An Interview with Libertarian Spike Cohen

On Thursday, April 11, Editor-in-Chief of The Dartmouth Review Zoe E. Dominguez (TDR) sat down with Former Libertarian Vice Presidential Nominee Spike Cohen (SC) for an hour long interview on a wide range of topics. Mr. Cohen, visiting Hanover for the weekend for an event with the Dartmouth Political Union and Students for Liberty, answered a variety of questions regarding College policy and politics, his philosophy of gun control, as well as pressing national issues and concerns regarding liberty. 

TDR: Mr. Cohen, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with The Review. The FIRE Free Speech rankings placed Dartmouth at 240 out of 248. Harvard’s dead last. Our current administration places a lot of emphasis on “brave spaces,” in which people with different opinions can step outside of their comfort zones. Do you think students need to be encouraged to be more independently minded by their colleges? 

SC: Someone’s right to express whatever their opinion is on the subject short of making a credible threat of harming someone else is where I draw the line of free speech versus aggression.

I’m pretty much as close to a free speech absolutist as it gets with that. I will say that, as you asked me about the brave spaces, I am in favor of anything that helps facilitate more dialogue. 

One of the biggest reasons I wanted to do this debate was because I was really excited about the fact, A. that David Hogg wanted to debate me on gun control and B. that both he and the DPU were making it clear from the beginning that yes, this was going to be contentious, and we were going to be talking about where we completely disagreed, but that we were going to remain civil. 

We were not going to make bad faith accusations or assptions about one another, and we also weren’t going to get into the hyperbole of just attacking each other. If at all possible, we were going to try to find what we agree on. I’m a huge fan of that. You have to have basically unrestricted free speech to ever get there. Because it requires two people coming in and just 100 percent disagreeing with each other. 

To the point where each person sees the other one’s policy as extremely harmful to other people, and the problem is that more and more we see people saying if you support X, that in and of itself is violence, and I don’t believe you should even be able to say it. I couldn’t disagree with that kind of thinking more, unless you, again, are advocating for a credible threat to harm someone else. 

TDR: On the subject of the debate tonight, how would you say we balance gun rights and gun legislation with public safety concerns and individual liberty? Where is legislation, if at all? 

SC: Broadly speaking, whether we’re talking about speech, guns, disease, whatever else, up and until the moment that you are either engaging in something to intentionally harm someone else, or are actively planning or threatening to engage in something to actively harm someone else, any attempt to infringe on your—up until that point—otherwise peaceful activity is a violation of your rights.  

When it comes specifically to guns, not only is any infringement on your otherwise peaceful activity a violation of your rights, but we have a plethora of data, and decades of it, to show that the idea of having to choose between individual rights and public safety is actually a false binary.

It’s not true. Gun control doesn’t work. It doesn’t make us safer. Our schools, if we’re talking specifically about schools, were the safest and had the least school shootings at a time when students routinely brought guns to school.

When school shootings really took off was after 1990 when the Bush administration signed the Crime Control Act, which had lumped into it the Gun Free Zones Act. It made it a federal crime to carry weapons on school property, unless you’re law enforcement. The other thing it did was it assigned school resource officers to protect everyone because there weren’t going to be guns there anymore.

We almost immediately started seeing school shootings, and this was for three reasons. We were telling all the peaceful, law abiding adults that were coming into the building, you can’t have a gun here. 

We were instead replacing them with police officers, who are hammers, who see every person as a nail. And then, you were telling the kids, sometimes who were the victims of those officers and who were just dealing with issues in general, you were telling any kid who was considering doing a lot of harm to their fellow students, if you come here and try to shoot this place, we’re going to warn you.

No one here is going to have a gun. The school resource officer is going to run away. We’re going to call the police and they’re going to wait for you to stop shooting. And then they’ll come in and you can decide if you want to die in a hail of bullets or give yourself up. In the meantime, you can kill as many students as you want.

That’s what that no gun sign means to a would-be school shooter. We’ve seen an increase in shootings. Basically, they have imposed the conditions of the inner city into government run schools. And lo and behold, the number of shootings has gone up.

And we could literally get into gun control on every single facet, whether we’re talking about assault weapons bans, high capacity magazine bans, red flag laws, any of these things. They are trying to assign the problem to guns instead of criminality, and by focusing the resources on guns, which primarily takes guns away from peaceful people, and largely either ignoring or mistreating the criminality, they actually make the problem worse. 

