The Reason Roundtable XX
[0] Hello, and welcome to The Reason Roundtable, the podcast of free minds, free markets, and free takes.
[1] I'm your host, Peter Suderman, and joining me today are my esteemed co -panelists, Catherine Maggie Ward and Matt Welch, as well as special guest, Reason's Eric Boehm.
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[5] Hello.
[6] Happy Monday, Peter.
[7] Happy Monday to everyone but American avocado eaters.
[8] Today, we're going to talk about Trump's big new tariffs, the federal government's spending freeze and employee buyouts, a reader question about the president suing a broadcast news network, and the political blame game surrounding a tragic, deadly airplane crash in Washington, plus a few other things as well.
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[25] Holy guacamole, it's a trade war.
[26] Over the weekend, President Trump imposed 25 % tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico, with a reduced 10 % tariff on energy imported from Canada.
[27] Trump isn't a video gamer, but it sure seems like he's feeling the call of duties.
[28] Or maybe not.
[29] Maybe not just minutes before we started recording.
[30] The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration has agreed to pause sweeping tariffs on Mexico only for a month while the two sides hammer out an agreement.
[31] Apparently, this was announced in a tweet, as all things are now, from Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum, who said that during a conversation with President Donald Trump, Mexico had agreed to post 10 ,000 National Guard troops on its border to block the flow of drugs, especially.
[32] fentanyl.
[33] Eric, what is going on here?
[34] Please just give us the lay of the land.
[35] And then I understand that specifics are going to be really hard to figure out.
[36] But help us understand, like in broad strokes, what is going to be the impact and effect of these tariffs should they go into effect?
[37] Yeah, I want to start off by just making a clarification here, and that is that Peter asked me to be on this episode of The Roundtable last week on Monday before this stuff happened.
[38] So I think in some sort of screwed up butterfly effect, something or other, that's why the trade war is happening.
[39] The news cycle was conspiring to give you an issue that you know a lot about.
[40] So explain to us.
[41] We made this happen.
[42] OK, say it with me, folks.
[43] Tariffs not only impose immense economic costs, but also fail to achieve their primary policy.
[44] and foster political dysfunction along the way.
[45] That should be on a shirt.
[46] That should be on a shirt.
[47] It's been on a shirt.
[48] I was actually going to wear it today, but I had worn it last week and I hadn't done laundry yet, so I couldn't wear it for the show today.
[49] That is the best summary of what tariffs do.
[50] And as you said, Peter, we've got this new – maybe we have 25 % tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
[51] Now maybe it's just Canada, 10 % on oil and other energy products from Canada, 10 % on China.
[52] But I think the thing that we should think about as the – news continues to develop, and as the specifics of this will continue to spin out, is that phrase.
[53] I think we'd go back to that original kind of meme from the first Trump administration, thanks to the Cato Institute and Scott Lincecum for putting that out there in the world.
[54] But the important thing there is, yes, tariffs impose immense economic costs.
[55] There will be costs from these policies.
[56] We know that.
[57] We don't maybe know the specifics.
[58] But there's a lot of other things that tariffs do too.
[59] And I think if we focus too much on this being purely an economic story, you miss some of the other elements to this.
[60] You miss the fact that they oftentimes contribute to corruption.
[61] They allow for more centralization of power in Washington, D .C. There's obviously a geopolitical angle to what's happening here with Trump.
[62] And then there's that part in the middle of that phrase, right, is that they also fail to achieve their primary policy aims.
[63] In this case, it's not even really clear.
[64] What those primary policy aims are, Trump has talked about, yeah, he wants to stop the flow of migrants and fentanyl across the border.
[65] I'm confused how taxes on legal imports are supposed to prevent illegal drugs from coming across the border.
[66] It's not as if we're going to be charging tariffs on the drugs that are smuggled in.
[67] By definition, like that just doesn't make any sense.
[68] J .D. Vance tweeted some stuff over the weekend about how the tariffs are in response to Canada not living up to its promises to contribute enough to NATO.
[69] It's very unclear.
[70] There's just this like grab bag of things.
[71] And Trump sees tariffs as kind of the ultimate tool, the lever that he can use against other countries to get them to do whatever it is that he wants, even if that's not a trade thing, even if that's not something that.
[72] And tariffs, I think, are pretty ineffective tools even at doing trade policy, as we saw from Trump's first administration.
[73] There was really no reputable study that found any significant changes to China's behavior, for example, on trade, despite that being the thing that Trump was trying to do with the tariffs in his first administration.
[74] So, yes, tariffs are going to impose economic costs.
[75] We know that for sure.
[76] There will be costs here one way or another, however this shakes out.
[77] But they're also going to fail to achieve whatever sort of vague political policy.
[78] And there will absolutely be more political dysfunction, not just American political dysfunction, but now broad North American political dysfunction, all of which is just really not great.
[79] Catherine, The Wall Street Journal over the weekend called this the dumbest trade war in history.
[80] Is there a non -stupid justification for this?
[81] Give us the steel man case if there is one.
[82] And if not, just explain to us why the Trump administration says they are doing this.
[83] I mean, I think the steel man here is what just happened with Mexico, right?
[84] If you say, OK, Trump has a bunch of goals and maybe they're a grab bag and maybe they don't have a lot of internal consistency, but he's got stuff he wants.
[85] Trump's not internally consistent.
[86] I know.
[87] This is breaking news here on the Reason Now table.
[88] You know, if what he wanted was more security at the border and a promise to try and do something about the fentanyl, he got it right now.
[89] Will this work?
[90] Who knows?
[91] Was it worth the horrific, although in this case, short term economic upheaval and then the long term economic uncertainty that the threats of tariffs pose?
[92] I don't think so.
[93] But I think the steel man is.
[94] This is a card that Donald Trump can plausibly play that scares other nations into doing what he wants.
[95] And I think it's adorbs that Justin Trudeau is out here being like a spicy little Canadian.
[96] And he's like, you're not the boss of me. I think the spices are mostly coming from Mexico.
[97] Guacamole is spicy.
[98] I said spicy little Canadian, advisedly.
[99] I recognize that's still not spicy.
[100] Sure does more of a maple syrup guy.
[101] Syrupy little Canadian.
[102] I actually was thinking he, you know, he too will probably fall before this podcast is over into whatever, conceding whatever Trump is going to retroactively say he wanted.
[103] But that's it.
[104] This is something Trump can credibly threaten.
[105] He said a long time.
[106] for really his entire first term, his entire time out of office, his entire campaign for this term, that he was going to do tariffs.
[107] So it's a plausible threat.
[108] And he's already gotten some of what he wants.
[109] So that's the best case for it.
[110] In fact, there are reports that Trump has a meeting scheduled with Trudeau later today.
[111] So it is at least possible that by the time you hear this podcast, the Canadian tariffs will also be paused.
[112] Matt, one of the things that sort of related to this is that Trump has proposed ending income taxes entirely and replacing the income tax with tariffs.
[113] So now that Trump has imposed a bunch of tariffs or maybe is threatening to impose a bunch of tariffs, can we end the income tax now?
[114] Functionally, no, is one big issue when people play this intellectual policy game of, hey, we swapped out big tariffs in 1913 for the adoption of the income tax, which is a deliberate swap for a variety of reasons, one of which is that adjusting tariffs during the big tariff era between 1870 and 1912, every time you would do it in any direction, it would be an absolute orgy of corruption, because what do you do?
