Speaker 1: It's always a successful podcast, James, when you managed to
work in the word flounce?
Speaker 2: Did I get in flounce?
Speaker 1: Did I get there fence?
Speaker 2: Yeah I do too.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Okay, next week we won't flaunce will swan about.
Speaker 3: That's the good one too.
Speaker 1: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
what you can do for your country.
Speaker 3: Mister Gorbucha.
Speaker 1: Tear down this wall.
Speaker 2: It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lanks, and we have
Stephen Aingward and Charles and C. W. Cook and we're
going to be talking to Daniel McCarthy about tearuffs, Trump
and other things. So let's have resup the podcast. Other
federal workers not revealing their names because of concern over retribution,
described to NBC News fear and panic and Orwellian nightmare.
Speaker 4: Seventy thousand for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland,
forty seven thousand for a transgender opera in Colombia, thirty
thousand for a transgender comic book in Peru.
Speaker 1: This is what they're mad about.
Speaker 2: Welcome Everybody Eats. The Ricochet Podcast part of our Boeing
series this year. It's number seven hundred and twenty seven.
James lolaxs in Minneapolis, which is due to get about
ten inches of snow in the next couple of days
or so. And I'm talking to Stephen Heyward and Charles C. W. Cook,
who I assume are at their polar opposites, one in Florida,
one perhaps in Well. Where are you, Stephen? I know
this is a great interest everybody.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't know about that. I'm in California, out
of the coast, but it is raining, so it's got snow,
but we are getting some rain.
Speaker 2: There's that. Well, wherever you are in this country, I'm
sure that you've heard, of course, the nailing, washing and gnashing, gunashing,
and rending of garments that is attending day eighteen of
the of the you know, the Tasmanian devil like activity
going on from the Trumpe administration, a doge and whatnot.
And I'm here to tell you I spend a lot
of time in a lot of time, but I go
to Reddit a lot because it's interesting. It used to
be one of those places where, oh, here's a niche
community that I like. Let's let's talk with some like
minded fellow citizens about this, that and the other. But
every single subreddit has been infected by a level of
craziness I haven't seen before. There is an utter conviction
that we are basically in nineteen thirty four Germany. It's
going to get worse. We are under the boot of
fascism at the moment, and it's interesting how it manifests itself.
In one subreddit, they were noting that a whole bunch
of subreddits had been turned off, had been banned. Now
they were porn subreddits, you know, r R slash feet,
our slash teens, stuff like that. But the general consensus
was was this was a switch that had been installed
by the administration or the Reddit administrators on the orders
of the administration, to test how easy it would simply
be to just shut Reddit down. Because, as we all know,
Donald Trump paces you know, the Oval Office at two
o'clock in the morning worrying about what Reddit is doing. Think, well,
that's paranoid nonsense. Let's go over here to where we're
talking about the best ways to store all of the
videos and books and things that we've downloaded, and there
they are talking about the fact that it is necessary
for everybody with a conscience to download as much information
as possible from federal government websites, because it's all going
to be taken down in the interests of installing the
imminent fascists. I'm I don't want to go to the
comic strip history one because I am relatively certain that
there will be an argument about banning Twitter links. It's crazy.
Speaker 1: Well, now, hold on a minute, James, I had this
more than vague recollection of a few years ago, either
during Obama or during Biden, there was all this talk
of the federal government having available to it a kill
switch for the Internet so they could turn off the
whole thing and for some national emergency, and gee, you know, boy,
a good thing. I didn't get that because Trump would
use it, of course, on twelve oh one, eighteen days.
Only eighteen days, by the way, it seems so much longer,
which is what's so glorious about it, Charles.
Speaker 2: It seemed like a year, right, some highlights perhaps, if
you will. What's instructive about all this is, I don't
know if you guys know what the state of Minnesota
looks like when you think of Minnesota, do you do
you have a picture of it in your mind?
Speaker 3: Charles, Tim Walls my favorite.
Speaker 2: Well, that's an image I mean geographically of what would
look like. We know that there's that pointy edge. We
know that there's that sort of irregular edge that nestles
and cuddles with Wisconsin and a fairly sharp and discernible
border with Iowa. But way up in the north, there's
this little promontory that pops up, some remnant of an
ancient map making dispute. It's a little tiny part that
pokes up into the butt of Canada. And I like
to think that USAID is like that. It's a very
small thing, but yet how illustrative and defining of the
entire organization the government. It truly is. What we are
seeing is the tip of the iceberg, the Minnesota part
that juts indicators.
Speaker 1: We're seeing.
Speaker 2: The curtain has been pulled back on the smallest of
plays and all the things. We're finding.
Speaker 3: Where to start, James, anywhere to start. It's difficult with
this because it is being talked about, as you have noted,
in these hyperbolic terms, and yet it is extremely complicated.
It's extremely complicated on the merits, it's extremely complicated constitutionally,
it's extremely complicated even within the executive branch. And people
keep asking these questions that are simple. Do you think
it should exist? Well, which bits do you think Elon
Mash should be able to audit? It probably depends what
you mean. Do you think that this is the beginning
of a constitutional crisis? No, but it would be if
the president were doing things that it doesn't look as
if he's doing. And then you've got some of the
illustrative elements, as you noted, where whatever is found, however
stupid it is, the rejoinder is, well, it's only x
percent of the federal budget, which is not a defense.
It's just not an defense.
Speaker 1: For a start.
Speaker 3: If you took that as your excuse every time, you'd
never cut anything ever, because you would say, well, this
is not very much. Okay, fine, Second, the fact that
it's not very much doesn't necessarily matter, because aside from
what things cost, there is the question of should the
United States be doing it at all, even if it
were free, even if it made money, and some of
the things that we're uncovering the United States should just
not be doing.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 3: I'm not including in that pepfar, which I think is
a good program, but I don't care if the encouragement
of Papua New Guinean tribesmen to become transgender makes the
United States a billion dollars a year. I don't want
the federal government to it, and so this is getting obfuscated.