TDR: I actually would be very curious to talk about red flag laws, but also Ghost Guns is an issue that the Libertarians group on campus has hosted speakers for before. One, is distinct from the other, but at the same time, there’s a lot of crossover in these. They’re two hot button issues.

SC: I’ll start with the Ghost Guns because that’s the easiest one.  Back in my day, the term we used for Ghost Guns were Saturday Night Specials. It’s a very X-er/Old Millennial term there. It was just the newest scary term for home manufactured guns, which frankly, the original guns were home manufactured guns.

The era of mass production of firearms is a relatively new phenomenon. Winchester was the first company to really mass produce firearms, and then it has become a larger share of the market, but home manufactured firearms have always been there ever since the first federal gun laws,in response to the violence which was being caused by alcohol prohibition and, and not guns, but in response to that, that was probably the first time they tried to start saying, yeah, we shouldn’t be letting people make guns at home.

And they’ve always tried to assign it to greater criminality because, at first glance, it might make sense to some that, if you want to commit a crime, the first thing you’re going to do is make your own gun because then no one knows where it came from. When you think of the amount of resources it would typically take to make your own gun, it’s easier to just get one illegally, or steal it, or borrow it from someone, or even buy it legally, and pass the background check, because you haven’t done anything wrong yet, and then go and commit a crime, right?

So making it yourself isn’t, there’s not really any reason to assign criminality there. In fact, in two recent decisions, the ATF is trying to defend a ghost gun ban and in the other, a state attorney’s general’s office is trying to defend it as well.

In both cases, the judges asked them to provide evidence of additional criminality, disproportionate criminality with ghost guns. They both declined. There is none. And it’s a good thing there is none, because the reality is, thanks to 3D printing technology, I like to say right now, telling people you can’t have a gun is like telling them they can’t have a bag of weed.

It’s just as effective, it means nothing. Soon it’s going to be as effective as telling someone they can’t make their own paper airplane. It will not mean anything. You’ll be able to make it from the comfort of your home using whatever AutoCAD file that you can find online and with an encrypted connection, no one knows you’re even doing it and it’ll cost you nothing.

They’re getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper. So it’s a good thing that they aren’t assigned to greater criminality. On the topic of red flag laws, every single state prior to red flag laws already had something on the books that allows in exigent circumstances for law enforcement to come in and take someone’s firearms, especially if they are acting in a disturbing or threatening way.

The difference between those and red flag laws is that those had due process. Because, according to the Constitution, before the government can take something from you, they have to prove you’re guilty, and you have to be able to go there and assert your innocence, and challenge them proving their attempt to prove you guilty, and hear from your accuser, or at least know who your accuser is.

And what happens with red flag laws is that all goes out the window. You could have an ex spouse, or an ex boyfriend, or an ex girlfriend, or someone who used to live with you as a roommate go to a cop and say this person said something disturbing. No evidence. That’s all they have to say. The cop then goes to the judge and says, we were told this person said something disturbing, so we’d like a red flag warrant. The judge will rubber stamp it because they get state funding for it. And thanks to the bipartisan Gun Control Act that was passed in 2022, they now get matching federal funding for it. So it’s incentivized for them to say yes to it. You never know this hearing happened.

You’re not allowed to know this hearing happened. You just have cops come to your door and say we’re taking your guns.  And if you live in a state that has no knock warrants, the cops will probably just apply for a no knock warrant so you’ll have a SWAT team bust your door down.  It’s swatting.

There was a Colorado sheriff, he was never a fan of red flag laws, but now he’s definitely not a fan of red flag laws because he got flagged twice by prison inmates, and they were able to successfully get red flags because they said they lived with him at his jail. 

That’s what a red flag law is. Multiple studies have been done. None of them have ever shown that red flag laws could be tied to a reduction in homicide rates or gun homicide rates. There was, I believe, one that was able to show a minor reduction in gun suicide rates, but not in suicide rates at large.

They just took their guns and they killed themselves in another way. That’s what I think about red flag laws. 

TDR: Do you think there’s any branch of law enforcement that’s capable of protecting its citizens? Or are they all too incentivized?

SC: There’s a few questions in that, one is, what is the job of law enforcement?

We know from multiple eSupreme Court decisions, it’s not their job to protect us. Protect and serve is actually fraudulent advertising that they put on their cruisers and on their stuff. And honestly, if any other company, claimed to provide a service, that in multiple court decisions, they fought in court to say that they don’t have to actually provide, that would be considered false advertising. They wouldn’t be allowed to say it anymore. Police being able to put “protect and serve: really bothers me because they’ve fought in court and won in saying, we don’t have to protect and serve anyone.

