America just turned 250. The movement that claims the word liberty is dead. Barry Goldwater’s road is the one we should have taken, and today the 4Liberty Network becomes its home.
By Austin Petersen | Founder, 4Liberty Network
What this essay covers
Barry Goldwater, the road not taken
Twenty-two days ago this country turned two hundred and fifty years old, and I spent part of that week thinking about a man who lost forty-four states.
Barry Goldwater is the road not taken in American liberty politics. I want to make the case for taking it now, because the alternative has been tried for fifty-five years and it ended last month in a hotel ballroom in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Start with his ideas, which have not aged a day. His stated aim was not to pass laws but to repeal them. He had no interest in making the federal government more efficient because he intended to make it smaller, and he refused to ask whether a bill was needed before asking whether it was constitutional. He described Lyndon Johnson’s method of buying votes with the expanding gift power of Washington as political Daddyism, and it’s as old as demagogues and despotism. Find me a sharper summary of the modern welfare state. Find me one written in 1964.
Ayn Rand called the other road in 1971
I came into this movement the way half of you did. Someone handed me Atlas Shrugged and my brain rewired itself. Which is why it matters that the woman who wrote it took one look at organized libertarianism and wanted nothing to do with it.
In 1971 Rand refused to endorse any political group and dismissed the people then calling themselves libertarians as the “hippies of the right,” accusing them of lifting her principles while discarding the philosophy that made those principles coherent. For most of my adult life I thought she was guarding her turf. She was right and I was wrong.
She understood that a philosophy stripped of every prior commitment, to a nation, to a civilization, to a moral order, stops being a philosophy and becomes a permission structure. Tell a man the only sin is initiating force and eventually he will explain that mass migration is not force, that a hostile power buying his farmland is not force, that spreading blood libel to two million followers is not force, but that a county road tax is tyranny worth dying over.
The bill came due last month in Grand Rapids
Delegates in Grand Rapids threw out the leadership that had run the Libertarian Party for four years. One of the new national committee’s first acts was to disaffiliate the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, the only affiliate which has accomplished anything. In 2024, after losing the party’s presidential nomination, the Mises Caucus’ insurgent standard-bearer Michael Rectenwald went on Twitter and posted calls for the physical removal of Jews.
That is not a fringe. That is who they are. Left Libertarians and right libertarians all united on one thing: Israel Derangement Syndrome. Whatever your opinion on Israel or it’s lobbies, the singular, helio-centric focus on Israel and foreign policy has clearly retarded the movement. Low IQ antisemitism has alienated the movement from electoral success, and from the founders of the movement itself.
The rot reached the academy too. Walter Block spent decades as a senior fellow at the Mises Institute until he made the classical liberal property-rights case for Israel. The institute stripped his fellowship. Hans-Hermann Hoppe and his followers have since turned on Javier Milei, the most successful libertarian officeholder in the history of the planet, a man who took a chainsaw to the Argentine state and won, not for betraying free markets but for defending the West after October 7th.
I have been watching this waterline rise since a 2011 dinner party where the conversation went from Austrian economics to the Jews running the Federal Reserve somewhere between the steak and the dessert. I wrote that story for Tablet last October. What I will add here is that free speech means the government cannot jail you for what you say. It has never meant that I must hand you a microphone and an audience I spent fifteen years building.
The man they called an extremist: who Barry Goldwater really was
Now consider the character of the alternative.
Goldwater was the son of a Jewish father, grandson of Michael Goldwasser, who came out of Poland and built a mercantile empire in the Arizona territory. When Washington columnists started whispering about it in 1964, he neither hid nor groveled. He wrote later that he had simply never practiced the faith, and then said the thing worth carving somewhere: I’m proud of my ancestors and heritage.
Barry Goldwater handled bigots the way a free man handles bigots. Turned away from a restricted golf course, he asked, “I’m only half Jewish. Can I play nine holes?” Rick Perlstein records that when Goldwater became president of the Phoenix Country Club in 1949, he told the membership that if they refused to admit his friend Harry Rosenzweig he would blackball every candidate they put up. He desegregated the Arizona Air National Guard before Truman integrated the armed forces. He belonged to the Phoenix NAACP.
Somebody will send me a clip of an elderly Goldwater telling an interviewer the Israel lobby was too powerful, and treat it as a trump card. Let’s put some numbers on it. Federal lobbying is disclosed and public. In 2025 the total was $5.08 billion. The Chamber of Commerce spent $72.1 million, the Realtors $54.4 million, and the pharmaceutical industry spent $105.4 million in a single quarter.
AIPAC’s registered lobbying in the 2024 cycle was $3.3 million. Its real muscle is elections rather than lobbying, roughly ninety million dollars a cycle counting contributions and its super PAC, which makes it a well-run interest group of the kind Madison described in Federalist 10. Fair enough. Goldwater made the ordinary complaint that a lobby had outrun the national interest on arms sales. He was not signing on to the theory that a hidden ethnic network runs the banks, the media, and the wars. The tell on that theory is that no number ever satisfies it. You can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.
