Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "American Authoritarianism" with Matt Welch

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"American Authoritarianism" with Matt Welch · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Good day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. And it's certainly the
• 0:07
  scariest idea that I've ever had about the United States, which is that that country,
• 0:15
  the country which is more ostentatious than any other about its embrace of freedom, the
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  country for which freedom is baked into its DNA, has entered a period in which the sort
• 0:29
  of fundamental freedoms that have been around since the Magna Carta, certainly since
• 0:34
  habeas corpus, the idea that a person who is snatched off the street by his or her government
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  will have the ability to challenge that snatching in court, will have the ability to prove themselves,
• 0:48
  or not even the ability to prove themselves, that the onus will be on the government,
• 0:51
  on the prosecutors to prove that that person has done something so vile, beyond reasonable
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  doubt that their liberty deserves to be taken away, that that principle would no longer prevail
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  in the United States is somewhat terrifying. And look, I don't want to use this show as a way
• 1:13
  to be reactive to the news. You will have noticed, given the topics that we've covered in the period
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  since Donald Trump's ascendancy to the throne of King Emperor Grand Puba of the universe,
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  that I'm not spending my time talking to people about that. You have plenty of that in your
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  feed anyway, but there comes a time where one has to address it. And the best person to do so
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  is Mr. Matt Welch, who is a libertarian journalist. He is the co-host of the wildly popular
• 1:41
  podcast, the fifth column. And Matt was on the real time with Bill Mar, the great HBO panel talk show
• 1:50
  last weekend. He did a great job there. And I got him onto Zeppes Live, which is my weekly streaming
• 1:57
  television, video, chat, thing, and be squidget, where you can ask questions live. And we respond
• 2:03
  to them, we banter about what's going on in the news. And this is that recording. We don't just
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  talk about the crisis, the possible crisis of American authoritarianism. I also wanted to think,
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  to hear what Matt thinks about Doge and Elon and government waste and red tape and whether or not
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  that's all the distractions, since he generally has a preference for much smaller government. And
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  I really wanted to understand the criticism of what Donald Trump is doing, not from the perspective
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  of a wild-eyed, Trump-loathing lefty, but from someone who is measured and has their bonafidaz
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  as a person who has no necessary partisan interest in taking down the president, but is deeply
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  concerned about the consequences for American liberty. This is a wide-ranging conversation.
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  I hope you enjoy it. If you do, then tune in for the next sub-stack live. They're on at 9 p.m.
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  every Tuesday evening, Eastern time, which is 11 a.m. Wednesday mornings on in Australia.
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  Otherwise, just subscribe to sub-stack and you'll get pinged every time we go live. I hope you
• 3:04
  enjoy the one, the only Matt Welch.
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  Congratulations to everybody who's just joining us. The wonderful Matt Welch is our guest on
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  Zepp's live this evening. Libertarian, extraordinaire, commentator, co-host of the fifth column,
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  podcast, sub-stack, media empire, and delightful guest on real-time with Bill Marr last week.
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  Oh, thank you.
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  Which, Matt, it pains me that all of your best zingers and best arguments with Bill were on
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  the overtime segment that doesn't go to air on HBO, but goes on YouTube and I think CNN and
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  you can get it as a podcast because I rarely take this opportunity to piss in the pocket of my
• 3:53
  guests as we say in Australia, which means to blow smoke up your ass. But thank you for calling
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  out Bill on his environmentalist bullshit, where he was going on about how thankful he is
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  that he was born in the, you know, he grew up in the 70s when everything was so much cleaner
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  and there weren't toxins around. And nowadays, kids are just so contaminated by toxins and you
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  said, but that's nonsense because things are much cleaner than they used to be. And he was like,
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  well, I don't know what kind of science you're talking about.
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  What kind of libertarian intellectual science?
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  Environmental toxins is really the story of my lifetime. I'm glad I was born as old as I am
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  at a time when everything wasn't completely polluted. I think that's why I'm still alive today.
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  And it just got worse and worse and worse.
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  But the air is less polluted. The water is less polluted. As countries get richer,
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  they pollute less. When they're industrializing, they pollute more. There might be individual
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  environmental toxins, yes. But as a broad like description of the status of OECD countries,
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  we are polluting on that less. And then he accused you of being deluded by libertarian ideology
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  in believing that, and you were like, well, I can see the mountains from Long Beach, which I
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  couldn't when I was a kid. And he didn't have a response to that. Yeah, not being from Long Beach,
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  right? He's from New Jersey. He doesn't understand our pain out there in the flood plain of
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  Southern California. No, it's a common thing. For one, Bill, who I obviously enjoy quite a bit,
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  and I'm always happy that he is generous enough to invite me on his show. He has a little bit of
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  kind of some woo-woo environmental stuff he always has. I mean, he's talking about the plastics
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  and the toxins. And he's also an excellent shape. It must be set. So whatever he's doing,
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  including smoking all of the world's marijuana, seems to be working out for him for the most part.
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  But he's got a little bit of that of that RFK. I don't know how much he agrees with RFK about
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  anything, because I don't follow that closely. But just sort of that intuition that we're being
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  contaminated by the corporations and that big farmers trying to push all this kind of stuff,
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  there's some overlap there. And some definitely some skepticism about the efficacy of certain
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  vaccines, not all of them. So he is definitely right for some of that. And I think whether you're
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  coming at it from the RFK angle or the more kind of classic environmental sort of pessimist angle,
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  it's always striking to learn the weird truth about wealth, which is say, which will for wealth,
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  but it makes your air cleaner and your rivers cleaner. And also a reforestation of lands and a bunch
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  of other happy things that happen once you're on the other side of the industrialization curve. And
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  people get their countries get there for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes it's going to be
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  because they did the regulation. That's actually part of the story in in my native Southern
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  California is that they cut a lead in the cart. We didn't know it long ahead of leaded gasoline.
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  And they made some actual environmental regulations. Sometimes it just people are wealthy enough
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  so that they can demand the regulations or you're just rich enough that the companies themselves
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  operate a lot cleaner. And for those who think that you got to be a good solid, you know,
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  commie to go clean. Just those of us who are like around the Iron Curtain and around 1990,
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  that was some of the most polluted places. Trees would not grow in northern bohemia and then
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  checkles of hockey now that checker public, you know, because all of the uranium mining that they
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  done there and the coal that was everywhere. So yeah, it's better to be it's better to be clean
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  and wealth allows for that kind of cleanliness. This just it strikes me that this this kind of
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  bilmar RFK junior like woo woo rift on the left is a bit reminiscent of another battle that's
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  happening between the sort of Ezra Klein abundance liberals versus the restrictionist liberals,
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  which I think is interesting Matt like that that pretty much throughout my life the left has been
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  associated with a kind of Ralph Nader style conception of what it means to be on the left,
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  which is we should empower communities to push back against powerful companies and governments
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  that want to tremble on their rights. Therefore, we should insert as much red tape and as many
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  impediments to the doing of big business and government as we can. And now that seems to have
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  led at least America at least blue state America to a position in which it's impossible to do
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  anything like build high speed rail or builds skyscrapers or you know create affordable housing
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  or whatever it might be because there's so many so many pressure points at which self-appointed
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  spokespeople for the community can obstruct. And now there's a renewed energy on the left to say
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  actually we should be the party of building things as a libertarian. What do you make of that clash?
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  I am I'm heartened to see that there is a movement among a count them on one hand maybe to
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  number of blue state left leaning pundits who've got a nice book out that they're popularizing
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  and starting conversations with that's great. It's better than the alternative at the same time
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  there aren't a lot of elected politicians in this country that are acting anything like any of
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  that even a little bit. I mean there aren't you know maybe an abundance Democrat is Jared
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  Polis the governor of Colorado but maybe not. I have friends in Colorado who get really mad when
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  I talk about that he's you know better than the average Democrat on economic policy. He has
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  signed some things into law that are not so great as well. It's just not there aren't a lot of
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  of great examples of like oh we're doing this in this place you know Austin seems to be pretty
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  well governed. I don't even know I presume that Austin local government is is dominated by Democrats
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  just because Austin tends to be a left of center city. I could be wrong about that but they build
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  housing there. You know they're having incredible population growth and the costs are not really
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  going that high in that because they allow for stuff to be built. I'm from you know you mentioned
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  Long Beach. So I'm from a part of North Long Beach right next to a city called Lakewood. Lakewood
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  was the biggest levitown west of levitown. They built something like 50,000 houses in a year and a
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  half two years after World War II. It's all incredible. It's this huge kind of planned community all
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  GI builders by three models of houses all three bedroom two bathroom just dependent on like where
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  your porch was and they just built it all like that. They probably built more houses there in two
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  years than have been built in Southern California or in LA County in any given year since you know
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  the 90s or something. It's just astonishing. There aren't abundance Democrat kind of examples
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  anywhere and if there's anything to make that should make Democrats feel really awful about
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  their governance is that you mentioned high speed rail. California has one of the most infamous
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  pointless and expensive and unbuilt ice field rail projects that has gone from like Merced to
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  you know outer Merced maybe at this point. Is there an out of Merced? I want to I want to
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  visit out of Merced. This isn't the suburban paradise. If you haven't seen if you haven't seen
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  physical graffiti in a while it was all mostly shot in Merced. It's a lovely place. I love it.
