Does Covid Prove People Don't Want Liberty?

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One point among the post-libertarian crowd who oppose Dave Smith running for president to spread the message of liberty is that people don't want liberty. They say the people have already heard the message of liberty and rejected it. That is evidentially clear from 2020 and the acceptance of the Covid lockdowns and mandates—and the continued acceptance of those restrictions on liberty through 2021.

I agree that is true to some degree. There are people—many people—who do not want liberty. For whom no amount of spreading the message will persuade. However, there are also people—many people—who can be persuaded by Dave Smith or similar voices of liberty. Those people have simply not heard the message yet.

At one time I was one such person. I had already been trending toward libertarianism before discovering Dave Smith, though I was a more centrist minarchist libertarian. It wasn't until discovering Dave's podcast (and Michael Malice's) that I became fully red-pilled into anarcho-capitalism and hating the state. I don't know if I would have gotten there if I had not heard their podcasts.

It was Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Jonathan Haidt before them who served my first red-pills and woke me up from my default progressive liberal democrat programming. (Plus at the same time discovering Austrian economics through the Bitcoin rabbit hole.) If I hadn't heard Peterson and Haidt, I may not have discovered Malice, Smith, Mises, Rothbard, and Moldbug. I may have believed "the narrative" and happily accepted the Covid regime's mandates.

The point is, despite how the masses reacted to Covid, this does not mean they will all reject liberty forever. You have to keep in mind that the American (and global) public were under one of the largest mass media propaganda campaigns in human history, aimed at convincing people that Covid was a once-in-a-lifetime dangerous life-threatening pandemic to people of all ages and health levels. Even I fell for it at first, and was willing to stay home "two weeks to flatten the curve."

Thankfully I had already been following people like Tom Woods who were able to cut through the Covid hysteria propaganda. And Tom gained a much larger (and well-deserved) audience from his efforts at doing that. But he is only one podcaster, and so many millions of Americans have still not seen or heard his data contradicting the Covid regime. Nor have they heard anything resembling the greater libertarian philosophy. There are millions of Americans who are hopeless and will remain blue-pilled forever, but there are also millions of others who can be red-pilled if someone would just be their Morpheus.

There's a reason the Cathedral spends so much time, money, and effort on their propaganda campaigns to manufacture public opinion—because public opinion dictates what the state can and cannot do. So if libertarians want a free society, we need to provide better propaganda—to change public opinion to want to be free. Convince them (with truth) that personal freedom is in their personal interest.

We can never convince them all, but we can convince a LOT more. If most of the public are NPCs, then they will desire liberty if enough of the cultural elites they look up to desire liberty. We are ultimately in a numbers game—not a purely numbers game where we need a simple 51% majority—but we need more than we currently have. And Dave Smith intends to bring in more people to the cause of liberty.

The Mises Caucus and post-libertarians ultimately want the same thing, and they agree about all the problems—they only disagree about the solution to get to that end game of freedom. I don't know the best strategy, and I don't think anyone does, which is why we need to try them all. Dave Smith's solution differs wildly from a neoreactionary like Curtis Yarvin who has influenced the post-libertarians (and myself). But Dave Smith's current plan is not in conflict with Yarvin's (yet) because his plan is not in the solution stage yet. His run for president is not a solution—it is still in the pre-solution stage of making more people aware of the problems that we all agree on.

Before a solution can have any chance of succeeding, more people need to become aware of the problems, otherwise that solution will have no chance of being achieved. To get anywhere near a free society, we need more people on the side of liberty. We do not have enough yet. And we probably still won't have enough if Dave runs for president in 2024. But we will have more. And more people in favor of liberty is always good.

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