 Welcome to the Reasoned Roundtable your weekly podcast from the Libertarian Magazine. We're giving Tuesday lasts for eight days. Yes, that's another plug for annual Webathon. Please go right now, right the hell now, to reason.com slash donate. I am Matt Welch, joined by Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Catherine Mangu Ward. Happy repeal day everyone. Hi, Matt. Howdy. Happy repeal day. You know, it was like a Hanukkah. Are you happy? Right, yeah, what was that? It was happy. It was like it's a Hanukkah miracle our giving Tuesday. We thought we had enough giving for one Tuesday, but it lasted eight days. When you, you know, you just give until your heart bleeds, until your lip bleeds. Yikes. Speaking of bleeding, let's get right into the weekend's kerfluffles. We try on this program to not necessarily be the proverbial dog chasing the proverbial squirrel, Peter, because sometimes nothing just it's more squirrels. They're day rats, as we all know. No, because of the important things happen on every day. Important bad things happen with the government and others. Things every day and attention seekers tend to suck up attention. They don't necessarily want to look at it all the time, but nevertheless, Elon Musk and sometimes Donald Trump keep persisting on late Friday afternoon. The mercurial new owner of Twitter announced that he would soon be publishing the Twitter files with noted journalist and commentator Matt Taibe on lead tweets. What came next was a sometimes strange, but very interesting thread of some 40 odd tweets from Taibe describing some of the context behind why and how the social media company under pressure from politicians and others in the politics business, among others, took the extraordinary step in the fall of 2020 of suppressing a New York Post article about the discovered contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, which included a bunch of salacious slash pathetic party picks of the then presidential candidate's sons cavorting with hired gal pals, as well as information about various shady looking overseas business deals among Twitter's heavy handed actions at the time, just flat out banning the New York Post from Twitter for more than a week. As the Twitter files revealed, Twitter's ad hoc justification for the suppression was that the story violated its hacked materials policy, even though there was no evidence that the materials were hacked indeed, despite many news organizations broadcasting and repeating as fact various national security mouthpieces saying at the time that the story had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation campaign, years later we now know the laptop and its ugly contents were very much real. A couple of reactions to the Twitter files were briefly noting scores of journalists, including those who work for the very same publications that were poo-pooing the story two years ago, just heaped derision all over Tai Ebi, including his former employer Rolling Stone, who called it a snooze-fest and referred to Tai Ebi as a substacked blogger, and former President Donald Trump suggested that the massive and widespread fraud and deception made the 2020 election eligible for nullification, perhaps writing on his social media site that quote, a massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Lots to chew on here. Catherine, why don't you lead us off? What did you learn in the Twitter files, both in their contents and the reaction thereof? So I'm soft launching a new politician that I don't completely hate today, which is Ro Kahana, who I had previously suspected I might not completely hate. He and I were on Bill Maher together, and also he's done some good stuff on the CJ Ceremella beat with respect to shoring up Fourth Amendment protections. But, you know, Robbie Suave wrote this up for us as the Twitter bombshells were dropping and basically said these are not bombshells, which was certainly my main takeaway that there was not a lot in there that we didn't already know or suspect. And, you know, in this sort of horrible way that one can be disappointed when the worst thing doesn't happen, I was like disappointed that the the malfeasance was not at the levels I had feared or something, right? So, I mean, there was absolutely a scenario here where there could have been a, you know, not to use the cliche, but let's go ahead and do it, smoking gun, in which we had kind of a sitting government official, maybe, you know, Biden adjacent, specifically asking for these stories to be suppressed. That's not really what we saw. And in the case of Ro Kahana, we saw actually like an extremely sensible note saying like, this is a bad idea and you shouldn't do this. Not quite getting the First Amendment right in my view. The First Amendment does not speak one way or two other about whether Twitter lets the New York Post share stories, but otherwise directionally correct. And as Robby noted, some of those folks actually come off looking better than expected in those exchanges. But, yes, the big bombshell was actually a little cherry bomb. Peter, there's some fuzz, is there not, with that line between government's pressure and what Twitter did, there was somewhere in the, in the 20s or 30s, in the number of tweets of Tybie on Friday afternoon late, there was a group, a representative of a group that had corralled sentiment among 12 members of Congress who were on, I think, the Judiciary Committee and said to Twitter, basically, you're going to get a pretty rough treatment on the next committee meeting if this doesn't happen. Is that not, if not a First Amendment violation, is that a thing that happens and should we be worried about that on free speechy and even First Amendment grounds? So that was NetChoice, which is a trade industry tech group, right, that their business is that they kind of communicate between the tech industry, and that's not one specific company, it's a bunch of member companies that communicate between the tech industry and Congress and sort of, and lawmakers and policymakers, right, that's their business. NetChoice is a group that I think, you know, we have in some cases talked to here at Reason. I certainly, I believe we know some of the folks over there. And what they were just saying was they were communicating what was likely to happen, because that is their business, right. And now you can, I think, so to be clear, I don't think that NetChoice did anything wrong in communicating that, because that's NetChoice's job is to communicate what they're hearing on the Hill and what they're hearing in Washington. I think if you want to make an argument that there was something, you know, sort of shady going on there, it was your or something on toward, you have to say, well, it's the policymakers who are saying we're going to come, you know, who are communicating through back channels, we're going to come down on you if you do this at the same time that those policymakers were, if I understand correctly, saying, basically, don't block this story. Don't restrict all of this because that will be a problem for you. And indeed, it is a kind of a has been a kind of a problem for Twitter, not necessarily in the sense that resulted in direct, you know, legislation against Twitter or, you know, similar sorts of