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  But Florida just went ahead and bought a built a high speed rail and it's functional. Now
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  you're Ron death Santis himself under his governorship or under the last two governorships. This
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  thing was built a mostly private money if not all private money and it's up in functional. You can
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  build stuff in Florida. Taxes are low by high speed rail in an American context. That means 40
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  miles an hour. I think it's I think it's faster in that case. I don't have the details in front of
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  me but it's not it's not a joke of high speed rail. It actually it's straight. It's straight. There's
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  not a lot of mountains in Florida. It's not stuff in the way. It kind of it's it's difficult to do
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  that like on the everyone wants. There's only one line on Amtrak that ever makes any money or comes
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  close to it and it's the one between DC and in New York City or DC in Boston and people
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  belly ache about they're not being high speed rail but there's a lot of cities and there's a lot of
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  curves and like rivers and stuff. It's kind of hard to get a thing like same thing in California.
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  You've got gigantic mountain ranges all over the place for their high speed rail projects but
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  Florida just goes ahead and builds it like you drive into. Let's talk with. Let's talk with my
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  driver like Thomas L. Friedman in California and we're. Was it an Egyptian driver and were you
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  talking about the fate of the C.C. Regime and Kyra because that tends to be Thomas Friedman's
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  bread and butter. This one was Russian hours. We weren't talking with Thomas L. Friedman's
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  the thing you talk about is you have the Egyptian in the peace process or you're talking about how
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  in China you can build things fast but in this case it was like the quality of the roads as soon as
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  you get into the city limits of Los Angeles or the city limits of New York City and I do a lot of
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  driving between where I'm at in Brooklyn and upstate New York a couple hours away and it's like
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  you drive in and it's the oh welcome to the Bronx. You just start like it's like you're on the
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  airport road to Sarajevo in 1994 just like dodging sniper fire and gigantic bombed out craters.
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  It's incredible. So you're paying all these taxes. Nothing works. All the infrastructure sucks and
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  you can't build anything. So long story short I'm glad they're talking about it. It beats the
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  alternative not talking about it and there isn't any real evidence that I've seen on the ground
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  that this is changing the basic dynamics of especially state and local democratic governance.
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  There's a I think one of the ills of American politics for the last 10 15 years
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  is that everyone just thinks about the presidency everybody thinks about the federal government
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  and so they can tell themselves including my tribes such as I have one just sort of independence
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  and small L libertarians they sometimes say oh it's just the it's the uniparty that all
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  agrees with each other about something and there's something to that critique although it's
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  overly simplified but on the state and local level there's actual pretty big difference
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  in the way these things are governed. This came to the fore especially about all things related to
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  COVID. If you were a heavily democratic place you had heavy lockdowns you had heavy vaccine
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  mandates. You're just basically Australia or schools are closed. There's a lot of. Don't throw
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  us in don't throw us in with that. I'm gonna just throw you forever. When you go in you go back
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  we've revisited the data recently on a very interesting episode that I did with an economist
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  about comparing the metrics of various countries and for the majority of Australians throughout
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  the majority of the pandemic there were no lockdowns schools were open and then at the very
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  end when we fucked up a vaccine the vaccine rollout there was like a 100 day period long after
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  the rest of the world had forgotten about COVID. But if I would have tried to visit you you would
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  put me in a concentration camp for like three weeks first right. Yeah you'd say yeah yeah you
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  would have to go to a you would have to go to Auschwitz but only for 15 days and then once you're
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  out of Auschwitz. That's all I'm saying but no I asked David I asked David from about the about
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  you know the claims of hysterical idiots online like Tim Poole who were calling Australia's
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  quarantine facilities for in inbound travelers returning home concentration camps and David
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  from said I'll tell you how you can tell whether something is a concentration camp are there pillows
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  fair enough fair enough anyways but yeah but at the risk sorry no go on I was going to say at the
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  risk of being Thomas all Thomas Elfriedman on you I would I just got back from Japan yeah and on
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  the point of you saying that it's difficult to build high speed rail in the northeastern corridor
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  in the United States because there were rivers and mountains I did take the shinkansen from
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  Tokyo to Osaka and they are currently building in addition to the shinkansen a maglev between those
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  two cities which is not impossibly expensive and you know will actually be successful and you know
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  if you know anything about the geography of Japan there are rivers and there are definitely mountains
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  so it's it's possible yeah I knew york I think the cost per subway track mile is something like twice
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  as expensive as the next most expensive subway system in the world it is astonishing the
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  New York Times ran a great of three or four parts series about five years ago I think this pre-COVID
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  about the dysfunction in that system and it's all that just you know when there's guaranteed
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  revenue streams or the perception of guaranteed revenue streams in American politics people and
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  maybe this is true everywhere but but it seems to be heavily true in America these days people
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  just treated as like a feather bedding system rather than we're going to build this you would have
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  remember a Barack Obama when he was president was like you know we used to build golden gate bridges
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  why don't we do that anymore and it's true but it's also true that the federal government didn't
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  build a gold gate bridge and that's kind of part of it you know they weren't right but who did it
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  wasn't a private consortium right there was there was actually a lot of private private
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  private actors helping to build a gold gate bridge it wasn't you're right it wasn't a fully
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  private project but it was it's been a while since I looked into this and wrote about it but I
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  did at the time and it's it there was like five different actors involved and some of them were
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  you know Bank of America or local Wells Fargo have you got which acting more on on their own
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  yeah you just you can't build big things there's both states environmental review and national
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  environmental review things they're designed to come things up typically you mentioned Nader
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  earlier who's a presidential campaign in 2000 I covered and I remember the first press conference
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  I saw him at I was just struck by how many times he used the word corporate or very corporation
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  and I just started like it was running a tally and I think it was like 63 times in like a 25 minute
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  thing it's like wow just using the seawater dropping sea bombs all the time but Nader in the 70s
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  was a bit more complicated than all that like Nader was a force for deregulation in in America he was
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  part of the conversation about deregulating airlines he saw the dangers of having the governments
• 19:08
  enforced kind of cartel arrangements with companies and he would see them sort of cementing the
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  corporate power that he does not like so yeah this just odd bedfellows that could exist in 1970s
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  American politics but could not by the late 80s where you know Teddy Kennedy was part of that
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  a part of the deregulation thing Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and I think the only real debate that
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  they had presidential debate they were just like arguing which one was the bigger deregulator it was
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  like crazy like we don't think and you don't think about that because we see the end of it when
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  deregulation was seen as the sort of vatua Reagan evil right wing plot or whatever or fantastic
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  liberation against the commies but it was more mixed than all of that at the dawn of all that
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  activity in the 70s one of our viewers on sub stack live and a big hello to everybody
• 20:04
  I'm Josh Sepson here with Matt Welch there's a zeps live we do it every Tuesday at 9pm
• 20:09
  eastern time US time is also go out as an episode of uncomfortable conversations my podcast which
• 20:15
  is different from the live stream but you should subscribe to anyway you know how to do that
• 20:20
  you're already on sub stack and Matt one of the listeners Nell just chimed in saying is the
• 20:26
  labor force in Japan local or are they migrants and I'm pretty sure that in Japan the people who
• 20:31
  are building the magla for Japanese people they don't have a policy of importing migrants and I