I think in this broad now this is partly the
fault of the people who are investigating it, because they
have quite rightly made a big deal out of how
much money they're going to save. And that's all very good,
but they should have said at the same time, I
think in marketing terms, they should have said, we have
a dual mandate, one to find waste and fraud and
abuse and corruption, and some of this really is basically
log rolling for progressives, and we're going to find things
that America should not be doing at all. And you
know that the excuse, oh well, it's not very much
money just doesn't address that side of this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great distraction to focused on the amount
of money involved. You know, I've been hearing for years,
going all the way back to the Reagan years from
appointees to usaid that it was not so much corrupt
and a slush on for liberal activist groups. I think
that's been growing in probably sens Obama is my hunch
about this but that it was just ineffective, wasteful, not
thought through, and so forth. I have a hunch that
what happened here is there may be some career people
inside USAID who raised the flag for the incoming Trumpers
that you really ought to look closely at how some
of these AID slush funds are going to activist groups.
By the way, I think most Americans have probably never
heard of USAID until five days ago. What they're hearing,
I think they don't like. But last thing for as
an opener, is the latest figure I saw just this
morning from the Columbia Journalism Review. Certainly not a member
of the right, vast right wing conspiracy, that AID grants
supported over six thousand journalists, over seven hundred different news outlets,
and as the way they put it, two hundred and
seventy nine media sectors, civil society organizations. That's a euphemism
for something bad, more than thirty countries. One of the
publications we've heard about Politico and a few others, but
I'm shocked to learn that one of the publications that
has somehow gotten some of USAID money is Christianity. Today.
It's a whole separate story that they've sort of been
moving left for quite a while. But you know a
lot of them is how in the world is Christianity
today getting money from the USAID. I want to learn
more about that. But this looks like they've really and
there's gonna be more of these kinds of things in
other agencies EPA regular state department. I remember going through
the COVID relief bill in twenty twenty one, that was
your past in haste, and I found in there, you know,
a grant of three million dollars for gender education in Pakistan.
So it's not just USAID, it's everywhere, and good for
them for rooting this out. And I don't care if
it only saves a dime.
Speaker 2: It's the things we used to make fun of. Yeah,
we're spending a lot of money for trends gender operas
in Ireland. You know, we make these ridiculous examples and
then they turn on to be exactly what they were doing.
You mentioned the Politico thing, of course, I think it
is interesting. It's been defended by a lot of people
who say, well, no, they need access to this. Interesting
that people in government in Washington need to pay money
to learn what's happening in Washington and government. But set
that aside, if you will, Charles Wright does. This is
the part that fascinates me, and you mentioned slush funds
is there's a Twitter account x called data Republican I
think is her handle, and she's developed all kinds of
tools that allow you to drill down. You enter in
various codes and whatnot, and it spits out thanks to AI,
these marvelous little grafts that tell you exactly how the
money flows. And the boxes that are marked red are
the ones that receive federal government money. And the almost
every single instance here it's all read on the left
and then on the right where the money eventually ends up.
It's some NGO, it's some private enterprise or the likes.
And you see how these institutions are. These organizations angos
get grants and then sort of wash them through other
through an educational facility so that they you know, Ford
gets the money and gives it to Vanderbilt, and Vanderbilt
then gives it to uh, you know, Tides Foundation, which
pops up a lot and Tides gives it to some
local entity, which sounds perfectly wonderful doing marvelous things for
the people and the rest of it. But you just
see this money as it flows from the state to
the to the to the private enterprises, getting less and
less as it goes along, of course, because everybody's got
to take their cut. And when this is when, when
this visual is repeated over and over and over again,
it is hard not to assume that there's just a
tremendous amount of inefficiency going on here. And I think, yes,
the idea is to zero it out and build it
from scratch and justify anew every single one of these things.
Now you can say that's just simply too much work.
I think we got enough people in Washington who are
who could probably work nine to five figuring out exactly
how to do this and put it into a bill
so that instead of having is big slashing that money
that goes everywhere, that you have specific lines and specific
laws that empower and instruct instead of the blob And Charles,
I know you're with me on this, and Stephen too,
that it's not that we're opposed necessarily to spending United
States government money on philanthropic efforts. We just want something rigorous,
something codified, so that there are actuals so that Congress
does its job that we have a budget, not a
continuing resolution, but a budget. And do you think we
might actually get a budget out of this after two years?
Or does Trump lack the discipline to actually keep going
and follow this to its natural conclusion?
Speaker 3: Can I rant about something for a second that's making.
Speaker 1: Rant? Okay?
Speaker 3: So I have for the last thirteen or fourteen years
written over and over again that we need Congress to
take back its powers, that delegation to the administrative state
is a problem. That the back and forth we get
every time we have a new president, because so many
of the decisions that should be made by Congress have
been farmed out, is unstable. And I've done this irrespective
of whether the president was a Republican or a Democrat,
because it's a structural question, not a partisan question. Most notably,
I think given the scale of the usurpation, I spent
a couple of years shouting at Joe Biden for trying
to spend four hundred trillion dollars billion dollars, not four
hundred trillion that's next time, four hundred billion dollars bailing
out student loans with public money that he was not
allowed to do. And I did not see this as
a partisan question, and I opened my arms and asked
other people to come in with me on the endeavor
and say, no, the president's not allowed to do this. Democrats, Republicans, independence, whatever,
just please accept that Congress is supposed to it is.
