Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: The 274th episode of Objectively Speaking, I'm Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. I'm very excited to have my friend Spike Cohen, founder and president of you Are the Power on to talk about how ordinary citizens can push back on to protect their families from government overreach and unjust state state action. So Spike, thank you for joining us.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Thank you for having me on. I've really been looking forward to this.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: So I guess always like to know a little bit of our guests. Our, our audience likes to know our guests origin stories. So tell us yours. And I understand some early health issues changed your priorities.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: They definitely changed my priorities. I don't think they changed my thinking much about things, but they definitely changed my priorities. So I guess whenever anyone asks for my origin story, I probably go way back, way too far. But I very early on my parents taught me the importance of working hard and also the importance of the value of money. They didn't want me to grow up like a typical millennial. So basically they made me get a job when I was 13 and I learned very quickly all of the things they wanted me to learn. But I also learned that I didn't want to work for anyone else. So I started my first business when I was in my late teens, like around the age of 16, 17, I started my first business which was a web design company. And I, the first decade or so after that I was just kind of focused on making money at the expense of other things in life. And so my priorities were very skewed. I would say things like, well, I'll take care of that when I'm older. And turns out you actually do get older and if your priorities don't change, then you're kind of stuck in a Ruth. And that all kind of changed when I, when I, when I was diagnosed with Ms. And that kind of forced me to take not just my health seriously, which I'd never really done, but it also forced me to take my life seriously. Yes, making money is important. Yes, earning an income is important.
But what are the other things that matter to you? And you know, should you continue putting them on, putting them off kind of indefinitely. And I came to the conclusion that I shouldn't be. And so with that I, for, for a while actually stopped doing any kind of work at all other than taking my kind of reprioritizing my health, getting my Ms. Under control. And I've been, my Ms. Has been stable since then, going on eight years now. And, and after that I thought, well, what are the things that actually matter to me? And at the time, what mattered to me most was talking to people about the ideas of freedom and liberty and in contrast, the status quo that we're living under. And that led to me having a podcast, which ultimately led to me running for the Libertarian Party nomination for Vice president, something I did not think I'd actually get. Turns out I did get it.
And then that led to the campaign. And during that, that led to me realizing we had a lot more work to do before we could actually seriously go to people and talk about running for vice president or any high office. And that ultimately led to the creation of you are the power. And that's what we do now.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: So obviously you're very passionate about your views and many, if not most, we share in common. Wondering whether there were any early influences that shaped your later libertarian perspective. Maybe even some Ayn Rand.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: So I will say something. I want to be honest.
I know enough about objectivism and about the, the writings of Ayn Rand and like Atlas Shrugged in the Fountainhead to be able to hold myself somewhat in a conversation about it. But I will say I never really got much into the writers and thinkers of.
I will call it libertarian. I know objectivists don't like to call themselves libertarian, but broadly speaking, libertarian or liberty friendly, individualistic thought.
Mine was very much a, a consequential, I reached it in a consequential way. I was not very politically active and I hadn't really thought much about politics or about political philosophy or ideology in any real way. Again, my focus was just on business and, and, and as I said before to the, to the detriment of literally everything else, I didn't really think a lot about things.
And so when, when 911 happened, I was 19 years old and I was actually a neocon. And it wasn't because I had thought much about that. I had, you know, I reacted in horror just like everyone else did when 911 happened. And I completely bought the government media line, hook, line and sinker. That, you know, there were these terrorists that hated us because we were just so darn free and we needed to basically spread our peaceful loving ways using whatever, whatever violence we needed to, to, to spread them to the rest of the world so that we could fight him over there so we wouldn't have to fight him over here and all that stuff. I, I believed it. I believed it. I had no compelling reason not to believe it. And when people like.
Interestingly enough, one of the earliest influences was someone named Matt Kibbe someone we both know now.
He was involved with a group called Freedom Works at the time. And I had some signed some petition, some conservative or something petition at some point. So he got my email address and I would get his regular emails and he would talk about opposing these things. And I never liked how he talked about it because unlike people on the left who would tell me I should, you know, oppose the war or oppose the Patriot act or oppose these different things, but they said it from a standpoint that I certainly had nothing to do with, but he would say it like, flanking me from my right. And I didn't like that. And then when I started hearing Ron Paul doing the same thing, I definitely didn't like that.
And over time, all their predictions came true. I realized that the war on terror was a lie and that. That the lies they had told us to get into it were lies. And then the more I actually did kind of look into different ideas, the more I kind of settled on libertarianism, that it made sense both from the standpoint of what I was reading and from my own personal standpoint as a business owner, that the more your life is being centrally planned by people who don't know you and know nothing about you and have no vested interest in you doing well and sometimes actually have a vested interest in you doing poorly, so you can be more dependent on them.
The more centrally planned it is by people like that, the worse it's going to be. But that in contrast, the more I can make decisions for myself and you for yourself and everyone else for themselves, it's not going to be perfect, but it's certainly going to be better. And so that. That it was actually kind of going through the process of being a neocon, seeing all of the things I thought were true just completely dashed in front of my face, that led me into libertarianism.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: So can you briefly talk about the process of how you became the Libertarian Party's 2020 vice presidential nominee? And is the process of choosing candidates different within the LP compared to the Republican or Democrat Party?
[00:07:14] Speaker B: Oh, it's wildly different. And I believe historically it's the way they used to choose their nominees as well. I'm not positive of that, but I believe that's what I've been.
So the way the Republicans and Democrats do it, obviously, is they have their primaries in all the different states, and some states have caucuses, but it's the same type of system. The voters are choosing who they want their nominee to be, and then that nominee for president then chooses their running mate, usually right before the. Their convention, where it officially gets rubber stamped what was already voted on in the Libertarian Party, our delegates separately pick our presidential candidate one day of the convention, which is usually held on Memorial Day weekend of that year, of the, of the election year. So they, they picked their presidential nominee, and then the next day they picked their vice presidential nominee. And so when I was running, I was running for the vice presidential nomination.