• 20:36
  think for a big infrastructure projects which raises the question why is American infrastructure
• 20:42
  so diabolically expensive do we even know that presumably it's not like American union workers
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  and more than French union workers maybe later they probably do on on average
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  why I'm just guessing no it's a lot of a lot of made in America stuff a lot of rules and regulations
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  the MTA here in New York City their average salary is a lot it's a whole lot so you know
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  again just sort of like the bigger the city the more like semi successful it is New York
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  goes through periods of success and failure but it's not like a Detroit or St. Louis it's not
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  internal decline then the barnacles can attach to it I from what I understand about Japan which is
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  basically nothing so but that they haven't had a large foreign based immigration or certainly not
• 21:41
  don't necessarily welcome foreigners with open arms culturally no that's right or numerically
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  you know you can't build in New York City you're gonna have immigrants no matter what but it's not
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  like you're gonna go to the local Home Depot and hire some dudes to go lay some track for the MTA
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  you're gonna those those are all really good union jobs so that's part of the reason but it's
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  also just everything to do everything in in New York is is expensive you've got to get it
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  inspected you've got a you know in many cases use eminent domain or by this guy out it's a notoriously
• 22:15
  tricky piece of land to try to get anything done on but that doesn't explain why it's difficult to
• 22:20
  build high speed rail in most said California because nobody well there's no reason to build high speed
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  in most said California to be absolutely clear no I mean high speed rail in I can't speak for
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  China I haven't ever been to Asia my life so it's all pure ignorance in my part but I have
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  spent a lot of time in France and the in the high speed rail that people like to talk about in
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  compare to is the TGV which is lovely especially the one between Leon and Paris which is their
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  version of the hey you know DC to New York or DC to Boston sure works why isn't the rest of the world
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  like this well Leon de France is a straight or Leon de Paris is a straight shot and there isn't a lot of
• 23:08
  terrain in trouble that's the two biggest population centers and people do work and you can get
• 23:12
  going pretty fast and you can commute you know pretty much not I don't buy this matter the problem
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  is not a geographical problem in America there is there are lots of mountainous places in Europe
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  that have high speed rail in Switzerland and in Bavaria and Northern Italy there's Japan like it's
• 23:32
  not yes it's more complicated to build a train between DC and Boston than it is across the planes
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  of Texas that's a fair comparison but that's not the principle obstacle that's causing things to
• 23:42
  be twice or three times as expensive there's not there's not I mean so there's the expensive part
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  and then there's just the it there's no reason for this to be built part which are kind of related
• 23:53
  in California part of the expenses that you have a lot of earthquakes I know you have earthquakes in
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  Japan too the mountains are not are not nothing that the hatchupy range is a big a mountain range
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  as is the coastal range that you have to get through and no matter what you do I think right now
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  there's a there's a project that is being contemplated or worked on between LA and Las Vegas
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  which kind of makes more sense actually because those are places that people want to go really fast
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  and there's you know the only other way to get there with any kind of speed is is on on airplane but
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  there's no way to get to a place that you want to be in LA and a place you want to be in the bay
• 24:29
  area by train even the most perfect imaginary train you can imagine where the time and the money
• 24:36
  for the ticket would be remotely worth it so like even if the cost was was good if they wouldn't
• 24:42
  have enough ridership to be able to justify the the building of it and all the assumptions that are
• 24:48
  but why do you why do you assume that that's true it strikes me as a perfect distance which is
• 24:53
  it's just far enough to be you know to need to get too quickly and you don't want to drive but
• 24:59
  it's just enough that flying people going back and forth if you could do it in if you're going
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  to do it in an hour and 45 minutes or two hours or whatever it would be if you were traveling at
• 25:08
  250 mile an hour yeah you're just not gonna get from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in two
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  hours if you could then it'd be a more interesting project but that that cannot physically happen
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  and there's not enough of a population that's going to and throw Las Vegas in LA that's a big
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  population every single weekend right there's a lot of motivated customers who want to do that and
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  there's basically only two ways and both of them kind of suck in their own way and there's a lot
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  of no man's land there aren't people that you aren't farmers that you have to buy out there isn't
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  a complicated nearly as common there are mountains but there's also a lot of empty space there so
• 25:44
  it's easy to easier to deal and work in empty space between larger population centers that are
• 25:50
  motivated to go to and from there's not a huge daily traffic number going from the Bay Area to
• 25:56
  Southern California it's it's sizable but it's not like it's not enough to support the amount of
• 26:02
  time that it would take to go back and forth the ridership numbers just aren't remotely close now
• 26:06
  I'm skeptical there's a lot of a lot of lift there's a lot of there's a lot of air lift between
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  those cities and it may not be two hours but it's not going to be more than two and a half hours
• 26:14
  I think isn't it like a six hour drive or a seven hour drive the yeah you have to haul ass to go
• 26:19
  five and a half six hours yeah so if your if a train is going four times faster than a car does
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  yes I like I I'm taking the under on on that being what the the final destination is because
• 26:34
  this just sounds to me like it sounds to me like a conversation that I have a lot with Americans
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  which is that they bank the wins that American audacity and ingenuity provides in areas of technology
• 26:47
  military prowess innovation and then they make excuses for the failings about the things that
• 26:54
  America doesn't do well like the healthcare system or like infrastructure and if you just get
• 27:01
  if you gave a different example if you just imagined a scenario in which the Elon Musk's and
• 27:06
  Thomas Edison's of the of the world had created incredible high speed rail and it was Europe that
• 27:14
  was doing really good AI and tech stuff I can imagine a different version of you making excuses
• 27:20
  about why you know there was something specific to the European condition that made it more
• 27:25
  conducive to technology and why trains were easy to construct in the United States because
• 27:31
  it's big it has large population centers and so on and so forth it just sounds like like excuse
• 27:36
  making frankly and if Elon Musk really wanted to build high speed rail and if the legislative and
• 27:42
  regulatory framework were in place for it to do so there's no reason why the Senate and driest
• 27:47
  mountains would be an impediment I think he has a he had a boring project idea to go through
• 27:54
  some of those mountains build a gigantic tunnel and look I would love for I first of I'd like to
• 28:00
  hit him to get a government and which I think it's going to happen by the end of this podcast anyways
• 28:04
  but I would love for him to to work on that but part of the problem in California is that you can't
• 28:10
  have that allow that amount of private sector involvement in a big project every government has
• 28:18
  to get their fingerprints on it and that makes everything more expensive as well so in the Florida
• 28:23
  case not just for the high speed rail there but a lot of the building of highway system in Florida
• 28:27
  which is big and it works pretty well is that a lot of that's been private if California allowed
• 28:34
  for more of that and I think that if I'm not mistaken you're forcing me to talk out of my ass a lot
• 28:38
  here but I'm going on memory my job the I think that the LA to Vegas thing is a much more kind of
• 28:48
  private concept than than being like top-down kind of a government thing so I would give it more
• 28:57
  of a chance to succeed I think technologically we can do all kinds of great stuff but governments
• 29:03
  managed technology is not working think about space and you mentioned Elon Musk
• 29:08
  that Jeff Bezos and all these other people I remember arguing with the late Lou dobs on on the
• 29:15
  red eye program on Fox News during the Obama God rest his soul God rest his soul because one of the
• 29:21
  topics was some jackass like rock singer was talking about going to the moon or said something silly
• 29:27
  about that and I was on a panel of Lou dobs and I'm old enough in in media years to remember back when
• 29:33
  Lou made a desperate gambit to a desperate lunch for that early dot com money and he went from
• 29:39
  CNN to space.com and so like Lou started his like answer to the question by trying to dig
• 29:51
  Barack Obama and I said something along lines of like far be it for me to step on the toes of
• 29:58
  the founder of space.com but one of the few things that I genuinely appreciate about Barack Obama's
• 30:04
  presidency is that he unlocked the ability to for private industry to go to space. He said okay let's
• 30:13
  let's have a private industry help with NASA to deliver payloads they removed a lot of the kind
• 30:19
  of monopolistic NASA stuff and we see the fruits now like we we are starting to do those big
• 30:26
  insane dreams again and a lot of that stuff was the path was cleared by Obama so that people could
• 30:33
  actually start doing those things so if we allow people to do things solve all the problems it'd
• 30:37
  be great. Before we leave the subject of high-speed rail mat one of our viewers on sub-sac live Alex
• 30:43
  has this insightful question for me Alex says hey Vegemite breath where's the train from Sydney
• 30:50
  to Perth it's so easy to build so Sydney to Perth is not a good candidate because the same
• 30:57
  distance as like New York to Los Angeles it's too far flying is better for those distances the
• 31:03
  better own if you wanted to own me would be where is the train from like Sydney to Melbourne which
• 31:08
  is true there should be one and there isn't and I'm not saying that Australia is is great at this
• 31:12
  stuff either but they should be a train from Sydney to Melbourne I mean there is a train it takes 12
• 31:17
  hours it should take four hours there should certainly be a train from Sydney a fast train from
• 31:21
  Sydney to Canberra which is currently get this map just in case anyone thinks that I'm like like
• 31:27
  lauding my Australianness over inferior Americans the drive from Sydney to Canberra the nation's
• 31:34
  capital is a three hour drive and the train takes four and a half hours so me a culper okay another
• 31:43
