The Vanishing Voice of Liberty: Where Did the Libertarians Go?

We plunge headfirst into the alarming surge of authoritarianism gripping society, pointedly highlighting the conspicuous silence of self-proclaimed libertarians in the face of blatant governmental overreach. As federal troops patrol urban communities, we question the deafening quiet from those who ostensibly champion individual freedoms and civil liberties. It is perplexing to see libertarian support for figures like Donald Trump, whose policies have often expanded, rather than curtailed, governmental powers. It is argued that libertarians have seemingly abandoned their core principles in favor of populist sentiments, failing to uphold the traditional pillars of liberty amidst shifting political alliances.

We also dissect the controversial figure of Representative Jim Jordan, scrutinizing his role in defending individuals with deeply troubling pasts, including the recently spotlighted case of Ghislaine Maxwell. We expose the profound irony of Jordan advocating for a known sex trafficker, especially given his own historical allegations of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse during his tenure as a wrestling coach. This stark juxtaposition not only dismantles the credibility of his narrative but also ignites serious questions about accountability and integrity within the highest echelons of political discourse.

Further unsettling revelations emerge with the spotlight on LifeWise Academy, a Christian nationalist initiative that has amassed a staggering $35 million in donations. The operation is unflinchingly likened to a pyramid scheme, where local communities bear the brunt while the organization reaps substantial profits from their efforts.

Full Show Notes & Links Used

Chapters

• 1:00 Rep. Gym Jordan Covers Up More Sex Abuse
• 7:31 LifeWise Academy is a pyramid scheme
• 16:00 Where the hell are the Libertarians?

Transcript

[0:05] As we barrel down the road toward dictatorship and a loss of our basic civil rights, with jackbooted thugs on the street, the people clamor, where the hell are the libertarians?

[0:17] Then we ask, why did Trump want Representative Jim Jordan from Ohio to defend another pedophile? And finally, we ask, why is LifeWise Academy sitting on $35 million in donations while many local efforts struggle to pay for their product? This is Secular Left with Doug Berger, an independent, religion-free, progressive viewpoint on topics of the day.

[0:44] Music.

[0:59] So i want to get your response to those democrats making these claims congressman and then and then also the second part of the question just will the committee ultimately make these records you've received public? Well, we'll see. What I know is they didn't release parts of the transcript. They released the whole transcript. And, you know, so you can go through the whole thing. And of course, this confirms what we all knew. If the Democrats, if President Trump had done something wrong, you don't think the Democrats would have released that? I mean, it was their Justice Department who handled all this. You don't think the Garland Justice Department and the Chris Ray FBI would have released it for me? We knew President Trump didn't do anything wrong here. He said that repeatedly. This transcript is the whole transcript. And it confirms that. So I think this is there's there's nothing there, it seems, based on what. And yes, that was Representative Jim Jordan from Ohio in one of the funniest, one of the funniest interviews I've seen that he's done this year. And why is it funny? Well, because the topic that he's talked about is Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted pedophile sex trafficker who...

[2:16] The MAGA people really, really love right now because they believe that she'll say that Trump had nothing to do with whatever Jeffrey Epstein was doing. And but it's just so ironic. It's just so choice that they would choose Jim Jordan to speak on behalf of the Trump administration about Maxwell's interview that she did with the Department of Justice a couple of weeks ago. That's the transcript that he's talking about. The transcript that was released was transcripts of the audio of Trump's former personal lawyer interviewing her about what she knew about Trump. And, of course, she played it off. She said Trump had nothing to do with anything. I didn't see him doing anything inappropriate.

[3:10] But why is that choice? Well, because Jim Jordan, while he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State University in the 1980s, knew about and did nothing about a sex abuser by the name of Dr. Strauss, who molested and sexually abused several members of the wrestling team back then. There's some speculation that he had been doing it since the mid-70s when he first started working at Ohio State through the 80s. And Jim Jordan as a coach, the wrestling team knew about it and claimed to not know about it.