I ran alongside someone named Vermin supreme, who I'm sure some of you have heard of Vermin. If you haven't, you'll have some fun Googling them after this. But he, but, but we both ran with the understanding that it was very likely that one of us would get picked and the other one would not. So it was not a, you know, you had to pick both of us deal. That's common within the Libertarian Party. People will sometimes run as a proposed running mate ticket, but then you, you know, end up picking one and not the other. And so I, yeah, I, I ran for the nomination. I, as I said before, I had no thought that I'd actually get it. I was just a guy with a podcast who most people had never heard of up until two years prior, maybe a year and a half prior. And, but I had some thoughts about how libertarians were spreading their ideas, and we can, we can get into that in a little bit. We are often cerebral to a fault. We talk about things the way that we got reached, which is not the way most people get reached. And so I just had some ideas about how we could spread libertarianism, and I thought they'd go, okay, yeah, that sounds great. Now here's who we're going to pick for vice president.
Or maybe whoever did get the nomination for president, vice president, might want me to help them with their messaging or something like that.
But a couple things happened during that. One was, I guess I was actually doing a good job selling it, because even, even before COVID hit, I was going to conventions and hearing a lot of people going, oh, well, you're already my VP pick. Now I'm deciding who I want for president. And I thought, well, that's odd. And then the other thing that happened was that Covet happened, which means that the lockdowns happen, which means that a lot of the conventions ended up being online. Well, I'm a podcaster. I have professional lighting. I have professional camera. I have the, I have practice in talking to a camera in a room by myself as though I'm talking to many, many people. And, and many of the other people running for any of the nomination for anything. They did not have those things. They were suddenly having to use their poor lighting in their office or their living room with their, you know, webcam on their laptop that they were just figuring out how to use. And you know, they did not have practice in talking to an empty room and pretending that it's full of people. And so I think that helped me a lot as well. And so yeah, I ended up getting a nomination that I didn't, I don't think anyone thought I was actually going to get it. And then I, and then I somehow did get it. And it was the, and then the lockdowns kind of started lifting shortly after I got the nomination. But which means they started having events across the country. We also started deciding to have events in states that had lockdowns. And there were times I did events that we never really asked for permission or if we did, we never heard back. And so we just did it anyway and thought, well, we'll, we'll ask for, we'll fight that afterwards. And so we, we ended up, I ended up campaigning in roughly 40 states. So I went from just being in this room that I'm in right now running for a nomination that I was pretty sure I'd never get to actually running for vice president and I think visiting more states during that time than the Republican or Democrat candidates did.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: Did the process of running as a Libertarian party candidate change your views about the either two party system, the viability of a third party and the Libertarian Party itself? Did you come out of it saying, wow, this is great, this is the way or you know, we gotta try to influence one of the major parties rather than trying to be an outside force?
[00:11:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't, I don't think I came away thinking either of those things. I definitely, it, it reinforced my understanding that we are in a system that imposes itself as a two party system. I think what I also came to understand is that part of the reason for that imposition is, is that if you give a large enough population multiple choices, they're largely going with, with, with the understanding that one of them has to win. And it's a first pass to post winner takes all system.
People are going to fall into two camps, broadly speaking, they might like an eye another idea better, but they're going to eventually look for the consensus on okay, what's the thing that sounds the seems the most likely to win and I agree with the most so I can fight against the likely thing to win that I agree with less and that's the Whole lesser evil thing. And so I, so yes, there's all the things that, that are put in place, ballot access restrictions, third parties have to spend millions of dollars and countless man hours fighting to even get on the ballot. There are some states where the Republic, most states, the Republican and Democrat parties are automatically on the ballot and anyone else has to spend thousands of dollars, tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. They have to get tens of thousands of signatures on ballot access petitions. They have to fight in court. There's all this nonsense they put in place. So that's there.
There's the, if you're running for president or governor, any large high office, you have to fight to get on in any of the debates or to get any media attention. And if you're running for president, you are not going to get it.
But I think even if those things were in place, I think we'd still have a very big uphill battle because I met so many people and still continue to meet people who will tell me, yeah, what you guys have to say or what you have to say makes the most sense, but you're not going to win, so I'm not going to vote for you. And as frustrating as that is, because I want to, I want to grab them lovingly and gently and say, I can't win if you don't vote for me.
But in their mind, it's not up to them. It's already been decided that I can't win. And so, or that, and not just libertarians, but that if you're not running in the two major parties, you can't win.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:45] Speaker B: We've also seen what happens when you try to, you know, try to influence one of the major parties. You might get some results. But now you're also tying the, the brand of what you believe to someone who 95, 98, 99% of the time they're going to do something that's often the opposite of that, which means you're muddying your brand in the process.
And by brand you're muddying the understanding of what it is that you believe. And so for the average person looking at it, they go, oh, that must be what they support. And it's like, no, we don't support the vast majority of this stuff. So I'm not sure any of those are. I think the biggest thing I walked away understanding was that during the campaign I met all these people that would put all our events together. They would be out there with, you know, doing sign waving and, and fighting to get ballot access or ballot access Petitions and all this stuff. And they were fighting for a goal that was actually attainable.
Not an easy goal, but an attainable one. One we actually had a shot of getting ballot access and some level of attention and be able to have successful events there in their state. And they'd accomplish it often with spending pennies on the dollar, what you would expect that to cost. And they were excited and they'd say, man, I wish there was something we could do year round where we could actually win and not just get together every four years to lose. And then I met these other people that would come to my events and they had all these terrible stories of things that their local governments were doing to them and there was no one helping them. And here I am running from a race that I know I'm not going to win. And so I thought, okay, here are all these people that want to do something that's actually effective, and here are all these people that need our help right now, not some utopian future where libertarians have taken over the world. And I thought, all right, well let's apply our ideas in practice.
And so that's how you were the power starter.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: Well, let's talk about that.