  person and also before we leave this whole thing about abundance and why America can't do things
• 31:48
  and start talking about the fascist authoritarian takeover of your fine United States you mentioned
• 31:54
  Elon so there is this interesting thing on the left which is this battle between obstructionists who
• 32:01
  want to preserve communities and the environment and put impediments in in the place of what
• 32:09
  others might conceive of as being progress versus the you know the the the abundance agenda but
• 32:16
  then on the right there is also this conflict between a I suppose a populist the working class
• 32:25
  oriented like let's get things working for the heartland again agenda which it strikes me would
• 32:31
  actually need government to function and would need government to be deft at empowering the working
• 32:39
  class and the poor against what seems to be the Elon Musk attitude of like like our frank
• 32:48
  and used to have a saying about republicans which is that republicans get elected on the platform
• 32:52
  that government doesn't work and then when they're in office they prove it and it strikes me like
• 32:58
  you need a certain amount of government functionality in order to have to get government out of your
• 33:03
  life it's not enough to just rip at a part and expect it to be benign when you rip at a part
• 33:08
  often you end up with the rules without the human mind to interpret those rules and you get
• 33:14
  what the Soviets called a faceting machine which is just like a mindless bureaucracy that ruins
• 33:20
  your life without any way of actually engaging with it the DMV or the IRS what do you make of
• 33:27
  like what is the what is the best case for what Elon is doing and how could it be better
• 33:34
  well I think that what he has ended up doing is instead of having a department of government
• 33:38
  efficiency it's more like the department of government disruption it's how can we use
• 33:45
  sometimes technological tools sometimes just hey let's change this rule and kind of do this
• 33:55
  and or just pull the rug out under an entire agency they are more like attacking perceived
• 34:04
  strongholds on the left so perceived and actual in many cases strongholds on the left in ways
• 34:09
  that get people on their heels and like what so they're disrupting businesses usual I would
• 34:15
  again point to the gap between national republicans and local republicans where there is much more
• 34:22
  of a focus on how do we get stopped on actually how do we work efficiently and be more like a
• 34:29
  Mitch Daniels as a governor of Indiana than as Elon most sort of jumping around the federal government
• 34:36
  as part of that I had a pretty early intuition that we wouldn't be getting a lot of actual
• 34:42
  sort of efficiency style reforms by the fact that I'm now old enough I know I don't know 25
• 34:50
  people that you would definitely tab if you were serious about like oh here's someone who's
• 34:56
  been thinking on the problem of government efficiency and doing a lot more a lot more effectively
• 35:02
  and with less and they've been thinking about this and working on this and actually getting some
• 35:06
  winds here and there sometimes for the last 25 30 years they're obvious people let's go to them he's
• 35:12
  gone to zero he's gone to absolutely zero one I would name that I work with that reason who's
• 35:19
  been here for 50 years and how to work on airline deregulation and transportation issues high speed
• 35:25
  rail to Bob pool like you would just hire Bob pool or you would consult him and figure out what his
• 35:32
  ideas you would go to people who work at the competitive enterprise institute people have been working
• 35:36
  you know at AEI other places it's not just that they've been twiddling their thumbs at cinecures in
• 35:42
  Washington and accomplishing nothing they actually have been thinking on these problems in a productive
• 35:47
  way I don't think that there has been much if any expressed interest in any of those people and
• 35:53
  their work and those have been some of the more strenuous critics not even like oh we've been frozen
• 35:57
  out it's just like dude you could there's so much you could be doing right now we want this to work
• 36:02
  we are the target audience for it and also we could be henchmen for it and they are not interested
• 36:08
  in that I think they're more interesting in punching the left in the mouth and you know occasionally
• 36:13
  I might be interested in some of those actions maybe it's going to lead to things that are good
• 36:20
  it's really hard to say because he's not transparent and musk in particular is a really
• 36:24
  horrible communicator every day of his life but but I just don't see the government becoming
• 36:31
  more efficient because of this and certainly not and measurably smaller which is another concern
• 36:37
  that I have at a time that we're just a few years away from what is looking like a debt crisis
• 36:42
  Nate makes an interesting point on the in the chat in the sub-cycle i've comments Matt
• 36:47
  saying the abundance faction meaning we were talking about the left's battle between
• 36:52
  restrictionists you know Ralph Nader style people who want to put impediments to progress
• 36:58
  versus the as recline abundance agenda Nate says the abundance faction is a relatively new
• 37:03
  phenomenon I think this is in response to you Matt saying that it is still a vanishingly small
• 37:09
  proportion of the democratic party Nate says the marga takeover of the GOP took nearly a decade
• 37:14
  to complete if abundance democrats are going to rest control of blue state party governance that will
• 37:20
  likely take a decade plus to complete the cycle so we can we can be hopeful let's talk about human rights
• 37:27
  yes sorry do you want to jump in on that Matt yeah just that there aren't a lot of notable
• 37:33
  ideological takeovers that have originated at it opinion journalism
• 37:40
  much is it depends me much is i would have perhaps like to do one myself i don't know i'm
• 37:46
  although i'm not it shouldn't power politics in america stubbornly happens at the consumer level
• 37:53
  and i'm not sure that there is i wish them all the success in the world but i think that's a
• 37:58
  little bit different than what Donald Trump's been doing DJB writes on the in the comments
• 38:05
  clive james had a relevant quote to this topic of government bureaucracy you said it's only when
• 38:10
  they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are what great Australian great Australian
• 38:18
  flip says on the in the comment you by the way you don't i can't and i can't suffer the
• 38:23
  ignominy of you holding your fingers to your ear so don't don't even just just just give up just
• 38:28
  go just take one out and put it in your mouth you're the one who's been trying to make me
• 38:33
  look this ridiculous and congratulations the humiliation ritual you're doing to me what
• 38:38
  Donald Trump did the Paul Ryan ten years ago i appreciate it uh flip says can you guys get into
• 38:47
  the whole trump will patently be a disaster versus the relax the guardrails guardrails will hold
• 38:53
  perspectives pre election matten his co-podcast is downplayed the threat whereas others like Josh
• 39:00
  felt it was fairly clear it would be really really bad obviously hindsight is twenty twenty but
• 39:06
  would like to hear both your takes on how it's going and what you got wrong or right flip i
• 39:10
  appreciate you're throwing mat under the bus like that and referring to my perspicaciousness
• 39:16
  foresight suits air like abilities mat defend yourself yeah i would commend people who were
• 39:24
  interested in my record which won't be a lot of people but uh i wrote i think on the election day
• 39:29
  or the day before the frustratingly unknown stakes of election uh 2024 um and the thing that
• 39:38
  i pointed to that was unknown with trump was not his desires um which uh i think stated plainly
• 39:45
  he's gonna get his tariffs and he's going to do things that shock the conscious on immigration
• 39:49
  what is unknown is the uh guardrails question particularly in light of the supreme court
• 39:56
  giving the president kind of a lot of power to do crimes to do crimes all these
• 40:01
  presidents and um and also the sort of question of the type of staffing infrastructure and
• 40:07
  how people would be um uh setting it up so that they wouldn't have as many obstructions as they
• 40:13
  did in the first hundred days of his first election um i had no illusions about um that he would do
• 40:20
  these things um i i am perhaps surprised by some of the velocity on kind of the doge or ending USAID
• 40:29
  but i don't i wouldn't describe what i have to set about trump to be downplaying at all i
• 40:34
  wrote a cover story for reason magazine in front of the 2020 election under under the headline
• 40:39
  the case against Donald trump um you know when he first uh escalated into our lives
• 40:45
  really think though match stop running around the book i you know i i think that he is a
• 40:50
  uh a malign force in american and global politics um he's also a um a response that um he's a tool
• 41:02
  that people use to express their um their real and deserved indignation at how the elites have
• 41:10
  screwed up as well um so i think it's a little bit more complicated than pointing to him and saying
• 41:15
  you know he's going to be the embodiment of the worst adjective i can think of a of a politician
• 41:20
  throughout human history um i don't think that i downplayed or i'm used the word guardrails to
• 41:27
  describe um something that it was around him it's part of the the uh disquiet in advance of the
• 41:34
  election was like okay guardrails are different this time um and he looks at a little bit more
• 41:39
  seasoned and he has been running more vociferously and specifically about tariffs in particular which
• 41:44
  is something that i care about um then he did previously so it looks like he's serious with it
• 41:50
  so um you know i can only speak for for what i have done um but i don't think that it has been to
• 41:56
  minimize the latitude that he has had latitude that he himself uh helped expand in the supreme court
• 42:01
  helped expand and then Joe Biden helped expand too um in the sub stack live questions jack says would
• 42:07
  the us and by extension the world be better off now if Kamala Harris had won i think so uh
• 42:14
  you know i i i was rooting for that to be the outcome i didn't vote for her i live in the state where
• 42:20
  my vote doesn't matter she was gonna win no matter what i did um i had no enthusiasm about her i don't
• 42:25
  think she's a good candidate or a good politician or a good person um and uh i think many of her
• 42:32
  policies to the very limited extent we knew about any of them um we're not great but um so i think
• 42:39
  that it's a worse thing to bust up the entire global trading system than whatever she was going to do
• 42:46
  um uh but she would have been a holding pattern um like Biden was a holding pattern this sort of
• 42:52
  exhausted faded memory of a post-World War II america led order that no one really believes in
• 42:58
  anymore um at a time when there's just kind of a lot of understandable societal uh disquiet and feeling
• 43:06
  alienation from the elites who govern over you so um you know it would have been in its own
• 43:12
  way also very bad i think um but you know um trump is using power more aggressively i think then
• 43:21
  she would have ever have done and in ways that i perhaps idiosyncratically do not like
• 43:27
  the extraordinary thing about trump is that he's so much focused on american greatness yet from
• 43:32
  the perspective from my perspective as a friendly foreigner from a medium-sized ally
• 43:38
  it strikes me that he's doing exactly what you would do if you wanted to accelerate american
• 43:42
  global decline by relinquishing america's role on the world stage basically forcing allies to
• 43:51
  figure out a way of doing business around let's like forget about the economics let's just think
• 43:55
  about national security and Ukraine and the fate of central and eastern europe you know europe is
• 44:01
  going to come together and probably extend the british and french nuclear umbrella to a kind
• 44:06
  of mini NATO across the european continent countries like australia and south korea and japan
• 44:13
  and india are going to form their own alliances we already have a thing called the quad between
• 44:17
  japan and india and australia and the us which we can continue without the us on on a sort of
• 44:24
  multilateral ad hoc basis for our own security in terms of the us dollar they are dramatically
• 44:31
  reducing faith in the us dollar the bond markets obviously are becoming less confident in
• 44:37
  the american economy and in the the credibility of american guarantees about future payouts
• 44:43
  so it's like i don't quite yet i don't quite get the connection between the rhetoric about american
• 44:50
  greatness and the practical insularity of the outlook which is going to
• 44:58
  which embodies a kind of withdrawal from international leadership can you reconcile those for me?
