 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds on reason. Today, Liz Wolfe and I are joined by our colleague, Matt Welch, editor-at-large at Reason, and podcaster on the Reason Roundtable and the fifth column with Camille Foster and Michael Moynihan. He's going to help us break down the recent Iowa caucus results and talk about what it means for the election going forward. We also want to discuss where libertarians and independents might be leaning at this point in the presidential race and also want to talk about some of the increasingly glaring divides within libertarianism that have led to different factions pursuing very different strategies and hold widely divergent views of political candidates like Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley. Matt, thank you for talking with us. Thanks for bringing me into the fantastic JAQ den. I appreciate it. The den of Jack Astery, if you will. So let's bring up, this is from NPR. These are the results from the Iowa caucus. We see Trump took 51% of the vote. DeSantis, about 21%. Haley, third place, 19%. Vivek, 7.7%. And Aisa Hutchinson with 0.2% of the vote. Where does that leave the race at this point in your estimation, Matt? That was as good of a result for Donald Trump as he could have possibly expected, which is, yes, it sort of confirmed that he has more than 50%, a little bit more than 50% of the vote, at least in Iowa, but also that it was close between Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. And even though DeSantis was ahead is good for Trump because it keeps DeSantis more in the race than he might have otherwise been. If Nikki Haley would have somehow gotten 30% and DeSantis 15, he probably would have dropped out of the race and making it more of a two-human race in New Hampshire. And that's not the case. That's great. And then Vivek Ramos-Swami drops out immediately and officially becomes Trump's mini-me on the campaign trail. And that's helpful for him, too. So it was as good as it can be for Donald Trump. I think what you have to look at this race right now and realize is that it's going to be probably over in five weeks, or at least the next five weeks will be determined if you have New Hampshire next week and then you have South Carolina on February 24th, I believe it is. And that's Nikki Haley's home state, of course. New Hampshire, it is, she needs to win. She needs to win something at some point. New Hampshire has one of the most independent electorates. It's easier for Democrats to come over and do shenanigans and vote in places. New Hampshire is also prickly. It doesn't like to be told by Iowa what to do. We had the first poll that came out today, the post Vivek and Chris Christie dropping out. Because remember, Chris Christie was polling like 11% in New Hampshire. And this is Boston Globe Suffolk Suffolk. And it had Trump at 50, Nikki Haley at 34, and Ron DeSantis at five. And if you look at the same poll back in September, Trump's at 49. I think it's fascinating. One of the most interesting polls in this entire season was one done by Fairvote, right? The ranked choice people, and this is, I don't know, four months ago or something like that. And they took, when the field was still wide, they took all of the candidates and they made everyone do ranked choice of them. And so what you find is that Donald Trump is the first choice by nearly half of the Republican electorate. He's also the last choice by nearly half of the Republican electorate. So like, I forget exactly where the number was, but like he started out at 47%. And then ranked choice after you vote, you know, the loser on the island gets kicked off and then that person's votes gets sort of a portion that keeps going. Trump couldn't get over 50% until it was just him and Nikki Haley at the end, right? Because people kept ranking him last. He's a polarizing figure even within the Republican Party, let alone the rest of the country. So Nikki Haley has really wanted this to be a two-person race. It's still not, and that's going to be a little bit difficult for her. She needs to win either New Hampshire and or South Carolina, her home state. If she can't win South Carolina, then what is she even doing? And this would be the only other mode for her to get in if she indeed loses in those next two, which I think is still the likeliest scenario. Although I think there's some hope that she might win for her in New Hampshire. The other scenario is just that she comes in second place and something weird happens to Trump. Like, I don't know, he gets arrested and not arrested, but he gets he gets convicted and he's in prison. And that affects the way that Republicans vote or I don't know what it creates some kind of dynamic. And she's the one left with the second most number of delegates. But basically, you know, the Iowa confirmed that it is Donald Trump's party until we find out otherwise. Well, so in 2016, Donald Trump didn't win the Iowa caucuses, right? That was Ted Cruz. What does his win this time by 51% tell us about this race and how this looks a little different than 2016? We've never seen anything like this in the Iowa caucuses, which have been going since 1976. People who on when there's not an incumbent Republican president, these caucuses are close like the biggest margin of victory before this week was in 1988. When I believe it was Bob Dole, the not eventual nominee beat Pat Roberts and also the not eventual nominee by like 12 percentage points. Trump wins by 30. That's just kind of huge. So it tells us that the Republican electorate is treating Trump like a quasi incumbent. And and that has remained the case for a long time. We've never seen in a contested primary Harry Enten from CNN pointed this out earlier this week before the Iowa vote. We've never seen in a non incumbent race, a Republican treated so much like an incumbent. So it's his to lose. So why should we be giving Iowans this much power in the first place, Matt Welch? Have we? Have we, Liz? I'm not sure. Like, you know, it's the it's the perennial case of boy, these early states have a lot of power than they all jockey for various positions and and whatnot. These are the people who gave us tomato beer and hand balls, right? Like, do we really trust these people with all of their well and cultural proclivities? They haven't picked winners of the seven times that we've had non incumbents presidents running in Iowa. They've picked the winner twice. So I remember president Santorum, who was president Huckabee. I mean, actually, Ron Paul came came within an eyelash and there was some like interpretation that he actually came in first. But by the time they figured that out, it was several months too late. So it's not necessarily predictive, but that's just a huge margin. And there's a lot of copium being drank by people who don't want Trump trying to talk themselves out of what looks like. It's his to lose unless, you know, unless there's a New Hampshire miracle. I do think that people are overreacting a little bit or they're they're precluding the possibility of New Hampshire doing the New Hampshire thing. It's still a possibility. And, you know, Nikki Haley has has narrowed the margin by a lot in a short period of time there. So who knows? I assume that the game. I assume like the game theory here is like there's all the incentives for DeSantis and Haley to hang in there, right? Because of that X factor of Trump's, you know, legal troubles. I guess it's it's got to coincide with Super Tuesday. One of the cases is that your expectation that, you know, they're just going to hang in there just on that, no matter what happens just on that off chance that someone's got to be the nominee. DeSantis, his demeanor reminds me a lot of Rand Paul's demeanor in 2015 and 16 in the sense that Rand Paul is not having fun and you could tell like at some point we forget this now. But in 2014 kind of in the prehistory of that election, Rand Paul was a front runner. He was frequently ahead in polls and he seemed to have the wind at his sails. We were living through the libertarian moment, the micro moment when Liz Wolfe was in diapers. I had a Rand Paul t-shirt and I must say there's like some adorable photo of me from like my college days with like all my Rand Paul gear on. So I'll have to. There's a lot of standing with Randy at CPAC and elsewhere. But like he just had a miserable time. He was not having fun. DeSantis, you can tell he's not. I mean, he's just, Zach, you know him a lot better as as your governor as America's governor down in Florida. But like he has, I think even a different demeanor as governor than he does as a presidential candidate. And there's been a lot of reporting coming out just like that. I mean, they blew through a ton of money. They bet it all on Iowa and he barely squeaked one out against Dick Haley. He's polling right now. That same poll has met 5% the Boston Globe Suffolk poll. And, you know, that's after they wiped out Vivek and Chris Christie. So who knows whether I, you know, if he gets 5% of the vote in New Hampshire, that's an awful, that's an awful low amount to get excited about campaigning for another three weeks. I think it's plausible that he drops out then. I mean, it must be really hard stuffing his feet into those cowboy boots with lifts every single day. You know, I can understand feeling a little exhausted by all of that. If you're going to use them to dance a little bit like some Cuban heels, there's no problem at all. But if it's just like I want to be taller than that's no good. Or man, I do want to understand, Matt, you've been studying the Libertarian Party in all of its different incarnations for many, many years now. Where do you think Libertarians are likely to cluster now, given the sort of weird and changing presidential field? We have no idea. And it's also