[3:51] On many occasions, he's claimed not to know about it, but he had to know about it. And in fact, one of his former players, team members, said in a hearing, a legislative hearing in Ohio, that Jordan had called him incessantly to get him not to keep talking about it and to hide it and to cover it up. So I think it's just choice that an enabler and cover-up of sexual abuse of people, vulnerable people, would speak about what a pedophile said. And not only a convicted pedophile, but she was also charged with perjury. She lied on the stand and she was convicted of perjury.

[4:45] And so you expect her to be truthful now, right?

[4:51] And the other thing, the other part, too, is if you listen to the exchange, he's trying to equate the transcript with the Epstein files themselves, which is a totally separate issue. And he talks about how the Democrats had these files and they didn't release them. Well, Epstein was arrested and convicted in the 2000s during, I'm sorry, during the George W. Bush era. Then he was arrested on federal charges in 2019 while Trump was still president. And so all of the investigating files that they had was collected during Trump's administration. Why didn't the Trump administration release them?

[5:40] Especially after Epstein died, when he died in his jail cell of mysterious circumstances. And as the judge said, the current Department of Justice went to a judge wanting to release the grand jury testimony instead of the files. And the judge told them point blank, you guys have the power to release these files completely. Completely.

[6:09] And the reason why they weren't released during the Biden administration is they didn't need to be released during the Biden administration. They weren't investigating anybody else. You know, it's the fact that Trump is just so steadfast in claiming that he did nothing wrong, that he was a perfect gentleman. That is what's causing all of this, this ebb and flow, this consternation about it. It's of his own doing. You know, everybody knows he's in the file. Everybody knows he was his pal, Epstein's pal. They were friends for 10 years. You know, we know that Epstein, according to Trump, stole some young women from Mar-a-Lago, including the woman that took her own life. And I just saw an article today that her autobiography is going to be released soon. And so that's all his own doing. But to have Jim Jordan talk about it, oh my goodness, it just couldn't get any better. It was actually like watching a Saturday Night Live sketch to me. Why don't they release them? They need to release the Epstein files.

[7:21] Music.

[7:31] If you're a regular follower of this podcast, you know that I do not care for LifeWise Academy. LifeWise Academy is a Christian nationalist group that wants to force kids in public schools to go to Bible class, to learn the Bible. They have been pretty clear about it, pretty straightforward, that they want to indoctrinate children before the age of 14 so that they go to church as adults. They are very clear that they want to indoctrinate children, public school children, in the Southern Baptist version of Christianity. They've been very clear about that.

[8:13] But they had a report on a local TV station, NBC4, in Columbus recently, that pretty much focused on LifeWise and some of their more shady practices. And I just want to briefly talk about one of them. Now, a lot of my friends that I work with on this issue, they consider LifeWise to be like a, what they call a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme. Basically, how that works, it's like Amway. If anybody's familiar with Amway, it's another extreme Christian group or run by the extreme Christian family. And basically what that is, is you have this product and you try to recruit people to come in. And in order to do that, they pay some kind of money to get in.

[9:09] And so the people that are at the top of the pyramid, they get all the funding, all the money. And the people at the bottom don't unless they bring in new people. So they're not on the bottom. And it's this perpetual thing. And that's why they call it a pyramid scheme. And LifeWise is similar to that in that they require local groups. If you want to have a LifeWise program, let's say, in your local elementary school, you would have to show interest in that to set that up.

[9:46] And then you get together with some like-minded individuals that also want to do that. And you get a steering committee going. And you need to raise money because it's not an all-volunteer thing. It costs money for the curriculum. It costs money for insurance. It costs money to pay the teachers because they really encourage you to pay the teachers. It costs money for transportation because, again, you have to take these children off campus. to go to these Bible classes. And so the local group is responsible for fundraising money to pay for all this stuff. I've seen some notes. I think even Joel Penton, the founder of LifeWise, says that it can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 a year to run a program, just one program, in a school district. And so in 2025, they charge basically $30 a student to provide services from the central office. They also charge like a 9% administration fee.

