Chapter 5: "No Charisma"

Boring my ass

On X, Josh Smith’s troll team had been worked feverishly to cast me as a boring, dry, professorial pendant lacking “charisma.” The attempts to figure me as such represented a tactic drawn straight out of the Trumpian toolbox. It was akin to how Trump had characterized Jeb Bush as “low energy” and later Biden as “sleepy Joe.” I wasn’t about to engage in any such tactics myself and never did, although I’ve yet to see any evidence of Josh Smith’s vaunted “charisma.” But I was intent on undermining this unwarranted narrative framing.

Incidentally, even as a professor, especially at NYU where I taught for 11 years, I was a colorful and engaging professor and my students found me anything but boring. Just have a look at the RateMyProfessor comments about me, issued by hundreds of students. Here’s but one example:

Simply an amazing professor. This is perhaps the COOLEST class in all of NYU. Take him at all cost!! Read the material and class discussion will be very interesting and you will not be bored. Really you can't go wrong with Dr Rec, he's the bomb diggity.

But as Harrison Koehli points out in a Political Ponerology Substack post: “As long as you are first to make the accusation and/or can reach the widest audience, it will be extremely difficult to remove the stain that accusation has caused.” (I highly recommend the Political Ponerology Substack, by the way. I wrote the Preface to the recent edition of the book by Andrew Lobaczewski, edited by Koehli.)

Establishing a narrative that would be nearly impossible to overcome is what the trolls hoped to achieve.

I aimed to disabuse good-faith detractors of the notion that I was boring, but of course the troll army was not acting in good faith. But unlike Smith, I proved early in the campaign that I was a firebrand willing to go after Chase Oliver for his leftism in libertarian garb and in particular his LGBTQIA++ activism.

In my first debate, at an event held in a New Jersey restaurant before the convention season began, I argued that an objective of social welfarism is the dissolution of the family and that transgenderism was part of this agenda. The State aims to dissolve the family because the family is the final buffer between individuals and its complete control. Any funding aimed at destroying the requisite social units of the family (man, woman/husband, wife, child) has as an object the family’s dissolution.

Oliver appeared to take offense at what I’d said and stated that “as a member of the LGBTQ community,” he knew many transgender people who do not want to dissolve the family. In fact, he said, he knew many transgender people raising children in two-parent homes and called my position “collectivist”—although he himself had just identified himself as part of the LGBTQ collective. And I hadn’t said that LGBTQ people want to dissolve the family.

My argument was that the State’s funding of transgenderism was apiece with its aim of dissolving the family. I suggested then, and many times later, that the State has a hand in the culture wars that Oliver insisted should be off-limits to Libertarians. The State tipped the scales toward degeneracy, the dissolution of the family, and the erosion of the social fabric—on purpose.

Admittedly, some of my other early performances were less than stellar. I really didn’t smash the mold cast for me by the troll army until the convention debate in Alabama. (Interestingly, Josh Smith did not attend this convention, part of a pattern that was obvious to all but his most disingenuous followers.)

In Alabama, I felt more comfortable than I had at any of the previous debates, largely due to the strong support I felt there. And, at last, the central question was finally asked: “What is the role of government?”

The other candidates issued the typical minarchist responses. The government’s only role is to protect individual rights and provide defense, etc. That’s interesting, I thought, since the government violates individual rights by definition.

I felt emboldened at last and answered, rather daringly:

You know, if you ask me, there’s no role for government at all. I’m an anarcho-capitalist. I don’t believe in the State at all. I think that the State is a parasite…”

There, I’d finally said it. I was free. And I won the debate straw poll.

After this breakout moment, I felt everything shift. In fact, I had begun to move the Overton Window for all the LP presidential candidates—toward anti-statism. Other candidates, including Chase Oliver and Lars Mapstead, began to use the term “the State” for the first time. Chase Oliver even started saying that he wanted to “smash the State, brick by brick.” And he began appropriating my language in general.

Boring my ass.