And you know what I got. I got nothing. I
got absolutely nothing. In fact, you've got the usual suspects
either stayed quiet about it or said no, he can
do it, or well, it's nice. We have had a
Republican president for what is it, fifteen days sixteen days now,
and that Republican president, as far as I can see,
is exercising powers that were delegated by Congress.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: I don't want them to be delegated. I don't think
it is a good idea for Congress to say, here
is a massive change of money, you go spend it
as use effect. I'm totally with you, James. If Congress
has done that on any of these issues, I will
be the first person to stand up and say, I'm sorry,
President Trump, but you can't cancel it. But thus far
we seem to be in a situation in which the
president is just auditing what he is able to spend,
and in some cases saying I'm no longer going to
spend it, I'm no longer going to use the discre
that I have been given, that every president has been given.
And what is the press saying? It's a constitutional crisis.
So what we have is a scenario in which when
presidents Barack Obama did it with DHAKA, Joe Biden did
it with student loans, where the executive branch is literally
stealing the power of Congress, is literally usurping the constitutional
authority that has been given to Congress. These people are
silent or endorse it. And the second that a president
starts to use the delegated authority that they have actually
been given in a way that they don't like, they're say,
this is the coming of Hitler, this is the end
of the republic. This is a constitutional crisis. Is this
is insane. This is making me so cross because I've
been standing asking these people to come help for ten
fifteen years and they won't do it. And then the
second the president is actually doing what he's been allowed
to do. Agreed, he shouldn't be allowed to do it,
but he is. It's a constitutional You have got to
be kidding me. You have just got to be kidding me.
Speaker 2: The Constitution. The Constitution matters when it matters, and it
doesn't matter when it doesn't. And if the President on
the way out can just say, oh, by the way,
this amendment is part of the Constitution, now, he can
do that. Although we've forgot about Joe, but I doesn't.
The Constitution is living and breathing, or is you know,
if they want to graft another limb on to it
in the sternam, then they'll do so. If they want
to hack off a foot, they'll do.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I take all of their protestations of constitutionality with a
bag of Morton salt. But I don't have an awful
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to the podcast. Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age, the
vice president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and contributing editor
to American Conservative and The Spectator. You can find his
writings in countless of the publications. You can find him
on x at Tory Anarchist. Daniel, Welcome, Thank you, delighted
to be here. Well, Monday, you had a piece in
the Post New York called Trump's Canada tariff tiff, and
I think there should have just been Trump's tariff tiff
for alliterative purposes, tells America's friends to get real on
defense spending. We don't usually think of Canada when it
comes to defense spending. We're looking at Europe at what
they are or are not doing. Explain exactly how that relates,
because a lot of people may have looked at that
and said, why Canada. Maybe it's fentanyl, but there's something
else going on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there are a whole constellation of issues that we
have with Canada, one of them being Canada's role in
NATO and the fact that it's one of the relatively
few NATO members. Now that is still lagging behind its
defense commitment. So NATO members are supposed to commit to
spending two percent of their GDP on defense. That's obviously
for their own defense, it's also making sure that you know,
the entire alliance is financed, and Canada is lagging significantly
behind that. Canada spends about I think one point three
percent one point seven percent where between those figures on
its defense right now. I think it's actually one point
three it's significantly less than two. And Pierre Trudeau is
just not serious about meeting his obligations, and he said
it's actually going to take until the twenty thirties before
Canada is able to reach the mark that we expect
from our allies in NATO. So I think Donald Trump
is using tariffs here to put pressure on Trudeau, pressure
on Canada on a whole number of issues, including this
one of Canada being a free rider on national security
coming from the United States and the NATO Alliance.
Speaker 1: Dan it's Steve Hayward out in California, by the way,
you could have just stopped a moment ago by saying
Pierre Trudeau is sorry. Justin Trudeau is not serious. I mean,
he's such an un serious person. Look, I want to
ask you three or four things. You have for quite
a long time staked out a position on the I
think the non interventionist camp, i'll call it that way
right and against it. I have a lot of sympathy
for this, against foreign entanglements and military events overseas. I
think that viewpoint has caught on with a lot of people.
But two things in particular. Right now, what, Well, let's
start in reverse order, reverse chronology. So the last couple
of days, Trump has let fly with this idea that
we ought to take a role in rebuilding Gaza and
moving people out, and you know, we'll have a I
don't know, it's like a real estate deal, an ownership
stake and the resource that will be built. What do
you think of this prospective entanglement? Do you like this?
How do you are you enthusiastic for it? Or does
this violate the McCarthy proviso?
Speaker 5: Well, I think Trump likes to state a maximalist position,
and oftentimes a shocking position, right from the beginning of
a negotiation, in order to completely shake up the existing position.
So you know, I mean there's a kind of almost
ritualistic element to the way foreign policy negotiations are typically
conducted everybody knows exactly where everyone else stands, and all
the maneuvering involves a lot of not saying what everybody knows.
In this case, Trump has, you know, of thrown the
chess pieces in the air. Nobody knows whether they're going
to land or what's going to happen. Now that said,
I really don't think Trump is going to send troops
to Gaza. I don't think we're going to have a
military occupation. I do think he's saying, you know what.
First of all, I mean, it's been interesting to see
typical hawks like Lindsey Graham now suddenly having to sound
like doves as they say, wait a minute, this proposal
goes too far. So okay, Now he's, you know, sort
of testing the limits of where the morehawker side of
his own party will stand. Second, he's also telling the gozens,
wait a minute, why the heck do you want to
come back to this, you know, land of yours, which
has been reduced to brubble. And if you do come back,
how is it going to be any different than last
time when you guys launched an attack on Israel. So
I think that too, is again getting to the core
of the dispute here and is kind of forcing negotiators
to be more honest about what they actually want and
are willing to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think it calls the bluff of
all the Arab countries who say they're pro Palestinian and
won't ever do anything to lift a thing. I like
that aspect of it. The nier one, perhaps for you,
I think, is a prospective attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
And I can't remember if you've written on that or not.
I know Tucker Carlson and other people are saying absolutely no, no,
we should you know, we should not go along with
Israel and any kind of military action against Iran. Where
do you land on that?