[115] Don't tell Ben Dreyfus.
[116] I will not tell Ben Dreyfus anything, and he will like it.
[117] It was a terrible corruption.
[118] They couldn't do it, even when Grover Cleveland, who was the only Democratic president in that era, tried to reduce tariffs in 1894.
[119] Congress larded it up with so much corrupt, oh, well, I'm going to get this exception.
[120] Oh, you're going to tear up this guy now more over this way that he was physically revolted by it and refused to sign it into law.
[121] And so there was this kind of similar to the way that the neighborhood that I'm in, in Brooklyn.
[122] They swapped out its entire port in the post -war era because there's just no way to get it out of the hands of the mafia.
[123] So they sort of swapped it out for container shipping in New Jersey.
[124] Like people did that with tariffs back in the day.
[125] Good thing there's no mafia in New Jersey.
[126] Well, there's less and they're more comically available to us as television characters.
[127] All of which to say is that most importantly, the president has broad latitude to impose tariffs, particularly when he invents some national security fantasia associated with it.
[128] The president does not have that broad authority to wave the magic wand to make taxes go away.
[129] He will.
[130] Trump and the Republican Congress, which has a majority of about three nose hairs.
[131] will be attempting to pass some big tax bills coming up soon.
[132] And we'll see what the content of those will be, but they will pale in comparison.
[133] Here's a thing to think about.
[134] David Henderson, Phil Magnus, writing in the National Review last week, pointed out that the entire sum of imports in America is around $3 trillion a year.
[135] Keep your brain focused on that.
[136] The amount of money that we get from federal income taxes is two point five trillion dollars a year.
[137] So even if even if Trump had a magic wand to make all income taxes go away, which you would love, he clearly wants to do that swap.
[138] He doesn't have that.
[139] But even if he did and you did this swap, you would need to tax those three trillion worth of imports or tariff them at 83 percent.
[140] And then hope that there would be no change in the behavior of the selling of those imports, which, of course, there wouldn't be.
[141] People wouldn't buy as many imports.
[142] So you can't.
[143] There's just not enough money there.
[144] In the absence of the Republican Party.
[145] actually reducing the size of government, which it steadfastly has refused to do, including spectacularly during Donald Trump's first term when he added more to the deficit in three and a half years before COVID than Barack Obama did in eight.
[146] If they're not going to do that, then all you are doing by any of these measures, in addition to making Scott Lincecum print T -shirts until the cows come home, is that you're going to.
[147] turn the annual deficit from $1 trillion to a kajillion trillion dollars.
[148] So no, none of this is going to work.
[149] I think that's the official CBO estimate.
[150] It's the new CBO.
[151] I read the reports.
[152] Do we even have a CBO anymore?
[153] That's maybe a separate question for later in the podcast.
[154] We'll get there.
[155] No, we're not going to magically make the federal income tax go away, sadly.
[156] Eric.
[157] Matt said that Trump has broad authority to impose these tariffs.
[158] But I have seen headlines suggesting that maybe there are going to be some legal challenges here.
[159] So walk us through the legal aspect of this.
[160] Is this really legal?
[161] Does Trump actually have the authority to just do this unilaterally?
[162] Yeah, the answer is that he probably does.
[163] I wrote a piece about this about a week ago in anticipation of this potential move of tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
[164] He probably does.
[165] He would have to invoke.
[166] The International Economic Emergency Act of 1977 to do that.
[167] But the shorter answer before we get into that whole.
[168] issue is that Congress has delegated basically all authority over trade to the president in a number of acts going back really to like the end of the Great Depression, but then accelerating in the 60s and 70s, a couple of different trade bills that gave the president a wide latitude to lay tariffs.
[169] Trump used some of those laws, like the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, to put tariffs on steel and aluminum during his first administration.
[170] That was the sort of lever that he pulled there.
[171] He pulled a different lever from a different law, one that was passed in the 1970s to put tariffs on China, all those imports from China during his first administration.
[172] But the big one there, the big kind of flashing red button on the wall that no president has yet pushed to impose tariffs, but it looks like Trump is, you know, we don't actually know yet from the White House if he's actually invoked this authority as of this moment, but presumably he has, is the Emergency Economic Act of 1977.
[173] That allows a president to basically do any - thing he or theoretically she would want to do in response to a an unusual set of circumstances that threaten the national security of the United States.
[174] So you end up with a sort of funny scenario here in which to to pass legal muster what the White House is going to have to do if it wants to maintain these 25 percent tariffs on Canadian imports, for example, is put in writing that the country of Canada and all of the goods that it sends to the United States that are peacefully bought and consumed.
[175] by Americans somehow represents at this moment an unusual and unique threat to American national security.
[176] They're going to have to say that.
[177] And then they're going to have to convince a court that that is legit.
[178] And it's you know, I. I don't know that a court will see that as legit, but I'm also not very confident that a court will just toss it out either because we saw courts gave pretty wide deference to the president, to Trump specifically, in his first term on some of these legal challenges relating to tariffs.
[179] This would be a new and broad and, quite frankly, ridiculous expansion of presidential power over the economy, but I'm not sure that courts would step in to stop it.
[180] Congress is who needs to step in to stop it, but that's a...
[181] basket of limp noodles at the moment, so I don't expect to see much out of there either.
[182] Noodle prices will probably also be up, but this explains...
[183] Egg noodles especially, which I really like, so that's a bummer.
[184] Boy, we are all going to get hit really hard by here.
[185] Tequila, Canadian rye whiskey, egg noodles, guacamole.
[186] No, but I think the national security explanation actually helps us understand why they are blaming fentanyl coming through Canada, which Canada is not...
[187] is not a major supplier of illegal fentanyl to the United States.
[188] Also, opioid deaths are dropping right now.
[189] I mean, it's a total nonsense justification, but it allows you to claim a national security argument here.
[190] Catherine, I actually want to ask you about a different national emergency here.
[191] So if I recall correctly, before all of this happened, Donald Trump said that there was an energy emergency.
[192] And that we we had like an emergency surrounding like needing more energy and energy was costing too much.
[193] We need to build more and have more capacity.
[194] And one of the interesting things about this about Trump's plan is that it actually imposes lower tariffs on Canadian energy imports, seemingly an acknowledgment.
[195] that these are going to raise costs, right?
[196] Like it is an implicit acknowledgement that all of this is going to make things more expensive.
[197] At the same time, like Trump just ran on Biden.
[198] He beat Biden largely on the basis of inflation.
[199] And he is now coming through with a plan that is going to make everything more expensive, including and especially energy.
[200] Make it make sense to me. I cannot.
[201] But I do think that we are not to you, not to myself, maybe not to anyone.
[202] I do think, you know, we are doing a fairly serious experiment here in.
[203] Can it get bad enough that it gets better?
[204] As I've said many times on this podcast, I don't really like that theory of political change.
[205] I don't think it works very well.
[206] And of course, there are costs in the meantime.
[207] I wonder what will happen, though, on that front here, because it does seem like slapping a bunch of tariffs kind of willy -nilly on our major trading partners.
[208] And then the feedback loop should be...
[209] pretty fast and pretty effective.
[210] There should be immediate price increases on lots of stuff.
[211] And eggs are already quite expensive because of flu issues.
[212] They killed all those chickens because they got the flu.
[213] I mean, it's tough times out here.
[214] The stock market fell 500 points this morning at its opening just because of these threats.