• 45:05
  yeah first of all your globalist cuck so that kind of explains a lot
• 45:12
  second he's he has a three of the case it's a his three of the case is that um
• 45:18
  that the global trading order the thing that american designed uh after world war two and made very
• 45:24
  copacetic for american interests in a many different ways place it's at the center of the universe
• 45:30
  that whatever it has whatever it started to be it has become a system for the world to rip us off
• 45:38
  and to do bad deals and to take us for granted um and to snipe at us uh no matter what we do
• 45:45
  that part is true and you know it is uh and um and that uh once we go through a certain
• 45:51
  restructuring um we are going to have a more kind of 1900-esque uh economy um we're
• 45:59
  this sorry i would drop you again met but i i've actually what i'm looking at the comments and
• 46:04
  it's just funny how so many people are focused on the positioning of the earbuds and i want to
• 46:08
  pander to them position the long bit downwards so they're pointing down vertically down away from
• 46:17
  yeah i want you to publish our text tricks sounds which i used the word the asco about 75 times
• 46:24
  and like before we went live matt was pressing and he was like this whole thing was going to
• 46:29
  fuck up because uh it's not gonna and but now success look tim just said and someone else said
• 46:37
  the solution is to put the earbuds in the trash which i think is also a good
• 46:41
  absolutely clear here's the thing to people who are just tuning in the wonderful matt welch
• 46:45
  is joining us of the fifth column you might have seen him on real time with bilmar uh last weekend
• 46:51
  we joined we gathered together with a fascinating person like matt every Tuesday night at 9 p.m.
• 46:57
  eastern or wednesday day time Australian time uh and if you don't subscribe to my podcast
• 47:02
  uncomfortable conversations you should do so because this will come out crisp clean audio like
• 47:09
  uh see that mic in front of matt it's capturing every little fart every sniffle every every
• 47:16
  asmr uh mouth noise is going straight into the podcast which will be released on Thursday and you'll
• 47:22
  be able to hear it then but if you're tuning us tuning in live matt now has it thanks to the
• 47:28
  crowdsourcing of our wise viewers his ear his air pods in correctly and continuing to uh yeah and
• 47:37
  and uh i think all the floor take it away and uh and eight percent on my phone so this is not going
• 47:42
  to last much longer anyways uh i can't be held responsible for that uh yeah why not um no he
• 47:50
  just thinks that at the end of this once we've restructured that uh those factory jobs are coming
• 47:55
  back to america um and that we're going to build a bigger um and that uh the world won't be able
• 48:02
  to rip us off anymore and it's all gonna work out um there aren't many uh uh economist not named
• 48:08
  Peter Navarro who of course is not an economist um who believe that but he does um and he thinks
• 48:14
  that tariffs can make you rich and can make you great so in his his idea we are um we're sort of
• 48:22
  ripping the bandaid off of the soft american empire um because it created all these distortions
• 48:28
  and allowed china to get rich at our expense and allowed flabby western european countries to kind
• 48:33
  of coast under our security umbrella again is true uh and uh and people to snipe at us and you know
• 48:41
  somehow take advantage of us by buying all of our all you know uh all of our dollars are investing
• 48:46
  in our uh country as much as they have um so again i think he's wrong but i think he has a theory um
• 48:52
  about it and that's fine but it's not a theory of american greatness it's a theory of american
• 48:57
  complaint about being taken advantage of and therefore we should hunker down close the shutters
• 49:03
  focus on ourselves like it's a it's a it's a america as switzerland it's not america as empire
• 49:10
  first of all switzerland's awesome you take take that back uh and uh and second of all uh uh
• 49:17
  yeah uh it is it it is based on a lot of complaint i think he just thinks that you know that
• 49:24
  the same system where we have or had until recently half of the world's capital markets
• 49:29
  money um and you know most of the world's best universities and all this kind of
• 49:36
  ferments and technological development that makes europe look like a backwater um that that will
• 49:42
  go on after we break bonds with the empire that we created um and that is a reality that i think
• 49:50
  more and more of his advisors are saying hey i'm not sure this is working we got a back down from
• 49:55
  china now um and it's that vision is not is not paying off and we have we aren't even at the
• 50:01
  place yet where the tariffs have really hit consumers they're going to the sooner rather than
• 50:07
  later it's going to hit some probably in their workplaces before it hits their pocketbook but um
• 50:11
  what does that mean man uh it just means that uh that like you know the the the stuff on order has
• 50:19
  and the prices haven't really rise risen too much yet uh but they're going to um but i mean when
• 50:24
  you say that it'll hit them in the workplace before they pocket book what's that distinction uh
• 50:30
  truckers don't have jobs that allow you to share you know the LA ports are already down i think 20
• 50:36
  LA along each port is already down about 20 percent um not that everything is that but um you know
• 50:41
  two thirds of the imports that we get in this country are used in american manufacturing and those
• 50:46
  manufacturers facing investment uncertainty and facing inputs being way more expensive especially
• 50:52
  if they're from china or canada uh our our suspending orders our tourism is way down it's falling
• 51:01
  off a cliff in two in February and uh and march already and that probably has less to do with tariffs
• 51:08
  and more to do with a lot of the chatter that i see um forums and tourism sources here in Australia
• 51:14
  which is about people's anxiety about oh yeah through yeah that's ports and stuff and being like
• 51:19
  not being citizen and being snatched and then finding yourself in some El Salvadorian prison or some
• 51:23
  shit yes the the way that has to do with tariffs is just that uh as part of the tariff conversation
• 51:28
  trump is repeatedly demeaned to canada canada unhelpfully in this context is the greatest single source
• 51:33
  of foreign tourists and i think they've cut their business down by like 50 percent overnight
• 51:39
  um so the tourism industry is absolutely really um mat you've been talking a lot about tariffs but
• 51:45
  to be honest the the thing that alarms me the most and that i failed to predict the most was
• 51:52
  the extent of here of trump's trampling of a habeas corpus and um individual liberties i suppose
• 52:00
  and the ability of republicans to go along with that the party that is supposed to care about
• 52:04
  individual rights um and the the looming showdown with the courts i even i didn't think that it would
• 52:10
  get this um dire this fast but the idea that you know i to americans who don't know what it's
• 52:17
  like to be on a green card in the state so i should say once you're on a green card when i
• 52:23
  transitioned from my temporary work visa um to a green card as far as i was concerned
• 52:30
  i was as functionally a citizen who couldn't vote i mean i thought you know you're a permanent
• 52:34
  resident i talked to my attorney immigration attorney about it and i was like is there any reason
• 52:38
  to eventually go for citizenship and he was like not really i mean there's no practical benefit to
• 52:43
  being a citizen like he was like you can come and go you can use the residence lane at the airport
• 52:49
  you know you can you can do everything that a citizen can do if you've got a green card you won't
• 52:53
  get the consular protection if you're you know locked up abroad or something then the u.s
• 52:59
  government won't go into bat for you but i was like well the Australian government would go into
• 53:02
  bat for me anyway so there's no real difference now i'm hearing green cards and permanent
• 53:08
  residency status being kind of poo pooed as if it's just you're here at the whim of the state
• 53:14
  department so don't be surprised if we kick you out for no reason and oh by the way we may even
• 53:19
  kick you out to a foreign prison that we pay you to go to and that we pay for your residency at
• 53:26
  and when a court insists requires us to facilitate your return to the country our answer will be
• 53:34
  we are facilitating it because if the country that we're paying to incarcerate you somehow returns
• 53:42
  you to the border we will not turn you away like that's to me a foundational constitutional crisis
• 53:53
  moment in a you know in a sense in which like tariff policy is not it's dark it's dark uh yeah
• 54:00
  I mean tariff policy is a constitutional problem in that the constitution spells out the power
• 54:07
  to levy taxes and tariffs in the congress and congress is just like uh uh maybe not so uh
• 54:14
  that that is just just to be congresses attitude towards everything correct that's that's been
• 54:18
  trending in that direction for a long time but this is trump telling the supreme court to get
• 54:23
  stuffed while uh spiriting away residents of the u.s uh uh just kind of willy nilly based on on
• 54:32
  lord knows what uh legal justification and then you know arca rubio combing through the opeds
• 54:38
  of every college newspaper uh in the country to deport the hundreds of uh people on student visas
• 54:44
  there's even been secret revocations of people's visa status they thought they were legal
• 54:49
  but somewhere in secret they were made illegal and then like bounce out of the country at a time
• 54:53
  when they're like wifes in the hospital giving birth there was a uh uh uh u.s citizen in erisona
• 55:00
  was pulled Hispanic guy um pulled over by cops and sent to an immigration detention center for