Speaker 5: I think Israel's quite capable, as it has before, of
taking out Iran's nuclear capability by itself. So I'm not
too worried about the United States having to be involved
in that. And it really is a matter for Israel
to decide what's appropriate for its security. Obviously, as a
neighbor of Iran, it's got the most skin in the
game here, and so I think the United States should,
you know, not be actively involved in that. But also
should not be telling Israel that this is something they
can't do. We're not Israel's keeper. They are a sovereign nation.
They can act according to their own interests.
Speaker 1: Well, but isn't it an our interest? I mean, Iran
has declared that the two great enemies of the world
are Israel and the Great Satan. That's US. I mean,
you know, they threatened US, we know they sponsored lots
of terrorism. Leave aside the question of whether Israel can
do it alone. I know there's disagreement among military experts
on that, but it seems to me that Trump might
do it. And if Trump do do it, what does
Dan McCarthy say.
Speaker 5: Well, I don't think Trump's going to, you know, be
having the United States take the leading role here. And
I don't think the United States is going to be
acting directly with Israel in order to take out Iran's
nuclear capability that they're trying to develop. I think, you know, again,
Israel has a very good track record of being able
to keep Iran in check, and so I expect that
to continue. Now if that's not the case, you know,
then again it's a different chess board, and you have
to actually look at what's happening. I would be very
skeptical of the ability. I mean, we can certainly, you know,
have missile strikes, we can do a number of things.
I think if we get into regime change and occupations,
then we'd have a real nightmare on our hands. So
it's all. And the other thing too, is that it's
very hard to tell. Obviously, there are signs that the
Iranian regime is weakening. There are signs that, you know,
it is indeed, its oppressions have reached a point where
the people are showing their discontent. On the other hand,
it's hard to know exactly, you know, how deep that
reaches into the countryside in Iran. So I'm kind of
optimistic actually that you know, Iran's regime, like the Soviet
regime you know in the nineteen eighties, is not necessarily
going to be around for that much longer. But that said,
I mean, containment, I think is the white policy for
the US there, And if something more than containments needed,
I would think Israel is the best person, the best
state to undertake that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, well, I certainly agree with you that we
don't want to be contemplating boots on the ground or
in Iraq type regime change strategy. I think we've learned
our lesson about that. I've got one more sort of
challenge to you before I turned it over to Charles.
So I'm enjoying your most recent article in the Dispatch,
where I didn't think I would see Dan McCarthy writing
anytime soon. But you're paired off with the Andy Smarrick
on Trump's appointments, especially of Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Junior,
and you give a good spirited defense of those. I
could pick some knits with the way you characterize Reagan,
but I don't want to bore listeners for that. But
I do want to pick one knit. You mentioned briefly that, oh,
National Review, in the old days of Fusionism went tilted
too far in accepting expert social science, and don't think
that's correct. I mean, I mean, yeah, they used to
have Ernest vonden Hogg, but he was usually trashing the
established social science. So I thought you were being a
little mean to National Review there, which seems to be
a popular sport these days. And I'm doing this for
Charles benefits, so he doesn't have to be put on
the spot. But I'm an old guy's been reading it forever.
But maybe the last point is, or maybe could turn
this into a question is Yeah, I share all of
the sort of Russell Kirk and other conservatives disdain for
social science on very deep levels, but I'm also a
consumer of it. And there's you know, some of the
best social science the last generation has been by people
like Charles Murray and James Q. Wilson. And you know,
when our guys do it well, or back to Ernest
Vonden Hogg forty years ago, when our guys do it well,
we clapper the heck out of the left. So maybe
maybe can I get Dan McCarthy to say just the
kindest little thing in favor of decent social science? Or
is that a bridge too far?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 5: I wonder if I came off the wrong way in
that article, because I wasn't trying to say that social
science doesn't have a place on the right, and in fact,
I wasn't even trying to say that National Review had
tilted too far towards social science. I have a line
in there. I think about James Burnham having a problem
with Richard Weaver, thinking that Weaver was too literary to philosophical.
You know, perhaps too southern. Even so, that was the
kind of contention that I wanted to get at. Also,
the other thing being that obviously James Burnham had a
long standing feud with Frank Meyer. Meyer thought, you know,
conservatism needed to be an ideology or kind of you know,
a well articulated philosophy. Burnham thought that conservatives should be
more empirical, more machiavelian. Even so, that's the kind of
dispute I was getting at. And in fact National Review
was a lot of fun, and I think, you know,
to the extent that comes through today can still be
a lot of fun when these kinds of clashes between
different methodologies among conservatives arise. That said, I do think
that the vast majority of social science is absolutely worthless.
And the idea, the fundamental idea that if only you know,
we put science in government, that if we have the
right technocrats large of our bureaucracy, we're going to get
wonderful outcomes. I think that's wrong. And even conservative you know,
conservatives from think tanks and you know, who have social
science credentials or you know, credentials in you know, even
economics and things that are relatively more grounded than most
social science. I'm just skeptical of their ability to actually
govern and maneuver the country in the direction they want
to go. I think there's actually and that's you know,
one reason why I favor a much more decentralization and
also just you know, more of a sense of dealing
with human beings as the essence of politics rather than
dealing with sort of Benthamite abstractions of maximum utility.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'ren' heated agreement on that.
Speaker 2: Dan Benthamite abstractions, I believe is going to be the
name of this particular podcast for mass Appeal, although I
love that locusion.
Speaker 3: So what interests me is defining success for this Trump administration.