[215] So feedback's happening, yeah.
[216] In theory, we get this feedback both in the kind of capital markets and in the grocery store or at the pump or whatever.
[217] And that's going to show up in polling.
[218] Maybe Donald Trump doesn't care that much about polling anymore because he can't run again.
[219] I don't know how that's going to hit.
[220] But maybe if I'm being a terrible kind of optimistic, this is an example of it could get bad enough quickly enough that we could get a fairly rapid pivot.
[221] Also, I just feel that it's illegal that we've made it this far into this podcast and not said the word Smoot Hawley.
[222] So there, I did that.
[223] The pivot, the problem with that is that even if that were to happen, even if somehow this call today with Justin Trudeau manages to smooth over differences, and those differences include Trump saying serially over the weekend things like, without our massive subsidies to Canada, which I think he means a trade deficit.
[224] The trade deficit, yeah, which he still doesn't understand.
[225] Canada ceases to exist as a viable country, harsh but true.
[226] Therefore, Canada should become our cherished 51st state.
[227] So even if like somehow they were to smooth over these little differences, differences which have now absolutely alienated the Trump administration from Pierre Polivare, a conservative who was looking really good in the polls about a month ago.
[228] And suddenly that gap has narrowed a great deal.
[229] And he's and he's a principled free trader and a principled conservative and kind of like a mini Malay, not quite as crazy up north.
[230] So what you would do is if like, OK, let's say he does what he did last time, like he redoes NAFTA.
[231] It's like Trump NAFTA.
[232] And so we sign it.
[233] what does that paper worth as long as you have people like trump and jd vance who has been putting the clown nose on several times over the weekend talking about various things associated with this What does that mean for people believing the ink on that paper when it can just be changed?
[234] It means that Canada and everybody else who is a steadfast ally and trading partner of the United States is going to be seeking reassurances elsewhere.
[235] You're created a permanent instability, even if you can change those terms very quickly.
[236] And I don't.
[237] really think that Trump is looking for a quick exit on this.
[238] I think the meta way of looking at all of what Trump and the Trump coalition seeks to do is to undo the entire post -World War II superstructure.
[239] They feel like America has been taken advantage of by NATO, by the World Trade Organization, by the Davos elite.
[240] And so every...
[241] possibility to chip away at that they're going to take.
[242] And they're going to replace those multinational agreements, which the United States forged and always put itself in a pretty privileged position within.
[243] They're going to replace those with individually.
[244] sort of power politic negotiations using America's might, which is considerable, both economically and militarily, to sort of bend Panama or Denmark or Mexico in ways to do our bidding.
[245] And he wants to do that.
[246] That is a sincere intellectual project, as well as stopping the U .S. being a place where refugees from the world's misery comes as well.
[247] He wants to do that.
[248] So I have a hard time believing that he's just going to.
[249] accept a little Canadian two -step and suddenly his tariffs, which he has threatened over and over again to all the BRICS countries, to Russia.
[250] He just keeps bringing up tariffs every day.
[251] I think he's sincere about wanting to use them and to forge this new reality in America and international life.
[252] I agree, but I also do think we can't rule out the, oh, look, a squirrel.
[253] possibility of governance, right?
[254] Like just the idea that something else will happen that will catch the Trump administration's attention and that they will focus on and just not do the work of unraveling all the rest of these trade agreements.
[255] I do want to recommend to people.
[256] There's a piece in The New York Times this morning that just quickly outlines it's one response to Trump's tariffs, trade that excludes the U .S. And it just quickly outlines the fact that the neoliberal like global trade order continues apace in the rest of the world.
[257] And that a very, very rational response to the way that the U .S. is behaving right now, which is happening on the part of other countries, is they're just making trade agreements without us.
[258] And so we are not going to stop globalization with our behavior.
[259] We are going to.
[260] Stop.
[261] gleaning its benefits within our borders.
[262] If I can just put a quick cherry on top of that whole thing, because I think the point Matt made there about not trusting the US going forward, that's a big potential part of the political dysfunction that these tariffs and this trade war could cause.
[263] And so I think just to kind of wrap up this discussion, we should think back to the fact that it was President Donald Trump during his first term.
[264] This is the stupidest part of this whole thing.
[265] He renegotiated NAFTA, right?
[266] We got the US -Mexico -Canada agreement, the USMCA.
[267] And when he signed that in 2020, Trump said it was the fairest, most balanced, most beneficial, blah, blah, blah, trade agreement we've ever signed, the best agreement we've ever made, he said.
[268] And now he basically tore that up this weekend and indicates that he wants to continue tearing it up going forward.
[269] So now where we are, this is where we are.
[270] We have a president who has torn up a trade deal that he himself signed just five years ago.
[271] We have a political party, the Republican Party, that was elected just a few months ago in large part because the American people wanted political leadership that was going to lower prices or at least lower inflation and deal with the cost of living.
[272] And now the first big project that that party is undertaking is a thing that is going to, by definition, increase prices on Americans.
[273] And then you have a populist movement, a supposedly populist movement, the MAGA movement.
[274] that is pursuing a policy that is going to entrench more power in Washington, D .C., give more power to unelected bureaucrats at the Commerce Department and the Office of U .S. Trade Relations, create more insider dealmaking because tariffs are ultimately about concentrating power in D .C. It's the opposite of a populist movement.
[275] And that's kind of where we are with the things that Trump has done this weekend.
[276] All right.
[277] So speaking of economic instability and confusion, this isn't the only major Trump economic policy that we've seen since the last time we had a podcast.
[278] The Trump administration also ordered a freeze on federal aid and grant spending via a memo from the Office of Management and Budget, which called for a temporary pause on all federal government grants and loans.
[279] Trump's order was immediately challenged in court.
[280] On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked the OMB memo.
[281] And on Friday afternoon, a second U .S. district judge.
[282] issued an order saying the Trump administration may not pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate obligations to provide federal financial assistance to states.
[283] Eric, I want to start with you here.
[284] And I want to read you a tweet from Press Secretary Catherine Levitt.
[285] This is actually from Wednesday, so before the second judge's order came down.
[286] But this is after the first judge blocked the OMB memo.
[287] Levitt tweeted, this is not a rescission of the federal funding freeze.
[288] It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo.
[289] Why?
[290] To end any confusion created by the court's injunction.
[291] The president's EO on federal funding remains in full force and effect and will be rigorously implemented.
[292] Did that end any confusion?
[293] No, I think it only created more confusion.
[294] And in fact, I actually had dinner late last week with a congressional staffer who said there's like three different active interpretations of what all that means.
[295] Nobody seems to understand what's going on.
[296] But just to back up, what happened is that on Inauguration Day, President Trump signed a whole bunch of executive orders.
[297] Most of them contained a bunch of vague, unclear language about like he was ordering all departments to shut down.
[298] Well, I guess one of the more clear.
[299] was like shutting down all the DEI programs.
[300] Many of them were vaguer than that, like including the one that they're now pointing to as saying this is the justification for freezing all of this federal spending that goes out the door.
[301] It was a nesting doll of confusion.
[302] Right.
[303] And then there was an OMB, this OMB memo went out that offered clarification.
[304] The OMB memo was very specific.
[305] It gave lots of different line items of government programs, things that were free.
[306] It was several pages long, just sort of specifying freeze this program.
[307] freeze that program, whatever.
[308] The White House maintains that this is like a temporary freeze.
