Last night, three men who knew they wouldn’t be president but were running for office anyway took to the stage in Los Angeles for a heated third-party debate.

In the debate hosted by Free and Equal, Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and Constitution Party’s Randal Terry debated whether the government should get much smaller, much larger, or move entirely toward Judeo-Christian values. .

The third-party candidates, ideological gadflies, have all made refreshingly undistilled cases for opposing visions of government.

Oliver has done an admirable job laying out the foundations of libertarianism and then applying them to individual cases.

“If you are not harming other people with your behavior, your behavior is completely acceptable and should not be regulated by the government or any other organization,” he said last night, arguing that we need to eliminate zoning laws and reduce depredations to make housing affordable. spending, selling federal land to reduce debt, and staying out of foreign wars.

The other two candidates offered some new perspectives that, while not all recommendable, were at least interesting to hear.

Terry argued that we should build a wall on the northern border to keep Canadians out, drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to pay off our national debt, and eat raw broccoli to cure cancer.

Stein said building a wall on the southern border wouldn’t stop drugs from entering through legal “portals of entry” but would devastate wildlife and natural ecosystems along the U.S.-Mexico border. He also brilliantly argued, without any real acknowledgment or discussion, that we were drifting towards a wider war in the Middle East.

The fact that everyone on stage knew they were not going to the White House opened up space for a fruitful agreement, especially between Oliver and his two debate rivals.

The libertarian candidate actively agreed with Stein that we should cut foreign aid to Israel and nodded to Terry’s rousing anti-property tax cries.

In a day and age where Donald Trump (who skipped last night’s debate) is the Republican nominee, one might think that the appeal of watching gadflies say crazy things in a debate format would diminish.

Tough. Last night’s third-party debate managed to create a unique and refreshingly strange twist.

Whether it’s the candidates making non-mainstream diagnoses like rampant obesity, or debate moderator Christina Tobin making a lengthy comment about the power of music to heal psychological distress caused by “the system” or even just the sheer frequency of musical guests (a musical break every five minutes toward the end). The whole discussion was delightfully weird.

With all that said, there were also a lot of boring, terrible, and wrong premise floating around.

Stein has repeatedly argued that we can balance the federal budget by taxing the rich, cutting military spending, and passing Medicare for All. He called for emergency rent control and vacancy taxes to lower housing costs. He said we could end mass illegal immigration by lifting sanctions on the socialist economies of Venezuela and Cuba.

In addition structure wrongThese ideas are not things you would expect to hear from a progressive Democrat (or a Democrat). rent control And Debt reduction fantasiesa mainstream Democrat running for president).

Similarly, Terry dusted off the old one. Mitt Romney’s idea that we could cause “self-deportation” of millions of illegal immigrants if we make life miserable enough for them. His closing speech also ended with a call for the complete destruction of the Democratic Party. One wonders why he didn’t just run as a Republican if he thought either of the two major parties was so bad.

The upside of Terry and Stein parodying Republican and Democratic talking points is that it reinforces the idea that the Libertarian Party is the only true third party. Oliver did not represent a more extreme version of either mainstream party. He offered a unique message and a unique vision of government. It’s a shame more mainstream audiences don’t hear about it.