like small L and capital L are different things. I mean, small L Libertarians, like those of us with Libertarian persuasions who may or may not be miffed by the direction of the LP. The, it's funny, you know, the people who know about the direction of the LP, right? You know, about the Mises Caucus self-described takeover that happened that Zach covered so well in the past and on an ongoing basis, really. That is known by people like us who are very online Libertarians. I'm not sure that it's known by the 750,000 Americans who were registered as Libertarians, which is by the way, three times the number as it was 20 years ago, which is pretty significant. Libertarians are on a three presidential election bronze medal streak, which is definitely a tallest dwarf category situation, but also like we haven't seen any party do that since the 19th century when it was the socialists. So by far they will have the most presidential ballot access of any third party. It remains to be seen what happens with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and how many ballots he gets. He's doing a mix of his own name and like hijacking or creating other parties to get on there. And I think all of that is one of the, the most underrated part of this campaign. I presume that we're going to see a lot more thought and activity about that in the very near future. Certainly, depending on what happens, Nikki Haley in the next two main primaries, Nevada has a caucus and she's not even competing. But there is such a huge sentiment, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is polling at 15%. That's crazy. We haven't seen that from an independent since Ross Perot. You still have Dean Phillips and Mary Ann Williamson polling combined above 10% against Joe Biden and no one paying any attention to them at all. There's even an outside chance that Dean Phillips might be a thorn in Biden's side in New Hampshire. It's all weird with righty and stuff. There's all this ferment happening. Americans hate this election and they have from the beginning and it's now looking even more like the thing that they wanted to hate. Both Biden and Trump are underwater among independents who were always the swing vote in presidential elections. Biden won last time. People tend to forget this. He won because the people who voted third party in 2016, the majority of whom were libertarians voting or at least voted libertarians. He won because those people didn't vote for third party they voted for him. The percentage of the third party vote in 2016 was 5.7 in 2020 was 1.8. And what did the Democrat do compared to Hillary Clinton? He went up by 3 percentage points. So it's pretty clear that's what happened. People freaked out about Trump. They didn't like him. Independents soured on Trump from the moment he was elected just as they have with Biden, by the way. Biden actually had a higher ranking among independents when he was inaugurated like 61%. And then it plunged to 34 within six months and it remains there. So when we talk about where libertarians going to vote, we have to, I think, understand that libertarians at least for the last three presidential elections, they just kind of vote libertarian. I'm not sure how much they know that there's all these feuds within Mises Caucus and non Mises Caucus. There's lawsuits at the state party level and all this kind of stuff. It might be something that interests them and it might also be something that they haven't even begun to hear about and that they have just created their own political identity as libertarians. And if they see that word on a ballot, they go, okay, vote for that. So we don't know. So my observation of the very online libertarians was a decent amount of enthusiasm for Vivek. I mean, I ran an informal poll on my Twitter, so take that for what it's worth. And he was the kind of, you know, plurality getter on, you know, who is there, like which candidate would be most beneficial to your personal liberty. And it's just kind of confirmed what I've been seeing a bunch, among a lot of online libertarians. Now that Vivek is out, what do you make of that, that Vivek love among a certain segment of the libertarian movement? What do you think accounts for it and where might it go? Well, I mean, he wants it to go to Donald Trump, obviously he's now asking the demanding. What do you think it's going to necessarily? Well, it's not that he has a large following to begin with, you know, he's polling nationally like four or five percent in a Republican primary. The Iowa, the Libertarian Party did do like an Iowa caucus thing. There's a very small number of votes, but I pulled that up to pull that up. Chase Oliver got the most chase Oliver. That's an underrated story, right? People have been talking about the Mises caucus takeover and this and that and the other chase Oliver to my knowledge. And I haven't been following the LP very closely so far this cycle. He's not a Mises caucus guy. That's not where he's coming off like he's a two time candidate who's pushed a Democratic Republican elections in Georgia into runoffs twice. He seems to sort of clean up and present pretty well as a former military, I believe. But that poll is also interesting because Vivek Ramaswamy got four times as many votes as Jacob Hornberger, Jacob Hornberger, who last time was the runner up in the Libertarian Party. He was and he was also the Mises caucus choice or at least by, you know, compared to Joe Jorgensen and she won kind of come from behind victory against Jacob Hornberger. This could be just an outlier and it could, you know, there was a talk of that Vivek's name got on that ballot through an odd way to begin with. Yes. And I saw some math whiz figuring out that if that those like 1%, 1.1% numbers represent like one vote that about like 89 people voted in this 99 counties. Yeah, so it should be. More grains of salt. There are dozens of us, dozens. Dozens, literal dozens. Vivek says things that some people like to hear, which is that, you know, January 6 was an inside job and that the election of 2020 is stolen. Of course, that's in direct contradiction to what he said about the 2020 election, literally 14 months ago, which was that people who are complaining that it's stolen don't have any evidence and that they're there. The one's drinking copium and then it's unseemly and they're becoming the grand old party of crybabies. But, you know, whatever we all we all change with new data, I guess. There are people who like that and also like his very like bold provocative ideas about foreign policy, sort of a radical semi anti war or anti US intervention depending on how you look at it type of things like he will negotiate with them to give chunks of Ukraine to Russia in return for making sure that Russia and China don't cooperate. And if they do break that then Ukraine goes into NATO and I guess there's an audience for that. What do you make the audience like that like what like tear that argument apart for me because it seems a little bit. Josh Barrow has the great piece about I believe it's Josh Barrow about how the Beck is basically section guy at any fancy school. You always see these people in college and people who are always in a hurry to raise their hand and they think they know the answers to absolutely everything. And there's this this ego this narcissism this sense of hubris and that they have all the answers to everything. And I look at the facts, typically Twitter posts on foreign policy that talk about how actually he'll just solve China, and he'll just make it so Putin and China cooperate. It always strikes me as, I don't know, like a 19 year old larping as a foreign policy expert, Matt you have way more experience in this what do you make of it. So president has the magic wand, and we should have learned that from Donald Trump. Of all things, I mean, you know, he was going to use the magic wand to build a wall or you know extend the wall on the southern border, and it extended somewhat but the magic one doesn't exist it's hard to get stuff done and it's hardest of all to get stuff done in the international arena. And the more that you're going in there with instinct, rather or just, you know, feeling a vibe, rather than knowledge of how powers interact with one another, the more that someone imagining magic wand sounds great. And without, and without like a backup plan I mean we're living in a populist moment in the United States and the globe and we have been for about 10 years and there's a lot of the part of that instinct is a correct one in my view which is that. The way that the world is ordered doesn't have as much democratic legitimacy it seems to be happening, regardless of whether one wants it or not. That's the always the fertile ground for conspiratorial thinking and I use that non pejoratively in this case. If you're trying to figure out why this policy or these conditions, these decisions keep happening and your vote has nothing to do with it your attitudes have nothing to do with it. Then you start developing some theories about that because it seems like you you are powerless. I mean you see this a lot in Western Europe, for example, because the world order is something that Western Europe hasn't had a lot of influence on it's the United States that pretty much has the most influence on it. And so the average French person is going to think all kinds of conspiratorial things about how these decisions get made and where and by who. So Vivek plays into that or like he taps into that I should say that sentiment that feeling like if we just withdraw from NATO, and if we just do this do this, then something that has never been thought of before can happen. It's just naive it's not how structures and parties work I would say like one way of thinking about it is is Brexit, right. Brexit makes total sense