Kibbe on Liberty

When people talk about the need for government-sponsored medicine, they’ll often use words like “compassionate” and “humane,” but neither of those terms describe what’s been happening at the National Institutes of Health. Matt Kibbe and Justin Goodman, senior vice president of the White Coat Waste Project, talk about some of the horrific cases of animal cruelty and abuse that the government has be...

Why are we taught that communism and fascism are opposites when both have led to the deaths of millions? Are conservatives for free markets or for corporatism? Is the Left anti-war or pro-war? Matt Kibbe is joined by Verlan and Hyrum Lewis, authors of “The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America,” to explain how the entire concept of the Left-Right political s...

Matt Kibbe talks to Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) about the recent fight over the Speaker of the House election. One of the concessions Kevin McCarthy offered in order to secure the position was the formation of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which is being likened to the Frank Church Committee, designed to investigate the CIA in the 1970s. This new committee w...

Matt Kibbe is joined by Justin Hart, author of “Gone Viral: How COVID Drove the World Insane,” to talk about the wide range of irrational behavior we saw during the pandemic, from shutting down the economy and quarantining the healthy rather than the sick to blindly trusting models that turned out to be grossly wrong and demonizing anyone who didn’t agree with the official narrative. The last thre...

Matt Kibbe gives his analysis of the current election for Speaker of the House taking place in the U.S. Capitol, then is joined by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) for an inside look at the proceedings. For the first time in a hundred years, Congress has been unable to decide on a Speaker after multiple ballots. While insiders assumed that Rep. Kevin McCarthy would be the obvious choice for Speaker, he is hav...

Matt Kibbe is joined by Sienna Mae Heath, host of “Leaving the Left for Liberty,” to talk about their different strategies for communicating ideas of liberty to the public and whether we should focus on a fact-based analysis or a more emotional approach that appeals to people’s intuitions about how the world works. On a practical level, both communication styles are necessary — both separately and...

Matt Kibbe is joined by Hannah Frankman, founder of Rebel Educator, to discuss the country's growing move toward education alternatives. Following massive school closures during the pandemic, many parents have discovered the failures of the government school system. Zoom classes exposed both what children were learning and how they were learning it, and neither turned out to very sensible in a wor...

Matt Kibbe talks to Jennifer Sey, former brand president of Levi’s, about how she was pushed out of the company over her views on COVID lockdowns. In this off-the-cuff conversation, Sey is bursting at the seams to explain how she legged it from the jeans giant rather than button her lip, as it became increasingly clear that some political leaders were in the pocket of Big Pharma, telling pants-on-...

Matt Kibbe is joined by the R Street Institute’s Adam Thierer and Wayne Brough to discuss the state of free speech on the internet. With Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, we are in the middle of a national debate about the tension between censorship and free expression online. On the Right, many people are calling for government to rein in what they perceive as the excesses of Big Tech companies, w...

Matt Kibbe is joined by Jack Hunter, co-founder of Based Politics, to discuss the results of the midterm elections, what we can learn from a lukewarm performance from Republicans, and the state of conservatism in the United States. One clear takeaway is that those Republicans who took a clear stand on liberty issues did better than their less principled counterparts. Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, Mike...

Matt Kibbe is joined by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to discuss the results of the recent midterm election. Many people were expecting Democrats to take a beating after COVID lockdowns, a weak economy, and record inflation, but for the most part, this didn’t happen. There are several explanations for this, including a number of lackluster Republican candidates and failure to sufficiently convince vo...

Matt Kibbe talks with economist Per Bylund about his new book, “How to Think About the Economy: A Primer.” Bylund explains what the economy actually is and how it works in terms that are easy for anyone to understand. Economics is not, as many believe, the study of money or finance, but a way of understanding human decision-making given the constraints of scarce resources. Per also explains the ba...