• 55:06
  10 days because he didn't have his ID um we haven't been a papers please country up until now but
• 55:13
  now they're starting to do that um and he was uh but also let me just separate i just want to
• 55:18
  clarify matt the sharp line that i as someone who comes from a liberal democracy that has an
• 55:25
  incredibly harsh immigration policy see between a harsh uncaring uh immigration policy and
• 55:36
  uh secreting people away uh in into black vans and sending them to black site gulags in
• 55:42
  foreign countries without a trial like yeah these are very different things and i don't think
• 55:47
  that americans should make the mistake of getting them confused if you want to boot some uh you
• 55:52
  know someone on a student visa out of the country be my guest it might be harsh but that's any
• 55:57
  countries right uh if you want to change someone's immigration status if they're not a permanent resident
• 56:04
  that's any countries right like put me on a plane and fly me back to my homeland if you
• 56:10
  must um if i try to enter illegally you can even do what Australia does and force me away from
• 56:16
  the border and lock me up indefinitely in a concentration camp on a desert specific desert
• 56:22
  island while my case is being processed again not nice but within the rights of a liberal democratic
• 56:30
  country to decide how people are going to enter its sovereign territory what is not okay
• 56:37
  is for someone who is on your sovereign territory for whom you have a duty of care
• 56:43
  to without a trial with no respect for habeas corpus with no respect like for rights that go back
• 56:50
  to the magna cada a thousand years ago to simply lock them up and throw away the key and wipe
• 56:57
  your hands of them and disavow any responsibility for it because they are now no longer in your
• 57:02
  possession that is fucking pinnashay stuff and it has nothing to do with immigration policy it has
• 57:09
  everything to do with what i regard as a massive dangerous line that's being crossed the way that
• 57:17
  i'm not uh the way that it has to do with immigration policy is that it's being done in the name of
• 57:22
  immigration policy and the thing that that civil libertarians been trying to point out to
• 57:27
  americans who are more immigration restrictionists is that um when you crack down um and you crack down
• 57:35
  in uh i don't care if i'm coloring outside the lines type of way on immigration and for instance
• 57:41
  you get blase about due process as part of that you were going to get american citizens caught up
• 57:46
  and that is already beginning to happen um and uh and americans will discover that far too late
• 57:53
  in this process they think you can hermetically seal it off um say we know what part of breaking
• 57:57
  law doesn't they understand um and just sort of shrug that they're being sent to foreign black
• 58:02
  sight prisons um it's a dark place that we are at right now um and it is a it's an open question
• 58:10
  it is clear that the administration if they wanted to they could bring back Garcia from El Salvador
• 58:16
  and deport him to literally any other country it would be over in a second um he he is a deportable
• 58:20
  by law um they could do that they're choosing and said to fight against supreme courts they want
• 58:25
  the latitude to be able to do this and trump said with michelle's uh uh presence at the white
• 58:31
  house like wouldn't it be great if we could do this to americans too like you should build more
• 58:34
  presence for us let's go uh um he's got this sense of he wants to expand um his authority
• 58:40
  Marco Rubio is expanding his authority and not necessarily black prisons sites but doing it
• 58:45
  away that's antithetical to american values by targeting people for their speech for their political
• 58:50
  non-violent not doing anything else wrong speech they're expressing opinions and they're being
• 58:55
  bounced too because the law is overbroad giving Marco Rubio power it's all of a piece but you
• 59:01
  write that one piece of it is particularly particularly dark uh right now so there's a lot of people
• 59:06
  sort of their uh their claws on the on the chalkboard um uh waiting to see what what comes next and
• 59:13
  it's just clear trump is relishing this fight because he uh has the intuition that the fight is
• 59:19
  going to give him more power and he believes and i think he believes wrongly that the american
• 59:23
  public is going to be behind him in the name of wanting to be hard on immigration uh and more robust
• 59:31
  policing the borders that they're not going to care about violating due process running over
• 59:36
  the supreme court and sending people to an authoritarian hellhole prison um uh i can see in the
• 59:42
  comments on sub stack live some people are saying well yeah but it was anti-semitic speech that
• 59:47
  these people are guilty of yeah so what in america you're allowed to be an anti-semite you're allowed
• 59:51
  to say whatever you want another thing for the josh and shay was a killer don't people are saying
• 59:56
  don't you know don't compare it to pinnashay pinnashay was a killer well what do you think goes on
• 1:00:00
  in a certain and El Salvadorian prison for terrorists if not occasional murder as well it's
• 1:00:04
  certainly reckless uh you know if if someone who the united state sends to that prison ends up dying
• 1:00:09
  in it uh prematurely uh you know that may not be direct murder but it's certainly manslaughter
• 1:00:15
  of a of a kind or reckless disregard for their life i i just don't want met this conversation
• 1:00:21
  to um to to have any ability to land in the minds of republican leaning americans as being
• 1:00:29
  similar to the discourse about um there was no such thing as an illegal and you know ice is a
• 1:00:35
  criminal enterprise and you we shouldn't be deporting people and children in cages it's got
• 1:00:40
  nothing to do with any of that yeah it's got nothing to do with deporting people it's got to do
• 1:00:44
  with incarcerating people without a trial deport who you want but you can't lock them you can't
• 1:00:50
  pay for them to be locked up in a foreign jail and then pretend you have no control over it that
• 1:00:57
  you've washed your hands over it uh no it is it's absolutely dark and bad business and um and i
• 1:01:04
  don't think that uh i don't think that americans are ultimately going to stand by it like more than
• 1:01:08
  80 percent of americans are against um this uh the president of uh uh defying supreme court
• 1:01:15
  orders even if he doesn't like them uh we don't like it when we deport we wanted to deport
• 1:01:19
  illegal immigrants especially criminals but we don't want to deport people who have jobs and a
• 1:01:24
  US citizen families um so i i think that there is going to be a public opinion break on this even
• 1:01:30
  if republicans elected republicans do absolutely nothing another person says on the in the
• 1:01:36
  sub stack live chat uh what they're doing is equivalent they're talking about the El Salvadoran
• 1:01:41
  prison is equivalent to Australia's refugee islands um whilst i oppose Australia's refugee
• 1:01:46
  islands the way in terms of the harshness of of the way they they're used and just to clarify for
• 1:01:52
  people who don't know Australia has a policy that if you try to arrive here illegally by boat
• 1:01:57
  the navy will intercept you uh before you reach Australian shores and uh we basically bribe small
• 1:02:05
  neighboring countries namely naru and pup when you're going to need to build to have let us build
• 1:02:12
  prisons on them where the people are processed and then repatriate and you will never set foot in
• 1:02:17
  Australia you will be repatriated to friendly countries if you're a refugee or sent back home if
• 1:02:22
  your case is found not to be refugee the difference is those people are being intercepted before
• 1:02:28
  they get to the country and they're aware of the risk when they get on the boat that they're
• 1:02:32
  never going to get to Australia the difference between um what Australia does and what President
• 1:02:37
  Trump is doing is uh a it's not taking place on Australian soil and b it's happening to people who
• 1:02:43
  know that who are making a very conscious choice to come illegally and who know all of the
• 1:02:48
  peril all of the legal perils that that might put them in it's a different thing i mean the whole
• 1:02:52
  point of intercepting the boats off Australian shores is so that we are not they're not yet in our
• 1:02:58
  duty of care and that we don't it may seem like a distinction without a difference to a libertarian
• 1:03:02
  but i do think it makes a difference whether or not a person is wandering around in your country
• 1:03:06
  with an expectation uh that their human rights are going to be expected be respected versus
• 1:03:12
  making a hazardous journey across oceans you know with all of the perils that that entails yeah
• 1:03:19
  yeah the uh as always in america i think half or so of our illegal immigrants or people who came
• 1:03:26
  here illegally which is also a a distinction that people sometimes lose they think everything is
• 1:03:33
  just a border crossing illegally through you know a river or a boat or something yeah right right
• 1:03:39
  right um what happens with the courts now i'm at and how concerned are you and what would you like
• 1:03:45
  to see the courts do in the extent to which they push push back i ask this because there are
• 1:03:51
  a few schools of thought you know one school of thought is the cautious one which says the courts
• 1:03:56
  should try to play trump and sort of kind of retroactively make it seem like trump is doing what they
• 1:04:03
  ask him to do and be as generous as possible towards extending to the administration as much of
• 1:04:07
  the benefit of the doubt as they can in order to avoid an overt confrontation because they know
• 1:04:12
  that the worst thing that could happen to the credibility of the court would be uh and the executive
• 1:04:18