In fact, one of those examples was the Parkland shooting. The SRO ran away.  And when they tried to fire him, he successfully went to court and said, yeah, according to all this case law, I don’t have to do anything. My job is to enforce the law. My job is not to risk my life protecting anyone. They went, yep, you’re right. 

So, right off the bat, police are a hammer against a nail. One of those nails is not protecting you and making sure you go home. Now, to be clear, officers save people’s lives all the time. Because those individual officers were willing to do that. But that’s not their job. Their job is to enforce the law.

So, there are laws that need to be enforced. If we’re to have a government, if we’re to be a nation of laws, we have laws that need to be enforced. That’s their job. When it comes to protecting us, not so much. There’s a phrase, when seconds count, the police are minutes away.

And yeah, they are minutes away, and then they show up and they wait outside for the gunfire to end, to collect the bodies and do their paperwork. It’s not their job, and they want to go home too, right?

If I have to choose between risking prosecution or dying, you know, being judged by 12 or carried by 6, I’ll be judged by 12 all day long. I shouldn’t have to make that choice. And so no, I do not support gun control in any shape or form. The only argument I’ve ever heard for taking guns out of the hands of people are those who have been proven to use them in mass violence. I agree with seriously disarming the government. 

TDR: The immigration process, as it stands, arguably the same for profit systems that we’re discussing, but are there solutions or any kind of major issues that stand out to you?  Should immigration be even like a thing? Should we have a closed border with Mexico as we do now?

SC: To whatever extent you prohibit otherwise peaceful human behavior, you are implicitly creating a black market because what you’re not doing is addressing the demand or the supply. What you’re doing is saying the supply of this demand is illegal now. Okay. There’s still a demand. 

There’s still going to be a supply. We see this with drugs. We see this with guns. We see this with immigration. If every state border had a border resembling the border between the U.S. and Mexico, for me to get from South Carolina to New Hampshire, I would have to engage in some extremely criminal, illegal behavior.

I’d have to work with coyotes, I’d have to work with cartels, I’d have to probably smuggle stuff with me to be able to get here. I’d have to go separately from my children,  I may have to run a serious risk of never seeing them again. Now, someone listening to this or hearing this might say, why the hell would you do that?

Okay, stay in South Carolina then. I mean, yes, it’s wrong and we shouldn’t do it that way, but like, why would you leave? Well, if, for example, the U.S. government, through the War on Drugs, was, essentially, sponsoring cartels that were taking over my home country, or if authoritarian regimes were engaging in massive amounts of political violence, either the ones that were appointed by the U.S. government or the ones who came in and swept away the ones that were appointed by the U. S. government and are now engaging in violent recriminations against their supporters, either way, it’s the same thing. It was caused by larger governments, the U. S. and Russian and Chinese governments, namely, that are doing this stuff

Destabilizing your home country, and now they go to the one place they know that they’re probably safe, which is one of those countries.  They’re not going to destabilize their own country, right? They work their way here, and then they find out the legal process. Even I get the idea of saying we need to have some kind of a streamlined legal process just so we know who’s here, right?

The problem is, for just about everyone south of the Rio Grande, the legal process is not in your favor unless someone marries you, or unless you are just highly, highly, highly skilled in something that no other person in the United States can really provide. Like some kind of athlete or something like that, an actor, or something, perhaps a  multi billionaire, multi millionaire wants to bring your business over.

So for the vast majority of people in those countries, there is no actual legal process. There’s a gigantic multi million, maybe even multi billion dollar smuggling operation that can bring you in. It’s very dangerous, but they’ll bring you in. Now we’re finding out that in some cases the government is having NGOs bring them in illegally. So there’s more trafficking. You, you now have the government engaging in trafficking. To call it broken is to insult broken things. It is some weird combination of broken, but also intentionally screwed up and being exploited by every party involved.

We’re putting the migrants in your homeless shelter. Sorry, you gotta move over here. You can’t use your school stadium anymore. We’re going to put the migrants there because the migrants aren’t allowed to work or find their own homes. They brought them here or they have these cartels bringing them in.

They know they’re coming in by the hundreds of thousands or millions and they’re saying, you can’t work and you can’t get a job and you can’t get a home, but you need to go through this process.