from just like a sovereign T kind of point of view. Right. And the people who are pushing Brexit had all kinds of very naive ideas about what would happen afterwards. They actually didn't have a very good plan for that and then Brexit still kind of a big mess afterwards and the results were not what the people who were pushing for it promised or wanted. It's a lot easier to say, you know, to quote Steve Martin I break with the I break with the and you throw dog poop on somebody shoes, then it is to build what replaces the post World War two order. So if your instinct is like well just fuck that order. Then, then Vivek Ramaswamy is good and there's a lot of people who have that instinct and and would rather just express that, then try to construct what comes next. I think the populism question is central to understanding libertarianism right now in 2023. We had this conversation. We went into this topic with Dave Smith on the first episode of the show. And I wanted to just play a little bit of Dave's argue. He's very much in the pro populism camp and this is a debate that stretches back to kind of the beginnings of modern American libertarianism. Let's have I want to have Dave articulate his case for libertarian populism and then kind of delve a little more deeply into this so let's roll that best. I'm a big believer in the Rothbardian kind of like populist idea that and look I think you see this with Javier Malay right like this is the way it can be done. Like this is the way to do it is to tap into these this this kind of populist streak, particularly at a time when the elites have so mismanaged everything and kind of like talk to people about how they're being ripped off. So I think that got cut off a little earlier. Let's keep. It looks like it never froze. There we go. So I mean what what do you think of that that argument that you know at at the end of the day there are there there is a sort of you know managerial elite or at least people who have that ambition to plan our society and that libertarians should be defining themselves in opposition to that agenda. I think a lot of things about that. One is that I should always preface that my job or my self conception is not about the wielding of political the attainment or the wielding of political power. And so when I am asked about you know how should we attain and wield political power. I don't have great answers or at least you should take them with all the gray of salt my jobs to do journalism libertarian journalism. A lot of that can be very righteous and angry and frothing and pointing out the just brutal mismanagement by the elite political class it's a huge percentage of what we do at reason. And what I've done it in my life before and I ever worked for reason or really knew much about the place. So it's part of it. Yeah. But also journalism is just a different thing. It's it's it's gathering of facts. I would point to if we're going to be talking about Marie Rothbard strategy as being something that that is helpful. You should point out that it wasn't always helpful. The Marie Rothbard went to some bad places in the early 1990s. That is what happens when you go towards the attainment of political power and also power and also like this sort of attempt. And there's something elite about the this attempt as well or at least not elite it's it's like it's a it's a temptation that intellectuals and people who work in the knowledge class always are tempted by which is that if I can just harness this populist feeling out there I'm going to produce my intellectual ideological outcome. Yeah. You see this with with Marie Rothbard and Lou Rockwell in the early 1990s with the Roth Rockwell Rothbard report. They were talking about Joe Senator Joe McCarthy tail gunner Joe as being a role model they were saying nice things about David Duke. They cozy it up to Pap you can and at the time as a kind of predictive elements of where a segment of the population was going to go as as a sort of John the Baptist figures for Donald Trump. They were on to something absolutely and they were on to something much more than I certainly expected. So hats off for you know sort of like describing a world as it exists rather the world than I thought it was. But as a place where a person can go and and like and hold on to one's libertarianism or one's ideology it was corrupting those types of things are corrupting it's going to lead you to positions. And that's what it all had of like defending the cops against Rodney King of writing just really horrible things like the early 1990s stuff that came whether it's in the Ron Paul newsletters or the or the Rothbard Rockwell report and all these kind of things it's it's very noxious it's very anti libertarian. It went to a bad place and you could say that admiring Rothbard for plenty of other things that he contributed in his life but he was always kind of a political schemer. And take Rothbard and take libertarian politics out of this for a second is look at the difference between what what Chris Rufo does and what's for instance the foundation for individual rights and education does they are always at loggerheads even though they frequently have the same kind of opponents in the world. It's just a different approach of fire uses a sort of tethered to a set of principles which they apply hopefully and in my view, usually very consistently across time Rufo is is going towards power, political power like Ron DeSantis in Florida, and trying to influence it. I think both approaches are valid by the way and I think, like, absolutely Chris Rufo has influenced American policy and debate more than a lot of private actors have for a long time. But I think it is also corrupting you're going to lead to bad laws which I think some of that has happened in Florida. So, it's libertarian popular I think libertarian is naturally populist in that sense, it is a position from which you critique the application of power and you correctly identify that, especially those people who say that, Oh, we're just over here like trying to solve problems that that is actually ideological as much or more ideologically or more influentially ideological than libertarianism is. And yeah, Javier Malay going off a bunch and ripping stuff off of wall is awesome. I would love to see that as I would love to see someone articulate in the way that he has in those videos that we've all seen talking about economics and just rapid fire insane, you know, Nick Gillespie on on crank kind of mode that's that's all thrilling and exciting. But let's also remember the conditions that brought him were so horrible and I hope we don't live to see them in this country. Yeah, and there's a it's also it's also, you know, targeted at a the from a libertarian perspective, it's grounded. We talked about this with Dave to it's grounded in libertarian theory and he is when he's you know saying a friend and ripping things off he's talking about dismantling unnecessary government bureaucracies which all of us in this conversation agree with and like when I think about populism. I agree largely with what you're saying Matt that there's a sort of cynicism to libertarians embracing it, because populism can almost be its own ideology it's like it is the belief that there is just that that elites themselves are kind of inherently bad. And I think for libertarians it's like, well, no it's more like people who are using their elite status to infringe on others liberties are bad like in a free society. They're, you know, we would have, you know, academics, and we would have, you know, titans of industry and so like so there would be kind of like natural elite so we're not against that necessarily but we're against natural elite Zach Weismiller. Well we're against like, you know, the cloud swabs of the world, who is himself defining himself against libertarian he said you know libertarians these anti system people are the enemy. And so, you know, I have no problem being kind of like creeped out by like the dastardly plans of the World Economic Forum even though I don't think that, you know, they're out there, you know, eating babies that but they want to. They have a vision, they have the kind of, you know, technocratic vision of the world they have this, this idea that, you know, we're going to kind of meld public and private and we're, we're, you know, have we're going to have stakeholder capitalism. We're going to kind of go the China model that that is something to be alarmed about and worried about and to the degree that, you know, resisting that is quote unquote populism, fine. But this kind of unmoored populism and appealing to just like in a vague sense of the elites are, are controlling everything. I think that is where we start to run into big problems. Wouldn't libertarian populists counter to both of you because I do want to sort of play devil's advocate for a second here. I think I agree with what you guys are saying, but wouldn't the libertarian populist if one were in the room with us counter. Zach, they shut you inside your house in Los Angeles for, you know, a really long time to the point where you felt the need to move your entire family to Florida to ensure your kids didn't grow up masked. Matt, you know, same for you in New York City. I mean, you have basically been betrayed by the state that has locked you inside your houses for many months on end and basically removed public schools as an option available to your children. What has the state done for you? And Liz, Liz, they blocked you from going to church, right? Well, yeah, I mean, legitimately locked people from going to church. That is such a radicalizing notion. I mean, they did all of this to us. So then they basically said, you know, Matt and Liz, in order to possibly enter a New York City restaurant with your family, you have to show