Here at Free Talk Live, we’re no strangers to taking and holding controversial positions. Obviously, there was that time our founder and currently-political-prisoner Ian Freeman admitted that, when he had been young, he performed sexual acts with an older person, and he used this to support his position that one doesn’t become magically capable of providing informed consent at the age of eighteen and that it can happen earlier.

Let us not forget, either, that lovely Good Friday episode in 2021, when Bonnie and Aria proclaimed the successful “leftist Satanic takeover of Free Talk Live.” While neither of them had thought about the fact that it was Good Friday, we all know this wouldn’t have stopped them anyway, and might have actually just made the situation more extreme. Obviously, Aria alone manages to generate a fair bit of controversy simply by being on the show, although this has definitely lessened in recent years. Still, rarely does a livestream happen or a video get posted that at least one person doesn’t ask about the “redhead man who is mentally ill.”

It says a fair bit about us, I think, that our founder currently being in federal prison probably doesn’t even rank in the Top 10 of Controversial Free Talk Live moments.

So the position of many of the current hosts right now, that we are going to vote for Donald Trump to show our support for his position on commuting the rest of Ross Ulbricht’s sentence, doesn’t really even make a blip on our Controversy Radar, but we just left Porcfest, where we received a number of criticisms and critiques that we would like to address.

Free Talk Live Gone MAGA?

Free Talk Live has definitively not “Gone MAGA.” In fact, Aria is still happy to tell you how much she loathes Donald Trump for being a lying, swamp-dwelling chauvinist–probably not a rapist, but at the very least a disgusting human being. Donald Trump is not a good person. A vote for Donald Trump is in no way an endorsement of his character, his positions, his politics, or his history.

Donald Trump sucks.

Joe Biden also sucks.

Aria has said repeatedly that if you wanted to create a tournament in order to find the two most despicable, entitled, hateful, and evil people in the United States, whatever system you came up with to do this would be more or less identical to the American presidential election system. This became obvious in 2016 when somehow the United States managed to put forward Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton, and then in 2020 miraculously managed to lower the bar even further by giving Americans the luxury of choosing between Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Jo Jorgensen (with no disrespect meant to the Libertarian Party, how do they keep nominating candidates we’ve never heard of on FTL? We aren’t exactly unplugged from the liberty movement…).

Aria and Bonnie, who seem to be the loudest voices on Free Talk Live who advocate voting for Trump in 2024, do not own red MAGA hats and have no Donald Trump swag outside of the stickers they received that make it clear that a vote for Donald Trump is being done to free Ross, and for no other reason. Free Talk Live cannot in good conscience advocate for President Trump or President Biden (or President Anyone right now, except President Vermin Supreme), and the hosts are not doing so. They are voting for Ross Ulbricht, and only Ross Ulbricht.

A Vote For Slightly Less Evil?

Voting for Trump is made ever-so-slightly more palatable by the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, which had gone on for nearly two decades at the time that Trump finally ordered it done. Al Queda immediately swooped back in and took control of Afghanistan, but this was always going to happen, and another two decades of American occupation in the middle east would not have changed that. It was said on Free Talk Live at the time that if one wanted to donate billions of dollars of military equipment to Al Queda, Trump’s actions were the best way of going about that. Still, though, the War in Afghanistan (which should never have been started, as it was never declared) should never have happened, and its end marked a watershed moment in American politics.

Similarly, Trump started no new wars. Trump kept up the bombing campaigns and the drone strikes throughout the Middle East, and Free Talk Live has certainly never suggested that Donald Trump is a peace candidate, but given the ubiquity of war in American history (no less than one hundred and eight wars in barely two centuries of existence), it is fair to say that “not starting a new war” constitutes a huge moment of progress for the United States. A quick glance at American history reveals that the United States absolutely adores war–death is the United States’ largest export by leaps and bounds–and any step away from that is a positive one.

It is also true that Biden has started no new wars, despite flirting with one in Ukraine. It is for this reason that we point out that Joe Biden could take all these libertarian votes away from Donald Trump right now by immediately commuting Ross Ulbricht’s sentence, or going even further and pardoning him. With that one act, the momentum that Trump is building would be stolen, and many of the libertarians who had been planning to vote for Trump to help free Ross Ulbricht would either instead vote for Joe Biden or Chase Oliver.

Lying Liar Who Lies About Lying

Yes, everyone at Free Talk Live knows that Trump, like all politicians, is a liar. There is some chance that Trump is using this promise to commute Ross Ulbricht’s sentence simply to gain votes from libertarians; indeed, it may even be probable. That would be tragic, and Free Talk Live prays that isn’t the case; we want Ross Ulbricht freed–now, preferably–and would do anything to keep Trump held to his promise, but we can’t deny it is a possibility that Trump is simply lying for votes (as political candidates tend to do).

However, let’s analyze this a bit, because it highlights the remarkable disconnect between libertarian theory and political reality.