How does this keep us safe from people, from dangerous terrorists? It only makes sense if you go, how could they possibly maximize the amount of taxpayer money they can justify wasting? It’s an incredibly broken system. And so I think possibly the best shot that we have is twofold.

Number one, streamlining the system that we have. Number two is acknowledging that there’s nothing in the Constitution that grants the federal government the authority to restrict immigration. As per the Tenth Amendment, which says that any power not granted in the Constitution is to be left to the states or the people.

This is supposed to be handled by the states.  I actually agreed with Texas being the ones enforcing this. Not because I like how they did it, and I certainly didn’t agree with their argument that we’re doing what the Fed should be doing. No, the argument is the Fed should have never been doing it. It should be California and Arizona and New Mexico and Texas.

They should be the ones who are doing it because that’s what the Constitution says. They can’t spend endless Federal Reserve funding money to incentivize it being as terrible as possible, which means they’d have to figure out a way to balance security with the fact that there are people that need to come here

We’ve always been a nation that has thrived on saying, we’re a nation founded on an idea. That idea is that all people are endowed with certain inalienable rights by their creator. Everyone. That doesn’t necessarily mean three billion people can all come here at once, but it does mean that we at least respect the idea that people can come here provided that they can do something, that they can contribute something and they can take care of themselves. 

This is one of the many reasons that we need to dismantle the welfare state. It’s not even one of the biggest ones, the welfare state is of course the most harmful to the people that it pretends to help.  That’s a whole other subject, but that is my thoughts on immigration.

It is incentivized to be as terrible as possible and as broken as possible for the most vulnerable and marginalized of both Americans and migrants, and it’s just to benefit as many cottage industries and special interests and government agencies as possible. Oh, and the cartels. 

TDR: You hit exactly the topic I was interested in discussing next. The welfare state is entirely too large to discuss in short form, but I would appreciate better understanding your stance on the issue and the issues we’ve seen as a result of that system. 

SC: When the government figured out that they couldn’t break the backs of Native and Black people by just straight up assaulting them, that that was only going to go so far and that they were going to engage in in group economic preference and building up their own communities economically and socially and arming themselves and protecting themselves, and further, that they were increasingly getting the sympathy of white people who understood they’re not doing anything wrong, leave them alone.  

They figured out they could break them by destroying their families.  These are incentive structures. You tell poor people, we will take care of you and your children, but there better not be a man in your home. 

After seven, six, seven generations of that, that’s now the norm in native and black communities. It’s not because of who they are as a race or a culture. It’s because they were paid to. You subsidize apples, you get more apples.

The government subsidizes broken families, and it targeted the most marginalized among us first. Now it’s targeting all of us, but it targets the most marginalized among us, of course. It encourages people to engage in anti-social, anti-family, and self harmful behaviors that they used to be disincentivized from doing because you had to provide for yourself. There were charities that would help you if you, if you couldn’t help yourself, or if you fell on hard times but you couldn’t just be a perfectly functioning, able bodied and able minded adult and never do anything. People were gonna say get up and do something schmuck, you can’t have a ton of children and not take care of them.

If you didn’t take care of your family, they were going to shame you from society.

Instead, the government went in and said, we could just pay you both to look the other way.  Look at how destructive that has been. The welfare state is a horrific thing. It is destroying. It is money that is spent to incentivize people to live in a type of comfortable mediocrity and ensure that they never get anywhere. 

TDR: Do you find that your nonprofit, You Are the Power has strengthened this stance? Has it given you more evidence to say this is what  government intervention looks like and this is how harmful it is?

SC: I started You Are The Power officially in 2022, after kind of running it as a proof of concept in 2021, just before I was going to start a non-profit and ask for donations from people and start hiring people.

Is this even going to work? So we spent 2021 running some test cases, and it worked beautifully.  I’d already run for vice president. I knew the government sucked and I knew that I’m an anarcho capitalist. I don’t believe the government should exist. I’m not a fan of government. If we are to have one, it needs to obey its own laws and it needs to stay as far the hell away from us as possible.

I believe the market and people do better than any kind of forced presumption of authority built into a monopoly of violence, just in general, so I already felt as anti government before starting You Are The Power as I do now. Knowing in the abstract that these terrible things are happening, I’m now meeting people that they are happening to on a day to day basis.

I had met people that had been victimized by the government. I wasn’t meeting dozens of them a week.  I have met families whose children have been stolen from them by Child Protective Services, who know that the kids aren’t being abused, and know that they have medical conditions, and they hide the evidence, and the judge plays along with hiding the evidence, and refusing to have it allowed in family court, and the arresting officer plays along with refusal to actually investigate it.

