Kibbe On Liberty

The phrase “going medieval” is used to refer to an extreme and brutal reaction to a problem, a colorful figure of speech that can have some sinister implications. With respect to the COVID-19 pandemic, public health authorities explicitly stated their intentions to go medieval on the virus, something that should have alarmed anyone who knows anything about the state of medicine in the Middle Ages. Matt Kibbe catches up with Jeffrey Tucker, founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, at the 2023 Porcupine Freedom Festival in New Hampshire to talk about the strategic barbarism of the COVID response, a series of plans that have been in the works far longer than most people realize.

Culture is upstream of politics, and while libertarians are great at compiling spreadsheets and writing white papers, they’re a little bit behind when it comes to making compelling art that communicates the benefits of a free society. Pho Chan, who records as the Pholosopher, and producer Jack Lloyd are trying to change that. At the 2023 Porcupine Freedom Festival in New Hampshire, they spoke with Matt Kibbe about how they are using rap music, memes, skits, comics, and other forms of multimedia entertainment to spread their ideas of voluntary cooperation, ethical behavior, and consent culture.

The Deep State, that collection of unelected bureaucracies that run the government and maintain the status quo in spite of what the American people vote for, has been identified as one of the biggest threats to liberty and democracy faced by our country. Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wants to dismantle it. But can it be done? At this year’s annual Porcupine Freedom Festival in New Hampshire, Matt Kibbe caught up with the presidential hopeful, as well as former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin, to find out what the chief executive can actually do to rein in D.C.’s alphabet soup agencies and restore accountability to the American government.

Everyone would like to have access to better, healthier food, but government regulations favor huge factory farms while making it difficult for the thousands of independent farmers across America to reach consumers. Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farm, recently testified at a congressional hearing about letting local producers sell beef and pork products directly to consumers. Government regulators are terrified that loosening regulations on small farmers will result in unsafe food, but there’s every reason to believe that local food is safer and more accountable to the consumers than these large, anonymous producers.

Won’t someone please think of the children? From time immemorial, this has been the battle cry of the moral guardians who want to control what you’re allowed to see, hear, or think. Matt Kibbe talks to Shoshana Weissmann, digital director at the R Street Institute, about the ways in which Congress is attempting to regulate speech online. Under the guise of protecting children, there are plans to build permanent databases of users’ private information, strip the anonymity protections from the internet, and centrally control what kinds of content users are allowed to experience. This is nothing more than an emotional manipulation tactic to claim that anyone who still defends freedom of speech must be against children’s safety, which is obviously not the case.

As progressive politics infect more and more sources of popular entertainment, it's becoming increasingly rare to find themes of independence, freedom, and self-determination in movies and television. Matt Kibbe is joined by Reason Magazine's Eric Boehm, who points out that "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" is an exception to this rule, containing many of the same elements that define the heroes and heroines in the novels of Ayn Rand. The story about a woman pursuing her dreams to become a stand-up comedian celebrates artistic integrity, personal ambition, and not allowing the petty envy or pessimism of others to stand in the way of a life worth living. At a time when the politicians in Congress are arguing about how many trillions of your dollars they are going to spend next, it's all the more important that we take inspiration from those who, fictional or otherwise, are willing to stand on principle and do the right thing, even in difficult circumstances. 

In today’s hypersensitive environment of political correctness, it seems like nobody can even take a joke. We’re told that speech is violence and that certain subjects are off limits for humor. But comedian Lou Perez believes that, now more than ever, we have a responsibility to hold a mirror up to society using the oldest and best form of social criticism: jokes. Perez and Matt Kibbe discuss their new comedy series, “Comedy Is Murder,” produced by Free the People. They take a look at the first two episodes, which tackle the absurdity of gender politics among homicide detectives and question whether gun owners are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to defend their families. Comedy Is Murder: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL36_JCmmBwZo1VpgR9vhdI33iCyOxOIuV

With the recent rash of beer commercials insulting the companies’ own customers in order to score cheap political points, it’s reasonable to ask what’s going on. Traditional economics holds that companies are profit-maximizing entities, so why are Bud Light and Miller Lite still willing to virtue-signal when it comes at the cost of boycotts and plummeting stock prices? Matt Kibbe and Jennifer Sey, former brand president for Levi’s, discuss how the impact of ESG scores has altered the behavior of corporations that now believe that being “on the right side of history” is more important than making good products and serving customers.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives just passed a bill reportedly designed to secure the border, but what they're not telling you is that it also contains a national identification program called E-Verify that employers will be required to use before hiring anyone, even American citizens. Matt Kibbe and Thomas Massie talk about the dark implications of such a program, comparing it to China's social credit system and vaccine passport program that was conceived during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Not only will E-Verify create the infrastructure needed for the government to keep constant tabs on its citizens, but we already know from existing programs how susceptible these systems are to mistakes, meaning that thousands of innocent, law-abiding Americans will be denied employment through clerical errors alone.

America prides itself on being a classless society. We abolished the peer system of England and replaced it with the concept of social mobility and the belief that all men are created equal. But in March 2020, the country was suddenly and forcibly divided into essential and non-essential workers. One class was expected fix pipes and remove garbage while the other watched Netflix and waited around for their groceries to be delivered by virus-ridden serfs. Matt Kibbe talks with Jeffrey Tucker, founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, about the surprising ways in which public health policy transformed the most egalitarian and meritocratic society on the planet into one in which your social status is not determined by your effort, intelligence, or ingenuity, but by the dictates of some cloistered bureaucrat.