[309] They're reviewing.
[310] Carolyn Levitt has said that they're reviewing the dollars that go out the door so they can make appropriate decisions about what to do after the fact.
[311] And then there's this now ongoing debate as to what actually then there was a second OMB memo that rescinded that memo.
[312] But, you know, to your point, didn't rescind the executive order.
[313] This is really starting to feel like the plot of an episode of severance.
[314] Like on the one hand, I understand that things are happening, but I don't understand what's going on here.
[315] It seems like and I'll just say this and let somebody else chime in to try to clarify.
[316] It seems like the operating stance right now is if President Donald Trump approves of this line item of spending, then you should spend it.
[317] And if he doesn't, then you shouldn't.
[318] But as we've talked about and as anyone who follows politics is aware, Trump does not have a mind that is focused on particular policy items in that sort of level of minutiae and certainly is not.
[319] And what he wants even changes from day to day and hour to hour.
[320] So you can't have that be the operative policy of the federal government is only spend the dollars that Trump wants to spend.
[321] So there needs to be some sort of clarification.
[322] That OMB memo, the now rescinded one, was an attempt at providing that information to the executive agencies that actually have to make these decisions.
[323] And so it seems like in the absence of any sort of...
[324] actual guidance.
[325] And now with a couple of stops being thrown up by the court, it means that everybody's just sort of sitting in limbo and isn't quite sure what to do.
[326] That's right.
[327] The fight over Trump's spending freeze is in many ways a fight over something called impoundment, which is whether or not the president has to spend money that Congress has appropriated.
[328] So this fight goes back to the Richard Nixon presidency and the passage of the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act that not only created the CBO and the modern budgeting process, but also said, clarified for the record that the president has to spend.
[329] all the money that Congress appropriates, that the president does not have a choice.
[330] And so a big part of what we are seeing with the spending freeze is that the Trump administration is trying to get this litigated in court.
[331] They want a legal challenge so that they can set a precedent here.
[332] So Matt.
[333] There's a lot of confusion, including coming from the White House about what, like even some of the small stuff about what exactly this means.
[334] Press Secretary Levitt said that among the suspended grants was $50 million for condoms in Gaza.
[335] Is that accurate?
[336] According to reasons work on that, it doesn't seem to be particularly accurate.
[337] I will confess I haven't looked at every single asinine thing that the press secretary of the United States has claimed over the past week or the past four years or 40, for that matter.
[338] So I can't cite every particular detail of this.
[339] I think the broader picture that is worth keeping in mind is that if the government, the executive branch, Trump administration, whoever wants to cut the government by a trillion dollars, which Elon Musk is still saying as part of his sort of doge remit.
[340] And Elon Musk seems to be a prime mover in a lot of what is happening at places like USAID, which he called a corrupt organization and a criminal racket or something on Twitter over the weekend.
[341] Government wants to do that.
[342] There's a way to do that, which is that Congress passes a budget that is a trillion dollars less than it was last year, which would be great.
[343] Super good idea.
[344] Totally in favor of it.
[345] Why not go for two trillion and say that we no longer have a USAID department if that's what you want to do?
[346] And I think there's a decent argument for that.
[347] The USAID, which I became pretty intimately aware of in the 1990s when living abroad, is not so great.
[348] of an organization.
[349] There's a lot of corruption that has traditionally, historically been associated with the place.
[350] It's this murky, are they supposed to make a profit?
[351] Are they supposed to invest in good guys, choose bad guys?
[352] Are they doing oil deals in Kazakhstan?
[353] It's a mess of an organization.
[354] And one of the salutary benefits of this freeze, which is possibly illegal and incredibly disruptive, is that it was a margin call for a half a second of like, oh, wait, we give money to this?
[355] Polish nonprofit or this opposition party publication in Slovakia?
[356] Why?
[357] And that's a good question.
[358] The question why is good.
[359] Having the U .S. government suddenly not honor its contracts to pay people who have already provided services, regardless of what we think of those services, is less good.
[360] It's more disruptive along the lines of what we just talked about at the beginning of the trade war.
[361] There's plenty of things to look at.
[362] I'm sure if we're not spending $50 million worth of on condoms in Gaza that you can find something ridiculous equivalent somewhere else.
[363] I don't doubt that for a second.
[364] The question is, what do you do to write that ship?
[365] Do you just sort of.
[366] suspend acknowledgments of previous laws and rules?
[367] Or do you actually sit down like a grown ass adult and say, oh, we don't want USAID anymore, period, or we're going to cut it back by 80 percent or something?
[368] And clearly the preferred method is let's do the big kind of chaos move.
[369] Let's let's.
[370] smack it with a battering ram and see what happens.
[371] And there's a lot of people who enjoy that.
[372] And we shouldn't be willfully...
[373] misunderstanding about that there is a pleasure associated with people who are supporting these moves they like to see the rats scurry from their point of view um and that is a tendency in american politics right now and until that receives some kind of satisfaction or expression we're going to see more and more of this The condoms were supposedly being used as bombs.
[374] So I guess this is an anti -war move.
[375] The last thing we want to talk about here is that the White House also announced what amounts to a buyout offer for federal employees.
[376] Those who take the offer can, as I understand this.
[377] just not show up to work and get paid through September.
[378] It's not clear exactly what the budgetary authority is for all of this.
[379] It definitely has Elon Musk's fingerprints on this.
[380] On it, the memo was titled A Fork in the Road, which is the same title, as I understand, that Elon Musk used when he let go the vast majority of employees at...
[381] Twitter, which is now X, something like 80 percent of the employees at X just got the X or left.
[382] And maybe that's the same theory that is going on here.
[383] Matt, do you see any potential problems with this order, with the incentives that it creates for federal employees?
[384] I don't know.
[385] Honestly, I like.
[386] I feel like that asking federal employees to go to work is a good idea.
[387] There are privileged positions in working for the federal bureaucracy, the likes of which those of us who would never contemplate such a thing.
[388] can't possibly imagine.
[389] You have much more job security traditionally than now.
[390] And a lot of the sob stories coming out from people who are on the other side of this, I understand the uncertainty could be kind of troubling.
[391] But generally speaking, you get paid pretty well.
[392] You have pretty generous benefits and it's really tough to fire you.
[393] And also you can cloak your job and perhaps work at it with this exalted feeling of patriotic service and duty.
[394] So it's possible that these orders, if legal, are a perfectly good thing.
[395] I think that it is worthwhile to do kind of a gut check on the bureaucracy and ask if it's just metastasizing for its own sake.
[396] That all said, having buyouts.
[397] We've seen this in the newspaper industry, private industry, admittedly.
[398] But newspaper buyouts was one of the worst things that in terms of quality for the newspaper business, because the people who are good enough to work elsewhere said, cool, I will take that year salary and I'm going to go work for this other guy across the street who's good.
[399] And the people who remained really sucked.
[400] So I would worry about that.
[401] It might not be possible to affect the gains that you want otherwise without using that blunt.
[402] instruments.
[403] So it's complicated.
[404] But yeah, I don't know.
[405] So I would be remiss if I did not channel Reasons publisher Michael Lisi here, who whenever we talk about this sort of thing, will say something like, you know, I'd rather pay the government employees to not work than pay them to work.
[406] And I'm never quite sure whether he's kidding or not.
[407] He's serious and he's right.
[408] He's serious and he's right.