What is the mission of the organization? And also within the broader liberty ecosphere, was there a gap that you felt was not being addressed?
[00:15:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't believe anyone in the liberty sphere is, is doing at scale or, or with the level of, of follow through what we're doing from, from, from, from beginning to end. And so what we do at you were the power is we find people whose lives are being just completely upended by local and state level politicians and bad policy. So, so people that are doing things for bad reasons and are using bad policy to allow them to be able to do it, and then we, we basically fight for them until those officials back off and do the right thing. And largely the way we do that is by telling the stories of these people on social media, letting it naturally go viral, and then directing all of that anger, all that attention about what happened directly to the individuals who are on the officials that are doing this. Not the government or the, this specific agency, but that exact city council member, that exact mayor, that exact government agent that's working on that case, that exact judge that's working on that case, and so forth. And we just keep applying pressure until that, until they back off and do the right thing. And, and I know if someone told me that without me knowing how successful this has been, I'd say that sounds like a really great idea from an 8 year old. You know, why don't we just go tell them not to do that? We've had 100% success rate for the last two and a half years. And since we were founded just over three years ago, we've had well over a 90% success rate. Something like, I think at this point like a 95, 96% success rate.
And while that's an impressive metric, what that actually means is people who were losing their homes to zoning abuse and eminent domain, but they're still in their homes now because the officials backed off. It looks like people that were charged with all sorts of bogus charges where the video footage showed that they didn't do any of these things and that they were being railroaded and the officials backed off and those charges were, were dropped. It looks like families who were being wrongfully accused of abuse when every bit of evidence shows that they weren't abusing their children and their children were being taken from them. Their children are now back home and all those charges have been dropped. And it looks like a lot of officials who thought they could just do this endlessly with no accountability and they've resigned in disgrace across the country. So that's what we do at you are the power. And no, I don't believe within the liberty sphere. There were a lot of people raising awareness, which is a good thing. I actually shouldn't do that. They were raising awareness, which is how people like us are attracted to things because we think of ideas.
Most people aren't like that. They think of people and when you tell them something, they don't say, wow, I'm gonna have to think about that. They say, what do I do? How do I get involved? Or I don't believe you. They either say I don't believe you or how can I help? And so what we do is we give them all the information, we present it in a compelling way and when they say how do I help? We tell them, go to this page and you press one or two clicks and you've just emailed all the people involved and you and thousands of others are going to do that. And then we're going to get these people to back off and do the right thing. And here's the next one you can help with and here's the next one after that. So that's how we, that's where our success has been.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Let's talk about one of your specific programs, which is the family reunification. What is separating these families in the first place and how do you step in to provide help.
[00:18:52] Speaker B: Yeah. So the reason this is happening, I had mentioned before, parents that are being wrongfully accused of abuse and their children being taken from them. The reason for that largely is because the. Something called Title 4E of the Social Security Act. So Title 4E was introduced in the 1970s, I believe. And what, what, what Title 4E does is state child, I'll call them CPS from now on. Child Protective Services, they're called something different in just about every state, but, but they're called Child protective services or CPS.
In the 70s, CPS agencies were not able to get the funding they needed to be able to actually investigate cases of suspected abuse.
And it was just at the time, there was a lot of apathy towards that. There wasn't the idea when someone would hear of a child being abused, the default for a lot of people was, well, maybe that child needed discipline. They didn't think about it the same way that we do now.
They went to the federal government and said, we need more funding.
And so the federal government said, okay, well, Social Security is a slush fund anyway. So what we'll do is we'll take money out of Social Security and we'll give it to the agencies, the state agencies, based on however many abuse cases they had to deal with the year before.
Most people would hear that and go, okay, that makes sense. But most of us realize what that actually means. They just created a quota system.
They just told these agencies, you are going to be subsidized every time you tell us that there was a case of abuse.
And so what's happened over time is not only are the agencies accusing more and more parents with little to no evidence of abuse so that they can get their kids and start getting that money, but they also. Now a lot of the states have started harmonizing their funding to that same standard of saying you're not going to get much state funding either unless you have, you know, unless you get, have a certain number of abuse cases. And so you have states that are some state CPS that are straight up telling their, their social workers, their agents, you're going to find this many abusive abuse cases this quarter or this month, or you're going to find a new job.
And the problem with that is most people, and this is very common with, you know, enforcement quotas, most people that are actually doing whatever the bad thing is, they aren't easy to find. They're usually trying to cover up their tracks at least a little bit. You know, they're not going to, for example, take their kid to a hospital after they've abused them.
But if you have a kid with a connective tissue disorder or a bone disorder or some other kind of chronic health condition that causes bruises and swelling and fractures, you are going to take them to the hospital because you're trying to figure out what's wrong with them or you already know what's wrong with them. You aren't abusing them and you are trying to get them help. But the problem is in these hospital systems and in these medical systems they've been told many of these doctors, so called child abuse pediatricians, they basically become agents of the state or contractors of the state because they are the ones that say, oh well, this could be considered abuse. And so they hand it to the CPS agent who then says, yeah, I guess that can be considered abuse. And, and then they hand it to the police. And the police go, yeah, I guess that could be considered abuse. And so they take their children and arrest them and then they hand it to the family court judge who goes, yeah, I guess that could be abuse. And then they, they, you know, order non reunification. And these parents never see their children again. They hand them off to the foster agencies and the foster agencies go, yeah, that looks like that could be abuse. And so they then put them in a foster family and eventually give them to an adoptive permanent home. It's child trafficking. And and so we actually had multiple.
It started with one family and I kind of tell that story of that family, but it started with one family that came to us with what seemed like an incredulous story. And the more we looked into it, the more we saw not only was there no evidence of abuse, there was copious amounts of evidence of this child having a chronic health condition that caused her fractures. And there were tiny fractures all over her body and bruising all over her body and also other things like a swelling of her head and things like that that have nothing to do with abuse.
