it's such i mean i just tweeted back to that saying like
• 1:13:08
  i'm surprised that anyone took that bait it's so easy like it's such an obvious thing to say
• 1:13:13
  about my tweet that it shows that i'm privileged because i don't i'm out of touch with people for
• 1:13:16
  not understanding the price of milk but that's not actually i'm still waiting for you to actually
• 1:13:21
  refute my claim that it's a stupid question or that most people even if they're not poor don't
• 1:13:26
  actually know what what milk costs but and so then people follow up on that saying like one says
• 1:13:32
  he's just another piece of shit sucking at the public tit he needs to be cut off i think that's a real
• 1:13:36
  person or what's another one here you think you're part of the normal people's eps you think more
• 1:13:40
  absurd examples from twitter is gonna make you look normal normal people can see through your gas
• 1:13:44
  lighting from miles away you psychopath i think that's probably a real person like i don't know i
• 1:13:49
  don't know what the what the proportions breakdown has have you gotten more backlash because you've
• 1:13:56
  said supportive things of joe rogan is that cause some backlash or no um
• 1:14:01
  like maybe more um people just more targeting you coming in and saying like look he's he's
• 1:14:07
  one of the bad guys now no actually no actually the the majority of the hate still comes from the
• 1:14:14
  anti lockdown uh freedom loving uh sort of ultra-righty people i don't want to call them
• 1:14:21
  alt-right because some people think i mean white supremacist or like fascist but in my lexicon i
• 1:14:26
  just use alt-right to mean a kind of a maybe my concern of it sort of tim pool kind of uh like
• 1:14:32
  ecosystem of people who are uh not necessarily you know right wing in a conventional political spectrum
• 1:14:40
  but they're like adjacent to the shit stirring brigade who take great pride in caring more about
• 1:14:47
  tyrannical world government than you do and in getting hysterical about age you know
• 1:14:51
  instance of government overreach or elite uh media manipulation or whatever that might be so
• 1:14:57
  i think that cohort are where i get most of my grief from and that's probably still from stuff
• 1:15:02
  that i've said in public especially on forums like joe show uh where i'm trying to bring a bit of
• 1:15:08
  nuance into the conversation about under what circumstances um pandemic restrictions are justified
• 1:15:16
  because there's uh this is another area in which your cohort has gotten a bad name and has not
• 1:15:22
  covered itself in glory frankly by having a very absolutist attitude towards um COVID lockdowns
• 1:15:28
  and restrictions again i think exporting american the american experience to the rest of the world so
• 1:15:34
  you know when a lot of these people hear about i know a quarantine hotel or a quarantine facility
• 1:15:41
  in Australia where people are locked up for two weeks when they enter the country during the
• 1:15:45
  height of the pandemic uh they think of Gavin Newsom at the French laundry uh having lunch
• 1:15:54
  you know in contravention of the very rules that he has put in or the californian government like
• 1:15:59
  taking bulldozers and covering skate part outside skate parts with sand so that teenagers can't use
• 1:16:05
  them and all the and or masking of children or the shutting shutting down of schools all of which
• 1:16:11
  have not happened in in Australia at all and there's been i think a more you know you can argue about
• 1:16:18
  the examples of overreach and i'm incredibly opposed to instances of police brutality or
• 1:16:23
  personality police enforcement of arcane rules but as a general rule those things i
• 1:16:29
  regard as being an independent question from the question of when is it okay for a community
• 1:16:35
  to enact emergency measures that require hard sort of lockdowns and clampdowns on their freedom
• 1:16:42
  in order to liberate themselves for the subsequent duration of the pandemic until you know
• 1:16:47
  until the the time is right to allow it in anyway that's all a long roundabout way of saying i
• 1:16:52
  think it's it's in the weeds of that discussion that i get the majority of hate i think most people
• 1:16:58
  who hate me for for standing up for someone like Joe rogue well for standing up not for someone
• 1:17:04
  like Joe Rogan for standing up specifically for Joe Rogan during all of this they know that they're
• 1:17:08
  being disingenuous because i've never said that i agree with every single thing that he said i'm
• 1:17:13
  taking a free speech attitude to this and i don't know that you can be principled and objected