proof that you've gotten the vaccine a bunch of times at a certain point, right? Because they required multiple doses. Oh, and then by the way, Zach, those questions you had about the origins of this whole virus and whether or not there was a lab leak, well, actually, we're going to censor and suppress a whole bunch of information, journalistic information that attempts to get to the bottom of this, even though it's all happened in China, you know, where the CCP, sorry, I did my best Donald Trump as China, but like where the CCP generally transparent with us, right? Like, so when you when you tally up what they've done to us over the last four or so years, not to mention every single year, they take hefty hefty chunks of our paychecks. How could you not hate the state? Well, it's not, yeah, it's not about that. And let me just give one counter that. And I'm curious to hear Matt weigh in on this. But, you know, when you talk about they locked me down in Los Angeles, it was basically one person named Barbara Ferrer, who was the public health authority for L.A. County, who's like, you know, a masters of public health or something like that. And then who was it that ultimately declared that, you know, locking people out of their churches was unconstitutional, it was a bunch of roped elites from Ivy League from the Ivy League sitting on the Supreme Court. So it's not as simple as like the elites versus the non elites are on your side or not on your side. And that's, I guess, my point is like we should be looking more at what is what are the mechanisms for these movements rather than like what kind of strata of society or culture is it coming. But I do think it is worth pointing out that like Barbara Ferrer and, you know, big city mayors, whether Garcetti or de Blasio, we're all taking their cues from Anthony Fauci and then the teachers unions and Randy Weingarten, who Matt has written about extensively, right, like to some degree, there was a level of coordination, maybe not in the sort of sense that people envision of like, well, the deep state is conspiring against us. But there is certainly will the CDC says one thing and Anthony Fauci says one thing and then all of these big city mayors take their cues from that and so on and so forth. Matt, what do you make of all this. That is, I mean, I've always used the phrase political class in that in in many cases and this is absolutely true and it was an actual conspiracy in that people met together and made decisions I mean the classic case is the February 2021 new Biden administration made guidelines at the CDC about distancing in public schools, where the new CDC director Rochelle Walensky made a recommendation that was counter to her own personal recommendation of the summer previously, when she was a private citizen, because she had Randy Weingarten president of the American Federation of Teachers in on those scientific discussions, and since a huge swath of the country the one run by Democrats for the most part, basically followed CDC dictate on these things that meant that there was a lot of kids to further time in half time or remote schooling. And there was a revolt that happened in Massachusetts and elsewhere, and they had to scramble and revise those calculations. A month later, but it shows that that thing was was corrupted from from root and branch and yes the the elites and this and I would include here of the journalistic class to as part of the political class right now you have a large swath of journalism who are cheering on censorship by the Biden administration like we have to combat COVID misinformation and if that means, you know, taking Joe Roganov spotify well darn it that's just what we've got to do it's insane. And we should have contempt towards that. I would just say in my own little hippie corner over here, we just had Martin Luther King day here and I always glad to see people look up his various writings and talk about everything and and I've always been, I think the perhaps greatest or certainly, you know, top five pieces of American political writing and rhetoric is letter from Birmingham jail, which has the four steps essential steps in his position towards creating a nonviolent campaign of non violence resistance and two of those steps are always kind of overlooked, but one of them is the gathering of facts, right, not fictions but facts. The other one is self purification, which is to say, if your heart is filled with hate you're going to do bad at doing persuasive convincing protest. So, I have contempt for a lot of the actions that you described Liz and even you bringing them up again makes the blood pressure kind of go up and get all prickly. And I try not to be governed by hate. I don't think encouraging people to hate the state is going to lead to great outcomes but that's just me personally. And again, I'm not in the power wielding business. I know that if I'm governed by hate of, you know, the protesters blocking the Williamsburg Bridge when I want to cross it that I'm probably going to get to some bad policy ideas. So I try to not do it. You know, reflecting on that message of non violence for a second and how kind of important that is to you. One of the political predictions that you've publicly made Matt is that there's going to be some sort of political violence unfolding this year, or at least you're worried that that's going to happen. And part of that seems to come down to how people view what has transpired in this country over the past four or five years. And specifically, you know, the touchstone there is January 6 and you you wrote a piece that I think drew a lot of fire, calling out Vivek Ramaswamy comments on January 6. Let me pull that up here. The headline is Vivek Ramaswamy really, really wants you to know he thinks January 6 was an inside job. And I highlighted a passage from here. This is what Vivek had to say about January 6. There's now clear evidence that there was at the very least entrapment of peaceful protesters similar to the fake Gretchen Witcher Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot. The FBI won't admit how many undercover officers there were in the field on January 6 capital police on one hand fired rubber bullets and explosives into a peaceful crowd, who then then they willingly later allowed to enter the capital that doesn't add up. If the deep state is willing to manufacture an insurrection to take down its political opponents, they can do anything. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. What is the fundamental problem with Ramaswamy's formulation there and what are your worries about how this kind of increasingly that that if this formulation is increasingly accepted or embraced by mainstream leaders, what effects are you worried that that's going to have on American civil life. That is not clear evidence of entrapment or the manufacture of an insurrection. It is not. It is not. That's not clear evidence of that. Like, show me the clear evidence. It's the beginning, noting that there are. There's been an admission that at least a handful of FBI informants were in the field that day. And that's by the FBI in hearings over the summer. Noting that is not clear evidence. It is the beginning of a series of questions. And those questions then should lead you to where the next place that you would find evidence for this. Especially if you're going to say that this is very similar to the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping in which like so many cases after 9 11 the FBI had people like people who are pretending to be people that they were not, not just informants sort of like, like saying, hey, these guys over here are doing it. They were cooking up the plot themselves to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, a plot that was never going to happen. It's private among a small group of somewhat gullible people. We've seen this over and over again. We've written about this over and over again at reason, including back long before Vivek Ramaswamy expressed any interest in the subject in any kind of public way. So the next place that you would look in a place like Gretchen Whitmer is like, okay, is testimony from those people's part of the charging documents in the case. Is it part of the criminal conviction when it goes to trial in those entrapment cases, they were. And that is typically how that goes. That's how we learn about it. That's how in the case of Michigan, some of those charges were thrown out, although they were then retried in the 889 convictions that have happened related to the January 6 rights Capitol Hill, 200 of which involved violent activity. There has been zero cases, as far as we know, as far as I'm aware of, in which that showed up in the charging documents and that was part of the trial, testimony, evidence from agents provocateurs, informants in the field. So if this is clear evidence, it would show some fingerprints somewhere, unless I'm still holding out the possibility here in general, like we should suspect the FBI, having a default suspicion and a deep one is totally fine. So then, where do you look at so the way that that you can imagine that this was that that we wouldn't need to use that testimony that could have been there is just by simply that the actions of the people, you know, charging through barricades, causing injury to more than 100 Capitol police, that their actions alone were enough to convict them, but that should lead you to, and so therefore they didn't need this testimony, even though they could have totally done it. But that should lead you to another conclusion, which is to say, the way that you avoid that kind of entrapment and let's remember that since I wrote that article of Vivek has now called January 6 entrapment day. The way to avoid entrapment is to not bust through barricades and break