Libertarian Theory rightly points out that the only kind of person who will ever achieve a position of political power is the one that will lie, cheat, and steal their way to the top, committing countless acts of deceit, fraud, and aggression in order to achieve their goal. Good people don’t generally become politicians, and, when they do, selling out in order to acquire more political power looks to be among the first things they want to do. Very rare is the example like Ron Paul of the U.S. State House of Representatives or Matt Santonastaso, who actually stand by their principles while in office.

Is Trump one of these rare gems?

Absolutely not.

It also doesn’t matter if Donald Trump is lying.

To be clear, it absolutely matters on a human level. Free Talk Live wants to see Ross Ulbricht freed, and Ross Ulbricht remaining in prison would be an abysmal result, and we would be deeply disappointed, angry, and filled with sorrow if Trump did not keep his promise to commute Ross’s sentence.

Our point is that it doesn’t cost you, the voter, anything to vote for Donald Trump, and you have absolutely nothing to lose by voting for him in the hope that he will do as he has promised by freeing Ross Ulbricht. One of these two lying idiots–Mr. Poopy Pants or ol’ Donald “Grab ’em by the pussy” Trump–is going to become the President in 2024, and there is nothing but delusion that permits anyone else to win the election. Chase Oliver isn’t going to win; Vermin Supreme isn’t going to win. While both of these would free Ross from the federal prison system, we know, with more than two centuries of history to back it up, that either Trump or Biden is going to win the election.

Your vote doesn’t matter.

Voting or not voting is not going to change the outcome.

Your vote won’t help Chase Oliver win.

Voting or not voting won’t help Joe Biden lose.

The 2024 election is going to have little-to-no impact on your life, in exactly the same way that previous elections have had no impact on your life. The inflation, the Drug War, the war machine, the bureaucratic leviathan that exists outside of the election apparatus… These things are going to continue unabated regardless of which of these demonic lizards wins the presidential election. Nothing in your life changed when we went from Bush Jr. to Obama, from Obama to Trump, or from Trump to Biden. This is because the American president is simply a figurehead, and the true power in the United States is the extraordinary four hundred, thirty-eight bureaucracies filled with unelected bureaucrats. Don’t forget that Anthony Fauci had been in his bureaucratic position for decades before Covid-19, and, despite not being an elected official, for a while he was the most influential and powerful person in the United States.

While the president could, at least in theory, exercise some amount of control over these bureaucrats, theory was curtailed by law in 1888 with the passage of The Pendleton Act, which Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute has talked about, and which made it difficult (if not impossible) for a president to exercise any real power over these unelected bureaucrats.

Plus, Your Vote Doesn’t Matter

There’s not much more to be said about your vote. Your vote doesn’t matter. The “close” popular vote of 2016 still came down to a difference of about three million votes. With 330,000,000 Americans, this would mean about one percent of the votes may have made some difference to the result.

But it didn’t.

Because the popular vote doesn’t matter either.

Hilary won the popular vote in 2016, and Trump became POTUS anyway.

When libertarians and others criticize Free Talk Live and some of its hosts by suggesting that these votes are achieving anything, they exist in the bizarre realm of political doublethink where our vote both does not matter and yet has a massive impact.

Schrodinger’s vote.

You know. Mitt Romney both was the CEO and was not the CEO of Bane Capital in 1998. That old thing.

Our votes don’t matter, and Free Talk Live knows that. Voting for Trump in order to free Ross does nothing except allow us to show our support in some tiny way for the whirlwind act of freeing Ross Ulbricht from the clutches of the Bureau of Prisons.

Libertarians have nothing to lose by voting for Donald Trump, and likely nothing to gain, since our votes don’t matter anyway. It matters a lot to Ross Ulbricht, though, who is currently being held in a maximum security facility without any computer access for what at present is two life sentences. Ross Ulbricht has no hope to breathe the fresh air outside of an open-air cage except for Donald Trump. Ross Ulbricht right now has one hope that is keeping his cell lit brighter than the fluorescent lights: that his time in prison may be coming to an end, thanks to Donald Trump.

Right now, all Ross has is hope, and Free Talk Live (at least some of its hosts) chooses to share in that hope with him. We can let our hope shine so wondrously that it cannot be ignored; that is, after all, how we ended up with Donald Trump at the Libertarian Party National Convention promising to commute Ross’s sentence in the first place. We have all worked hard for this, and Ross deserves to be free.

Maybe Trump is lying. Maybe he won’t win.

We hope that Trump is being honest here. We hope that Trump will fulfill his promise to commute Ross Ulbricht’s sentence. We hope that libertarians out there haven’t become so jaded that they have abandoned even the hope of freeing Ross Ulbricht as early as January 2025.

Maybe we’re wrong. We’ve been wrong before.

But hope is eternal, and we will always remain creatures of hope, because we think that hope is worth hoping for.

Vote Trump to Free Ross.