• 1:17:20
  to that yeah i agree with you i mean for me one of the central principles of liberalism like
• 1:17:29
  classical liberalism is free speech and so i don't know how anyone really objects to that i i
• 1:17:37
  i always hear these arguments about uh you know the marketplace and well Justin as a libertarian
• 1:17:45
  uh don't you support what the marketplace is doing and if if the marketplace says
• 1:17:50
  take Joe Rogan off the air isn't that what you should support because you're a libertarian but
• 1:17:54
  that's that's absurd libertarians don't say that we support every outcome the market produces
• 1:18:00
  we're saying that the market is one of the best tools we have for achieving liberty
• 1:18:05
  it's not the only tool but it is one of the best tools we have for achieving liberty
• 1:18:10
  and if the market had produces an outcome that is antithetical to liberalism or freedom
• 1:18:16
  then we're going to be against that outcome um and i certainly think uh there's a difference
• 1:18:22
  between objecting to someone because um you have your own uh personal issues with them or maybe
• 1:18:31
  something about their behavior you don't like uh as opposed to saying someone should be taken off
• 1:18:37
  the air because you disagree with them or because they invite people onto their show who present
• 1:18:42
  information that you think is wrong i think that there are those are there's a huge difference
• 1:18:47
  between those things you know what do you want to boycott someone boycott someone you know that's
• 1:18:52
  that's your business but that's very different from saying the reason i'm boycotting them is
• 1:18:57
  because i think this person should be taken off the air and i think we need to work together to
• 1:19:01
  get this person off the air i mean especially when it's so hypocritical because you know if you're
• 1:19:05
  a musician and your music is still on apple music i mean what do they pay the people in shenzhen
• 1:19:10
  factories making the iPhones again like what a you know like right and and also like look at musicians
• 1:19:15
  just uh as a general rule the kinds of things they've been able to say freely thanks to freedom of
• 1:19:22
  speech um and put into their music over the years uh they should be embracing the idea that people
• 1:19:28
  will challenge the system and say things that are unpopular um we we can't base freedom of speech
• 1:19:35
  on whether we like the actual or you know words being spoken no i mean that's actually not well
• 1:19:40
  yeah it's not even the point of free speech at all because of course we like the of course we like
• 1:19:44
  people saying things that we like like that's not free speech that's just talking it's if it comes
• 1:19:49
  free speech when we have to bump up against things the people saying things that we don't like
• 1:19:53
  and sometimes in america because we have the first amendment here people
• 1:19:59
  um get confused where they think that free speech is the same thing as the first amendment when
• 1:20:04
  these are different things right the you know the first amendment is protecting you know your
• 1:20:10
  freedom of speech from government censorship but and and while private censorship of speech may be
• 1:20:17
  allowed under our system under our constitution it doesn't mean that it's not um an attack on free
• 1:20:25
  speech you know it can still be an assault on free speech even if it's not protected free speech
• 1:20:32
  so yeah as a libertarian i think sometimes because we in america are so used to thinking of
• 1:20:38
  free speech in the first amendment as almost being synonymous like they're one and the same um
• 1:20:44
  we we get this confused a lot and they're not the same thing no that frustrates me as well when
• 1:20:49
  people i i think it's way too cute for people to be like well these social media companies are private
• 1:20:54
  companies and spotifies a private company therefore they can do whatever they want and there's
• 1:20:58
  nothing inconsistent about it's not a first amendment issue because the government's not doing it
• 1:21:01
  and i'm like well would you be saying that if it was someone who you cared about like or if it was
• 1:21:05
  you being excluded from these platforms these are the places where the public has conversations
• 1:21:09
  with itself like you know if you're not on there then you're you're not really able to speak
• 1:21:14
  how do we just and let's i want to let you go but how do we turn the volume down on all this i mean
• 1:21:19
  if you if you well you can take this in one or two directions or we can do both i think there's a
• 1:21:25
  political thing that i'm interested in your thoughts on and then there's a cultural thing that
