Kibbe On Liberty

Matt Kibbe is joined by James Harrigan and Antony Davies, economists and hosts of the Words & Numbers podcast. They explain how an objective look at economics reveals a world that is constantly improving, from improvements in technology to increases in lifespan and reductions in extreme poverty. The Americans who complain about their country lack the necessary perspective to see how much better the quality of life is than in any other country or any other time in history. Still, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about the growing threats of inflation and centralized government power, which may reverse some of the gains we’ve made.

Matt Kibbe sits down with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) for a conversation that will surely attract the ire of censors everywhere. Massie explains why public health officials are ignoring the evidence for natural immunity acquired through exposure to COVID-19, why we’ve been repeatedly lied to about the effectiveness of face masks, and the subtle political strategy underlying the Biden administration’s planned vaccine mandates. Is it a conspiracy? Is it a cover-up? Or is everybody in power just incompetent? Watch to find out before this show gets scrubbed from the internet.

Matt Kibbe talks to Khalid Ramizy, CEO of the Afghanistan Economic and Legal Studies Organization, about the situation in Kabul during the departure of American forces. Khalid successfully managed to flee to Albania with his family, where he was able to find safety, but it took extraordinary cunning and great risk to escape the country. Khalid was also a particular target for the Taliban as the leader of a free-market think tank in Afghanistan. Those who wish to stand up for freedom in the Middle East are taking their lives into their own hands.

Matt Kibbe sits down with TheBlaze.com founder Glenn Beck to discuss his rescue activities in Afghanistan, as well as the increasingly depressing state of the world. Having seen unspeakable horrors with his own eyes, Beck now understands the magnitude of government’s cruelty and callousness towards ordinary people, even when lives are at stake. That knowledge, combined with the systematic attempts to dismantle the values and freedoms of Western civilization, makes it difficult to be an optimist at this particular time in history, although Kibbe gives it the old college try.

Matt Kibbe sits down with comedian JP Sears to talk about his evolution from a spiritual satirist to a champion of freedom. As the political landscape has shifted, JP saw his liberties legitimately threatened for the first time and was surprised to find how little the rest of his community cared. The generation that grew up with participation trophies has gotten used to never having to deal with discomfort, which leads them to expect someone else to solve all their problems. What they have to realize is that if you want to live free, it’s not always going to be safe or easy, whereas if you want to feel safe, it means giving up most of your personal autonomy.

Matt Kibbe sits down with veteran and congressman Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) to discuss Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. While Rep. Davidson has long advocated ending the war, he views it as unacceptable to leave American soldiers, civilians, and allies behind to fall into the grip of the Taliban. Davidson and a group of Republican veterans in Congress have been asking Nancy Pelosi to reconvene the House of Representative to put pressure on the Biden administration to cut through the diplomatic bureaucracy and make complete evacuation a priority.

Matt Kibbe sits down with Jo Ann Skousen, director of the Anthem Film Festival at FreedomFest in Rapid City, South Dakota. For ten years, Anthem has been a place to celebrate and encourage visual storytelling with a focus on issues of liberty and personal responsibility. Jo Ann explains how she came to find the festival, how it has grown and changed over the years, and why the ability to put together a compelling narrative, either through fiction or nonfiction, is essential to anyone who wishes to reach a broad audience of any kind.

Matt Kibbe is joined by Kelley Vlahos from the Quincy Institute and Matt Purple of the American Conservative for an emergency special edition of Kibbe on Liberty to sort out what is happening in Afghanistan and whether President Biden should be praised for ending the twenty-year conflict or condemned for mismanaging the withdrawal. Americans have voted for anti-war rhetoric in each of the last six presidential elections, and now at last they are seeing some results. Ending the war was never going to be pretty, but it was nevertheless necessary and long overdue.

Matt Kibbe sits down with Gene Epstein, director and moderator of the Soho Forum, to talk about the importance of debating big ideas. The Soho Forum has hosted over 50 debates on a variety of topics of interest to anyone who values liberty, philosophy, economics, public policy, and political science. Epstein offers his opinion on what makes a good debate, and the role that these conversations play in shaping public attitudes toward things like capitalism, socialism, and the role of government. He also explains why debating socialists can be a difficult and dangerous enterprise, primarily when members of the audience become hostile.

Matt Kibbe is joined by Tom Woods, host of the Tom Woods Show, who discusses public speaking, communication, and the importance of communicating complex ideas in simple language. Too many libertarians talk like economists, resorting to obscure and overly specialized jargon. If we want to spread the message of freedom, we need to get better at boiling our ideas down to their essentials. They go on to discuss the insanity of COVID-19 lockdowns, misleading caricatures of libertarians, political strategy, and the future of the movement with young people.