windows and fight with Capitol police officers while trying to enter the Capitol building on the day that they're supposed to be certified the president election, you could totally avoid it by not doing any of those things and I don't say that cheekily. And I don't say that in a way to be like high fiving these grossly long sentences of various Proud Boys members, I don't think that the insurrection, the sedition charges, I don't think that those were appropriate, I think they're way too long. I agree with Vivek Ramaswamy that people who are nonviolent shouldn't be serving prison for their activities on that day. I agree with him. So, but it's not clear evidence of entrapment. It just isn't. And he also said that the Capitol police are just the same as the FBI. No, they're not. They're different. They're actually different organizations. And if the Capitol police and the other two things that he's pointing to as clear bits of evidence were like, well, look, they, you know, they did tear gas and rubber bullets over here, although very small amounts. But they let in the barricades over here. So look, they're just like letting them right in. That doesn't add up. It's a chaotic scene. If you have anyone who has been in a riot knows that it doesn't add up. Riots are crazy moments like everyone is acting in strange ways. And if the Capitol Hill police were in on it, that means that they ushered in. But first of all, that means that all of the interviews that have been done with them, they all managed to just sort of like be completely disciplined about not spilling the beans on the worst day in the history of the Capitol police. They're like, okay, we'll just totally swallow this conspiracy. It's hard to whistleblower. How many people would have to be in cahoots for all of this to add up, right? Like it would have to be hundreds and hundreds of people who've all perfectly synced up their stories with not a crack in sight and not even anybody privately sort of admitting to their groups of friends. What's what, right? I do want to get to the beginning of Zach's question, which is because it's not one-sided. It's not just January 6th is my worry about violence. The way that I'm worried about violence related to January 6th is that it is clear that the Republican Party, the mainstream of the Republican Party is not taking responsibility for January 6th. Like clear majorities when you poll Republicans either blame it like on Antifa or the FBI or REAPs or whoever's in their imagination who did it. Or they say, yeah, it's fine. Like it's justified because Biden stole the election. So like that's not taking responsibility for human action at all. You have to like own the agency of it one way or the other in my estimation, or else you are basically intellectually greenlighting further violence. And on the left, that is the same in different ways, but that overall dynamic is the same with the 2020 post George Floyd riots, which killed, you know, 14, 19 people. Huge amounts of damage. And not just that, but Portland was on fire for 100 consecutive days. People were just like, you know, besieging and throwing human shit at the police building in downtown Portland over and over. There's burning stuff day after day. We boarded up New York City, Manhattan, which I don't think is a Trump, you know, a big Trump supporting region. We put plywood on windows here because we assumed that if Trump won, the people who didn't like him would riot. So that says to me that we've normalized a lot of political violence and the post October 7th demonstrations, which I mentioned before, which do irritate me to great effect because it keeps me from getting home. And that's that's just no good. If we're allowing small groups of raggedy ass protesters to close bridges to prompt the evacuation of the White House, which happened the other day. That says to me that we haven't thought we haven't come up with a plan on what to do if you behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated in the famous formulation. And so if that all it takes is a couple of beardies and some college dropouts to block a bridge that well that seems fun. Let's block O'Hare airport. The worst thing is that they're not college dropouts. They in fact graduated from their liberal arts schools and now want loan forgiveness from the rest of us. So, you know, it's important to note that. But I do also I was confused by the boarding up of windows all up and down Fifth Avenue on Election Day. This past go around as well, especially because one of the things that was most striking to me was that sleep number, the mattress store was boarded up and I'm a little bit like, were you seriously expecting the looting of mattresses in Manhattan? Like, how exactly was that going to go? Please play this out for me. But you're tired and like from a long night of writing and need a little rest. But I think your point is well taken. And I think it you you're writing on this actually kind of at least shakes me out of this mindset where since this has just been the state of play for the last, I don't know. Frankly, since 2020 summer of 2020 post George Floyd, it was very much normalized. But even before that a little bit we saw Zach and I were just talking recently about all of the, you know, carnage in Ferguson, Missouri. And basically how that was sort of, you know, obviously there have been different waves of protests. Ellie in the 90s is another good example that you mentioned earlier. There have been these waves of protests and riots that have popped up. But to some degree, I kind of feel like from 2014 and then we had a little pause when things were kind of good and decent from 2016 to 2020. And then 2020 up until now, these eras where it feels like small groups of people exerting extraordinary influence and really affecting other people's abilities to live their lives. People, you know, shopkeepers abilities to actually earn a living for themselves, people's abilities to go out their business unmolested. It's kind of increasingly rare. It's important to kind of whip our heads, snap our heads out of this. And remember, living in such a politically tumultuous era is not a normal thing. This is not aspirational. This is not good. This is not how every single era has totally been, though obviously there have been these waves of it. But at least for the last four years, the fact that this is, at least to me feels like a fact of life is a hugely problematic thing. Where it doesn't feel like political violence is sort of increasingly, it's like we increasingly act like if it's for the right cause, it's no big deal. And actually it's really important to say no, no matter the cause, it's a really fucking big deal. I think that's the key point is that the the excusing of it and the cowardice from political leaders to condemn political violence. If it's coming from your side more or less, that's what Matt is describing with January 6th. That's what we saw with these riots and that denying of personal agency, which I would think is something that libertarians would be particularly attuned to and able to recognize like the importance of agency and responsibility. But I do think it's becoming an increasingly unbridgeable divide among libertarians and other small government types who more or less believe what Swami says about January 6th and the lead up to it. And those of us who think there's there might be some shadiness, there might have been some egging on, but don't see the evidence of some massive setup. And that's not even to say that the entire insurrection framing or narrative is exactly right either. I just think there's a there's a lot of contributing factors and blame to go around, which you can trace all the way back to if you wanted to be to be getting so the Trump administration and the Russian investigation and the the discontent. I think a lot of it of legitimate about how that was handled. The outrageous that the lies and the bad policy around COVID, the media, the political hypocrisy and defenses of looting. It's all a valid discussion, but if one of us believes that January 6 was a manufactured plot to stop us from discovering the truth and the other just doesn't see the evidence for that. It's such a different view of reality. And I just wonder, like, can can people that have those two different views even really be in a political coalition together? Sure. Sure. I mean, part part of me hears you in the sense that, you know, I try to figure out what's going on and I will confess to occasionally writing with at least a little bit of mild irritation when I chased down someone's statement down a rabbit hole and like really spend a long time to try to figure out whether it's true and discover that there's that it's just based on not much. I did that like nine months ago when RFK Junior was saying that basically Tucker Carlson was bounced off Fox because he took on big pharma. And, you know, I wrote a thing that no one cared about, like going into it just because it was so frustratingly wrong and indicative of a different mindset. And yet, Zach Weissmiller, I think you should smoke more pot like Liz Wolfe does. That, you know, there's always unbridgeable divides like 60% of Americans, including Jacob Hormer. I think it's written like a couple of books on this, leading libertarian party candidate believe that there's a JFK conspiracy beyond that, you know, the communist guy shot him. And I don't. But does that mean I can't agree with Jacob Hormer and maybe when I vote for reviews on my ballot in New York. It's not a totally different situation because that's like one discreet long ago example. No, as opposed to this like massive political undercurrent, this political thing that's still happening. I get what you're saying. I'm just like people, you could have like used the phrase unbridgeable