And I think, Daniel, you and I don't have the
same politics, although it overlaps in some areas. I have
confused I think some readers recently, because you know, on
day one I will say, well, Trump's done this great thing,
and I really like it and I'm so glad that
he did it, and then on a d two I say, ah,
don't do that. And because we're in this honeymoon period
for Trump, it is sort of looks odd to some
because they want to be all in right, so I
wonder what, from your perspective would a successful second Trump
presidency look like. Right, neither of us is in a cult,
so neither of us is sort of tied to Trump
or so angry with Trump that we will reject it
when he does things that we like. So if you
were to look forward four years, what would he have
to achieve maybe two or three things in the next
four years for you to say, well, that was a
really good presidency and he moved the country and the
right and the Republican Party in the direction that I
Daniel McCarthy like.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 5: So in terms of foreign policy, what I would say
is that you need to have our allies being capable
of providing more of their own security, more of their
own defense. So I'd like to see NATO members Trump
is said, perhaps NATO members should be contributing five percent
rather than two percent of their GDP towards their defense.
I think it can be a mistake to look purely
at those percentages. It's really a matter of the threat environment,
and when you have Russia engaged in an invasion of
Ukraine right now, obviously Europe should be spending not just
two percent, but a lot more trying to keep their
neighborhood as peaceful as possible. So one thing I want
to see is more of a kind of tiered defense
system where our allies are contributing more for themselves. We
are still there, but we are the provider of security
of last resort, rather than what we are now, which
is more or less the kind of sugar daddy that
everybody goes to for their first line of support. In
terms of social policy, I think Trump is already making
tremendous advances, So getting rid of the federal government's role
in affirmative action, DEI, all these other things, that's exactly
the right move. I tend to think that Trump is
actually right strategically for the pro life movement in terms
of saying that you have to focus on the local
before you can hope to do anything at the national level.
So I think Trump is correct to keep abortion as
much as possible in the States rather than trying to
make a federal issue of it right now, where pro
lifers would certainly lose. And then in terms of taxes
and domestic issues, you know, economics. I want to see
first of all that Doge continues to do the fantastic
work it's doing right now, stripping out this entire ecosystem,
this class system whereby the federal government takes our taxpayer
dollars gives them to mostly left wing NGOs. These left
wing NGOs, of course, then take that money and spread
it around their friends. It upholds an entire ecosystem of
progressivism that I'm very happy to see defunded. I like
to see tax cuts, you know, I'm not one of
these conservatives who thinks that suddenly there's something virtuous about
taxing the American people more. We're taxed enough already. In
terms of trade policy, I kind of like what I
see from Trump so far, where he's willing to use,
you know, the threat of tariffs to get you know,
various kinds of concession, just open negotiations, you know, from
a position of strength. I do you know, think that
if he suddenly slapped you know, twenty five percent tariffs
on Canada and Mexico, maybe on Europe. I mean, who
knows who else would get those kinds of tariffs. If
you do that too, suddenly you're going to have price shocks,
You're going to have supply problems, all all sorts of issues. Now,
whether you could have a more gradually implemented, large scale
tear of plan that I think, you know is probably
something you and I would disagree on. Yeah, but I'm
a gradualist, I'm a conservative. I'm someone who tends to
look with a certain degree of anxiety upon sudden drastic
shifts from one direction to another. That said, I think
Trump so far is not so much trying to do something,
you know, grabbing the steering wheel and suddenly turning the
car one hundred and eighty degrees. I think what he's
actually doing here is setting up a very interesting set
of moves for negotiations.
Speaker 1: That's fine.
Speaker 3: I agree almost everything you just said. I think we
probably do disagree on tariffs in your last point, but
that's pretty much what success would look like to me
as well. It's interesting though you didn't mention the border.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I take that for granted. Perhaps that obviously cutting down,
you know, not just illegal immigration. But I think Trump
is exactly right. We need to first of all, the
way in which so called birthright citizenship has been interpreted
by Supreme Court and is defended by all the progressives.
It really has a very flimsy grounding. And we know
the Supreme Court has made, you know, mistakes in the past,
so I think it's time that we get the Supreme
Court to revisit the idea of birthright citizenship and give
it a more constrained definition. Clearly, you know, the notion
of what it constitutes to be subject to America's jurisdiction,
which is the you know, the wording that is used
to say, well, look, anyone you know on our territory
subject to our jurisdiction, including illegal immigrants, including legal immigrants,
therefore they must be covered by birthright citizenship as well.
But you know, being subject to the jurisdiction actually means
different things for American citizens because we're still subject to
the United States and jurisdiction even when we don't live
in the United States, because we are taxed even if
we're living abroad. And obviously no Mexican citizen, either a
legal immigrant or an illegal one, is subject to that
kind of jurisdiction. So I think there's you know, Trump
is doing the right thing to question this building block
of kind of illegal immigration and of leftist you know,
promotion of mass immigration in general. And then you know,
I do want to see legal immigration limited as well
as illegal immigration, and I think that, you know, I
tend to side more with the critics of the vig
Ramaswami on H one B visas than I do with
you know, Ramaswami himself, although I acknowledge, you know, certainly,
when you have absolute, you know, Olympian level talents, when
you have Einstein level geniuses, yes you want to bring
them into your country, but you don't want to have,
you know, a kind of indentured servitude for tech workers
with H one v's.
Speaker 2: I want to get back to tariff for a second,
because I don't like them. But that's just me. We
talked before about what he wants out of Canada. It's
kind of obvious what he wants out of Mexico, which
is do something about the cartels and immigration. But China
we have, if I understand this correctly, the riivocation of
the the Minimus, the the idea that they can just
dump a whole lot of stuff here directly into the
country and they don't have to pay any tear on it.
The other day, I was making eggs for breakfast, as
is my wont and I have this wonderful little this
egg beater. You push down on it and it whips
your eggs. It's the second one I bought, because the
first one, after two or three months, started leaking black
oil into my eggs I bought. I bought another one
within two or three from a different and mind you,
this was a different one from a different company on
Amazon that had a list of consonants for its name
that you know XK five three seven two, as opposed
to the other one, which was nine three you know,
made up brand names. It's all coming from the same
Chinese factory, and I'm using it, and it dumps black
oil into my eggs, And I said, all right, that's it,
you know, twice bit and thrice whatever. Stupid me, but
I'm kind of used to like buying cheap junk from China,
and it's like, I'd rather pay a little bit more
and have quality goods made right here that employ American citizens,
if such a thing is possible these days? Is that
what Trump is trying to do? What does he want
out of China from the terra Does he want disengagement?
