The Tom Woods Show, episode 585.

Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion.

Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Woods Show.

Well, Rand Paul dropped out of the presidential race today, so I thought it was appropriate

to devote this episode to a discussion

of that decision and of the Rand Paul campaign in general and of the presidential campaign,

more generally still. And joining me to have that conversation is Dan McCarthy, editor of

the American Conservative magazine. You can check them out at the American

conservative.com. Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tom. Rand Paul dropped out today,

and it came as a surprise to me. I thought there was a chance he might drop out at some point,

but I could swear we had heard some campaign statement

to the effect that he was moving on to New Hampshire and everything was fine, and they had a strong

fifth place finish in Iowa, which I have to say there was a certain Soviet press release

aspect to all this. Like the, don't worry, citizen, the steel quota has been

met sort of thing to that, but I accepted it. And so I was a little bit surprised, and it's a

sad thing in some ways, because he did inject into the conversation some ideas that we weren't

going to hear otherwise. I wanted to talk to you

about it because you've just written a column actually on Rubio, but that really talks about

the top tier and about why Rand might have had some difficulty this time around. So I thought

you were the person to talk to about this. Were you surprised at the timing of Rand's decision?

Well, a little bit, but I think it actually is the right decision.

And even if the campaign had put out certain signals a few days ago suggesting that they were

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