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