• 1:21:28
  i'm interested in your thoughts on politically if you run in 2024 i assume you'll run as a libertarian
• 1:21:35
  if trump is the republican nominee you may split the non-democratic vote and you may
• 1:21:42
  enable the democrat to win you can either prognosticate about that or you can pass on that
• 1:21:50
  prognostication and then the cultural question is i feel like we're all just dialed up to 11 all
• 1:21:57
  the time and the woke left is emboldening the right wing trumpie crazies and they are emboldening
• 1:22:08
  the woke left and people who can reasonably disagree about things in the center are left
• 1:22:17
  holding their dicks in their hands as my grandfather would have said and not being invited to
• 1:22:22
  the party how do we change that dynamic so for the first one you know i don't know whether i'll
• 1:22:29
  run for president or run for any office in the next few years but i would say when someone runs
• 1:22:37
  for election they're not causing someone else to win or lose you know people get to go and vote
• 1:22:43
  for whoever they want on the ballot and they can vote for a democrat they can vote for republican
• 1:22:49
  they can vote for a libertarian they can vote for someone else if they want and if we take this
• 1:22:55
  mindset that anytime someone is on the ballot who's not a republican or democrat that it is just
• 1:23:01
  helping one of the other two parties then you are just perpetuating the problem like the problem
• 1:23:06
  never gets resolved and there are millions of people it i'd say a plurality of americans
• 1:23:14
  who prefer some alternative they're they're tired of being tied down to the republican nominee or
• 1:23:20
  the democratic nominee when you look at polling on this independence outnumber republicans and
• 1:23:26
  democrats and it's it's getting to the point where they outnumber them easily you know it's a
• 1:23:31
  significant margin by which they outnumber them why shouldn't all of those people have someone to
• 1:23:37
  vote for they are largely voting for the two candidates or republican or democrat because they've
• 1:23:44
  been left with few options there hasn't been a serious alternative that's presented that's been
• 1:23:50
  presented and to the extent we've been getting candidates in the past they have been less serious
• 1:23:57
  because of the narrative because of the narrative that they can't win and so even the people who
• 1:24:03
  run for these positions are not as strong as they could be so i think we just have to break through
• 1:24:10
  that someone has to say i'm gonna do it i'm doing it regardless of how it impacts the other two
• 1:24:18
  candidates and if you don't like me don't vote for me and if you want to you know if you want to
• 1:24:24
  vote for the other candidates go for it but if you want something different um vote for me again i
• 1:24:29
  haven't decided what i'll do in the future and what office i'll run for if i run for any office
• 1:24:34
  but i do think that libertarians and independents and people in other parties have to be bold and say
• 1:24:40
  we're going to challenge this but we also have to work on our election system here in the united
• 1:24:45
  states i think that um election reforms where you have things like ranked choice voting or other
• 1:24:52
  alternative methods for electing people would be extremely beneficial because with a first pass
• 1:24:59
  the post system like we have in most of the united states um and the design of our constitution
• 1:25:07
  you inevitably create a two-party system you know it's it's kind of inevitable with this type of
• 1:25:14
  system that doesn't mean these two parties must endure it doesn't mean that one of the two parties
• 1:25:19
  couldn't be replaced by the libertarian party or by another party but it does mean that you
• 1:25:24
  tend toward creating two strong parties and one thing that could help break that up is having a
• 1:25:31
  different election system where um where people run essentially on their individual qualifications
• 1:25:38
  and character and you have we have ranked choice voting and people have more of an opportunity to get
• 1:25:43
  to get by even if they are not tied to one of the two old parties um so that's what i would say
• 1:25:49
  about that as for you know how do we get past this point culturally like where we're at i'd go back
• 1:25:58
  to what i said before if you decide everything in one central repository in washington dc if you put
• 1:26:06
  all the eggs in one basket and say this is it however controls this this basket here controls everything
• 1:26:14
  then of course you're going to get all of this fighting of course you're going to have people