Does does he want, you know, for the people to
just simply move their factories elsewhere to India or Vietnam
or heaven forfend Indiana. What's the endgame with the with
the Chinese tariffs.
Speaker 5: Well, it's always difficult to predict an endgame for Donald Trump,
because you know, he's a strategist who has, you know,
kind of natural genius that does not necessarily, you know,
follow either ideological tracks or you know, predictable ones that
you know, other folks might envision. He's an entrepreneur. An
entrepreneur has to be able to kind of envision and
make a future that doesn't even exist yet. I think
decoupling is clearly a major component, however, of what Trump's
trying to do here. He wants to encourage, you know,
the taking of industry and of trade away from China
and putting it anywhere else possible, ideally here in the
United States with more manufacturing. But friend shoring is better
than having, you know, a trade dependency on China, so
you know, I think one of Secretary Rubio's accomplishments in
visiting the Caribbean and Central America in the past week
has been to try to deepen trade friendships and relationships
with the nations of Central America and the Caribbean in
order to try to you know, create more of an
industrial capacity more of a trade base here in the Americas,
for both the goods we want to sell to them
and also for their ability to develop and sell to us.
Speaker 2: And of course, to interrupt you for a second, because
you mentioned the Caribbean in the area Panama declining to
re up with Belton Road, I'm waiting for somebody to say, well,
they weren't going to do it anyway, and Ruby it
didn't get anything out of them. Is this significant? I
think it is. I mean, countries eventually wake up to
the fact that this is not a good deal for
them in the long run. Do you think that others
that this is the beginning of a diminution of Chinese
influence in that a way.
Speaker 5: Well, I do. But you know, Belton Road is the
you know, symbolic headline item. But the more important thing
behind the scenes is simply the level of economic penetration
power and especially technological infrastructure influence that China is able
to wield over our nearest neighbors, the Caribbean and Central America.
And I think one of the successes of Secretary of
Rubio's visit has been to work on a lot of
those things that are further down the agenda saying that,
you know, we need to have you know, supplies, especially
for you know, high technology coming from America. Five G
networks for example, we want those to be American based
five G networks. We do not want Huawei to be
you know, the primary communications NOE for Central America and
the Caribbean. So I think there's been significant progress there
and I'm hoping that's going to continue. And I think
that you know, most of the nations of the region
do understand that it's much better to be you know,
America's friend, much better to have these dependencies if you're
going to have them on America, don't have them on
communist China, because Communist China really you know, is going
to use that in ways that are going to be
harmful to the US. Then the US is going to
have to retaliate by you know, limiting perhaps our trade
and relations with people would like to be our friends,
because there are neighbors. A whole number of bad things
will happen if China is economic influence grows in Latin
America in general, but in the Central America and the Caribbean.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I don't know why anybody would would buy their
I mean, I am reasonably certain that the egg beater
I described that broke has an RFID backdoor into it
that China comes down to access my smart home network.
Speaker 1: Stephen, Well, well, actually, James, what we learn from your
example is that you're a very rich man if you're
using leg egg beaters, because eggs are now you know,
a million dollars apart. Whatever it is, Dan, I got
one last question for you. You referenced early on what
has been obvious to me for a long time, and
that Trump likes to make these outrageous seemingly outrageous and
completely beyond the pale suggestions on Gaza or the tariffs
and all the rest of that. And you point out
rightly that this is a long standing negotiating tactic of Trump,
and I wonder if you're going to reach the point
of diminishing returns right. It is amazing to me that
people have not figured this out about Trump, but it's
still working for him like a charm. But reach a
point of diminishing returns, doesn't he At some point you
really have to draw the line and really follow through.
I mean, I don't know whether it's invading Panama or
seizing Greenland. I mean I think those are crazy ideas,
but it does seem to be getting it does seem
to be getting results. Like you say, but what happens
if he doesn't? Where do you think Trump needs to
draw a line? I'll do the question that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, at some point somebody is going to call
his bluff and say, hey, I'm not going to give
you any concessions because I know you're actually not going
to follow through and slap us with tariffs. And I think,
you know, Trump, he's certainly created a persona for himself,
a public identity in the past several years here as
a tariff man. He says, it's the most beautiful word
in the English language. I mean, that's something you didn't
even hear from Pat Buchanan back in the nineties. This
is this is you know, certainly creating a public impression
of being quite not just willing, but eager to employ
tariffs in a big way. So I think, you know,
there will come a time when someone's going to call
his bluff. And you know, I think Trump is quite
willing to use tariffs. Now he probably doesn't want to
do it. You know, if you have twenty five percent
on Mexico, twenty five percent on Canada, all going into
effect the same moment. That's a big disruption. On the
other hand, if Canada doesn't get serious about what he's
asking of Trudeau, it's entirely possible. Maybe we have a
deal with Mexico, but we don't have a deal with Canada. Immediately,
Tariff's going to effect for a while, and then the
Canadians come back and say, oh gosh, we should have
taken you seriously the first time. Now we're willing to
make a deal about fisheries or NATO or other things.
Speaker 2: Daniel McCarthy, we thank you for joining us again. You
can catch him on x at Tory Anarchist, where you
can find that zest accommination of words explained to you
in a variety of tweets. How often do you? Are
you one of those sitting on the sitting on the
app all day, or are you doling out a gem
every fortnight or what exactly is you?
Speaker 5: I do look at it rather more often than is healthy,
I think, and I certainly participate to the extent that's reasonable.