divide in the 1970s to describe so very damn much the 70s. As bad as what we're having now and as as like as many palpitations as I feel about, I think the inevitable deadly political violence of this year and political violence is just it is more traumatic than than a political violence. Not necessarily to the people who experience it but the to the country at large because you could sort of see it coming out when the Proud Boys and Antifa are engaging in street battles. That's happened throughout the Trump administration, not just in 2020. There's something that's, you know, the idea of like a street political street gangs, we're right to be freaked out by that. But the 70s were worse by a lot. There was just hijackings and bombings like on a daily basis that were very explicitly political and what happened to a lot of those people who were just like they went bonkers that just joining the weather underground. Doing like the very schismatics between the in the Black Panther Party just like a lot of just murdering going on. People kind of like eventually went jogging by the late 70s and like came out of it as college professors and they stopped murdering people and doing bombs and hijackings. People are able to come out of it and there's always going to be in and I've said this many times. And I never mean this pejoratively again, but in marginal political movements and this is sort of just a description of its existence within the mainstream and libertarianism is marginal in that sense. It's going to attract marginal people, people who believe all kinds of interesting weird things and I am one of those people I am marginal. And there are things that I believe that are crazy. I'm sure of it. So I have a whole conspiracy related to Bob Woodward that I'm not at liberty to discuss at large flight 800 to I'm pretty big on that one too. Yeah, you bet. But no, like it just there's going to be people who tend toward the conspiratorial bent within the libertarian camp. That doesn't mean that I cannot break bread with them and agree with them on ad hoc basis of things. I'm again not in I'm not organizing a libertarian political party here. I don't I'm so like, I don't get as as frustrated as you sound with the sense of the un unbridgeable divide. I just take it as a given that my little thread of the world is going to be a very, very lonely place and and I also don't care what anyone thinks about. I mean, I guess part of my frustration is that I would like to see libertarianism move from the margins. And it seemed for a while that there was some momentum to that to that end. And, you know, I want us to to get, you know, a serious movement before we get to the point of, you know, needing a wild hobby or Malay to swoop in because we don't like it. Like you said before, we don't want to ever get to that point where where we need to where we're dealing with triple digit inflation and kind of just like rampant political corruption. But like as I was pondering this, this question of like, where is the libertarian movement right now and like, where are they going to settle in terms of candidates or, you know, and like our libertarians even going to matter in this election. One thing that was that popped out to me that that was interesting was this video that Rand Paul put up, who's an avatar of a certain kind of libertarianism and he wouldn't commit to any candidates, but he will commit to being never Nicky which is never Nicky Haley which is kind of interesting to me and itself that like he that he won't land anywhere but he can define himself as against something. So I want to play just a short bit from his never Nicky video and then ask you to react to the message that Rand Paul is putting out there. Let's roll that. Good morning, everyone. As I told you yesterday, I'm ready to say something about the presidential race. I've had a long relationship with Donald Trump and there's a lot to like there. I'm also a big fan of a lot of the fiscal conservatism of Ron DeSantis. I think Vivek Ramaswamy has been an important voice. Also have listened to and met with the independent Bobby Kennedy. I'm not yet ready to make a decision, but I am ready to make a decision on someone who I cannot support. So I'm announcing this morning that I'm never Nicky. I don't think any informed or knowledgeable libertarian or conservative should support Nicky Haley. I've seen her attitude towards our interventions overseas. I've seen her involvement in the military industrial complex, $8 million being paid to become part of the team. But I've also seen her indicate that she thinks you should be registered to use the internet, that people posting ideas anonymously. I think she fails to understand that our republic was founded upon people like Ben Franklin, Sam Adams, Madison, John Jay and others who posted routinely. For fear of the government, they posted routinely anonymously. And I think her failure to really understand that or to think that you should register through the government somehow for the internet is something that should disqualify her in the minds of all libertarian and leaning conservatives. So, I mean, that's not very hard for me to get on board with the rationales is pretty sound from my perspective, but what do you think of what Rand Paul is putting out there? Totally agree with him about in the critique of Nikki Haley for her bonkers idea about everyone registering online. We already have enough of a problem right now with bipartisan sensoriousness, especially as it involves technology. It's just a crazy thing. She keeps repeating it and it's bad. Also, Vivek Ramaswamy wants to ban TikTok from existing. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has threatened the corporate death penalty over any number of organizations, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute. So I'm not sure how we're exempting, especially RFK Jr., given his track record from, you know, saying what libertarians should and shouldn't vote for, which again is not my game, but I'm not an elected senator. I think it's interesting what Rand Paul did and has done and what Mike Lee has also done. Mike Lee before the Iowa caucus endorsed Donald Trump. And I'm old enough to remember the 2016 convention, which I covered in which I spent a lot of time in the hip pocket of Mike Lee. He was the leading voice of opposition to Donald Trump at the 2016 convention, just screaming and yelling at Donald Trump. This whole Utah delegation situation that went down. And then in October of 2016, after the Hollywood, what's it was called, whatever, the grab them by the pussy stuff came out. Access Hollywood. Thank you. Mike Lee was again a leading voice of disgust. I could never vote for someone who would ever say anything like that to any woman under any circumstance. And so to watch him in this year before the primary election before the Iowa caucus, say I'm going to vote for Donald Trump because he delivers on his promises. And you know, that's more important than mean tweets. I don't think that is, I think I find that to be a much less serious argument than what Rand just put forth. Although on some level, both of them are engaged in the same thing, which is to exist as a senator in 2024 as a Republican Senator. You need to probably be on board with Donald Trump much more than that was the case in 2016. We forget it right now, but something like 11 sitting US senators in 2016 did not endorse Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton. It sat on their hands or withdrew their endorsements that they'd given before, mostly because the access Hollywood tape, but some for other reasons as well. You can't, you can no longer basically do that. Mitch McConnell is one of the only people who's been sitting on his hands so far in this election. The Republican Party has come around. If you wish to exist as those people, that's what you have to do. So if you are a libertarian leaning politician in power, you are going to find a way to accommodate Donald Trump. And one easiest way to do that is to say that Nikki Haley is bad on war. I think the Nikki Haley is sees, you know, an axis of evil around every corner. I think many of those people who are in her purported axis of evil are also evil. So but her ideas about what to do about that are going to be different than mine. For me and I'm not a libertarian senator, libertarian issue, Republican senator. For me, how Donald Trump behaved in the run up to and on January 6 is self evidently disqualifying. I could never imagine any circumstances, which to vote for him. But again, as mentioned before, I presume that I am on a very lonely little island here. And that Rand Paul has his finger on the pulse of mainstream America more than I do. I am intrigued by the idea of this sort of negatively defining like, like could we could libertarians settle on someone by process of elimination or like via negativa like for Haley. It's like, you know, online speech check, warhawk check that's off the list. Trump, you know, acting like a maniac on January 6 and many other things check. And like it's the process of elimination towards a libertarian candidate. I wonder if that's something more politicians could consider and it also makes. Yeah, go ahead. Here's the thing that I was thinking about earlier this morning and last night in long preparation for my grilling by the two of you, which is what are Donald Trump's libertarian accomplishments? Seriously, what are they? Federal regulation cutting, right? So that's that is the one. And it is a mixed record at best because in addition to cutting regulations and I wrote a cover story about this in 2017, you cut regulation far more than than his biggest deregulatory supporters thought possible. But then he also regulated, you know, like when you when you choke off immigration, turns out that's