In a New York Times interview, Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed that he sleeps just fine, but if he’s at all concerned about the devastating consequences of his actions, he should have a lot of sleepless nights. Matt Kibbe and Sen. Rand Paul discuss the series of terrible decisions Fauci made during his handling of the pandemic and his continued equivocation and evasion under questioning. As ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Paul is demanding answers: Where did the novel coronavirus actually come from? Who funded it? Is gain-of-function research still going on, and could it lead to more man-made viruses being released in the future?

For decades, we’ve been told that only top-down mandates from the government can organize people to protect the environment, but in many cases, the federal government actually does more harm than good. Matt Kibbe talks with Chris Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition about the ways in which free-market innovation is a superior form of environmental protection. Not only do innovators and entrepreneurs — despite being held back by bureaucratic red tape and anti-nuclear bias — have the tools to produce better and cleaner technology, but free markets also create the conditions in which ordinary people can afford to care about the environment in the first place. It’s hard to get people to care about a potential environmental catastrophe in the future if they are struggling to put food on the table today. Building a strong economy and achieving energy independence are two of the best ways to practice responsible ecology.

The world of the arts is one in which creativity and original thinking should be valued above all else. But in fact, it's one of the industries that most enforces conformity and obedience. Matt Kibbe is joined by Clifton Duncan, a classically trained theater and television actor who found this out to his cost. When he refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine, he found his thriving career suddenly grinding to a halt, as managers, agents, and casting directors shunned him for failing to toe the party line. Duncan talks about the culture of the New York theater scene, the inability of free thinkers to speak out, and his new documentary, "Follow the Science," which exposes the muddled thinking, or lack thereof, behind the uniformity of opinion surrounding COVID lockdown policies.

In the midst of yet another American banking crisis, the so-called experts are at a loss to explain how these crises keep happening. But there is an answer, and it’s one that Austrian economists have known for more than a century. Matt Kibbe talks to Peter St. Onge, research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, who explains how our system of fractional reserve banking is a house of cards that is founded on the lie that the same dollar can be in two places at once. Simply put, the banks are so fragile because they are already insolvent—even when things seem to be going well. This issue can be solved, but it requires rethinking the way we bank and getting the government out of the money business.

The war against Big Tech is in full swing. Republicans in Congress are attempting to pass the Restrict Act, a dangerous piece of legislation that would not only allow them to ban TikTok, the China-controlled social media app, but would also give them broad powers to regulate Americans’ speech online and silence dissenting voices. Matt Kibbe is joined by Robby Soave, senior editor at Reason Magazine, to talk about why this is a really, really bad idea. The beauty of the internet is that it has given us access to a multitude of voices and a diversity of opinion absent from the old network news channels. But there are those who want to take all that away in order to enforce a single narrative, whether it be about the policies surrounding COVID-19 or the war in Ukraine. Tech companies restricting speech is certainly a concern, but as we’ve learned from the “Twitter Files,” almost all of the worst examples of online censorship were performed at the urging of the FBI and other government agencies. The last thing de

The housing crash of 2008, leading into the Great Recession, was one of the worst economic crises in the last hundred years. As governments around the world locked down their economies during the COVID-19 pandemic, the stage was set for a similar collapse in the real estate market, yet for the most part, it didn’t happen. Mark Calabria, author of “Shelter from the Storm,” talks with Matt Kibbe about the ways in which some policymakers were able to avoid making the mistakes of their predecessors, and avoid making a bad situation even worse. This points to the importance of having libertarians and those skeptical of big government in positions of authority within the very bureaucracies they would like to eliminate altogether. Shelter from the Storm: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1952223563/

From Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments with sequential photography to the earliest motion pictures, the power of sequential images to tell stories and communicate ideas has long been recognized. The medium of comics, once thought to be fit only for children, has emerged as a rich and vibrant source of creativity and passion among artists and writers. Matt Kibbe is joined by Matt Battaglia, executive producer at Free the People and author of the new book "House on Fire," to talk about art, creativity, and the ways in which comics can both predict the future and respond to the various challenges faced by 21st-century American society. House on Fire: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1736860569/

Cryptocurrency has the potential to liberate millions of people from the government’s money system, but there are some who want to use that very tool for evil instead of good. Matt Kibbe talks to Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) about the possibility of the Federal Reserve creating its own digital currency that would be controlled by the federal government. In addition to being prone to massive inflation, a central bank digital currency would be used to track your every purchase and could be denied to people who behave in ways that the state deems undesirable. In Canada, truckers were locked out of their bank accounts for protesting COVID policy. Imagine if Justin Trudeau had the ability to deactivate the very dollars in their pockets as well.

Election integrity, fairness, and representation are increasingly important issues in the minds of American voters, with several recent presidential election results mired in controversy and an unwillingness to accept the results. One point of contention with many is that the candidate who receives the most votes nationally does not always end up becoming president. Saul Anuzis, senior adviser for National Popular Vote, believes that changing this would result in a system that better represents the desires and interests of the American people. He and Matt Kibbe discuss whether a national popular vote would help to enfranchise more people and reduce pandering to swing states, or whether the current Electoral College system is necessary to protect the interests of rural voters.

The gender ideology movement has become extremely influential (and extremely radical!), but how much do the activists we see on college campuses and teaching elementary schools actually represent transgender people? Matt Kibbe is joined by Sara Higdon, a trans woman and the host of “TRANSform to Freedom,” who explains why she does not believe that gender is fluid, that women can become men, or that biological men should compete in women’s sports. Trans adults should be treated with respect and compassion, but that does not mean that men calling themselves women should automatically and unquestioningly gain access to all female spaces, or that drugs and surgery should be forced on young children. According to Higdon, this extreme ideology is actually a setback for people like her, who just want to live and let live.