Every bit of evidence showed a chronic health condition. And there was also all this evidence that the state probably knew it but just kept railroading them through the process because they get paid every time they accuse a parent of abuse. And if the child gets put in foster care, they get even more money. And the younger that child is, the more money they get. So they go for the youngest kids and if the child ends up getting put in permanent, it ends up being taken permanently from the parents and, and place for adoption and given to an adoptive family, they get even more money. And if that child turns out to have a chronic health condition, they get lots more money for the rest of that child's life. And so they've created a system whereby when these CPS systems see a child with a chronic health condition, instead of thinking, let's get this child the care that they need, they're thinking, cha Ching, this is the maximum amount of money we can get. And all we have to do is tear another family apart. And that's where the family reunification program comes in.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: So next month, I'll be interviewing Darcy Olson. She's the founder of the center for Abused Children. And I think there is a case to be made that parents, adults in the situations you are trying to address, they have some resources, they have a voice. They can turn to a group like yours, they can go to social media, they can talk to the press. Children who are being legitimately abused, they don't have that kind of voice. So how can society prevent abused children from getting lost in the shuffle while also preventing government overreach into family affairs?
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Yeah, so we're actually. We're acting as a voice for them as well. Because what happens is, if you're a CPS agent and you're being told, find as many abuse cases as you can, you're not going to look for the things that are going to require a lot of resources to investigate. You're going to look for how many people with children that. I'm no longer looking for abusive parents. I'm looking for kids with fractures and bruises, and I'm going to find them at the hospital.
And so I'm going to now be spending more and more of my time with cases that I'm pretty sure are not abuse, or at least I have a lot of reason to think they're not abuse. And then I'm railroading someone to. I'm going to spend less time and less resources on the harder cases, which are also the ones that are more likely to be actual cases of abuse and neglect. It's not for nothing that at the same time we're seeing more and more parents being wrongfully accused. We're also seeing more and more children dying from completely preventable things. From drug exposure, from overdose, from physical abuse, from neglect, and everything else. Those things are happening at the same time. This is the problem with government agencies, is that very often they are incentivized to do things the wrong way, because the more the. The worse the problem that they ostensibly exist to deal with, the worse that problem gets, the easier it is for them to push for more funding. So it actually, and this is the problem with government, because we remove all of the feedback mechanisms that exist in the free market that would exist anywhere else, like in the private sector, because we don't allow competition or opting out, then it creates this sort of perverse incentive for everything to get worse. So they can say, hey, listen, we need more money. And you know, we're the only game in town. We see this with poverty, we see this with, with everything, and including with child abuse. So what we say is that the best way to make sure that actual resources are being put into looking for abusive parents, looking for people that are harming their children or neglecting their children, or neglecting or harming someone else's children, the only way that we're going to effectively be able to do that is to stop tying their funding to a metric that's so easily manipulable by.
And removing this, this, this incentive for them to just look for kids with fractures. So we believe that ultimately when we succeed and get more legislation passed at the state level, like we did with Ridges law in Georgia, and hopefully eventually get this title 4 either eliminated or the funding tied to something neutral like the size of the population of that state or something like that, the sooner we do that, the sooner these agencies will be able to. Will actually be focused on looking for what they should have been looking for all along, which is signs of actual abuse. So that's the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is that I don't really trust government to do much of anything, or certainly not much of anything good.
Again, I will say that if we can tie their incentive structure to actually finding cases of abuse, then that's the best chance that we're going to have.
But I think that a lot of the child abuse and a lot of the.
Just a lot of the neglect and a lot of the just poor treatment of children and the objectification of children, and so much of what we're seeing, those are cultural things. So I think often the best thing, society, if I'm speaking broadly, society being a collective collection of individuals living together, the best we can do is to call out those things when we see them and to prioritize the good treatment of children and the. And the prioritization of children in our society.
But from a how do we handle it right now standpoint, best thing we can do is get these CPS agencies get their funding tied to something that doesn't incentivize what they're doing right now.
[00:28:26] Speaker A: In terms of where the rubber hits the road. What was the law that you got passed in Georgia and maybe a little bit about some of the other reforms that you and your people that are working with you are trying to get passed.
[00:28:42] Speaker B: Sure, sure. So Ridge's law was named after Ridge Collins. Ridge Collins is a little boy who was kept from his parents for three years because he had complications.
His mother had complications during his birth which led to him having injuries. These were documented. They knew this, they knew that he had injuries and some temporary health problems that come from having a, A, I guess a problem pregnancy and delivery. There was, there were issues that happened during the pregnancy and during delivery that led to some things that the doctors already knew about defects, which is the, the Division of Family and Children Services in Georgia looked at it and said, yep, looks like abuse to us. And so they, they seized Ridge and those parents, the, the Collins family, they fought for three years to get Ridge back. We got involved towards the tail end and helped to get them back.
And we dealt with many other families and continue to. The Hernandez family, the Tim's family, the Clark family, these are all just in and around Georgia.
There are many more that we've been helping, the Sullivan family, many others across the country. And we can't fix the federal problem yet. We're still getting the numbers and the critical mass. We need to be able to affect things at the federal level. But we had a feeling that we could affect things at the state level. And, and the biggest problems that are state level policy in Georgia are that if you are. Up until Ridges law was introduced, if you were accused of abuse within the child abuse pediatrician system, you didn't know who actually accused you. That doctor never had to actually review your child's medical records, which is how would they diagnose your children with abuse if they never looked at their records, but they didn't actually have to look at their records. And you were no longer allowed to get your kids medical records because your children were temporarily taken from you and became awarded the state. So, you know, how could you ask for a ward of the state's medical records? Well, you've just been accused of abuse and you are facing having your children taken from you forever and being put in prison sometimes for multiple years. The, the Hernandez family was facing up to 40 years in prison, but you're not allowed to access the records that you could use to try to prove that you were innocent. And so that's not guilty until proven innocent. That's guilty and not allowed to prove that you're innocent. And so what Ridges law did it fixed those, those three things. It made it so that if you were accused of abuse, not only are you now able to access your children's medical records, but you're able to go and get a second opinion from a credible, an actual accredited doctor. You can't go to, you know, which doctor or something, but you can go to an actual accredited doctor that's outside of that system and get a second opinion to, to. And if that second opinion says that the child wasn't being abused, well, now they actually have to use that as part of their, their evidence as well. And now you can, There's a lot more, if you're innocent, there's a lot more odds you're not going to have your, you'll get your kids back.