  to defy it overtly and create a constitutional crisis another school of thought says that the
• 1:04:24
  supreme court should go full Harvard and stand up to him and call his bluff and um and bring it on
• 1:04:32
  yeah um i mean the ruling so far have been pretty nine to nothing and seven to two was the
• 1:04:39
  most recent one i think the injunction midnight injunction of about deportations under the
• 1:04:45
  alien uh enemies act um from 1798 so um Damon root had a good piece of reason uh
• 1:04:52
  long many time guests on fifth column legal analyst great author um where he said he pointed out
• 1:04:59
  that um you know the supreme court under our division of government it doesn't have any guns
• 1:05:05
  you know you can't it can't make you do anything ultimately and there have been times in american
• 1:05:11
  history where supreme court come up with the big ruling brown versus the board of education in 1954
• 1:05:18
  being probably among the most famous um to desegregate schools and the people with guns in this case
• 1:05:25
  George Wallace um said uh you know Alabama like uh no no we're we're gonna take that one under
• 1:05:33
  advisement and uh we're not gonna do it and what happens in that case it was there was you know
• 1:05:38
  massive resistance against this on at the state level and eventually um the uh yes there was
• 1:05:48
  federal troops that were sent down but uh there was a big public opinion swing that came with it
• 1:05:53
  especially when people saw the brutality of the resistance of it uh against non-violence
• 1:06:01
  black school children and protesters of all hues um people became disgusted at those who were
• 1:06:08
  not following the supreme courts ruling and so there is in my optimistic heart uh if trump
• 1:06:17
  keeps doing this uh he's gonna back himself into a public opinion corner he can defy he can
• 1:06:24
  and absolutely will i think try to defy supreme court order i mean the fact that he's not
• 1:06:30
  bringing still um not just not bringing Garcia from El Salvador and i don't i can't remember all
• 1:06:36
  these other names so just Garcia and apologies to his family um but um you know they're they're
• 1:06:42
  like red penning in crayon or red crayoning um New York Times headlines about this and like
• 1:06:50
  crossing out things and saying you know illegal alien criminal emis 13 and uh we're never bringing
• 1:06:55
  them back sorry that kind of crap um they're acting like juveniles um just fumbing their nose
• 1:07:03
  at the supreme court and other courts and um the fourth circuit court of appeals especially
• 1:07:08
  um the very stirring opinion by the conservative Reagan appoint the jurist uh j harby wilkinson
• 1:07:14
  um they are just saying no screw it so i think they're gonna do that but um they're not gonna get
• 1:07:21
  the high fives from uh the court of public opinion that they think that they're going to get
• 1:07:26
  is but there are various things that the court could do right the court could follow up by saying
• 1:07:30
  by facilitate we in we require the administration to and then get more specific about what they're
• 1:07:36
  trying to do i mean i think they will hold they will hold funds from the incarceration you know
• 1:07:42
  or proactively you know they can't they can't with hold funds so they they will they will they will
• 1:07:46
  be more specific they will um they will be a lot of stirring uh judgments and i think you'll see
• 1:07:51
  some administrative administration figures being placed in contempt of court yeah so that's the
• 1:07:57
  other thing i was gonna say so like we we you said that they don't have any guns and that's true
• 1:08:03
  by design but they can escalate uh the pet of course the penalties still need to be imposed or
• 1:08:09
  followed through with by the executive branch but the judiciary can get a lot more granular and
• 1:08:16
  specific about what it's requiring in ways that make it increasingly uncomfortable and implausible
• 1:08:23
  for anyone to um decline so you know yes you can start holding people in contempt you can specifically
• 1:08:30
  order you know marshals to arrest somebody who has been held in contempt right and then
• 1:08:38
  it really does become a clear you in other words you can make the violation
• 1:08:43
  clearer and clearer and clearer and i just wonder whether the supreme court will do that and
• 1:08:49
  should do that or whether it should just write it out i don't think that the contempt um citations
• 1:08:54
  are gonna be where it's at i can't imagine currently the supreme court doing that but it's also
• 1:09:00
  it's possible that i lack imagination to kind of see the next uh three steps ahead uh because we're
• 1:09:06
  always every day it feels like we're in some kind of uh semi new territory that we hadn't contemplated
• 1:09:11
  previously so but i think um if supreme court comes down with pretty heavy contempt citations for
• 1:09:19
  high-ranking administration officials that is some showdown territory and um you don't necessarily
• 1:09:25
  want to do a showdown if um it's going to hasten both uh really highly politicized conflict i think
• 1:09:33
  John Roberts justice has already come out and criticized the Trump administration for
• 1:09:39
  intemperate uh kind of words about impeaching justices and trying to put a pressure on uh judges
• 1:09:46
  who don't act in the way that they want to um you just i Roberts is a very political figure
• 1:09:54
  and always has been like his obama care uh decision is a classic of him just trying to invent
• 1:10:01
  legal doctrine that no one ever thought existed because he wants to keep
• 1:10:06
  the legitimacy of the court in the public mind and in in the bipartisan mind at the same time
• 1:10:13
  and he's very um and look if he know if if you know that and if Trump knows that or at least
• 1:10:18
  Trump's aides know that then they can play the court yep right i mean if they know that
• 1:10:25
  Roberts's main motivation is to maintain the credibility of the court by avoiding an overt clash
• 1:10:30
  then they will just keep you know fucking around and saying oh we are facilitating the return of
• 1:10:37
  these prisoners because if they ever show up uh at JFK then um they can come in i think that's
• 1:10:45
  a nonsense response but it's not it's not direct defiance i i would you know crudely guess
• 1:10:53
  that instead of looking for citation um uh contempt citation uh avenues
• 1:11:01
  Roberts will be looking for how to get as many nine zero opinions as possible
• 1:11:06
  how do i just seem because it's a six three you know republican appointed supreme court um
• 1:11:13
  right now and so the kind of clown show conservatives like Sean Davis of the federalist
• 1:11:20
  and Elon Musk of course whatever he's conservative or not like how we need to impeach
• 1:11:25
  justices or we need to look somehow overthrow the supreme court lord knows what they're saying
• 1:11:29
  today um uh but they've been increasing these attacks the last couple of weeks um it becomes more
• 1:11:37
  difficult to have that gather any kind of groundswell if all the opinions from this six three court
• 1:11:45
  are nine zero in the other direction so i think that's where Roberts will be um spending most of
• 1:11:52
  his attention is corralling those things and then trying to appoint the best writers um to uh
• 1:11:58
  to write those opinions because that's hard for trump to keep weathering and already his
• 1:12:05
  public approval ratings have been sinking really really fast among young people it just
• 1:12:11
  uh cratered um there was really high before but now it's not independence down on the economy
• 1:12:17
  down even on handling a bit immigration down um so um uh you know he is used to
• 1:12:25
  governing as an unpopular president but that's going to be a lot of unpopularity in a short period
• 1:12:30
  of time so i think the supreme court is going to play that more than they are going to look for kind
• 1:12:34
  of artificial um uh shackles right so justice uh Clarence Thomas can put his feet up while
• 1:12:43
  Justice Amy Coney Barrett does all the legwork this uh this term presumably um so lastly Matt what's
• 1:12:48
  your sense of dread about the possibility of the united states in the longer than short term in the
• 1:12:56
  medium term becoming i sort of functionally i don't want to say authoritarian but like you know
• 1:13:06
  i don't i think the risk of it becoming Chilean 1973 or Russia today is very small
• 1:13:16
  but i do think that the risk of it becoming hungry or turkey for a while at least
• 1:13:24
  is not the close to zero that i would have put it at 10 years ago yeah how do you think about it
• 1:13:32
  i remember when trump got elected even before he got elected in 2015 when it was clear that he was
• 1:13:37
  going to be dominant in republican politics i couldn't believe it i was wrong about that been wrong
• 1:13:41
  about many things um but once that was clear that his popularity was not going to go away um i remember
• 1:13:50
  uh being in touch with all my friends who worked as foreign correspondents in central europe in the
• 1:13:53
  1990s you know we covered victor orbot in real time as he was switching from uh cosmopolitan uh
• 1:14:01
  anti-communists anti-soviet uh activist to a nationalist of repudiating um all the fancy
• 1:14:10
  pants booted past people around him i remember that i was there um we uh covered a lot of
• 1:14:15
  mere mechiar who like has so many commonalities with trump you just be constantly sewing
• 1:14:21
  journalists very funny um going to uh parts of Slovakia that no uh you know politician ever would
• 1:14:30
  think about visiting never condescending to people like actually doing democratic retail politics in a
• 1:14:35
  way that elites hate to do oftentimes but also being very thuggish and um and crude and politicizing
• 1:14:43
  everything enforcing people to kiss the rang in a lot of corruption anyways those those who
• 1:14:47
  covered those people we just there's not and there weren't that many of us at the time we just
• 1:14:51