actually a regulation. Those trade rules, those are regulatory. People would also point to appointing Betsy DeVos, though, and some of the title nine overhaul as well as well as also Supreme Court appointments. Yeah, but Gorsuch. Yeah, but Gorsuch. We've got something that, you know, lasts, you know, generations. We've got 2.5. We've got 2.5 libertarian accomplishments, I think. And I agree with the Betsy DeVos very much. It didn't. I mean, she was good in that position. It didn't really amount to that much, especially the title. The title nine was that you were right to point to the title line. That wasn't that wasn't a complete victory, although Biden is it was undone, right? So what does it really matter? There wasn't an enduring impact. It was sort of valuable for four years and then poof, right? I think one of the things that you see a lot of elected Republican libertarian leaning Trump supporters, big mouthful there, point to is Donald Trump on foreign policy. And I think the funny thing about that is that it wasn't Donald Trump who withdrew from Afghanistan. It was Joe Biden. And regardless of how you think he did it, and I don't think anyone thinks he did it particularly well. And if you look, I think it was an early suspicion at least. Mike Lee said that, you know, I'll take his fulfilling promises over over mean tweets. I think mean tweets are in many senses, people's sense of his accomplishments, right? Like if people talk about if an anti war libertarian talks about Donald Trump, chances are they're going to mention his speech in the 2016 primary in South Carolina, where he like absolutely trashed the entire Bush family as being like particularly great. And it was particularly great. It was mean it was wrong and stuff like like a manners level. But I was just like calling out an entire wing of foreign policy in the United States and the Republican Party. It was kind of righteous and awesome. It's also basically a mean tweet. It doesn't like how did that change? He didn't start a new big war. That's great. Neither is Biden. But that's also like a non negative accomplishment. I think people actually like it. His insult comedy and see that as an accomplishment or at least something that they can affiliate with because it drives his enemies insane. Yeah. And that is part of the establishment. Yeah, that's part of the thrill. Yeah, are you surprised that, you know, Ron DeSantis has not attracted more libertarian interest because, yes, he has these, you know, this odd speaking statement. This odd speaking style and these overboard social policies in Florida. But also he was the anti lockdown governor. He, you know, Florida I can attest is governed fairly well, at least compared to California where I left. And, you know, we did the whole issue on kind of some of the attributes of Florida and reason magazine. Like our libertarian sleeping on DeSantis. I think there was a lot of initial enthusiasm. Let's not forget Thomas Massey endorsed him early. Right. And, and I'm kind of surprised that more people didn't. But there isn't really a your list of libertarian leading Republicans runs out pretty quickly. And some of the few who existed have long since exited the scene like Justin Amash, like Jeff Flake from Arizona and others. So I think that if DeSantis would have run more strenuously on his COVID record. I mean, even in his terrible debate with Gavin Newsom, not saying that he was particularly terrible, although he wasn't great in that debate. But the whole thing was just kind of really dispiriting and awful. That should be such a layup for for Ron DeSantis. It shouldn't be close. It was like there. Newsom even indicated that it should be a layup because at one point Newsom was almost attempting to hang DeSantis on his own record. Right. Like Newsom was sort of like, you know, saying that he was that DeSantis was insufficiently, you know, letting Florida be insufficiently free from lockdowns. And it's like, well, wait a second. How could you, Gavin Newsom, possibly be saying this, right? To some degree, it was like Newsom's entire debate strategy was evidence of how Americans broadly now look at lockdowns as a serious mistake. Right. But I think what DeSantis did when he became a national candidate and being conscious of it, let's remember he was within 15 percentage points of Donald Trump one year ago. It was 45 to 30. And he looked like he had the wind at his sails. He went culture war. He went Disney. And that's what he was advertising himself to national conservatives. It wasn't necessarily his COVID record and what that would and what his COVID record taught him about stuff like parental rights or the intractability of teachers unions or whatever. It was like, we are going to go after, you know, Bud Light. The national conservatives who just openly hate libertarians. So it's like, yeah. I mean, I don't know DeSantis's own feeling about the libertarian mini quadrant either. But I don't think that that was a particularly wise strategy. It's also possible and you hear this now from DeSantis and sort of the pre post mortems that are coming out that like there's nothing he could have done. But I found myself in the DeSantis Newsom debate as someone who absolutely is on DeSantis corner in the comparative COVID record and think that that's like significant and important. I was wishing that Nikki Haley was the one defending it. She's just she's been a better candidate for the most part. She's kind of like not had a great last debate and she didn't really wasn't very impressive in Iowa in her speech. But like she has run a much better public campaign has been more convincing as someone delivering Bon Mott's and such. He just hasn't been very good at this. So I think it's a combination of going towards the wrong thing and then just being in the sort of impossible position of, you know, I want to run against Trump and I'm aware that it's Trump's party. So how do I deal with that? Like the the cognitive dissonance that that requires seem to wear more heavily on him than it does on Nikki Haley. So I spent a lot of time psychoanalyzing both of you, you know, whenever I get a minute to myself. And I was thinking, Zach, as you were talking earlier about libertarian beliefs, you know, being pretty marginal, but this enduring hope that you have that they will move, you know, into the mainstream. I was thinking about the degree to which you sort of to some degree like came of age in Ron Paul Revolution times. Is that sort of roughly correct broad strokes wise? I don't know about came of age, but I would say that would be politically activating. Yeah, it was a politically activating moment for you. Sure, sure. Came into a certain political consciousness then. But Matt, you had a weird origin story to being a libertarian. Depending on who you talk to, you kind of ended up sort of gallivanting around central Eastern Europe for quite a while there and reporting basically on the fall of communism for many years. How many how many years are you in Prague? And or like eight in the region, or in Prague, one in Bratislava and three in Budapest and it's post communism is the 90s. Give us your sort of superhero origin story. That way I can psychoanalyze you even better in the future. How did this make you libertarian ish? And what did that look like? And how does that make you think about things differently than the rest of us weirdos? It could go a long time on that subject. I would say, I mean, I always, I always hate a communism. I'm Cold War baby. And then when you see the after effects up close of the absolute like whole of society, like murderous damage that that does to the environment, you know, which is something that people tend to forget to the educational establishment to the minds of everybody that just is so destructive. Czechoslovakia was a much more totalitarian place than than late 80s Hungary, where I also lived on that goulash communism, which was softer, but it was just, it is so incredibly distorting and awful and and then also fell into the sway of the writings and who's behind me on my wall here or at least on that door, who's writing about politics and philosophy and anti-communism and totalitarianism are just really inspiring. He's sort of like a combination of George Orwell and Martin Luther King in some way. There's a lot of similarities and cross influences of all of these characters and he talked a lot about living within the truth or living in truth and like the power of that. In a sort of society or system based on lies. It's just very inspiring and interesting. One way that it affects me to this day or at least informs my understanding of Donald Trump, which might seem a little strange, is that in the post communist kind of wreckage, there arose a series of politicians, some of whom I covered really closely like Vladimir Mechiar in Slovakia and who became the sort of like crude, hilarious nationalists railing against elites in foreign capitals, Davos man. Oftentimes it would be sort of New York and Jerusalem or New York and Tel Aviv and and Budapest is where the bad people were coming from in Brussels. But like railing against the far off elites, always railing against George Soros who had an outside influence on those places and developing the civil society. And it was fascinating to watch them not just about their own actions, but about the self defeating reaction to those people by the elites. I can't tell you the number why can't because it's probably just like six because there weren't that many of us covering Slovakia and its first years of independence from Czechoslovakia in 93-94. Covering Mechiar, once we saw Trump arise, we all just emailed each other like, can you believe it? It happened in our country. Like people, because part of what they do is they go and they are better at democracy than the people who are trying to defend democracy by opposing them. By which I mean, they're just better politicians. Donald Trump has an incredible sway. He's incredible on the on on the stump. If you can't recognize that he's absolutely hilarious, regardless of how much you hate him, then you're missing a big story in American politics and he's courting that overreaction from people. He wants to say, not just like go up to the line. I once interviewed Mechiar and he was about ready to go to America to visit Clinton, although it wasn't a state sponsored sanction visit. I'm like, what do you hope to accomplish? He's like, I want to show Americans that I don't eat children and that I can use a fork and knife. And it's like, that's funny. He might be an authoritarian leading kind of guy, but it's kind of funny. And so the so many elites back then that I would talk to, including people who had been partnered up with him and served in his government until the very last minute. And then they said, oh my God, he's the worst ever, very similarly to all the Trump people do. They're like, well, you know, he's always going to get the votes out there in the countryside. But what do you expect? Those people are all stupid. It's this like, you have to actually beat Donald Trump and people like that in by doing democracy, not by like finding some extra like Democratic means, some shortcuts to dealing with him. And people were always looking for the short. 