[409] So speaking the default Michael Lisi.
[410] But speaking of responses where you're not quite sure whether they're kidding or not, the best part of the OPM story was that the offer was made in an email.
[411] And in response, federal employees filed a lawsuit saying that it was illegal for the president who...
[412] who definitely heads the executive branch, that's how the American government works, to email employees directly.
[413] Basically, instead of this meeting should have been an email, this email should have been a torturous bureaucratic procedure.
[414] Catherine, you are a manager and sometimes you like to email your employees.
[415] Like, how does this make you feel?
[416] Does this not, like, in some ways suggest that maybe all of these people are awful and just need to get the boot?
[417] The private sector and the public sector are different.
[418] The private sector and the public sector are different.
[419] It's so important to keep that in mind.
[420] I kind of enjoyed Elon Musk firing everyone at Twitter.
[421] I'm kind of enjoying maybe firing all the federal government employees.
[422] They're being offered a buyout and also being put on paid leave and all kinds of stuff.
[423] And they're also being ordered back into the office with the kind of not even veiled goal of getting people to quit.
[424] All of this is very appealing.
[425] The thing that I have been thinking about, though, is this moves so much more of our governance into the place that executive orders have already taken many, many crucial issues.
[426] So right now, our immigration policy, to a large extent, just ebbs and flows every time power changes hands.
[427] Right.
[428] OK, everyone come in, everyone go out, everyone come in, everyone go out.
[429] It's a lot more complicated than that.
[430] But like more or less, that is what is going on.
[431] If we do this with everything, that's not going to make for a better country.
[432] And so, of course, it is correct that Matt is right.
[433] I would love for Congress to say, should we have USAID?
[434] Let's debate it and then vote on it.
[435] That would be awesome.
[436] But I do think that making the strong claim, all of this is rightfully in the hands of the executive, trade policy, hiring and firing.
[437] There's a case for all of it.
[438] And if we move all of it into the hands of the executive and then if we get the situation we have now, which is that people with power are just trying to guess what the president likes and what he doesn't like.
[439] That's an autocracy.
[440] That's bad.
[441] We don't want that.
[442] We do not want.
[443] Plan for the future.
[444] Like the idea that we move more and more of this into the hands of the executive and that we take more and more of it just as an assumption that it's going to ebb and flow every time power changes hands.
[445] Remember that power will always change hands.
[446] And so when the next Democratic administration comes in and they go on an insane hiring spree.
[447] Everything in the federal government is now governed exclusively by DEI.
[448] We do.
[449] I have no idea what with trade at this point because there's actually no one who likes trade, really.
[450] Democrats are going to love free trade after four years of Donald Trump.
[451] Democrats are going to love free trade for the next three and a half years and then do whatever they're going to do.
[452] So all of that is.
[453] is there's going to be a boomerang.
[454] There's going to be a backlash if we move it into a place where it is basically kind of an autocratic.
[455] It is kind of funny to imagine the like the reply alls that happened, though, to that email that went out to the entire federal government.
[456] Right.
[457] Like, you know, there was some incompetent bureaucrat who just like sent no back to everybody.
[458] Yeah.
[459] But, you know, to Catherine's point here, like if the if the characters within the Trump administration who want to challenge the constitutionality of the Budget and Empowerment Act, if they succeed, then you are you're basically doing this.
[460] You're centralizing all budgetary authority in the executive branch because if the president can say yes or no to any bit of congressional authorized.
[461] spending, if he can just block it, then Congress has no role effectively anymore in the budget.
[462] And yeah, Congress's budget process is incredibly broken.
[463] So I hope that the best case scenario here is that this forces some sort of long overdue correction in the way in which we handle the budget because that's obviously very bad.
[464] But I think centralizing it even more so in the White House would be a worse outcome.
[465] I do want to say just one last thing.
[466] It would be cool if the federal government was way, way, way smaller.
[467] And I really do just like – it's way too big.
[468] All of these people doing all of this stuff on the federal dime every day are not our friends and they are not helping us.
[469] Of course there are government employees who are doing good and important work.
[470] There are functions of government that need to be performed for people to continue to function in the private sector even given the world the way it is.
[471] But there is – So much to cut and to do it in an even vaguely legitimate way would be the best thing that anyone could do.
[472] Republicans have power across the whole federal government.
[473] They could be doing this legit if they really wanted to.
[474] So I'm not the Trump guy on this podcast.
[475] But before we close out this segment, I do want to offer a kind of sort of defense of Trump's economic policies as we have seen them so far.
[476] Look, Trump is chaotic.
[477] Trump is a liar.
[478] Trump is malicious in so many ways.
[479] He doesn't have plans.
[480] And the people who he has surrounded himself with, they they all have their they have problems as well.
[481] But one thing about cutting government, one thing about reducing the scope of federal power is the people who want to do it and who are going to put themselves in the position to do it.
[482] That is the positions of power.
[483] Those people are going to, by definition, be kind of crazy.
[484] They're going to be kind of chaotic.
[485] They're just going to be headbusters who want to come in and stir stuff up.
[486] And to some extent, if you want that to happen, this is the option that you are going to get, is that you're going to get people who are not going to be processed people, who are not going to be good government people who do it the right way.
[487] They're going to come in and they're going to do it the wrong way.
[488] And maybe the wrong way is the only way to do it.
[489] Again, I'm not saying that I am exactly defending this, but I think if you want to mount a defense of doing this in a chaotic way, that's it.
[490] It's that it's.
[491] that this is inevitably a chaotic process.
[492] The bureaucracy is gonna resist.
[493] There is going to be a huge amount of friction.
[494] There's no good, straightforward way to just come in and do this.
[495] You don't have the manpower.
[496] You don't have the plans in advance.
[497] You gotta just come in and say, we're doing it.
[498] That's what Trump is doing.
[499] And I think that there are gonna be a lot of problems, but I hope that at least some of it works.
[500] So let's go to a sponsor here and then we will move on.
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[515] All right, let's go to our listener question.
[516] Reason Roundtable panelists, Donald Trump personally sued CBS for editing Kamala Harris' interview on 60 Minutes during the presidential campaign in a way that he feels treated his campaign unfairly.
[517] He recently exercised his executive authority under Article 2, directing the FCC to demand unedited transcripts of said interview from CBS to support his lawsuit.
[518] Does anyone else see this as problematic?
[519] Could this represent the first test of judicial doctrine of full immunity that SCOTUS created during the Trump v. United States ruling?
[520] Sincerely, Michael.
[521] Eric, let's start with you.
[522] I mean, I'm a little bit I don't think this is true.
[523] And I'm quite skeptical of the broad executive authority that's that's apparently been granted.
[524] I think there's.
[525] reasons to be concerned about that.
[526] This doesn't quite rise to that level for me because I mean, he's so he's suing in his personal capacity.
[527] I think I'm not a lawyer, but I think during the discovery phase of that lawsuit, unless CBS just decides to settle, which it looks like they want to do.
[528] But if there were to go to like a discovery phase, I think you would get those transcripts anyway.
[529] I don't think that has really any like I don't think the president's power.
[530] Maybe it makes it happen more quickly or something because the FCC on it.
[531] The FCC is is is threatening to compel that.
[532] Right.
[533] But I mean, I think that I think that information would come out in this lawsuit anyway, if if it were to go through.
[534] So I guess I don't know.
[535] I guess I'm skeptical of the idea that this is the first really good test of that.