The other thing that happens is now you actually know who's accusing you of abuse. You're not just getting a form letter with like 50 different names on it. And, and that doctor has to legally affirm, legally attest to the fact that they reviewed your child's medical records, which means they now have some skin in the game too. They're no longer just some anonymous person that never even had to look at your kids records. They now have to actually sign a legal document saying, yes, I looked at the child's records. Those two changes would prevent the vast majority of the cases of wrongful taking of children that we've seen. We're pushing to pass even more aggressive things in states like New Hampshire and Florida. In Florida it's called Patterson's Law. In New Hampshire, we're still working with, with lawmakers to actually put together that legislation to fix that. And, but ultimately the, the real fix is going to come when we can reach the critical mass necessary to, to be able to change Title 4e so that the funding isn't tied to how many people you accused of abuse last year. It's tied to, it's either not tied to anything. I mean, show me in the Constitution where it says anything about the federal government getting involved with a local policing action like dealing with child abuse, it's not there. But understanding how, how government works, we would take the lesser evil of at least tying that funding to something neutral like the population of that state or something like that. You know, what does the census say the population is in that state? Okay, here's your block funding for that. That would, that would, that ultimately is going to be what, what removes the incentive for them to do this at scale in the first place?
[00:33:17] Speaker A: All right, well, we've got quite a few audience questions that have been piling up. So we're going to take a little bit of a break and get to some of those.
One from Candice Morena is more about the Libertarian Party in general. She's asking, what are your thoughts on people sacrifice the principles for the sake of expediency? It feels like even among some libertarian types, there were many pro lockdown types. And yeah, definitely one of the things that I had to do during the pandemics and the lockdowns was feeling a bunch of queries from people saying why did the Atlas Society take bailout money? Which of course we did not. It was another objectivist organization which did that. Which seemed to me something that Ayn Rand would roll over in her grave. But yeah, too many, too many really disgraceful examples of libertarian organizations that were either sort of mealy mouthed or actively supported these interventions.
[00:34:24] Speaker B: Yeah. So most times when people compromise their, their values or their stated values, it's some combination of fear and greed. And I think we saw both of that with, with COVID I think we're seeing a lot of that now with the, the hope that, you know, we can get in good with a particular administration or something like that.
But it's the same thing. It's fear and greed. And with COVID I think it was a lot more fear with some greed, and now I think it's a little bit more greed with some fear. But you know, I, I know of libertarians who were, you know, objectively horrified by COVID 19 and fell into the trap of going, we just have to do whatever, we have to do something.
Well, that's what leads to security theater. Because now when you're being told, okay, we are going to do something, you have to stay in your house for the next two weeks or so, but you can still go outside because we'd all die if we had to stay in our house. And you know, all infrastructure shut down for the next two weeks. But, so you can go outside, but you can only go out during approved times and go to the exact same big box stores that everyone else is going to because we've shut everything else down. And you have to stay six feet apart because when you sneeze it goes about 30ft. So the first six feet you're safe for and you're all going to touch the same stuff and then go home and spread the germs. You just got to your closest loved ones. I just described cold and flu season, by the way. The reason cold and flu season is as bad as it is is because it's cold. And so we engage voluntarily, for the most part, in behaviors that. That lead to the spreading of illnesses, staying inside in poorly ventilated homes, more often venturing out only to go where everyone else is going at the exact same time, and then coming home and spreading all those germs to our closest friends and loved ones. And that's what the lockdowns impose. And so someone who normally would use rational thought would hear that and go, well, that sounds stupid. Let's do the opposite of that. Let's go outside more often. Let's continue living our lives. Let's not live in fear. Let's not have a bunch of central planners tell us how to live our lives. Because I. They keep breaking their own rules, which means they're either suicidal or they know this is a scam. Instead, they go, well, they're at least they're doing something.
And that's that mentality that leads to that. And we're seeing it now. We're seeing it. We're seeing people that are justifying the Department of. I almost said Defense. I'm glad. I'm actually glad they renamed it to war. That's act. It's truth in advertising. But the Department of War is dropping bombs on boats that in no way could ever make it to the US and in at least one or two of those cases, there are legitimate claims that those were people that were just out fishing. And you hear people. Yeah, but we got to do something about the drug war.
Yeah, I mean, we probably should end it, but at the very least, I mean. Yeah, or they'll say, we need to do something about this fentanyl crisis.
Yeah, we do. I'm not sure this is it, though. And so we see that a lot. I think a lot of times when people compromise their principles, they're either exposing that those weren't really their principles. They were just kind of cosplaying, or. Or maybe they were just being giant hypocrites, which happens a lot. Or they're just being manipulated by some combination of fear and greed.
I will say that there's also a difference between compromising your principles and making compromises. So, for example, there are people that will get upset when I say, hey, listen, I would prefer at the federal level that we eliminate all funding. All Title 4E and D funding. Get rid of Title 4. Why is Social Security. First of all, why does Social Security even exist? But at the very least, why is it being used for anything other than the retirement fund that it's supposed to be? Let's get rid of it entirely.
But I'm willing to compromise and say, okay, that's probably not going to happen realistically. But what realistically could happen is that it's tied to something that doesn't lead to this. Like these 50 state cottage industries of wrongfully taking children to traffic them for federal money. And there are people that will hear that and go, you're compromising on your principles. You're allowing the federal government to continue giving away this money and you're compromising on Social Security. You shouldn't even support that. No, I'm recognizing reality and saying within this reality, doing this is an actual feasible thing we can do relatively soon. That makes things considerably better and puts us in a better position to fight for even more reforms in the future. So I do believe in some level of, I recognize that in a, in a, in in any real at scale population there's going to be some level of incrementalism and which means there's going to have to be some level of compromise. So I'm willing to make compromises that lead to a better thing.