About the landslide: what Goldwater’s 1964 loss really built
Here comes the objection. “Austin! He lost forty-four states, so he is the definition of a losing strategy.”
Sit with the calendar. John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas in November 1963. He and Goldwater were friends who had discussed barnstorming the country together to give America an honest referendum between liberalism and conservatism. Eleven months after a president was shot on live television, a grieving nation was asked to fire his successor.
Goldwater knew exactly what had happened, telling reporters the day after the election that he had no chance against the man who replaced Jack Kennedy, and that the country would not install three presidents in three and a half years. Of the campaign itself he said flatly, “The whole campaign was run on fear of me.” That is what the Daisy ad was, a mushroom cloud spliced to a little girl.
Look what that “wasted” campaign produced. It put a fifty-three-year-old actor on television that October with a half-hour speech about the size of government, and made Ronald Reagan a national figure sixteen years before he took the oath. It built the donor lists, the youth organizations, and the county infrastructure that turned the Sun Belt Republican for a generation. Goldwater lost an election and won the party.
Where I agree with Goldwater, including the expensive part
Goldwater voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and for killing the poll tax. In 1964 he objected to two titles, Title II on public accommodations and Title VII on employment, arguing they built a federal enforcement reach into private commercial life that the Constitution did not authorize and that would only grow.
Jim Crow was an atrocity and it was not a market failure. It was written into state law and enforced by sheriffs, and where the law ran out it was enforced by mobs. Breaking segregation statutes and protecting the ballot was the federal government doing the one job it actually has.
Title II is the separable question, and I have been arguing it my whole career. In March 2016 I stood on a Fox Business stage and asked Gary Johnson whether a Jewish baker should be forced to bake a cake for a Nazi wedding. He said that would be his contention. Once you accept that Washington may compel a private party into a transaction he finds repugnant, you have surrendered the principle and kept only the haggling over which repugnance counts.
Title VII gave us disparate impact liability, which gave us the compliance industry, which gave us the diversity bureaucracy and the racial accounting of every workforce in America. Goldwater said in 1964 that this is how federal power behaves off the leash. He was called a monster for it. He was right.
What we build instead: sovereignty, allies, and borders
America’s military exists to defend our people, our allies in civilization, and our interests, which means rejecting isolationism and globalism together. Every libertarian is already typing Jefferson at me, so note that Jefferson warned against entangling alliances and also accepted a French fleet at Yorktown. Some alliances are entanglements and some are shields. Rand settled the harder question before today’s antiwar podcasters were born: when civilized men fight savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.
We are also done with open borders as a principle. Milton Friedman gave the honest version decades ago when he said free immigration and a welfare state cannot coexist. The deeper problem is that political systems are downstream of the people inside them. Import millions of voters with no inherited habit of free speech, armed citizenship, or suspicion of state power, hand them the franchise, and your grandchildren will read about the Bill of Rights the way we read about the Roman Senate. Borders are the guardians of sovereignty, and sovereignty is the container liberty lives in.
The 4Liberty Network launches today
Today the network goes live as a single hub at 4libertynetwork.com, and the activism I have been running out of six different places consolidates there. Six shows under one banner, starting with Wake Up America every weekday at seven Central. One place to find every livestream, one chat, one archive, one membership, one place to sign a petition or find a candidate to volunteer for.
I have watched liberty organizations die of the same disease. They mistook having an opinion for having an institution. Institutions have addresses, payrolls, mailing lists, and a job for the nineteen-year-old who shows up. Goldwater did not found the Barry Party. He took an existing one from the inside with delegates and precinct captains, and the people who called him a dangerous extremist in 1964 were working for his ideological grandchildren by 1981.
Come join us, and back the work at wakeupamericashow.com/support, where the 1776 Club runs $17.76 a month and funds the shows, the ideas, and the infrastructure that will build this movement to restore the Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican Party.
Two hundred and fifty years in, this republic is still the best argument for freedom ever made. It deserves defenders who can count, who can win, and who are not embarrassing.
The arena awaits.
Austin Petersen is the founder of the 4Liberty Network and host of Wake Up America, weekdays 7 to 9 AM Central. He was runner-up for the 2016 Libertarian presidential nomination and a 2018 Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Missouri. He wrote “A Manifesto for Libertarian Nationalists” for Human Events in 2024 and published the revised edition in October 2025.
Man I love this I had never seen this video. There’s also a great one of him doing this for Ronald Reagan as well that’s worth a watch. I hope we can get Barry Goldwater back in the public’s name the same way that people are for Richard Nixon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KMDj0YVzzE