[10:59] So it ramps up depending on how many kids you have. And then the other thing too is, if you don't have enough people involved or you don't raise enough money, the LifeWise National Group can come in and take it away from you. They can shut it down. And if they shut it down, they keep all of the money that you've raised. You can't return it to people. And there's been a couple of school districts here in Ohio where that has happened. And the reason why that happen is because unless it's a small, rural, ultra-conservative area...

[11:38] LifeWise is not that popular. You can count on maybe 10 to 20 percent of people that are interested in it. And it takes a lot more than that to sustain it and to have people. I know one of the school districts that I went to school in when I was a kid, they want to have three programs, three different buildings, and they couldn't find enough people or enough money. I can't determine which. And so they had to shut down one of the older programs so that they could start a new program at another building further away in town.

[12:17] And so that happens a lot with LifeWise. And they manipulate the numbers. They also sometimes fake interest forms because you can go on their website and fill out a form saying that you want a program in your school district. Well, they don't vet who fills out those forms. You know, we have stories, I've heard stories of entire churches from other areas, from like other counties, filling out the form for a particular school district so that that particular school district can get started when they have maybe five or six people that are actually interested in starting it. Then what they do is they claim that it's voluntary, but they force the school district to accommodate them, and that's through state law.

[13:11] And that, to me, is wrong as well. Not to mention the fact that many of these programs happen during lunch and recess, and if it's at lunchtime and they take lunch with them, the school gets reimbursed by the state for the lunch that the kids ate at LifeWise. And so that violates the spirit of the Zorak v. Claussen law of Supreme Court decision that they champion, because that decision said that there can't be any material support for these RTRI classes. And if you are using state tax dollars to reimburse schools for lunch, you are indirectly supporting that program. And I think that's wrong.

[14:01] But anyway, so I got the links to the recent report on NBC4. You can check it out. And, oh, and the point, I almost forgot the point that I was talking about. And the point, the reason why I bring all that up is because they have, the national headquarters down in Hilliard, Ohio, is sitting on $35 million in donations, outside donations, that they got from donor-directed funds and other Christian nationalist organizations. They are sitting on that money. So much so that they even had a single donor, who was a former trustee at Ohio State University, pay for their fancy new headquarter building in Hilliard. He donated $2 million. He wrote him a check for $2 million. He donated it. Jim Trestle, who is the lieutenant governor currently of the state of Ohio, donated a sizable amount of money and got a room named after him in the LifeWise headquarters. And that's what they do is everybody at the top is making all the money. And they force the local groups to do all the work. And that's how some of these programs work. They don't care about the kids learning the Bible. They're all about getting the money.

[15:29] Music.

[15:39] For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[15:46] Music.

[15:59] After reading about some protests that have been happening, and here in my area, they had a resistance festival where a bunch of progressive groups got together to commiserate over the dumpster fire that we call the Trump administration. And I couldn't help but thinking, where in the hell are the libertarians? I haven't heard anything from libertarians. I know some libertarians. I usually hear something that they're talking about, and I haven't heard them talk about the jackbooted thugs in the streets, the National Guard being sent out, and people being disappeared off the streets, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm like, where the hell are the libertarians? Or for that matter, the Second Amendment guys, the guys that like to walk around with their rifles to intimidate people. Where are they at?

[17:03] You know, they're the ones that say that they had to carry these guns because the government was either going to take them or was going to round them up. Well, you've got government troops rounding people up. So where is the Second Amendment guys? So I was doing a little noodling on the computer, and I found an article on the website of the Libertarian Party. It was titled, The Trump Presidency, a Libertarian Review of the First 100 Days.