The child abuse pediatrician plays along with pretending that it was abuse in the first place, doing everything they can to make these parents spend tens of thousands of dollars in court just to get the medical records, only to have the judge say, I’m not going to admit any of this. I’m taking your kids and I’m going to order non reunification.

With the bail conditions that you and your wife, or you and your husband can’t live together or talk to each other or be within 100 yards of each other. We’re never actually going to take you to a criminal trial because all the evidence shows you’re innocent and we’re guilty.

We’re just going to let that sit over your head forever. Why don’t you just sign this plea deal? You’ll never see your kids again in person, but you might see them in prison, protected virtual visits on holidays, and you’ll get to live with your wife again. Maybe you can start a new family. And the reason they do that is because they get federal money every time they call a case abuse.

You want to talk about incentivization?  That’s what federal incentivization looks like. It looks like families being torn apart. I already knew that. I’m now meeting these families, and I’m meeting them sometimes separately because they can’t be in the same area at the same time. I have a whole new level of hatred, visceral hatred, for what the government is.

And it’s not as simple as replacing these bureaucrats with other bureaucrats because it’s the system they’re operating. It’s a systemic problem and it’s built on terrible incentives, so what You Are The Power has done is two fold for me personally. It has really made my rage at this system  white hot. 

It’s also given me an effective conduit to actually affect change because we’ve helped reunite a family. We’ve helped reunite a husband and wife. We’ve helped help get some of these families able to see their kids again and are working towards getting pressure on the public officials that are necessary to reintroduce due process into the child abuse investigations as they should have always been and hopefully eventually be able to build enough of a domino effect that at the federal level, they modify Title IV of Social Security and defund the whole system. In the meantime, we’re helping these families and so I’m not just sitting here raging, I’m actually directing it in a useful way and giving other people who are like me, who are just sitting there raging, something that they can direct their anger towards. 

TDR: How do we have liberty without creating social dysfunction? 

SC: We have social dysfunction because we don’t have liberty. 

So I think that the more you disrespect people,  the more you refuse to respect people as individual human beings, the more discord you create. This is something we understand intrinsically even as little kids. The reason that you are able to function in society, go out, walk down the street, go from here to a store and come back, go to your home and everything else, you will be around dozens, hundreds, thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of people in that time that you’re doing that.

For me to get from South Carolina to the Charlotte Airport to the Boston Airport to here, I had to go by hundreds of thousands of people. Virtually none of whom I knew anything about, total strangers, I had no idea what their motives were, no idea what their ideas were. What I knew was that I had a relative expectation that I was going to be safe and able to thrive and do the things I wanted to do because all of us have a general understanding that we’re not going to stomp on each other like ants or push each other out of the way like birds because that’s in our way as human beings.

We don’t have to like each other, know each other, care anything about each other, but we have a certain level of respect that we have for one another as human beings. This is something we understand intrinsically as we’re beginning to form words. That’s how ingrained it is into us. We have a general level of reasonable expectation that other people will have this level of respect for us as well, as individual human beings. 

Unless they’re the government.  We have been conditioned to set aside that expectation of human respect when it’s the government. They’re literally the same people, if they weren’t behind the dais and behind their little name tag that says what their official position is, if they were just some guy walking down the street, we would still expect them to respect us as individual human beings.

But once they’re operating in this government capacity, now we don’t. Now their position is, well, it’s a policy thing. Whatever extent anyone in the private sector or public sector is infringing on you and disrespecting you is doing that as an individual human being.

That’s where the discord happens. It happens on a personal level. It happens on a familial level. It happens on a community and social level. It happens on an international level. It happens worldwide. I mean, war is the biggest example of this. It happens as broadly as to whatever direct proportion people are being respected. That is how much we can expect to be happy and peaceful and harmonious and prosperous. 

To whatever extent we are being disrespected, that is the extent to which we can expect to be unhappy, unprosperous, and unpeaceful.

The core of what I do at You Are The Power is to spread and act upon what I call the principle of human respect. When we respect each other as individual human beings, we are happier, we are more prosperous, we are more harmonious. Obviously the more we disrespect one another,  the less of those things we are.

I think that the best social cohesion we can have, the best function that we can have, both individually and collectively all the way out to, at a societal level is to have and to respect each other’s individual autonomy and individual liberty.