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.
