Good afternoon, Michael Malice here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. We have with us a very special guest, Angela McArdle, who has apparently taken over the

Libertarian Party over the weekend. I had told all my friends and well-wishers do not send me updates about what's happening with the Libertarian Convention, which was over the weekend in Reno. People tagged me on Twitter anyway, but I wanted to get the live report from you on the show for people who are interested or people who are uninterested and all in between.

Can you explain to those who don't know what is the Libertarian Party and what position it is that you personally were running for?

The Libertarian Party is the third largest political party in the United States. It was founded in the early 70s by David Nolan, a handful of other liberty thought leaders at that time who were very upset about Nixon taking us off the gold standard, Vietnam, and a bunch of other really sucky things that the government did.

They founded their own political party, mostly in a reaction to how bad the GOP was at the time, but there were some left-leaning anarchists involved as well. We have been dragging ourselves along for 50 years, maybe 51 years now, in an effort to make some political change in the direction of liberty, and that has been pretty hit or miss to put it diplomatically.

So I ran for chair of the National Party over the weekend, and I was elected. I'm basically the one driving the bus now in charge of everything.

So let's talk about the chair position. What is, when you say driving the bus, what exactly does the chair do in terms of the data activities of the party?

So some of this is going to be pretty boring, but I get to populate committees with appointments, so things like social media, communications, fundraising, auditing, finance, all of that stuff, the interesting stuff and the boring stuff.

I get to appoint certain committee members. The rest of them are voted on by the National Committee, which is basically like our board.

I also have the final say on hiring and firing staff, and I get to send out fundraising pledges, appeals, I'm sort of the voice of the party for all intents and purposes.

I make a lot of other administrative behind the scenes decisions as well.

So how many people were up for the position and how did the voting go?

Well, there were three serious candidates running. There was a fourth person who was also running, but he hadn't really campaigned or traveled or done anything.

And I ended up winning with 69.5% of the vote, and the other guys got one of them got about 109 votes, one of them got 150-ish votes, and I got almost 700 votes. I think it was 693.

Were you surprised at the vote margin by which you got the chair position?

No, it was exactly what I thought it would be 70%.

So let's talk a little bit about the recent history of the Libertarian Party.

Do you feel now that you've taken over as chair any sense of, I don't know if I'm going to be words you might have like loyalty on behalf of like recent campaigns and candidates?

Loyal team.

Let me ask you what, let me see what I'm not trying to say because I was thinking specifically of there's a podcast and Patrick, but David, and he has a podcast called Value Tainment.

And he had the 2020 Libertarian candidate for president Joe Jorgensen on his show, and it was a disastrous, in my opinion, and in the host opinion at one point during the show he says to her.

He's like, have you ever debated anyone and she brought up, she was the vice presidential nominee with Harry Brown, made me two decades ago.

...