I hated those conservative bastards.
Dagny Eames (Libertarian Activist)
Eames, who denies being named after the Ayn Rand character (“It’s a family name”), understands how important an ally the libertarian community was. Initially suspicious of the constitutional conservatives, particularly of their perceived social conservatism, libertarians soon realized the deadly threat to liberty posed by the progressives—the NSA scandal shifted the entire paradigm. Constitutional conservatives, as a group, tended to avoid social issues, focusing on what united them. However, many constitutional conservatives were active in the pro-life and traditional marriage movements.
With the understanding that working together did not mean agreeing on every issue, the libertarians joined the fight. The campaign for federal decriminalization of marijuana—opposed by the Clinton administration but supported (generally) by constitutional conservatives who saw the massive assault on liberty posed by the drug war—led to huge losses for the Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections as a majority of young people found themselves voting Republican.
Two things initially kept me and many other libertarians out of the constitutional conservative movement. First, there was the Republican alliance with big, corporatist business, which we saw as undercutting true free enterprise. That changed pretty quickly as the constitutional conservatives started seeing how they were being played by rent-seekers. So that issue was relatively easy to deal with. What wasn’t so easy was dealing with the social issues.
There were a lot of libertarians who were very concerned with what they saw as social conservatism running amok. They kind of went in two categories. There was one kind of libertarian that was pretty overwrought about it. They really thought that if the constitutional conservatives got into power, you would see things like bans on premarital sex, stoning for adultery, and detention camps for gays. Some of these people were crazy, some were stupid, and others were simply liberals who called themselves libertarians. It was hard to deal with these folks because they had already made up their minds—in their version of libertarianism, the most important things were these social issues and the rest of the liberty agenda simply didn’t matter much to them.
They were never going to be convinced to fight the liberals, ever. The liberals could limit free speech, attack religion, expand government exponentially, and these libertarians would remain convinced that the biggest threat to liberty was the chance that constitutional conservatives might gain power and somehow outlaw blow jobs.
They marginalized themselves. By about 2022, they were the only ones left in the Libertarian Party since the rest of us libertarians had left because we knew we had to stop Clinton, and the only practical way to do it was an alliance with the constitutional conservatives. That meant the Republican Party. When the conservatives did retake power and then didn’t ban sex and fun, as it were, then these people really had nothing left to offer to justify themselves as a movement. There’s still a Libertarian Party out there. It’s more of a name than anything else. The guy who runs it does it out of his apartment in Bangor, Maine. His name is Larry something—if I’m not mistaken, he ran for president last time and got about 12,000 votes out of 100 million or so cast.
But I don’t want to seem like I am making light of the differences we had with social conservatives. Social issues were important to me, and we had real disagreements. Gay rights, gay marriage—these were important to me on liberty grounds, and people who felt like I did were definitely in the minority in the constitutional conservative movement. The drug war too. I was also pro-choice on abortion. But the social issues were not the only consideration to libertarians like me. They were just one part of the big picture. Our liberty was under attack.
What I and many other libertarians came to understand was that these issues were not front and center for the constitutional conservatives. That’s not to say no one cared about them, but with all the other terrible things the liberals were doing to the country, as things got worse, these issues faded more and more into the background.
There was a real libertarian core in the Tea Party at the beginning, and that stayed true as the movement grew and matured. It was always very, very civil rights focused. Guns, for instance—it was hugely focused on gun rights, which most of us libertarians felt was vital.
When the NSA intercept news broke, they were very concerned with that. They understood the danger of government oppression because they were suffering from it. The Obama administration was using the Internal Revenue Service to harass and intimidate opposition groups on the right. As the Clinton administration attacked free speech rights, they were very pissed off, and that was a huge area of common ground.
In fact, we had so much in common that our disagreements, while real, simply weren’t that important. Now, when we took power, there were some conflicts. We disagreed, had a vote, and moved forward in dismantling the Leviathan.
However, I think a lot of the issues resolved themselves. By the mid-twenties, gay marriage was generally accepted by pretty much everyone. It had been going on without any real consequences for 10 to 20 years by then, so it was a no-brainer to formalize it at the federal level.
The drug issue was interesting because it was the social conservatives who pushed letting up on it as a moral issue, citing the damage it was doing to families and communities. So there, we actually found ourselves standing with the people who were supposed to be our opponents.
The constitutional conservatives turned out not to be the people the media portrayed. They sure weren’t prudes. Let me tell you, the constitutional conservatives were not about to ban sex. They liked sex—they are still the most fertile demographic group in the United States! And if you think they were some sort of antisex zealots in their private life, you should have been with me at some of the CPAC conferences in the 2010s!
Ted Jindal (Technology Consultant)
A second-generation American (his parents were immigrants from Mumbai), Ted Jindal was initially confused about where he fell on the political spectrum. But once he found his place, he saw that he and the establishment had much to learn about employing technology effectively.
I was a tech head, but I was very at home with the conservatives. I didn’t start out really that conservative, but the more I saw of how the liberals had stacked the deck against young people and how real conservatives embraced creativity, I knew where I belonged. And they appreciated my skills.
I started working on ways to link conservatives using social media. The tough thing was that it was so decentralized that it was tough figuring out what resources could be used by the most folks. See, everyone was doing something different, so they needed different things. Some were running for office, others were activists on the outside, others were writing or making videos. The technology was the easy part—figuring out what was needed by a bunch of amateurs was hard.
Puff (Hemp Advocate and Activist)
Puff—no, not his birth name—is an enthusiastic advocate of living what he refers to as “a bong-focused lifestyle.” The herb-friendly activist’s face is famous from the “Like, Jail Would Harsh My Buzz” street art campaign for marijuana decriminalization, and in person he is exactly as one might expect.
I met him in his garden, surrounded by towering marijuana stalks, where he relaxed (after a bowl full of “tasty premium”) and discussed how conservative support for decriminalization helped build bridges with communities not generally known for their openness to traditional conservative ideas.