Dire Report

Bret Weinstein announced a plan to turn the Libertarian Party into the American Liberty Party: not a third party, but a second party built on ballot access the Libertarians already have. BRET: And the idea is to take over the Libertarian Party and to rebrand it the American Liberty Party. So you wanna put up the American Liberty Party site so people can see what we're talking about. Now you will see that the slogan here, it says the new home for the America First movement. And I wanna point out that America First is a fraught term. What we mean here is America First in the sort of most obvious sense of the term. American policy should always be in the interests of the American people. There's no excuse for the American government making policy that isn't in the interests of the public. Now, lots of things can be in the interest of the public. Can foreign aid ever be in the interests of the American public? Of course it can. Of course, yes. Immigration, of course. But we have to have a discussion in which the American people's interests are absolutely overriding and we don't have that. At the moment what we have is governmental policy, which is at best indifferent to the wellbeing of the American public. So we are very interested in anybody, any patriotic American who is in line with the values expressed in our constitution, founding ethos of the country. If you want the country to function of those values, then this is the party for you. If you want to use America as a weapon, if you want it to be some kind of ethnostate for certain people, no, that is not what this movement is at all. This is about, frankly, a division that comes down to us and them. I hate to talk in us and them terms, but the us is everybody who wants a system that is fair, that provides equal protection under the law, that provides access to the market for everyone. HEATHER: The us could be nearly everyone. BRET: It should be everyone. It's everybody worth talking to. And the them is anybody who decides that they want something else, that they want special advantages for their people or whatever, or they want to use America as a weapon in some fight that is not our fight. So we're talking about effectively a second party, we're talking about an American effort, but one that is resolutely in favor of either rescuing the West or reinventing it.