Speaker 1: So yeah, wait a minute, Dan, I mean, you've got
the down, but you're the least anarchistic person I can
think of.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm bit just stating on Twitter a fair bit. Yes,
I think it's it's reasonable to say.
Speaker 2: But good well, we'll see you there and uh and
ketchup and your insights and your observations. Thank you Daniel
for joining us in the podcast today.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 2: You know. The one thing that we haven't heard from
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Well here we are again, closing up another episode, but
plenty of time to chat amongst ourselves. There was a
description of Twitter that I saw the other day. A
wonderful little exchange included a news report, then John from
Commentary weighing in, and then Selina Zito, and it all began,
I think with somebody who was saying that they were
facing quote and Orwellian Knightmarre. I believe that wasn't what
it was because they no longer knew whether or not
they had the lifetime protection that a federal job afforded
them hm. And was pointed out to this person that
actually this is what most people called real life in
a dynamic economy. And also the people the federal government
didn't seem particularly interested in the plight of the people
who were having their industries destroyed, downsized, or it made
irrelevant by various government decisions. Nobody asked to call. Everybody
told the coal miners to learn to coal, but nobody
seems to be We're supposed to have sympathy for the
somebody who lives in suburban DC and has been sitting
at home for four years, tapping away with a cat
in their lap.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I remember a story. It's not quite
about federal employees. But I don't think federal employees losing
their job will create mass sympathy with the American people.
But if you go all the way back to Proposition
thirteen in California in the seventies, that was the big
property tax cut measure, that was the signal opening salvo
of the tax revolt. And I remember someone quoted the
newspaper a local government person saying, if this passes, it's
going to devastate our budgets. It's gonna require huge spending cuts.
It's gonna be terrible for government in California. And the
person said he looked out at the audiences at rotary
clubs and wherever, and always saw were people smiling. And
of course Prop thirteen passed by a nearly two to
one margin, And it was that point that guy said,
I changed my mind about Proposition thirteen. Well, I think
something similar is going on now. I think there's no
sympathy for people who well, the bargain's always been kind
of phony. We need to have higher salaries and lavish
pensions for public employees at the state and federal level
because they don't have, you know, to compensate for the
lack of you know, pensions and stock options and things
like that. But of course when you look into these things,
you find that the pensions it's bankrupt in Chicago and
Illinois and so forth, and California is also way behind.
And so this is long overdue. And it amazes me
how Democrats want to die on all these hills. They
want to just end the transgender business, you know, aid
to media groups and all the rest. And I'll land
here Democrats revealing that they really are the most incompetent
political party. Republicans maybe the stupid party, but Democrats seem incompetent.
Speaker 3: It's also now a violation of the original deal. You
go back one hundred years to when the federal government
was hiring. In this case, because the prohibition, the Treasury
Department had to hire two thousand staff to enforce the
Volsteed Act. The deal, the explicitly advertised deal was you
will make less money than you would in the private sector,
you will get less benefits than you would get in
the private sector, but you have better job security. Now
government workers, especially at the federal level, have both the
job security insane levels of job security and pensions that
can't be matched in the private sector and salaries that
are on average hire. Now you have to be careful
how you passe that between me and and so forth.
But the deal that was once offered has been essentially
reworked so that government employees win on both sides of
the coin. And one of the reasons for that is
that the public sector unions have put themselves in a
position in which they get to play both the employee
and employer. Under Franklin Roosevelt, who was hardly a mean
right winger, the idea of a public sector union was
deemed to be ridiculous. It was only in the sixties
under Kennedy via an executive order, that public sector unions
became permissible. And the reason was obvious is that if
you have a private sector union, and I think the
way the government puts his thumb on the skills is outrageous,
but just in theory, if you have a public sector
a private sector union, then you have two people in
the equation that have an interest in meeting one another
in the middle. Because you have a guy who owns
a business and he needs things to be done, and
if he doesn't get his employees or employees on side,
then he'll go out of business. But you also have
people who have jobs and they don't want to lose them.
They don't want the company to go out of business either.
I don't think it always works exactly like that. I'm
not that naive, but the idea makes sense in theory.
You have these two, So that's not true here. So
we've ended up with this absurdly sprawling, largely useless federal
workforce that gets to set the terms of its own
employment by bullying the people who employ them with its votes.
That should never have existed in the first place in
that setup, and that violate the original deal, which was
come here for the job security. But you'll make less money.
I mean, it's just something that's got to be done
about it.
Speaker 2: Well, it may take somebody to cut through the Gordian knot.
Is Elon Musk our dollar a year man as they
used to call them, because you remember back in the
I think in World War two, they would hate they
would bring in a dollar a year somebody from private
industry who would take no compensation, but do this because
he had to know how, and because he had the
patriotic spirit. Patriotic if you wish to do the right thing.
What I'm looking forward to because all of what we've
been seeing with the USA idea is just to tune up.
It's just it's it's you know, it's the overture. It's
giving us the themes that we're going to be hearing
the operator to come. But the Department of Education is
in the sites now because every day it seems like
the administration wakes up and says, all right, we need
another galvaniced seismic, tectonic shift shock. You know, nobody's talking
about Greenland anymore because invading, occupying, and rebuilding Greenland is
like that, that's so a fortnight ago. We're so far
beyond that. These things will be dropped depth charges and
then everybody will absolutely freak out about them, and then
necessarily something has to be done about them, and perhaps
necessarily something will be the Department of Education. The I
began this hour by talking about the shrieking Unreddit and
the rending of garments. The reaction on Reddit to the
elimination of the Department of Education or even just pairing
it back to its statutory confines, which I believe that
they can do by executive action. You have to get
Congress to get rid of the cabinet. Is uniform in
that this is a concerted effort to stupefy the American
people and make them dumb, so that I don't know,
I guess ten eighteen years hence they willingly accept the
fascism in which they've grown up, that they're not critical
thinkers anymore. That the idea that if the Department of
Education does not exist, there is no education in America.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 2: That's kind of what they believe, which does not speak
well for all these kids who grew up under the
Department of Education and didn't get the basic civics listed,
because that's not the point. And then simultaneously, some of
these people will be coming in from our slash teachers
or public school credits, where people are talking about the
inanities and the horrors that they face trying to teach
an uneducatable generation, which has nothing to do with the
amount of federal spinning and has everything to do with
cultural events and the rest of it. So, I mean,
the idea that education right now is dependent upon A
the federal teat and b federal instruction is nonsense because
we've lived under this and we've seen what's happened. We've cratered,
we could be better.