Matt Kibbe sits down with Lily Tang Williams, a survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, to discuss her concerns about the direction America is going. Having fled the horrors of Chinese communism, Williams is dismayed to see public health officials openly admiring the Chinese government’s authoritarian approach to disease control. Not only that, but the type of critical race theory being pushed in American schools resembles Chinese propaganda that seeks to divide people into “oppressor” groups and “oppressed” groups. We see Americans reporting each other to the government, as Mao encouraged his citizens to do, and the proposed vaccine passports resemble China’s social credit system. Mao’s policies ended up killing tens of millions of people; it’s vital that we not repeat his mistakes here at home.

Matt Kibbe sits down with comedian Dave Smith, host of the Part of the Problem podcast, to talk about the diverse ways in which we can communicate libertarian ideas to the broader public. Smith uses humor and satire to skewer the absurdity of big government and its apologists. But in a crowd of 2,500 libertarians at PorcFest 2021, it’s possible to find examples of just about every other strategy you can think of. Both Smith and Kibbe stress the importance of building a community of writers, artists, and public speakers, because your ideas are only as good as your ability to communicate them.

Matt Kibbe talks to Martha Bueno, Candidate for Miami Dade County Commissioner and the daughter of Cuban immigrants, about the developing situation in Cuba, where locals are rising up in protest against government oppression. Bueno recounts the ways in which her whole life has been haunted by the specter of Latin American socialism, and explains what the situation is really like for people living in Cuba today. While American politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continue to apologize for socialist policies, people who have actually lived it know that the answer is freedom, not socialism.

In the first of a series of shows filmed at this year's PorcFest, Matt Kibbe sits down with organizers Carla Gericke and Dennis Pratt to discuss this remarkable gathering of liberty lovers from all across the nation. PorcFest is just one part of the larger Free State Project, an effort to gather libertarians and other freedom-minded folk in the state of New Hampshire to influence public policy and build a community. Whether you want to run for office, start a business, or just live near people who share your ideals, the Free State Project hopes to create an island of liberty apart from the increasingly polarized and authoritarian tendencies gripping the rest of the country.

Matt Kibbe sits down with Ted Mitzlaff from Goodwood Brewing and Oliver Dunford from the Pacific Legal Foundation to discuss the ways in which the capricious mandates from Kentucky’s governor have all but destroyed the state’s brewing industry. After struggling to comply with a series of ever-shifting COVID-19 regulations, the brewery has decided to take Governor Andy Beshear to court, challenging his authority to unilaterally wreak devastation on his citizens’ livelihoods. Goodwood’s situation is one out of thousands of similar businesses driven to the point of bankruptcy by draconian lockdown policies.

Matt Kibbe is joined by professor of economics Christopher Coyne to discuss the new book “Tyranny Comes Home.” Coyne’s thesis is that the abuse of military power works like a boomerang, with our nation-building efforts abroad returning to our shores in the form of police militarization, domestic surveillance, and massive civil liberties violations. It’s not actually possible to have a free and open society at home when we insist on acting as the world’s policemen abroad. Tyranny Comes Home: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084JC1DX2/

Matt Kibbe sits down with Blaze Media founder Glenn Beck to talk about the Great Reset or, as Kibbe calls it, COVID socialism. Under the guise of public health, we’ve seen terrifying expansions in government spending, debt, inflation, and outright authoritarianism. In the midst of all this, we hear President Biden admitting that the democratic process itself is inconvenient to the goals he wants to pursue. China is not only being praised for its handling of the pandemic, but for the top-down way it runs its economy. Basic American values like freedom and responsibility have gone from ends in themselves to problems to be overcome by our supposedly enlightened leaders.

Matt Kibbe is joined by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) to talk about where Republicans have strayed from their traditional values. As a high school dropout who turned a bad situation into a phenomenal success story, Rep. Mace stresses the importance of compassion and second chances in politics, crossing party lines to work on issues like ending foreign wars and reforming the criminal justice system. We can create opportunity and lift people out of poverty, but not by mortgaging our children’s futures with irresponsible spending and a one-strike-and-you’re-out prison-industrial complex.

Matt Kibbe talks with Li Schoolland, who grew up in China under Mao Zedong, about the many ways that Chinese communism persecutes individuals and crushes opportunity. As elites in the U.S. increasingly look to China for ideas about economic and social governance, we have to remember that country’s abysmal record of human rights violations and grinding poverty. Not only does communism emphatically not work, but the government knows it doesn’t work, yet clings to it anyway because political power is more important than an improved life for the Chinese people. It’s a road that the U.S. must shun at every opportunity.

Matt Kibbe talks to Gil Dagan, Leadership Outreach Coordinator for Students for Liberty in Israel, about the recent riots and rocket strikes in Jerusalem. In this highly charged atmosphere, Gil attempts to give a balanced take from a libertarian perspective about both the historical roots of the conflict and the situation as it exists today. As extremists on both sides continue to escalate and provoke violence for political reasons, ordinary Israelis and Palestinians generally just want to live their lives in peace and freedom.