14th amendment, like let's let's get him off this ballot. Let's try to disqualify him this way. Let's kick him off Twitter and then he'll start his own social media company and still get his crazy message of like seriously, people were always like, if we could shut down this newspaper or start that television station or take over this media, then finally we can get through to those stupid people. And like, no, and you see the same kind of dumb conversations about journalism in America, which again I thought I would never see in my lifetime journalism. When I was coming up 1000 years ago was was understood to be kind of sort of anti authoritarian in its mindset. At least I diluted myself into believing so and now it's just like openly sensorious and people are policing each other over the adjectives that they use to talk about Trump. Just kind of awful. So that shaped my thinking. Yes, Liz. Well, in looking at this, I had hoped that I wouldn't see it in this country because there's something kind of tawdry about going down the met she are slash Victor Orban path. And it's just amazing to me that Victor Orban again someone I've covered since the 90s has become a load star for conservatives in America like, wow, congratulations man. Why do they have crushes on Victor Orban is there something seductive about him that perhaps missing. No, I mean, they're seductive about like he rails against Brussels. So centralized authority rails against NATO. A lot of people are, are, are, you know, falling out of love with NATO in the Trump. Talk to me about NATO matte balls. I'm not. Look, don't don't French goodbye me here. He and he and he railed against immigration. He said I don't want immigration policy to be set by Angela Merkel. And he's kind of right about that. Regardless of what you think about what they their immigration policy should be. One, it makes sense to have a country be in charge of its own immigration policy. And it's kind of weird that you would outsource that he's also super corrupt. Hungary also has gone from being the leader of the pack on post communist economic growth and GDP per capita to being one of the worst just an abysmal record of in the economy. He's taken over and like a strong arm to various churches. He's really consolidated power. We've written the constitution crackdown on media done a bunch of stuff that objectively sucks. And I have pointed this out several times to conservatives and they honestly don't care. And part of them just wants to do that. You look at Trump, there's a lot of will to power to and I presume if he wins election, you will see him follow through on some of, for example, his threats to sick the Department of Justice. Or the, or the FTC against media companies in direct retaliation for their behavior. He said something like that just yesterday. But I think that he has much more chance of pulling things like that off the conservatives, especially the ones who are populist anti elite conservatives like Chris Rufo and like Ron DeSantis in a way they want to, they have a desire to wield government power against those institutions. There's a thirst out there for that. Victor Orban does that. So that's what they like about Victor Orban. They see him as successful for that. And then some of the more diluted ones like Rod Dreher believe that he's like the last voice protecting the West as if Hungary is like the bastion of Christianity, which is absolutely insane and self diluted. What's the thing that will disabuse some of these conservatives of the notion that Victor Orban is creating the Promised Land? Visiting any place in Hungary that's not called Budapest, probably. Budapest is super delightful cosmopolitan Jewish, increasingly thankfully. City, I say that just because their community have been so decimated in World War II and elsewhere. And it's nice to see even though Orban and people like him have flirted with kind of rehabilitation of explicitly anti-Semitic characters from Hungarian history, that there's been a flourishing of the Jewish community in the Budapest. It's also the best part of town in that district. It's great. It's super cosmopolitan. You go there like, my God, why can't everything be like this? Well, it's because you actually hate cities like this in America. Tucker Carlson giving architectural lessons about Budapest is just objectively hilarious. Your insight about Budapest and then the countryside reminds me a little bit of something that I was paying attention to last year when I was in Bucharest, which is different than Budapest. You dumb people if you in fact confuse them. No, not actually. And I was thinking in Romania about Bucharest and how, you know, Matt, you wrote about this, I think, in the mid-auts like flourishing movie scene, movie production industry there. Really interesting. I was noticing this past time, you know, a flourishing of the restaurant scene, a lot of immigrants from other parts of Europe coming in and opening up really, really interesting foods. Obviously, Romanian food has sort of, you know, is not really something to write home about and has under Ceciuscu is sort of, you know, took on less prominence and there were some issues with food shortages and such. So the Romanian food scene never really developed. But now immigrants are coming in and really restoring a lot of that. So you look at actual Bucharest and its thriving and its cosmopolitan. And yeah, there's some ugly, brutalist communist architecture still, but it's lovely. And then you go 30 minutes outside into the countryside and it's just full on rust belt people with decaying teeth kind of everywhere. Right. I mean, literal, literal covered wagons and, and, and Cami housing factories and blocks that are totally in rubble. Exactly. And it's sort of a little bit of this like, well, wait a second, I could understand how you could emerge from in your telling Budapest and in my telling Bucharest. If you'd only been in those places with a certain sense of, oh, this must be how this country is run. This must be, you know, these countries have just recovered wonderfully and leadership is currently absolutely excellent. And it's like, well, surely, if you see anything outside of that little tiny sample size, your view begins to get pretty complicated. So I'm sort of curious about, like, will the rod dryers of the world, like, is that sort of part of the problem? Like, did we diagnose it? Or are we missing something? Yes. I would also, and like Budapest has a bigger divide, every country has a, you know, country mouse, city mouse situation. But, but like, I think the next largest, the Budapest has 2 million people and the next largest city has like 300,000, I think. And that's similar to Cuba and not many other countries. Usually there's like, there isn't such a huge split. So that's going to create all kinds of weirdnesses that are pretty significant. Romania, it's a little bit more spread out. I would just add, for those, there might be some people who are sort of anti-interventionists, anti-U.S. interventionists who think that Victor Orban is a hero. You need to think that one through, because one of the things that he did, it's one of the single most destabilizing acts to peace in the world by a democratically elected leader over the last 20 years. Is that he gave voting rights to ethnic Hungarians who live to 5 million ethnic Hungarians who live outside the borders. I don't know if it affects 5 million, but there's 5 million in the immediate surroundings. And you don't have to have been born in Hungary. So ethnic Hungarians and like if you look at the history of Europe over the last 100 years, it's not real great for what happens when a country decides to give special rights to its erstwhile. Citizens who aren't even their citizens in neighboring countries. That is a recipe for unrest. And you're seeing it with the Hungarian minority in Ukraine and also in Serbia and in Slovakia. It's super not great. So if you like him for anti-war reasons, you should think that one through too. Well, with that, I want to thank you for talking to us. Matt Welts, we so appreciate having you on. Where can people find you? At Reason.com. Check out the Reason Roundtable podcast as you all well know on Twitter at Matt Welch as well. Wonderful. Not Matt Welch. Thanks for listening to Just Asking Questions. 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