Angela McArdle: What Role Did the Libertarian Party Play in Freeing Ross Ulbricht?

Today’s bonus episode of Just Asking Questions is a conversation with Libertarian Party National Chair Angela McArdle about the role the party played in securing a presidential pardon for Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the dark web marketplace Silk Road. Ulbricht, who entered prison at age 29 and walked out at age 40, had served 11 years of a double life sentence with no possibility of parole.

Ulbricht started Silk Road as an idealistic libertarian experiment, describing on his LinkedIn profile his ambition to  create “an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force.” The site was only accessible through the anonymizing network known as Tor, and transactions for all sorts of illegal drugs were made in bitcoin. For all these reasons, Ulbricht became a kind of libertarian icon.

The Free Ross movement was tirelessly spearheaded by Ulbricht’s mother, Lyn, and championed by the libertarian movement and its many institutions and publications, including Reason magazine, for the past decade. This decade-long effort culminated in a dramatic turn of events during the Libertarian National Convention last year, where Trump appeared and gave a speech in which he promised to free Ulbricht. 

Reason produced a 15-minute video essay describing Ulbricht’s case in detail and how this deal came to be, which we’ll also link in the description. During the production of that, I interviewed McArdle, who had met with Trump and told him that freeing Ulbricht was a major priority for libertarians.

For those of you who don’t follow third-party political drama, McArdle has been a polarizing chair who led the so-called “takeover” of the Libertarian Party by a faction called the Mises Caucus. Her unorthodox strategy, aggressive messaging, and leadership style have generated constant controversy within the broader libertarian movement. Reason has produced several documentaries and interviews on those developments as well.

This is the full conversation that Reason conducted with McArdle before the inauguration on December 13, 2024, about what her conversation with Trump was like, how the meeting came about in the first place, and what the terms of the deal actually were. It also includes some discussion about the state of the Libertarian Party and McArdle’s future within it. 

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

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