  were in shock we never thought never ever thought that our country would have politics like that
• 1:14:57
  just seemed like some weird cheap-ass post-communist shit when you're transitioning from you know uh
• 1:15:04
  communism to sort of insecure nationalism uh and delusions of grandeur and always like
• 1:15:11
  agitating against Brussels and New York and Tel Aviv and Washington um uh agitating against
• 1:15:17
  your sorrows you know he was a big demon hate figure in in all of 1990s central europe by nationalist
• 1:15:23
  politicians and to see those things to happen again that shock that alarm level and also just knowing
• 1:15:30
  um certainly by the time that trump got elected that this seven decade run was over um it still
• 1:15:38
  is something that i think people are only now beginning to really fully appreciate in europe and
• 1:15:47
  i presume in australia this well i go shit it's really over like that article five thing in
• 1:15:53
  NATO uh uh that's not really there anymore the just the assumptions that we had this post
• 1:16:00
  world war two world and the institutions that that uh were created as part of it it's done i
• 1:16:07
  knew it was done then uh but now we really know and that it's done now um so i mean but it's one
• 1:16:12
  thing for NATO to be done it's one thing for you know the u.s has always had this fuzzy
• 1:16:18
  relationship this weird relationship with the rest of the world i think even since i think
• 1:16:23
  probably in my lifetime starting with the iraq war the the big was the beginning of the erosion
• 1:16:29
  of faith in the in the bankability of american truthfulness and uh commitment to the global world
• 1:16:38
  border the post war border but for america itself domestically to become a place where
• 1:16:48
  people can randomly be snatched off the street and disappeared that's
• 1:16:54
  new and shocking genuinely yeah shocking uh i would i would point out that you know in the first
• 1:17:05
  uh in the second bush administration a lot of the kind of debates that we're seeing now bad
• 1:17:11
  debates um among the trumpest right we saw the bush chandy right there are battles over habeas
• 1:17:18
  corpus then there are battles over extraordinary rendition of dark sites abroad of if you're
• 1:17:24
  you're either with us or with the terrorists uh or you're giving material aid to the bad guys
• 1:17:30
  um you sort of eliding the difference between um speech and uh and you know actual kind of terrorism
• 1:17:38
  adjoining the bad guys those things happen it's kind of an irony that we that the trumpest who came
• 1:17:43
  into power trump in vance in particular and some other people they hate the neocons and have
• 1:17:49
  smitten them and driven them to the margins of life and you know they had a comment in large
• 1:17:54
  respect and sometimes i cheer um you know when trump went to south carolina in the 2016 primary
• 1:18:01
  and absolutely trashed the bush family in from a heavily military audience and people cheered
• 1:18:06
  there's like oh something news going on and i kind of like it uh because the arach war was a
• 1:18:11
  disaster um and it deserves to be um you know hang under hanging on people's neck like a millstone
• 1:18:20
  um so that's all good but now they're just taking the same stupid arguments that we heard i was
• 1:18:24
  waiting for the torture argument to come around like it also came in so we've done some of these
• 1:18:28
  things before um they seem to be categorically worse now the fight with the supreme court is more
• 1:18:34
  brazen i think the corruption associated with trump is a level that people just didn't contemplate
• 1:18:41
  in any uh recent uh presidency and it doesn't even get that much play anymore because there's just
• 1:18:47
  too much stuff to pay attention to but yeah and i and mad i heard a legal analyst talking about the
• 1:18:51
  difference between the bush administration and the trump administration on the human rights front
• 1:18:56
  and she was saying the difference is that the bush administration really tried to push the law
• 1:19:01
  to its limits but it's still respected like it it's still respected at least the kabuki theater
• 1:19:07
  of believing that the law was something worth adhering to like it would tied itself in not
• 1:19:12
  trying to figure out legalistic ways of saying that you know enhanced interrogation wasn't torture
• 1:19:19
  and guantanamo bay wasn't in the united states and therefore we can do this and we can do that
• 1:19:24
  here there is just a seeming disregard for the question of whether or not legality comes into it
• 1:19:30
  it's like there are bad people bad people deserve to have bad things happen to them we don't need
• 1:19:35
  them here it's really a strong man worldview where like we don't need to give like habeas corpus
• 1:19:41
  rights to these nasty people they're bad ombre's just get rid of the bad ombre's that strikes me
• 1:19:48
  as like i mean maybe i'm being hysterical but but as a different level than
• 1:19:53
  Chinese malevolent dark war on the forces of islamic evil i mean they did they did
• 1:20:01
  robustly try to expand the unitary executive they they had a theory
• 1:20:09
  that had been simmering since watergate where a lot of those guys cut their teeth training
• 1:20:13
  rumsfeld especially and they wanted to push it both by legal pushing and then by actions that
• 1:20:21
  were on the outside but it's it is a different scale and a different kind of brazenness and openness
• 1:20:29
  and contemptuousness level that we're seeing right now and i think i'm not ultimately as pessimistic
• 1:20:37
  as i think you are at the moment um probably because i'm still american and californian and
• 1:20:44
  very naive about these things but i have some faith in american public opinion not being with
• 1:20:50
  this i don't think that this is a winner in the long term i think trump thinks he it is
• 1:20:55
  and i i don't agree with him uh yes we want to deport ms-13 criminals absolutely it's like
• 1:21:02
  that's a ninety seven to two issue it's not even close everyone wants that but that's not what
• 1:21:07
  he's doing he's being he's using as a test case to say i don't we don't need to do habeas corpus
• 1:21:13
  we don't need to account for the people that we send a foreign black site prisons um and i just don't
• 1:21:19
  think americans can stand for it it might take a year and a half for the not standing for it to manifest
• 1:21:26
  in a way that provides relief to people now and so that's going to be a real rough 18 months
• 1:21:33
  yeah but i think you're reminding me that i should take some solace in the fact that the chief
• 1:21:40
  characteristic that political scientists look for in determining whether or not a power grab is
• 1:21:46
  going to be successful by an authoritarian uh in the case of you know erda one or in the case of
• 1:21:53
  orban is do they have a popularity of 70 to 80 percent before the power grab and if they do
• 1:22:00
  then we're in trouble and if they don't if it's pretty difficult to bend the country to their will
• 1:22:07
  so hopefully trump remains not there last question from one of our viewers on sub stack live
• 1:22:13
  Alex says how did matt feel about bill ma's defensiveness regarding the dinner with trump um i will
• 1:22:18
  admit to uh i could feel that he wanted to talk about it so there uh i you know i as i said i think
• 1:22:26
  on the show i thought it was great that he went to the white house and i thought his report was
• 1:22:29
  interesting and and i think that's the right approach i would go to the white house if they ask me
• 1:22:34
  and i don't like trump at all um i'm also not perhaps slightly less impressed by the gap between his
• 1:22:41
  private persona and what he does as a president because i just care about power more than anything else
• 1:22:47
  that said um i could tell he wanted to talk about that he was still like wound up about it and so i
• 1:22:52
  just poked him very slightly um to let it out um and needed to come out it was going to come out
• 1:22:57
  anyways he wasn't going to be able to fully concentrate until we got that out of the way and um
• 1:23:03
  you know i'm trying to make a better show i'm trying we're trying to do a good pub good broadcasting
• 1:23:08
  and him being mad at me is fine um uh fine broadcasting and he wasn't really
• 1:23:14
  um no no i mean he seems surprisingly thin-skinned about the reaction about the negative reaction
• 1:23:18
  that he's got to that it seemed like for the first time he's been reading his own comments and
• 1:23:23
  he probably just shouldn't because i i don't think anybody gives a shit that he went to
• 1:23:26
  Larry David does he and that does he yeah Larry David had a piece in the New York Times
• 1:23:31
  sink uh a satirical piece called my dinner with eight off it wasn't fun sadly like funny headline
• 1:23:38
  but the rest of it was really kind of cringe-inducing and it was just like a uh clearly a shot
• 1:23:42
  at Bill Marm right so there are people in maris universe i'm sure giving him a lot of
• 1:23:47
  guff for this and so he feels maybe a little bit defensive about it but he also feels uh
• 1:23:52
  indignants like that no that's that's why you fail is that you don't talk to other people and
• 1:23:58
  that's one of the best things about bill it through thickened through thin love or hate and whatever
• 1:24:03
  plastics or no plastics um he's going to talk to all sides um and no i love the guy i think he's
• 1:24:09
  i think it's great that he went so i think you did a great job on the show uh yeah i think
• 1:24:15
  but i agree with your diagnosis that simply because a well-known showman is good at being a showman
• 1:24:24
  for a few hours doesn't tell you anything about what he's doing or you know how we should think
• 1:24:29
  about his presidency so what he can charm you right on his turf on his turf exactly yeah um
• 1:24:37
  Matt it's great to talk to you as always come back any old time and uh next time i'm in
• 1:24:41
  new york city i look forward to a big night i i promised i might wear my uh stupid airpods better next time