[536] I think we we will have a really good test of that at some point because we have Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
[537] And and, you know, that's something that we should.
[538] kind of be wary about.
[539] But yeah, I don't know.
[540] I don't seem like this is really that it doesn't really bother me that much.
[541] Matt, you are our resident media critic.
[542] What do you think?
[543] I think it is more than problematic.
[544] I think that it actually violates an executive order that Donald Trump signed on his first day of office, one of the eleventy billion executive orders.
[545] It was called the restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.
[546] executive order, or he prohibited all officials from acting in such a way of using the levers of government to possibly act sensoriously.
[547] The FCC under Brendan Carr has expressed a keen interest in following up on Donald Trump's asinine media criticism and lawsuits by trying to compel discovery on the part of CBS.
[548] CBS rightly responded to this.
[549] uh lawsuit initially before trump was elected as ridiculous and now reportedly wants to settle because they have a merger um that is being uh looked at by the federal government as jacob Solemn, who is always worth reading the most about everything, points it out in his piece on this a few days ago.
[550] That is just one of, this is a quote, many ways that a president can try to punish or suppress speech that does not like.
[551] Other levers of power, executive power, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the IRS, antitrust enforcement by the Justice Department, privacy and financial regulations, and presidential support for new legislation.
[552] When you have a lot of business at the federal government and And the president or some other powerful person there tries to put pressure on you via a lawsuit or something else or just like wants to shape your behavior in such a way.
[553] You can be motivated to do this in that executive order by Donald Trump.
[554] It was pointed out that this was done because in reaction to a righteous reaction to, I might add, to the previous Biden administration putting pressure on social media companies to censor information and people giving that information having to do with COVID and other concerns.
[555] Whoever is out there criticizing the Biden administration for doing that and then cheering on the FCC getting involved in a Donald Trump lawsuit, a non -meritorious lawsuit based on some consumer protection law in Texas.
[556] If you're cheering that on, I invite you to.
[557] to examine your own sense of dissonance.
[558] The federal government and its officers should not be applying undue pressure on private individuals and companies based on the fit of peak by whatever politician.
[559] This is bad.
[560] This is not just like, ah, that's problematic.
[561] It's bad.
[562] I don't think that it tests the...
[563] the overall doctrine of presidential immunity acting as a in a certain way.
[564] I think individuals and individual companies still have option for redress about not just the president, but about various agencies such as the FCC.
[565] But it is very bad.
[566] And it's an early ominous sign that this administration's attitudes towards free speech are entirely incoherent.
[567] It's almost like.
[568] If you value free speech, you shouldn't let the entities that convey that speech be brutally hemmed in by multiple agents of the state on every side.
[569] Yes.
[570] Thank you for being quicker about that.
[571] All right.
[572] So before we close out, we are going to do a lightning round because there is too much news.
[573] So we're going to do a single question for each panelist.
[574] Matt, I want to start with you.
[575] There was a tragic and awful plane crash in the Washington, D .C. area last week.
[576] And then there was a blame game that followed this plane crash.
[577] The Trump administration, Donald Trump himself, blamed DEI.
[578] And when he was asked for evidence about this, he said something in effect of...
[579] well, I'm just speculating.
[580] It seems reasonable, right?
[581] Like he clearly had none.
[582] It's common sense.
[583] Right.
[584] Common sense.
[585] That's what it is.
[586] This is the common sense revolution that Donald Trump promised us.
[587] And then there were all sorts of tweets from people in the media or surrounding the media blaming Donald Trump for his actions involving the federal employees and for shutting down some sort of FAA council, something like that.
[588] How do you process this?
[589] What does this tell us about our national discourse?
[590] And maybe what also does this tell us about?
[591] like FAA rules and what we should be doing there.
[592] President of the United States is the commander in chief of the military and three members of the military lost their lives in a crash that claimed another 64 lives on American Airlines.
[593] It's horrible.
[594] I have this antiquated notion that it is not great for the president of the United States to preemptively pin blame on the crash, suggesting that maybe the woman who operated the Blackhawk helicopter and seems to have flown above what the limit is for the helicopters on that pretty dangerous route, was not just at blame, but that maybe she got her job there because of DEI rules that were instituted under Barack Obama.
[595] That's throwing your...
[596] dead employee under the bus.
[597] And I feel like that's an improper thing.
[598] And it's deleterious to the morale of the armed forces when you do that.
[599] And I've heard some feedback along those lines directly from people that are just distressed.
[600] You know, people who work in the military also tend to be the type of people who vote for Donald Trump.
[601] So it's not necessarily all that great.
[602] Is it possible that that person, maybe, who knows?
[603] You have to do an investigation on everything, but the preliminary look at a lot of this, including by Christian Britsky for a reason, is, for instance, on the FAA air traffic controllers, that it wasn't a question of understaffing that necessarily led to this.
[604] I think you...
[605] investigate things and see what happens and don't prejudge the investigations.
[606] And that style of governance that Trump has shown consistently for 10 years in the wake of a tragedy or mishap, he will pin a blame quickly and oftentimes prematurely.
[607] And I don't think that's particularly helpful.
[608] Occasionally, he will do that in a way that provides for an interesting moment.
[609] For instance, when he went to California and sat...
[610] with Karen Bass and other leaders talking about California's fire response as opposed to necessarily just what happened before, but like what should happen now.
[611] He kind of cut through a lot of smokescreen and BS about this in ways that was kind of helpful.
[612] But when you're talking about pinning the blame on a deadly tragedy involving many Americans and members of the armed forces, I don't think it was a helpful way to do it.
[613] Katherine, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have reportedly gained access to government payment systems with a lot of sensitive information.
[614] People are freaking out, saying this is the end of democracy.
[615] Are they right to freak out?
[616] Is democracy over?
[617] Yeah.
[618] So the Treasury Department writes all the checks, right?
[619] So they write trillions and trillions of dollars worth of checks based on what the agencies need to function.
[620] I guess the operating theory here is that this is another choke point, given that we have, as we've discussed in this podcast, already kind of thrown out the window the idea that Congress authorizes spending and then it gets spent per, would you like to say the name of the act, Peter?
[621] The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974.
[622] Thank you so much.
[623] But I suppose the Treasury Department could not cut those checks.
[624] That's another place where...
[625] We could just have things not happen if the president wanted them to not happen.
[626] There's no real evidence that that's what's about to occur here.
[627] And I do want to say a lot of the hand wringing around like this is the same Treasury Department that issued a report last month saying that there was a data breach last year in which Chinese hackers got a whole bunch of this same very sensitive information.
[628] So if this information is like.
[629] We cannot.
[630] It's so delicate.
[631] We can only have it be like the recipe for chartreuse in the hands of like two dying monks or whatever.
[632] There's three of them and they ride in the same vehicle that's like apparently like 30 years old.
[633] It's a station wagon, I think.
[634] I asked for this.
[635] I asked for this.
[636] If we are in a chartreuse recipe situation, then maybe the Treasury Department should do a better job of protecting its data before Elon Musk enters the equation.
[637] We'll see.
[638] This could be yet another place for the vaguely autocratic tendencies of the Trump administration to manifest.
[639] But at least right now, if you were trying to cut spending, it seems like it would be useful to have data about where those checks are going.
[640] The Treasury Department should buy more charges as well.
[641] In conclusion, the Treasury Department should buy more structures.
[642] Liquid gold.