[17:34] And it kind of starts out, it says, The idea of judging a president by their first 100 days in office dates back to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal Blitz in 1933. ever since it served as a benchmark for evaluating early priorities, tone, executive impact. For libertarians, that means asking, has government grown or shrunk? Have Americans gained more freedom or lost it? And so it went through some different points like the economy, foreign policy, domestic policy, justice and criminal reform, education, energy and environment, health, debt and fiscal outlook, military, immigration, and then it gave a score.

[18:15] So at the bottom of this article, and I'll have a link up in the show notes about it, it said libertarian scorecard, and this is on Trump's first 100 days, says liberty wins, mass pardons of peaceful offenders, DEI rollbacks, and agency cuts, pause on Ukraine aid, school choice emphasis, who exit, World Health Organization, and HHS cuts, the Kennedy cuts to the vaccine stuff. And it says, liberty losses, tariffs and protectionism, record use of executive orders, a trillion dollar defense budget and military buildup, police militarization and civil liberties erosion, immigration crackdowns without system reform. So what do you think the final grade that they gave? Without looking, what do you think is the final grade that the Libertarian Party gave Trump on his first 100 days?

[19:19] And if you said anywhere below a C, you would be wrong. Their final grade was a C-. And in the comments in the article, they say Trump's second term launch is a mixed bag for liberty. Oh, really? While there are signs of positive disruption, some red tape is being slashed, some political prisoners pardon political prisoners, some war spending pause, the deeper disease of centralization, fiscal irresponsibility, and state power remains unaddressed. Well, yeah, because you have little boy Fauntleroy in the White House wanting to be king.

[20:00] Then it says, libertarians should praise the steps towards decentralization, but stay vigilant as power continues to shift, often just from one federal hand to another. As I said again, they gave Trump a C-.

[20:17] So let's take a look at, since libertarians are all about liberty. Well, let's look at justice and criminal reform. It says, Mass pardons. President Trump has pardoned over 1,500 individuals, including nonviolent January 6th defendants and Ross Ubrick. Ross Ubrick is the guy that ran a dark web marketplace that trafficked in drugs and other illegal products and activities. And he was sentenced to, I think it was two life terms, plus, I think, like 30 years after that. So, you know, he had serious criminal charges, and he possibly had facilitated the payment of assassinations or murders of people. And, of course, Trump, because he's trying to fake it about being a libertarian, that was one of his promises that he was going to pardon Ross Ubrick. And he did. OK, and then they continue. Police militarization resurges orders to loosen federal oversight of police rearm departments with military gear and expand legal immunity signal doubling down on authoritarian law enforcement.

[21:39] Then it says support for foreign detention without trial. The administration has voiced admiration for El Salvador's mega prison strategy, locking thousands of people away without trial, and expressed interest in similar approaches, raising serious due process concerns. You think? Really?

[21:56] Libertarian view. We cheer the pardons, especially for peaceful dissenters and victims of the drug war. Peaceful? But we strongly oppose the expansion of the death penalty, militarized policing, and any move toward extrajudicial imprisonment. Liberty demands justice, not vengeance. And then I thought it was interesting how they talked about immigration.

[22:19] It says, mass deportation plan announced that the administration is rapidly expanding detention facilities and pledging mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, including long-settled workers and families. Asylum restriction orders. New policies further limit asylum access, encourage expedited removals, and penalize humanitarian entry.

[22:42] Underlying system still broken, despite aggressive enforcement, there is no serious effort to reform the legal immigration system, leaving in place a Byzantine quota-ridden bureaucracy that incentivizes the illegal entry in the first place. Well, not really. Not anymore. Not with Trump in office. The Libertarian View Libertarian View, where it says domestic policy and regulation executive order overload overload over 140 executive orders in the first 100 days alone topics range from rolling back dei mandates to renaming geographic regions and expanding executive authority doge and downsizing a new department of government efficiency claims billions and cuts and tens of thousands of federal layoffs which turned out not to be true in either case.