But I'm not going to compromise my principles in the process. I'm not going to compromise what I actually believe in the process. I'll just compromise on. It's like any negotiation. You fight for this and you get as close to that as you as you can get.
[00:39:03] Speaker A: All right, more of a comment from Jackson Sinclair, but feel free to comment on it if you have any thoughts. He says, take a look at some of your local elections for even things like school board. You will be surprised how few vote and how easily it could be to make a change if you can get people to rally together.
Okay, question from Alan Turner.
I've always heard horror stories about what happens when a child gets thrown into the CPS system. Why is this not talked about at a greater level? Politics, interest, money.
[00:39:43] Speaker B: The first thing is, unless you are willing to tell the full story, I think most people just have a built in bias of saying it can't possibly be that bad. Because if you think, especially if you're a parent, you don't want to believe that there's a very real chance that your child could be taken from you. You could be wrongfully accused. Everyone involved can know that it's actually wrong, including the judge. And you just get railroaded because that's how they get their funding. That's a horrifying thought.
And so it's easier and far, far it allows you to feed into the normalcy bias of saying I'm sure There are some bad actors, and maybe this case is true of this family. But, you know, in re. You know, they're, they're trying to do the right thing and, and most of the time it's, they're doing the right thing and it can't possibly be this bad. And so you've already got that kind of natural, like, the population is already kind of naturally going. I'm sure it's not as bad as you're saying. It's actually worse than we're saying.
But also, like local media, they rely on local government for their stories. They got to come up with 2, 1 to 2 hours of content every single day sometimes in a town of like, you know, 15, 20, 30,000 people. And so they've got to come up with things to talk about. Well, the government will give you a constant stream of lies to talk about.
And so there's often, the local media, often, at least initially, is very critical of us or doesn't want to cover it or we'll cover it from this sort of standpoint of, well, maybe this is true, maybe it's not, but the longer we get involved, the more they realize it's true. So there's just a lot of hurdles to it. Also, I think one of the biggest problems, this is true of libertarians as well.
The people that are the most vocal about this are people that it's happened to.
And so, yes, they want to tell you about their family, but they want to tell you about the system.
And so when someone hears the system is corrupt, they have some combination of going, yeah, well, all systems are corrupt. What am I going to do about it?
And then if they're hearing it from someone who was wrong by the system, they're probably more likely to say, I mean, that's your story. I'm sure there's a, you know, I'm sure I'd like to hear their side about it. Maybe it's not as bad as you're saying.
I've talked with people that have been working in this space for decades who said we've only ever really lost. Every once in a while we'd get a child returned or, or get some charges dropped or whatever. But for the most part, it's just been getting worse and worse, and we're seeing more and more innocent families being roped up in this.
You guys show up and suddenly everything is, you know, falling into place and laws are being changed and kid children are being returned and everything else. I think the reason for our success, not just on, on family reunification, but on things in general is that we invert how we talk about things. We don't start with principle and then move on to policy and then talk about people. We start with people and then talk about the policy that's affecting those people and then talk about the principle behind why this is happening to those people. But we focus on the people. This is why documentaries are so influential, often in a. In a negative way, in affecting policy, because they get people involved in the people. They get them so invested in the story of the people that then they can kind of get them to support whatever policy is behind that. That's. And, and unfortunately, more often than not, that that's manip. That people's desire to help people is manipulated for bad purposes. Michael Moore is a, Is, you know, a champion of that.
We're doing it for getting people to get involved in something that is actually a good thing.
[00:43:10] Speaker A: Well, yes, we are a people that like to tell stories and understand things through stories. It's why Ayn Rand was so influential, because she used her art, her novels, to tell the stories of people and what happens when things go wrong and how to choose to change course. Okay, I'm going to take this course question, then get back to my own. But this is a great question from my modern Galt. What strategies have proven most effective for mobilizing volunteers? Does it differ state by state?
[00:43:46] Speaker B: It doesn't differ state by state. It differs slightly case by case. So like the how we would approach a story of like, family reunification versus a case of like, eminent domain versus a case of, you know, someone being wrongfully charged with something, or a corrupt official or something like that. Another thing we've worked a lot on is cases of charities that out of nowhere, charities that have been helping people for many years, no problem. Everyone loves what they're doing. And then suddenly they're being threatened with arrest for helping people.
And you look into it and it's because the city or the county or whoever's threatening them has just struck some contract deal with an NGO to deal with whatever that issue is. And, and they can't have people out there doing it voluntarily for zero cost to the taxpayer, because then it would look like a scam. And so, so they have to basically muscle the competition out of town and tell them, hey, you're no longer allowed to help people. So we worked on cases like that too.
I'm not sure difference in strategy as much as a difference in the type of story that we're telling. Our strategy is largely the same. We find out about these cases, we thoroughly vet them to make sure that they're real, that they're legit, that we know all the facts, we know everyone involved. We.
And that it's something that we can actually create a movement around. Like if someone reaches out to us and says, hey, I got a speeding ticket and I can prove with my dash cam, I wasn't going 10 miles over the speed limit. I was only going 2 miles over the speed. Well, you. You're right. And you should fight that. And that is a case of injustice. I can't build a movement, you know, a nationwide movement around justice for the. The speeding ticket guy. But if it's a case that has a. Is going to create enough of a visceral response to actually create change for that family and for others, then we work on it from there. We put out our content about that family or about that individual, whoever's being affected, and then we create a page on our website so we don't just tell people about this and get them upset about it. We tell them, here's how you can help. Like we've helped so many others in the past. Here's how you can help. And it's a page on our website that gives all the details about it. But most importantly, in. In just a handful of clicks, they can send emails out to all of the officials involved. Even with all the wording already put there. They can add their own wording or. Or, you know, replace our wording with their own. But if they want to, they can just put their name at the end and send it off. And so that has allowed us to apply tremendous amounts of pressure on these officials, many of whom are often in very, you know, small local governments or. Or in small agencies that, you know, the CPS agent never gets emails. It's the governor, it's the senator, it's the whatever that gets emails. Suddenly they're the one getting the emails. And, yeah, they back off pretty quickly.