• 1:26:20
  thinking it's a life or death struggle and i can tell you that it's increasingly difficult
• 1:26:26
  for me to convince people on the right that um the proper outcome is liberal democracy
• 1:26:36
  that the proper approach is some kind of system where um we all decide things together
• 1:26:44
  and there's the rule of law and um and we try to live peacefully with each other
• 1:26:50
  increasingly people i think believe there's a big fight coming and it's uh it's like a life or death
• 1:26:58
  struggle for them is how they view it yeah and that if they don't if they don't stand up and fight
• 1:27:04
  they're like well we're just sitting ducks you know you're they'll say to me just and you're
• 1:27:09
  being naive like they might agree with me on a lot of my principles they might agree with me on a lot
• 1:27:14
  of um what i believe in libertarianism but they'll say but but where you libertarians get it wrong
• 1:27:21
  they'll say is that you still believe in the system and we the people telling me this don't believe
• 1:27:28
  in the system we think you're wrong to believe in it the they they increasingly think the founders
• 1:27:34
  were wrong about the system they designed that it's not compatible with liberty that um that
• 1:27:42
  essentially you have to defeat your enemies at this point and there's no way around it it's just
• 1:27:48
  one side's going to win and one side's going to lose and are you going to stand with them or
• 1:27:52
  you're going to stand with us and that's how it's increasingly framed and the the left is helping
• 1:27:58
  to fuel i think all of this by not um understanding why some on the right are skeptical about
• 1:28:08
  centralized power or concentrated power um restrictions on freedom of speech
• 1:28:15
  why people on the right are concerned about all that stuff i think that if people could learn to
• 1:28:21
  um live within their own communities and think about what's going on in their own areas and
• 1:28:26
  help the people around them instead of worrying about people who are halfway across the country
• 1:28:32
  all the time and what are they doing and how are they running their school and how are they
• 1:28:37
  running their police department i think we'd be we'd all be a lot better off but again this requires
• 1:28:42
  us to to push things away from Washington push things out of the um you know the the central
• 1:28:49
  ized system that we have and i i don't know how you get there except through education and um
• 1:28:59
  conversations and efforts at persuasion i i don't know how it's going to happen any other way
• 1:29:05
  it's not going to happen spontaneously through government you know the congress is not going to wake
• 1:29:10
  up and say we got to do things differently and either is the white house the answer to our problems
• 1:29:16
  will be president amash the first libertarian president in 2024 just and it's it's great to talk
• 1:29:22
  to you thanks thanks for your time i'm so glad that that we were able to connect thanks Josh i
• 1:29:27
  really enjoyed it and um maybe i'll have you on my podcast sometime i'd love to talk to you i
• 1:29:33
  love to talk to you but i just started it's just it's nothing it's not fancy like yours but i just
• 1:29:37
  saw it come up when i when i was googling you earlier and i felt embarrassed that i hadn't listened
• 1:29:41
  to it but i look forward to hearing it you just in a marsh podcast thank you it's nothing fancy um
• 1:29:46
  but you know i'd love to talk about australia i love talking about these kinds of things and um
• 1:29:51
  no i'm not interested yeah because i think there'll be an there'll be an interesting difference of
• 1:29:55
  opinion between and a constructive one between probably your worldview and the athlete perplexing
• 1:30:00
  worldview of the the Australian lockdowners uh which i can hopefully articulate
• 1:30:06
  yeah i love that stuff i think exchanging ideas learning about people from other places is
• 1:30:12
  is the way forward you know we have to try to understand each other and and bridge all those
• 1:30:16
  differences and accept that accept those differences you know good on your Justin uh we'll
• 1:30:21
  we'll speak again and if i'm ever if i ever find myself wandering across the frosty plains of
• 1:30:25
  michigan that will give you a call all right thanks Josh really appreciate it
• 1:30:29
  you
• 1:30:34
  uncomfortable conversations is produced by stefan posthuma follow me josh leps on twitter and
• 1:30:39
  instagram for all the latest may your day be fruitful your mind humble your enemies generous
• 1:30:45
  and your conversations perfectly sparklingly delectably uncomfortable