(The Center Square) — Chase Oliver sees an opening in the upcoming presidential race where voters of the two main parties are looking for viable alternatives.
The 37-year-old Atlanta resident, vying for the Libertarian presidential nomination, thinks he can be that alternative.
“I’m someone who calls for what I call a cultural ceasefire in this culture war that we’ve been seeing,” Oliver said. “As libertarians, we are the political philosophy that says that you can live your life as you see fit in peace, so long as you’re not harming others with force, fraud or coercion.”
What are your thoughts on immigration?
We need to simplify the process. We need to make it easier, less expensive and more simple for folks to be able to come in here to the country. I think having a complicated and costly process has allowed us to have the conditions that we’re in right now, where we have millions of people who are here without documentation, being part of a shadow economy.
It’s a community that’s easily exploitable because they can’t go and seek the remedies of law enforcement or anything like that because of fear of deportation. And so we’ve created these conditions where millions of people are here, and they’re not living to the full potential that they could be.
Does that include a border wall?
We always build more walls, and we always hire more Border Patrol. And it just seems that it does not stop the problem of people being able to get over here. You build a 20-foot wall, you’re going to have 21-foot ladders exploding south of the border for people to buy.
…I really don’t think any amount of building walls or just continuing to add more and more Border Patrol is going to do as much to stop the issue as … having a real common-sense process for these people to be able to come into this country and work. I also think if you allowed [the] easy movement across the border, you would see a lot more seasonal people coming up to work and then going back home.
What are your thoughts on criminal justice reform?
We do need reform, really, at every level of justice — that goes from the first interaction you have with police to prosecutors and courts to the way prisons are run and maintained. Really, the focus here is on treating people within their constitutional rights, and I believe in accountability.
As far as, say, police, I’m somebody who believes in ending qualified immunity. So that way, when wrongs are done, people have the ability to adjudicate that in a court of law — civilly as well as criminally. I believe in officers holding liability insurance so that way when they do wrong, those payouts don’t come from the taxpayer; they come from the liability policy. This also has the added benefit of pricing bad cops out of the marketplace because if they screw up too many times, they’re uninsurable, and so that’s just a marketplace mechanism to keep bad cops off the streets.
…Body cams should be mandated on police officers. And this doesn’t just protect the public from abuse. It again also protects the officer when it’s their word against someone else’s in a court, and they can say, ‘well, here’s my body camera footage, and you can see clearly I’m in the right.’ It protects officers in that way, too.
What are your thoughts on the Second Amendment and gun control?
I absolutely support the rights of people to defend themselves. I think any kind of gun control [proposal] right now is … virtue signaling because there has been gun violence in the world. But I don’t think much of what they’re proposing is constitutional.
…I think the real problem isn’t guns; it’s the fact that we dehumanize each other. It’s the fact that we don’t look at each other as human beings anymore.
…One part of that is the rise of social media. It’s so much easier to get behind that keyboard and be an avatar and say terrible things to people that you would never say in your normal, everyday life, face to face. And that allows you to start dehumanizing people, and if you look at [many] of the mass shooters that have come up in the last few years, they’re deep into social media culture, where they often dehumanize their targets to the point of becoming violent.
The other thing that I would say is the massive rise in antidepressants and psychotropic drugs — that needs to be looked at because so many of the shooters are on those drugs. And we need to be re-examining how prolific we’re using those to treat mental illness as opposed to other therapies that might produce better results.
Click here to read the first part of The Center Square’s conversation with Oliver.
This article was published by The Center Square and is republished here with permission. Click here to view the original.