[00:46:26] Speaker A: All right. Civil asset forfeiture remains a hot button issue, like the Texas case you highlighted, where a couple had to fight years to recover $41,000 seized without charges. Tell us a little bit about that aspect of your work and whether there are any legislative reforms gaining traction right now that could be promising.
[00:46:50] Speaker B: Yeah, so civil asset forfeiture, it was actually Joe Biden that initially pushed for this in the 1970s. As many policies, it was Joe Biden that was behind it. But what it does is the federal government empowers state themselves as well as state and local law enforcers to Take your property from you without charging you with a crime, necessarily. They can charge you with a crime, but they don't have to. And therefore, without any conviction, they can just say, this looks suspicious. And then they sue your property and your money, and then you have to fight to defend your property and your money. That's why they call it civil asset forfeiture. It's actually fought in. In civil court, which means that the standard of. The burden of proof is lower. And also they can just rope you up indefinitely. And the whole time they can say, well, we don't have to meet the same evidentiary standards as we would in a criminal court. This is a civil case. Even though they're trying to take, in some cases, everything that you have, they're trying to take your money. In the case of that Texas family, they were taking away their ability to be able to earn an income. They were taking their. Their money. And I believe in that case, they were taking their. Their trucks as well. Their. Their business. That might be another case, but, yeah, they take just about everything they can. This was supposed to be a way to go after the big drug lords. But the average civil asset forfeiture case is somewhere between two and $3,000, which means they're going after you. They're not going after drug kingpins for three grand. They're going after someone that looked like they shouldn't have two grand in their pocket. And it's a, It's a horrific thing. It's. It continues to scale up to the point where I think it was in 2014 or 15, the amount of money seized through civil asset forfeiture was more than all the private sector theft combined. And since then, the gap continues to widen between it. It's billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars in money and property that's stolen from by these local, state, and federal agencies.
In terms of policy, it's because there's two ways to approach this. One is at the federal level, which is to create a law to eliminate civil asset forfeiture entirely.
In the meantime, you can get state governments to impose some restrictions. And one example of that is in Maine, where they made some requirements. So basically, there has to be. I believe there has to be an actual conviction. You have to have a criminal conviction before the state can move to take any of your property.
We currently.
There are not any open cases that you are. The power is directly working on that involve civil asset forfeiture right now.
But it is definitely something we kind of. We take the cases that are brought to us with people that are ready for us to take on their case. And that for the most part, at least for right now, has there has not been one that civil asset forfeiture. I've highlighted some examples of cases. That was one that was resolved by Institute for Justice. By the way, huge shout out for to Institute for Justice, who has been at the forefront of getting civil asset forfeiture overturned one case at a time and with the hopes of creating legal precedent that eliminates the ability to even use it in the first place, which is another way to deal with it.
[00:50:08] Speaker A: So Wednesdays are not only my live podcast day, they're also the day when I tape one minute answers to questions submitted by Atlas Society followers on Instagram. And I could see we've got a lot of questions that have been rolling in about Mamdani in New York and what's going to happen. And you know, the government run grocery stores. Should this one drop out and we just hope for the best.
I'm kind of more aligned with an Atlas Drug scenario here that we kind of hope for the worst or at least hope for consequences and teachable moments. What are your views?
[00:50:50] Speaker B: The problem with hoping for comp. I mean, yes, there are going to be consequences and teachable moments. You don't even have to hope for them. They're going to happen because anytime that statism at scale is implemented, the consequences of it happen.
The problem is that, and we saw this with COVID there was a hope, I certainly was one of them, that seeing the consequences of, of a government that could tell you whether or not to leave your house would lead to people going, wow, I don't think anyone should have that kind of power.
Un. And it did for some people. Unfortunately for me, for more people, it led to them going, wow, I want to make sure that whoever has that power is someone I like.
And that's not how they say it. What they say is we need revenge for the COVID regime. If you try to remind them who was actually president during the COVID regime, they don't. That they don't want revenge on that. They want revenge on the parts of the government they didn't like from the COVID regime. But they also have no problem with making government bigger, with giving it even more power. And they didn't learn their lessons. And so I've. I've kind of realized that unless someone is understanding what's actually happening, they don't get the lesson. They get the pain and they get the anger. But if they're not learning what actually happened Then all they're learning is anger and pain, and they want to inflict it on someone else. It's like, you know, they tell you if you have a dog that you know that, that, you know, has an accident in the house or, or does something wrong, you don't beat them or, or rub their nose in it or whatever, because they have no idea what's happening. They don't, they don't understand that you're saying this is happening because of this. They don't understand. They're not learning the lesson.
[00:52:33] Speaker A: They.
[00:52:33] Speaker B: They're just having pain inflicted on them and they might fear bite you one day. And so I think the way I tend to look at these things is it's more important to me that people understand the consequences of these things than for them to have to experience pain in any way. The pain's going to come.
My job is to try to have them understand why that pain's happening and how we can actually resolve it instead of just wanting revenge endlessly. Because that just leads to the government growing. When the government convince, can convince the population to basically voluntary break itself into two warring tribes that each demand that the government inflict maximum pain on the other half, the government decides to grant you both your wishes and inflict pain on both of you, and that's what ends up happening.
[00:53:15] Speaker A: So regarding immigration and ICE actions, you criticized a recent horrific incident in Chicago where agents detained a woman with legal status in, in front of her house or her school, calling it reminiscent of the War on Terror's worst overreaches. So curious, from your libertarian viewpoint, how should borders be managed without violating individual liberties?