[643] I mean, have you seen prices on that stuff these days?
[644] It was at a liquor store.
[645] It was $110 a bottle.
[646] That's up from an average of 60 just a few years ago.
[647] Since Catherine brought up Chinese.
[648] Malfeasance and data protection.
[649] Let's talk just a little bit about DeepSeek, the brand new AI, the large language model that is competing with things like open AIs, ChatGPT and Claude.
[650] This debuted and people freaked out.
[651] They were very excited and they were also very worried because it's Chinese.
[652] And it was done for an awful lot less money than OpenAI's ChatGPT, although there are at least some disputes about how much money was spent to create DeepSeek.
[653] Eric, you have written an awful lot about trade policy, about America's rivalry with China.
[654] How do we process?
[655] This pretty good, maybe very inexpensive, maybe major technological leap AI that has come out of a Chinese company.
[656] How should we think about that in terms of U .S.-China relations?
[657] Yeah, I want to bring this back also to the trade war, which is really stupid.
[658] And if you wanted to, if you're somebody who freaks out about Chinese technological developments, the last thing you should want to see is some sort of North American trade war that distracts America's focus and also like pisses off our allies unnecessarily before we have to go have some sort of conversation.
[659] with China.
[660] All that being said, I'm not one of those people.
[661] I'm not really that worried about that.
[662] This seems cool.
[663] It seems like it does the same stuff that ChatGPT does, but uses less processing power.
[664] It seems like it was privately developed, although in China, you're never really 100 % sure about that.
[665] But the New York Times, in a really interesting piece that ran yesterday about the way this is being seen in China, talked about how it's basically been privately developed.
[666] So that's a good thing.
[667] And that actually really kind of undermines China's and Xi Jinping's.
[668] own sense that he's been trying to build up of like, you know, the Chinese state is going to be the, you know, the dominant force in AI going forward.
[669] So I think it erodes some of the perceptions of state power.
[670] Maybe it could erode some of the perceptions of state power in China.
[671] As far as like China -US rivalry, I don't know.
[672] We live in this awesome era right now where there's new AI developments all the time and each one of them is newer and better than the last one.
[673] So they're like, OK, China wins this round.
[674] I'm sure an American company will have something in the next six months that's even better or like a Norwegian company.
[675] I don't know.
[676] Somebody somewhere is going to develop the next thing that's going to be cooler than this because we're in this awesome era where everybody is finding and developing these new.
[677] tools.
[678] So yeah, I'm not really that worried about that this one came out of China.
[679] In fact, it seems kind of cool if it helps to erode Chinese state superiority there.
[680] And then I think the other point to make, the policy point here, kind of a maybe more nuanced thing is that the United States has invested quite a bit in trying to keep really advanced AI chips and the machines that make these chips out of China in recent years.
[681] And that seems to have failed.
[682] China still built this thing.
[683] A Chinese company did.
[684] And so I think it also speaks to the lack of America's ability to control what happens in China, which is, again, ultimately a good thing.
[685] This is the best kind of US -Chinese competition would be overdeveloping the coolest new tech.
[686] And that's where we're pushing each other to do newer and cooler and better things rather than having some sort of pseudo -militarized rivalry.
[687] Yeah, there are export controls on high tech chips, in particular, the very expensive chips made by NVIDIA.
[688] And the argument here is that we should keep those chips from China because that's going to prevent them from building things like DeepSeek and beating us in AI.
[689] Clearly, that didn't happen.
[690] And it didn't happen for one of two reasons.
[691] Either they built it entirely without those NVIDIA chips, which maybe not, or they just got those NVIDIA chips from elsewhere, probably from Singapore.
[692] Either way, the export controls aren't.
[693] working, the most interesting response to this, I thought, actually came from Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT.
[694] He basically said, you know what?
[695] Welcome to the party.
[696] We are glad to have another competitor.
[697] We think this is good for the industry.
[698] And I think that that's a good way to respond to this sort of thing is to say, look.
[699] Competition is good.
[700] This is going to keep us on our toes and and drive innovation all over.
[701] OK, so let's move on to our final segment.
[702] What you're watching, what you've been consuming in which each of our panelists brings us a cultural recommendation.
[703] Matt Welch, I want to start with you.
[704] What have you been watching or reading this week?
[705] In my never ending dad history phase, I went surfing on Netflix and came upon something that was pretty new, came out in December called Churchill at War.
[706] the ultimate dad thing to do.
[707] Um, it's a, uh, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, uh, executive produced joint, uh, four part series hour long, each series.
[708] And it's.
[709] what it sounds like.
[710] A documentary of the modern Ken Burns derivative style, and you got the John Meacham and the other historians who are going over the same bits.
[711] And it's pretty good.
[712] It's similar to the one I recommended last week about George Washington in that it has an actor and some recreations, but it's less recreations and more kind of like fantastical scenes of him sort of like wandering.
[713] It's...
[714] The artificiality of it is kind of, they use that to its own extent.
[715] And they use AI to record his voice reading his five trillion words of memoir that he wrote about World War II.
[716] And that actually is a pretty interesting little gimmick.
[717] Among the...
[718] Just like when Catherine, the Catherine robot, reads the Reason articles?
[719] Yeah, which I'm not going to listen to because I could just imagine those horrible fingers.
[720] It's just...
[721] The AI doesn't have the fingers.
[722] They're virtual.
[723] Says you.
[724] You don't know what this imagination is capable of.
[725] Anyways, two of the more endearing participants in this are Boris Johnson.
[726] with his tousled hair.
[727] And George W. Bush is a pretty interesting testifier about Churchill at the time.
[728] I was struck by the actual similarities between Churchill and George Washington.
[729] Both of them got incredibly lucky early in their careers not to have their entire careers derailed by screwing up massively and militarily when they were young.
[730] They both considered themselves to be part of guided by providence.
[731] them for this very special cause.
[732] They were the men for the moment, absolutely indispensable.
[733] And it's just kind of with these gigantic flaws of Churchill's approach towards colonialism, George Washington towards both slavery and Native American tribes.
[734] And it's just kind of interesting that Washington's the father of the country and Churchill is kind of...
[735] The hospice nurse for empire, unwittingly so.
[736] He saved England.
[737] He saved the West.
[738] It's a remarkable achievement.
[739] And at the end of it, England was done.
[740] The empire was done.
[741] Long live the empire.
[742] Which way?
[743] Western men.
[744] Eric?
[745] So there are two movies from last year that I am personally offended did not get Oscar nominations.
[746] And one of them is Hundreds of Beavers, which is like maybe the best slapstick comedy made since the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges.
[747] I know there's not a lot of competition in that category, but it's incredible and people should absolutely check it out.
[748] But the one I'm going to talk about is called I Saw the TV Glow.
[749] And this movie is like, OK, if you're about my age and you or you have kids who grew up in the 90s, you might be familiar with Are You Afraid of the Dark, which was this Nickelodeon.
[750] show was on SNCC, which was like Saturday Night Nickelodeon for teens.
[751] It was basically the Twilight Zone for teenagers.
[752] Every week there was like a different spooky story about, you know, monsters living in the basement under the school or ghosts in your grandmother's attic or something like that.
[753] It was great.
[754] I loved the show when I was a kid, but it was also very, very low budget.
[755] I mean, it was on Nickelodeon and it was the 90s.
[756] The special effects are not great.
[757] It's all just people in costumes.