Speaker 1: We saw the latest reading scores came out what ten
days ago with dismal results. And yeah, I mean, I've
been raised the question here on Twitter and elsewhere. Can
anyone point to any international development trends that USAID has
been a principal agent of? And likewise, can anybody point
to any improvements in public education since the department was
founded in nineteen seventy nine, And if you look at
the data, the answer is resounding no. The problem is
too many Americans are sentimental. And I think, how the
part it's about education, the EPA's environmental protection and we
like all those things, and so sort of a labeling thing.
But yeah, it's add this other thought, which is I
am watching again another perhaps example of democratic incompetence on this.
They're all attacking Musk. Who elected Musk, to which you
ask who elected all these bureaucrats that he's reviewing right now.
And people have also saying at some point Trump's big
ego and narcissism will cause him to have to break
with Trump because Trump's richer and getting all this press,
and I think you're missing that Trump is sorry. The
Musk is such a useful lightning rod for Trump, and
he's confusing and dividing the opposition that otherwise would be
focused wholly on Trump and Trump alone. And so I'm
just sitting back and popping more popcorn and enjoying the
whole spectacle.
Speaker 3: Again, leaving inside the constitutional questions, it does take Congress
to abolish the Department of Education, although not, as you say, James,
to make it sit within its statutory limits, which it doesn't.
If the Department of Education were to disappear tomorrow, I
truly believe that nothing of value would be lost. This
is why there is this great disconnect in politics at
the moment, because, leaving aside again the debate over structure,
the people you're discussing on Reddit, and many people within
the Democratic Party honestly seem to believe that if you
even let one bureaucrat go, the whole thing will fall apart.
And I think the opposite is true. I think you
could fire half of the federal workforce and no one
would notice. It would make the country better to do that.
And you know, this is the problem that the Democrats have.
Republicans will suffer if they if they seem callous or
they go too fast. But the problem that the Democrats
have is that reaction that was just mentioned with the proposition.
Remind me which one it is, Steve in California thirteen.
It's that reaction is that if you look at polling
on this the sob stories that I keep reading in
the New York Times that people say I have took
her and for a third day of the week, I
can't even imagine it. I cried myself to sleep this morning.
Just sounds completely insane to people. Yeah, but they don't
know that because they don't talk to anyone outside of
that group.
Speaker 2: During the height of the last tech bubble, when there
was just so much money slashing around and everybody had
their nice little show place office buildings, one of the
things you used to see a lot on Twitter as
it was known, or reels perhaps or vine even was
my day at the Twitter office, in which some young
twenty something would show up with the you know and
and flounce through the wonderfully appointed atrium and go to
their desk and get their get the cappuccino and a
little Claire, and then have a meaningless meeting with a
couple of other people. They're staring at screens and talking
about something, and then lunch on the deck in the
sun with the sprouts and the and then it would
be some other pointless and then it'd be yoga, and
then it would be then they would take their dinner
home and the rest of it. And it all looked
like this ridiculous experience, I mean, very very nice to live,
I suppose, but producing exactly what Twitter did. One thing.
It took in tweets, it gave out tweets. It was
back and forth. What they were talking about. I don't know.
Musk comes in and fires eighty five percent of them,
and Twitter somehow staggers on someone. You could get rid
of all of those people who are having all day
meetings about this, that or the other thing, and and
it turned out not to be essential to the thing
that they were doing.
Speaker 3: So how far is this profitable? Did you see this'?
Its revenues have been cut in half, but its expenses
have been cut to a quarter of what they were.
Speaker 2: Right right, which you know is the model that he
was seeking. And now I will grant that the advertising
on Twitter is extremely low compared to quality, compared to
what it used to be. And it used to be
all the big brand names, right, they were all out there,
and then they all pulled back because because Muscus a
fascist and turned it into a right wing sess pool,
which I find into an interesting comment because I am
on Twitter a great deal, as our previous guest said,
more than I should be, and I find the amount
of left wing invective or arguments is precisely what it
was before. What I don't find are the throttling of
ideas and opinions that are at the moment unpopular and
deemed to be hurtful disinformation that we have to do
something about. That's the other part about this. One of
the notes that we have here for the podcast is
how basically the resistance appears to be rudderless that you
have a democratic party having learned nothing. Putting David Hogg
as the vice chair of the DNC, that you have
these rallies where people are waving the flags of other nations,
which does not necessarily endear them to the population amongst
which they wish to live, and that you have all
of these, you know, people hyperventilating in the steps of
various state capitals insisting that fascism is on the way
or here as in Minnesota, one of the placards said,
there are no illegals on stolen Okay, make that argument
and see how that goes for you. So you want
to say, well, you know what got them on the run.
They'll never be able to pick it up and figure
it out. But of course perhaps they will or can they?
Is there a Clinton out there waiting to be born
who can triangulate and get them back? That may be
a whole another podcast that we should have. We kind
of gotta go, it's been an hour. I gotta hit lunch,
I gotta go to the gym, anything else, guys, or
you just contend to let me go with a self
indulgent peroration and leave it at that.
Speaker 1: No, that was a good one. I don't want to
try and top that. Who's been great talking with you, James.
Speaker 2: As every general it has been fun talking to you too.
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Speaker 1: Zero Ricochet who join the conversation