[00:53:42] Speaker B: Well, for the first hundred years that the US existed, there was a recognition that the question of who should be allowed in an area according to the Constitution under, under the 10th Amendment should be left to the states and the people. Because there's nothing in the Constitution about migration or immigration or, you know, economic population changes or anything like that. There's talk about naturalization, which is the process of when someone becomes a citizen or when someone who's already here wants to become a citizen. Obviously that falls under the, the wheelhouse of the federal government and also about, like, invasion in terms of, like, actual armies that are coming and things like that that are coming to invade or to attack. But it doesn't talk about immigration. It doesn't talk about people coming here. And in fact, in the Declaration of Independence, one of the grievances that the founders had against the Crown was that they were greatly restricting trade and migration of people into the Colonies.
So it was actually one of the reasons that they fought was that the government was restricting who could come there and how many could come there. So for the first hundred years, that worked pretty well.
You could come here. The immigration process was. You could come here.
And then in the, in the late 19th century, Democrat labor unionists successfully took over the federal government and the, and the, and the Supreme Court. And they were able to introduce the first restrictions on migration, which I believe was on Chinese women was. That was the first migration restriction. But whatever it was, they were able to skew the Constitution because they've been challenged in the past. And the courts had always said, yeah, there's nothing in there, that this is to be left to the states, not to the federal government. And the, the courts used a very skewed interpretation of commerce in the commerce clause to say, oh, yeah, see, if you look at the commerce clause, see, they didn't use invasion because that would have been laughed out of court. They used the commerce clause and said, well, it says commerce and people coming here as a form of commerce. So, yeah, the federal government can control that. It is that same. And that was the first time they ever did that. Skewed the commerce clause. It is that same commerce clause skewing that has led to gun control, the Obamacare mandate, all. Pretty much every terrible thing the federal government does that there's zero mention of it in the Constitution. It is because of a skewed interpretation of the commerce clause. Now many people will hear that and go, yeah, yeah, but, you know, we live in the here and now. And so how do we deal with that? I think the way that you deal with migration is you look at the reason that people are coming here.
There are people that are coming here to build a better life. Those who are coming to build a better life and to participate in the American experiment and to raise their children in that and to, you know, become a part of this.
Okay, good. That's. Yeah, that's like most of us descend from people who did that. So that's a good thing. We wouldn't be here if that didn't happen. I, I certainly wouldn't be here on either side of my family would have never come here if they hadn't had the opportunity to do that. People that are coming to get free stuff, well, that's a reason to get rid of the welfare state. Or at the very least, again, this is me talking about legitimate compromise. Say that you have to be a citizen to, to. To be able to get any of this access to Any of these things, possibly including public school. I actually think we should be, I don't think the government should be involved in education, but I think if, if there are people coming for a safety net, okay, we'll remove the safety net for everyone or at least for them then. Now the people that are coming are coming for, for good reason. If there are people that are coming here for, you know, for criminal aims, they're coming here to, you know, get involved in gang activity and things like that. Yeah, you should absolutely round those people up and deport them. They should be removed. They should be punished. Whatever, whatever they've done here or, or, or rounded up. If you can actually prove that they're involved in that type of thing and they should be removed. So I think if there was a targeted focus on things like that instead of, for example, you know, the, the ICE recently shut down a legally operated Hyundai plant and it led to billions of dollars being rescinded because they, they, they got a tip that illegal activity was happening there. Well, there wasn't. And so they, they go into a Hyundai plant. All the people there have whatever required visas or whatever else. That's all nonsense. But that's what happens when you have quota systems. When you say, I'm going to remove X number of illegals a year.
All right, well, that you just told a bunch of agents either find a certain number of illegals or find a new job. And so they're just going to haphazardly go around and round up whoever they can. I would instead say let's, let's get. Oh, and another thing, the federal government, so many people that are fleeing other countries, they're fleeing violence that was either directly created by the federal government or, or through a proxy like a drug cartel that's working with the DEA or a terrorist group that's working with the CIA and the State Department.
They've created violence that's making people flee that violence as well. So I think if we stop doing nation building and the war on drugs and the war on terror, there'd be a lot fewer people fleeing their homelands anyway. Most people stay where they're comfortable. A perfect example of this in the US There are some area codes whose average income in that area code or zip code is a hundred times higher than in other zip codes in the country. And if you're a US citizen, you literally are legally allowed to go anywhere you want in this country. Like, you can just, you can go. If you live in one of the poor zip codes, you can just move to that zip code. But if you tell someone that lives in a poor zip code that they go, well, I don't know the people there and you know, I have what I have here and I'll just, I'll try to do better here. That's how most people think. Most people want to actually just try to do better where they are. And the idea of going over somewhere else and, and even if it's way wealthier over there, I don't want to go. I don't even know the people over there. I don't want to have to move. There's so much danger going there. People are desperate if they're doing that.
[00:59:30] Speaker A: Yes. Great. Spike, I hate to cut you off, but we actually have reached the end of. I'm sorry.
[00:59:37] Speaker B: It's such a long thing to talk about. I apologize.
[00:59:39] Speaker A: Yeah. But I would, I don't want to end the show without you're telling people how they can get involved with you are the power and how they can help and where we can follow your work.
[00:59:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Go to you are the power.net and get involved. Today.
You can follow us on social media at yatpofficial. You can follow me on social media. Just look for Spike Cohen. I'm as you, as you saw, I'm pretty long winded and loud. You'll find me pretty easily. But if you want to get directly involved in what we're doing at you were the power, go to you are the power dot net. We'd love to have you be a part of it.
[01:00:10] Speaker A: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for the work that you're doing and for your continued advocacy for our shared ideals.
And thanks to all of you who joined us and asked such great questions. I hope you will join me again next week when Professor Wilfred Maclay joins us to talk about his acclaimed book Land of Hope, An Invitation to the Great American Story, along with his new book, Jewish Roots of American Liberty, the Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story.
We'll see you then.