Matt Kibbe sits down with Will Ruger, president of the American Institute for Economic Research, to discuss the theory of foreign policy realism and how we can apply it to international conflicts like the war in Ukraine. Contrary to what critics claim, realists are not isolationists. They recognize a role for the American military on the world stage. But at the same time, they think that involveme...

Matt Kibbe is joined by comedic magician Doc Dixon to talk about what it was like being an entertainer during the years when live performances were mostly prohibited. As a libertarian, Dixon saw the dangers of lockdowns earlier than most — dangers not only to his ability to earn a living but to the mental health of a nation deprived of human interaction. From there, the discussion swings through a...

Matt Kibbe is joined by Marian Tupy, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of “Superabundance,” to talk about the ways in which the standard of living has dramatically increased over the years. It has become fashionable to assert that things are getting worse, wages have stagnated, and prosperity is a thing of the past, but in reality the opposite is true. If you look at the numbers, as T...

Matt Kibbe is joined by Robert Alt, CEO of the Buckeye Institute, and Eric Flannery, owner of the Big Board, to celebrate the filing of their constitutional challenge against the District of Columbia. After Eric announced that his restaurant would not discriminate against the unvaccinated, the city pulled his liquor license and ultimately shut him down completely. Nine months later, after Eric was...

Matt Kibbe sits down with Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, to discuss the bottom-up revolution sweeping the States, driven by fed-up parents demanding better choices and accountability from failing government schools. While Arizona’s reforms are the new gold standard, and West Virginia is making progress in offering school choice to more students, parents sho...

Matt Kibbe sits down with Carol Roth, author of “The War on Small Business,” to discuss the many ways in which government policy favors huge corporations and makes life hard for the independent business owner. For all the talk about small business being the backbone of the American economy, it would be hard to design a set of policies more hostile to small businesses. Considering everything from C...

Matt Kibbe is joined by Stanford University epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya and John Ioannidis to discuss the interaction between science and health policy. The COVID-19 response was one-sided and dictated from the top down, which not only led to many disastrous policies, but also undermined the public trust in science and medicine as institutions. In the future, what is needed is a more humble a...

Matt Kibbe talks with Gene Epstein, director of the Soho Forum, about the economy, inflation, and whether or not the United States is set to experience a severe recession. Kibbe argues that between lockdowns, rampant spending, and an unwillingness of the Biden administration to take its foot off the gas, we could be in the midst of a perfect storm for economic downturn. Epstein, on the other hand,...

Matt Kibbe sits down with Jenin Younes, litigation counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, to discuss the lawsuit filed by two attorneys general against the federal government over online censorship. There is a mounting body of evidence that the Biden administration pressured social media companies into removing certain content, and the suit alleges that this is a clear violation of the Firs...

Matt Kibbe is joined by Lou Perez, comedian and author of “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore,” to talk about the future of comedy in a world where taking offense has risen to the level of a competitive sport. As comedians abandon college campuses and risk having their social media presence destroyed by saying something controversial, comedy has become the vanguard for free expression and the war again...

Matt Kibbe sits down with Heather Wilson and Jacob Wells, co-founders of GiveSendGo, a crowdfunding website that doesn’t discriminate based on differences in ideology. After several high-profile cases where crowdfunders have blocked campaigns for the Canadian truckers or businesses refusing to comply with vaccine mandates, people are looking for an alternative solution to support companies that ar...

Matt Kibbe sits down with economist David Friedman, one of the original advocates for a stateless society, where all services are provided by markets rather than government. He called this system anarcho-capitalism, and in the nearly fifty years since the publication of his seminal book “The Machinery of Freedom,” his ideas have become extremely influential among the libertarian movement. Friedman...

Matt Kibbe is joined by Kyle Mann, editor in chief of the Babylon Bee, to talk about the ways in which laughter can cut through the constant anxiety that news outlets and political partisans demand we feel at all times. The evidence that this works comes from the overt hostility displayed to the Babylon Bee’s innocent satire by fact-checkers and social media platforms. The mere act of bringing peo...