[758] And if you go back, as I recently did, because I was telling my girlfriend for some reason about a year ago about one of these episodes because it had come up and we went back and watched it and you go back and watch it now and you're just like, wow, this looks terrible.
[759] How did this ever entertain me as a child?
[760] And that's what this movie is about.
[761] I saw the TV glow.
[762] There's a show within the movie that the two main characters are obsessed with called The Pink Opaque.
[763] And it's basically Are You Afraid of the Dark?
[764] It comes on on the teen channel late on Saturday nights right before they start showing reruns.
[765] of old sitcoms, which is what Nickelodeon used to do with the Nick at Night.
[766] And it's sort of, so it's Are You Afraid of the Dark kind of mixed with like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, very 90s teen bad horror show kind of coded.
[767] And the movie pivots in the middle when one of the characters as an adult goes back and watches one of those episodes of this show that they were obsessed with as a teen and realizes that it is nothing like what they remember.
[768] And then the question that the movie asks is like, well, wait a minute.
[769] What if What if that actually isn't what you remember?
[770] What if you were actually a different person then?
[771] What if none of your memories are quite real?
[772] And so the best compliment that I can pay to I Saw the TV Glow is that it's basically a Sarah Pinsker story in movie form.
[773] I've talked about Sarah Pinsker books on this podcast before.
[774] She's won multiple Nebula Awards.
[775] Science fiction novelist.
[776] Yeah, science fiction writer.
[777] Who wrote basically a novel about the pandemic right before the pandemic.
[778] Yes, but her better stuff, like in her short story collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea.
[779] And in particular, another short story of hers, I don't think it's in that collection, one called Two Truths and a Lie, deal with this question of memory and identity and how those two things are tied up to each other.
[780] And in that story specifically also has to deal with a character who goes back and watches a TV show from their youth and has weird revelations about it.
[781] But basically the movie is all about these questions of how memory shapes your identity and how your identity is wrapped up in the things you remember.
[782] And even like these most foundational memories from your formative years maybe aren't quite accurate the way you remember them years later.
[783] And the whole thing is also obviously a trans metaphor.
[784] I should say that to the director, Jane Schoenbrun, is trans and non -binary.
[785] The opening shot of the movie is like.
[786] Like the main character silhouetted against like a blue and pink framing on either side.
[787] And that visual metaphor carries through the whole thing and is obviously a big part of what's going on here.
[788] But I think to look at it just purely that way kind of undersells what's going on here because it asks some interesting questions about identity that I think are interesting to anybody who's sort of interested in self -reflection, even if you're not specifically like a trans person yourself or don't have close relationships with them.
[789] But it's, yeah, really fascinating movie.
[790] and then has like a really terrific psychological horror kind of twist at the very end that will stick with you.
[791] So I saw the TV glow.
[792] You see that same sort of interest in identity and memory and the fluidity of it and the uncertainty in a lot of the early Christopher Nolan films, Memento, The Prestige.
[793] These are stories about maybe the way you remember things isn't exactly the way they happened.
[794] And maybe that suggests something about the impermanence of who you are and your ability to know exactly who you are.
[795] Catherine, what'd you watch?
[796] Or maybe we shouldn't structure our politics around an imagined golden age in the past.
[797] Just an idea.
[798] So I watched in a continuing series of Reason Roundtable recommendations that are also mental health checks.
[799] I finished rereading Snow Crash and moved on to just watching a lot of The Great British Baking Show.
[800] So that's where I am.
[801] And in particular, I want to highlight an episode that I watched recently.
[802] Snow Crash, The Great British Baking Show, a study in contrast.
[803] This is who I am as a person.
[804] I rewatched the 2022 episode in which featured possibly the most disastrous ever.
[805] They usually do one week where they where they look to a nation, another nation for culinary inspiration.
[806] This was Mexico week and it did not go well.
[807] So speaking of the twilight of the British Empire, speaking of.
[808] This is also Mexico week.
[809] This is what I'm saying here is.
[810] And it's not going well.
[811] The dangers of being too far away from the beauty and glory that is engagement with Mexico.
[812] If you ask a bunch of British people to.
[813] bake Mexican foods, including tacos, what you get is people saying the word guacamole.
[814] You also get someone saying pico de gallo.
[815] And you get the hosts who are two of truly the palest individuals you can imagine wearing serapes and shaking maracas, asking if Mexico is a real place.
[816] So this is the vision of a more separated world.
[817] This is the vision of national independence.
[818] that we should all fear.
[819] We need to love and understand that not only is Mexican food delicious and various, but also has baked goods that are delicious.
[820] No one needed to make tacos in this episode.
[821] And there we were.
[822] Let's not end up there.
[823] We do not have to follow the path of the decline and fall of the British Empire in this way.
[824] We have another choice.
[825] Wait, so was this cultural appropriation?
[826] Yes.
[827] But you're against it.
[828] in this case, right?
[829] This is the thing when people are like, oh, well, sometimes it's cultural appreciation and sometimes it's cultural appropriation.
[830] This was not appreciation.
[831] This was all darkness.
[832] It was sad.
[833] I watched the movie Seven, David Fincher's 1995 serial killer thriller, on the big screen for the first time.
[834] This was in a gorgeous new 4K restoration.
[835] Seven is one of my all -time favorite movies.
[836] I have seen it dozens of times.
[837] There was a period of my life where I had trouble sleeping.
[838] I would often just watch it in the middle of the night to help me sleep.
[839] It was incredibly influential on movies for years later, even decades.
[840] You can see in the most recent Batman film with Robert Pattinson.
[841] was quite heavily based on Seven.
[842] You watch it now and it all feels kind of familiar, but it really helped establish the grim, grimy aesthetic you now see in so many thrillers.
[843] First and foremost, Seven is a mood piece.
[844] It's a twisted tone poem with immaculate low -light photography from cinematographer Darius Kanji.
[845] is also a dark refraction of 90s era attitudes about urban crime and justice.
[846] So it's got Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.
[847] Pitt plays a young cop who is constantly griping about how nice the criminal justice system is to criminals.
[848] He just wants to bust heads, take matters into his own hands.
[849] And you're supposed to relate.
[850] After all, this is a movie about a bunch of really bad people who deserved it.
[851] But in the end, this sort of famously dark and twisted ending in which we find out what...
[852] is in the box and it is the head of it is it is gwyneth paltrow's head and gwyneth paltrow is the woman who is playing brad pitt's wife and so in in order to and like the killer has done this in order to tempt brad pitt into killing him and becoming part of his sort of artistic plan right and he does He kills him.
[853] He takes matters into his own hands and it only empowers the the villain.
[854] So this movie is kind of subtly a brief for bloodless proceduralism and for for a kind of cold and unemotional approach to the law and to vengeance.
[855] Right.
[856] And it kind of it says that, you know.
[857] Look, that way of approaching retribution isn't as viscerally satisfying as righteous vengeance, as just taking matters into your own hands.
[858] But it keeps society from falling apart.
[859] It keeps everything together.
[860] It is a great, powerful movie.
[861] It is now out on 4K Blu -ray if you're into that sort of thing.
[862] Strongly recommend it if you like good movies or you can't sleep.
[863] That is all we have for this week's podcast.
[864] Remember that if you like our work here, you can go to reason .com slash donate to give us your money and support our work.
[865] That's reason .com slash donate.
[866] We'll be back next week with another episode of The Reason Roundtable.