I Can't Go Back
I have a fundamentally different view of the world after the last two years that can't be undone
This weekend, I had the opportunity to do a live podcast alongside Clint Russell of Liberty Lockdown and Marc Clair of Lions of Liberty at YAL Revolution in Orlando Florida. The topic: Freedom in YOUR Lifetime. The three of us talked for 45 minutes about how to better yourself, regardless of the state of the government, and how to prepare yourself to be able to make moves to pursue what you want in life. This podcast will be on my channel next week.
It was a great time while I was there. Got to meet some new fans, and some new faces I hadn’t seen in person, and stayed up partying into the early hours of Saturday morning. There were many esteemed speakers attending, including Dave Smith, Ron Paul, Spike Cohen, Justin Amash, but there was one who stuck out: Tulsi Gabbard.
Tulsi gave an amazing speech, and as someone who often criticizes her for talking for an hour without saying anything, I mean that wholeheartedly. It wasn’t an empty culture war-infused pontification of how we are all children of god and must come together as Americans in the spirit of aloha, but instead it was a scathing, concise criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of the situation in Ukraine, and its obvious assault on freedom of speech through encouraging social media purges and installing a “Ministry of Truth.” She was met with standing ovations from the crowd.
Tulsi gets mixed reviews from people in the liberty movement, and rightly so. Aside from her obviously anti-libertarian stances on gun control and economics, she has often made concerning choices when it comes to endorsements and foreign policy positions.
While the mainstream may criticize her for meeting with Assad or suggesting that NATO has been an aggressor in the Ukrainian conflict, libertarians would see a red flag in her eventual support for Democratic nominees Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in 2016 and 2020, her self-proclaimed desire to wage a war on terrorism, and her confusing statements in the past on many foreign policy issues.
Many may know this, but I was an active supporter and campaigned for Tulsi in 2019 and 2020. I had supported Rand Paul in 2016 but never been able to jump on the Trump campaign, and after his veto of ending US involvement with the War in Yemen, bombing Syria and bending over backward for the Saudis with weapons deals, I was intent on getting him out of office. But I had been super unimpressed with every Democratic challenger except for Tulsi.
While I disagreed with her on several domestic issues and wasn’t too hot on some of her past rhetoric surrounding Palestine and Iran, she was leaps and bounds better than Trump. In fact, she was the only one who pointed to the evil atrocities of the Trump administration instead of claiming he was a white supremacist or Russian traitor. She also was willing to touch third rail topics surrounding our alliance with Saudi Arabia, and even pointing to the 28 pages from the 9/11 report that tied Saudi Arabia to the attacks.
One of the first videos I ever made on my channel was a compilation of different conversations and clips where I compared Tulsi Gabbard to Rand Paul, and tried to explain to my libertarian friends why she had my support.
However, despite my enthusiastic support a couple years ago, I have come to realize that it was a stamp in time that may never make sense again. A Republican president who had quasi-libertarian support forced my natural allies to be Independents, Jimmy Dore-type leftists and libertarians who weren’t blinded by Trump’s empty rhetoric. Unconventional times make for unconventional bedfellows.
I got to see her at YAL, the first time since February 2020, and talked to her for a few minutes. Putting my libertarian autistic desires to the side, I didn’t harass her to see if she had really changed her mind on guns or ask her if she’d finally come on my podcast, but instead told her about the Free State Project, my life back in New Hampshire, and then we looked back on the days of the campaign thinking of all the great people we had brought together. I ended the conversation with a hug, telling her that I wish she were in the White House instead of Biden.
Surrounded by my libertarian friends, seeing Tulsi leave the room, I realized what a different person I was now compared to two and a half years ago. Sure, the circumstances were different now, but it would undeniably false for me to say I was the same person. I also fully admitted that I couldn’t go back to believing.
Doing hours of streams with Scott Horton, Ryan Dawson, Adam Fitzgerald, watching documentaries like NUMEC, how Israel Stole the Bomb, A Very Heavy Agenda, and reading the book Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism has left me with a completely different view of what America is than when I had been a sign waving campaign member for Tulsi’s campaign a couple years back.
Knowing what the US Government administers around the world, I care much more about disabling the genocide of the Houthis and Palestinians than I do that people in California and Texas love each other and have a sense of patriotism. In fact, the most American value I hold dear is that of secession and decentralization. For that is in many ways what led to the revolution and break away from England.
Tulsi embodies the best of the blue pilled. She believes that the American government has gone astray, and that we simply need to put better people in charge. She believes that the biggest thing holding us back is the fact that we don’t love each other and need to work together to rebuild the American dream.
I no longer believe this to be true. While I love the geography of this country, and have friends in many different states, I have realized that our attempt at democracy and sense of oneness and patriotism has led us to the most reckless decisions in history such as the Iraq War, “stopping the spread” of Covid, and corporate bank bailouts.
The needs of people in New Hampshire are different than those in California, the cultural preferences of those in South Carolina are different than those of New York, the economy of Ohio is different than that of Hawaii, and that’s completely fine. But I’ll take it a step further. I have realized that people in California do not wish to respect my individual rights, and I have come to terms with it. If they don’t want unvaccinated people to eat in San Francisco diners, I guess there’s nothing I can do about it. All I ask is that I not be forced to contribute or fund such practices, and the same goes for the US Empire.
Unlike Tulsi, I believe the most positive thing about Congress is that they don’t work together, and that partisanship may be our only hope for salvation.
It was a tough pill to swallow for me and I’m still in partial denial
I think I’ve slowly reached more or less the same conclusions. It’s been an interesting ride for sure. Great to see you tacking some writing, I hope to see more!