[23:55] There wasn't billions in cuts and a lot of the people they laid off had to be rehired. Though questions remain about the math. Really? Even with these cuts, overall U.S. spending remains at or near record highs. Yes, and it's going to go higher. The libertarian view. Shrinking government is a win, but relying on executive orders instead of legislative change centralizes power even when the policy is right. Real decentralization requires structural change, not just a reshuffling of bureaucracies. Of course, libertarians, again, they have the wrong view of diversity, equality, and inclusion, just like all conservatives do, is that basically all they do is they just replace DEI with affirmative action. And so they lump it in with the same thing. And it's not the same thing. It's not mandates. DEI aren't mandates in the sense that it's a quota. It's not a quota. It's just saying that if the population of an area has a certain percentage of a certain group, your workforce should...

[25:14] Reflect that. So if if you have if you are in a in a business or in an area, well, where let's say 10 percent of the population is women, then your workforce should generally have at least 10 percent women, you know. And then the other parts of diversity, equality, and inclusion include that you are working to include more voices at the table.

[25:45] It just is kind of contrarian that conservatives and libertarians would be opposed to DEI because it violates individual liberty when opposing DEI violates people's individual liberty. You know, somebody should be able to go in and get a job without having the basis of their color or their sex or their religion being considered at all. But it doesn't happen that way. And so you have to consciously make that happen to where those things aren't considered if you're hiring or promoting people and trying to make sure that they get the proper training and that they are allowed to be in charge.

[26:37] You know, the libertarians say that they're all for mediocrity. Well, mediocrity is about as discriminatory as you can get. Because it's never about whether or not this person can do the job or history of success. It's, oh, they go to the same golf club that I do. Or, hey, he's a Boy Scout. I like Boy Scouts. You know, it's these arbitrary things that hiring people, they choose to hire somebody. Like if somebody shows up for a job interview and they have a tattoo on their arm. Well, the hiring manager doesn't like people with tattoos, so that person doesn't get offered a job, regardless of what kind of job that they could do. That's why we need DEI, whether they're mandates or policies or what.

[27:33] Because it is, if we just go by the way things used to be, you're violating the individual liberties of people that aren't like you. And libertarians should be against that, but they're not. And then the other article that I found was that I've forgotten about this is that Trump spoke at the Libertarian National Convention in May of 2024. He was booed, quite roundly booed by many people in the audience. And I remember that that got a lot of play on some of the news sites and blogs. There was also a faction that supported him. The Libertarian candidate for president, Chase Oliver, got less votes in November 2024 than any previous Libertarian candidate had received. Back in 2020, the Libertarian candidate got 3% of the vote. Chase Oliver only got like 640,000 votes. So where'd those votes go? Most likely they went to Trump.

[28:44] Trump picked up a large number of libertarians, including the Libertarian National Party's leadership supported him. And the reason why they supported Trump was because he brought Robert Kennedy into the fold. And Robert Kennedy espouses some libertarian ideals, particularly around vaccines. He's an anti-vaxxer, as are many libertarians. And so that brought him into with Trump. And so people started voting for Trump. And what is ironic is that Trump is complete opposite of a libertarian. He likes to control things centrally. He likes to use a big stick. He likes to sue people. He's not about, in particular, about liberty or civil rights.

[29:41] And he's just not a libertarian. And he, just like some of the atheists that I know that went with Trump or courted Trump because of his anti-Muslim stance, that's pretty much it. You know, it's not so much the party principles that they go with, it's the vibe. It's like, oh, he hates the same people we hate. Let's support him. So that's where the answer came. Where the hell are the libertarians? They're in the bag for Trump, unfortunately. And so usually when we could count on the libertarians helping us or getting in a coalition with other more liberal progressive groups to protect civil rights, the libertarians aren't home. They're with Trump. And that's something that people are going to have to put up with.

[30:35] Music. Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content. Our theme music is Dank and Nasty, composed using the Amplify Studio. For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[30:38] Thank you for listening.

[31:11] Music.

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