No, libertarians don’t only care about ‘weed and porn’

If there’s one thing that absolutely drives me crazy, it’s when conservative commentators start complaining that libertarians like me, and maybe you, are the real problem, because all we do is fight for drugs and gambling and pornography and prostitution, but we’re unwilling to fight for liberty where it really counts, on the things that matter to conservatives.

I see various people on the right making this argument from time to time—it’s a serious allegation, made by people who are either clueless about libertarians, or actively lying about us.

The latest to commit this failing is Megan Basham, an author and culture reporter for The Daily Wire, who writes a lot about religion and social conservatism. I don’t know her at all, and maybe she’s a nice person who generally does great work. But when it comes to libertarians, she is dead wrong. On X, she wrote the following:

My biggest problem with libertarians is that they can usually rouse themselves to fight for weed and porn and everything destructive, and rarely anything good and virtuous. As a general rule, libertarians are useless-to-destructive coalition partners. https://t.co/xf05QbIoyj

— Megan Basham (@megbasham) September 26, 2026

“My biggest problem with libertarians is that they can usually rouse themselves to fight for weed and porn and everything destructive, and rarely anything good and virtuous. As a general rule, libertarians are useless-to-destructive coalition partners.”

I don’t know where this idea comes from that we only fight for weed and porn, but it’s just obviously wrong. She should try opening the pages of this magazine for starters, where she’ll find libertarian defenses of drug legalization and other vices, yes. She’ll also find advocacy for addressing the national debt and cutting taxes and regulation, for shrinking the Department of Education and implementing school choice reforms, for saving New York City from socialism and rent control, for supporting the Trump administration’s correctly laissez faire approach to AI, and all sorts of other things that traditional conservatives are ostensibly in favor of. It’s the same deal with libertarian organizations like the Cato Institute, which published a magazine called Regulation that covers energy policy, transportation policy, housing policy, and antitrust. Trust me, it’s not all weed and porn.

The same is true of the Libertarian Party. Their most recent presidential nominee, Chase Oliver, is often unfairly tarred as some kind of left-libertarian, but he ran on the party’s standard agenda of massive cuts to government spending by shrinking the welfare state and the warfare state.

I’m sure somewhere there’s a self-decribed libertarian who only cares about his weed. But this is not really true of most people who have adopted the libertarian mantle and promote these ideas in public.

I’m used to fielding complaints from liberals that I spend too much time talking about issues that cater more to the right. We can’t make non-libertarians happy either way, which is why we just stick to principle and talk about the things that matter to each of us—but we libertarians do want freedom from government interference, for everybody, whenever possible, from homeschoolers and homeowners to seasteaders and sex workers.

But if this is a debate about priorities, then please explain to me how I’ll be more likely to get the economic freedoms I want if I temper my enthusiasm for personal liberties? Basham and her ilk keep acting like we libertarians are not helping, even though we never fail to come to the defense of the liberties they say we are supposedly indifferent to. When have libertarians stood idly by while the government was doing oppression and said, “Well, it’s not weed and porn, so I don’t care”? Libertarian legal organizations have sued the government to protect Second Amendment rights, religious freedom, and more.

In fact, one could make the case that non-libertarians are the ones failing to defend freedom when it counts. In this moment of total Republican control of government, is the right meaningfully constraining the size of government, freeing the economy, or reducing entitlements? Of course not. The best thing about the Trump administration is that it is listening to libertarians on tech and leading with a pro-growth agenda when it comes to AI. Thankfully, there are a lot of libertarian-leaning people in the tech industry who are helping to make this possible. You’re welcome.

In fact, the single greatest betrayal of freedom that transpired during the Trump administration was arguably the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While former President Joe Biden’s policies were abysmal, it’s important to remember that lockdowns, social distancing, school closures, and mask mandates all began under Trump—with enthusiastic support from some of the national conservative movement’s biggest names: Curtis Yarvin, Jack Posobiec, and Steve Bannon.

Where were libertarians? The Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate that year was Jo Jorgensen, who declared the pandemic response was “the biggest assault on our liberties in our lifetime.” So maybe stop blaming weed-and-porn libertarians and start wondering why a Republican-controlled government so often finds itself incapable of defending basic freedoms at all.