companies, but in the sense that Republicans have made a big political issue out of this. At the same time, I think that the takeaway here is how little the government was involved in this very specific story. So not that long ago, you had Matt Taibi, who was the person that as far as I can tell, Elon Musk handpicked to deliver this information to the world, right? It seems pretty clear that Musk approached Taibi to do this story. I think that's maybe not perfectly established, but certainly Musk is the person who is using Taibi as the person who did it and Musk gave him permission to do so. And not that long ago, you had Taibi tweeting stuff like the laptop is by far the secondary issue. The real problem is the FBI stepping in to cut distribution of the true story. So it was Taibi saying it was FBI pressure that was the real story here. And I just want to read you in full tweet number 22 from this tweet store, although several sources recalled hearing about a general warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks. So I'm going to now step in and just footnote this. That means this is a general warning that doesn't have to do specifically with the Hunter Biden laptop story and predated it. Then back to Taibi. There's no evidence that I've seen of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem is Taibi's conclusion, which I want to say is not mine. My conclusion here, first of all, is actually just that articles are good and Twitter threads are less good. And while I wasn't annoyed that Taibi put this on Twitter first, rather than on his sub stack to which I'm a subscriber, I was kind of annoyed that there was no eventual sub stack version, just kind of rounding it up in like a sort of clean article like way. Now, my conclusion here is that this was almost entirely just collective stupidity and cowardice led by like in inept ideologically inclined management and out to lunch CEO. And this wasn't a conspiracy. This wasn't really a sort of this wasn't big government pressure. So much as clumsiness and stupidity on the part of the people managing the platform, perhaps ideologically inclined clumsiness and stupidity, perhaps partisan clumsiness and stupidity on the part of the managers. But it wasn't this sort of deep nefarious thing. It was just a bunch of boneheaded decisions that blew up. There's a reading of that Taibi reference to government not having its fingerprints is that it was a reference to foreign government that he was not precluding FBI involvement. And there wasn't addressing that just to throw that out there. But and speaking of that, Nick, at the time, and the New York Post has had a pretty memorable cover story that showed the preponderance of people who came out. And they are a lot of ex FBI ex, director of national intelligence, ex CIA, deep state actors, deep state, Nick Gillespie. This was the actor studio of the deep state actors. So many contributor contracts to CNN and MSNBC who came out and poo pooed the story as having the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. And and so many journalistic outlets and fact checkers said basically the same thing. And we're very like sneery at those who are like, Hey, why aren't you covering this story? Is that not an ongoing kind of scandal and one that continues to erode trust in institutions? Absolutely. You know, and I mean, to kind of pick up on some of what Peter was saying, you know, what I took away from this was that Twitter and I don't know that it has this under Elon Musk, but under Jack Dorsey, who I am very favorably disposed towards. I think Jack Dorsey is one of the most visionary and important and forward looking, you know, major business people, you know, CEO types tech people around his. He was, you know, the CEO of two companies. Twitter needs a CEO who is focused simply on Twitter and not Twitter plus a bunch of other things. What I took away from it was the way that people below him kind of all cobbled together a really awful decision. I think it's more informed by their interactions with government people or spokespeople for government people when you see, you know, who gave money to, you know, at Twitter, who, you know, what kind of politicians that they give, what kind of open channels did they have when they were getting requests from politically motivated or politically connected people to say, Hey, can you can you get rid of this tweet? Can you end this? Can you end that? It's not that it isn't a conspiracy that you would see in a, you know, an anti-communist movie from the 1950s or something where, you know, the Kremlin is calling up somebody and says a code word and then suddenly everybody acts in a particular, you know, like in Domino's, you know, just going down the chain of command or anything like that. But it shows how decision making gets made. And more importantly, how group think in organizations really concretizes into just stupid ideas that take forever to come back. There's tweets in there where it talks about how long it took Jack Dorsey to even understand what was going on and what not. And then it was hard to reverse. And I think, Matt, that New York Post story you're talking about, which is kind of stunning where there's all of these people and a media, it has a great roundup of, you know, responses to the current Twitter files thread that just came out that is very similar to the critiques that were launched at the time. It's always trying to will it away. You know, group think is the major problem and group think can come from, you know, it can come from kind of direct government pressure or worse. Still, I think it comes from kind of soft pressure where people think they're doing the right thing or they're agonizing to do the right thing when it's not right and they're not being pressured to do it directly. Catherine, building on that concept, one of the pieces of information that I think were treated as an aha by one side and a snooze vest on the other some of the throat clearing at the top of the thread about, you know, 98, 99% of donations from inside the Twitter house that were earmarked for politics went to Democrats. You, being someone who neither votes nor has a natural rooting interest in either side, to Nick's point, is that some preponderance like that a 98 to 99% like a Cuban election style tilt within an institution that interfaces with government and the media? Is that a significant thing and would we treat it really differently if it was 98 to 99% Republicans? Yeah, I mean, I think we are used to those kinds of numbers in many of the, let's say elite institutions that shape our lives, right? So this is also true in universities, for the most part. And those universities churn out shmancy knowledge workers and then those shmancy knowledge workers go work at Twitter. And there's probably some additional filtering that further narrows the political bias or reduces political diversity, I guess you could say. I think it's relevant information. I just think most people want to then take that relevant information and do the wrong thing with it. So, you know, you sometimes hear this even from some of my most favoritist and sanest right wingers, like Jonah Goldberg and David French, we have to take back the institution like the fact that these institutions are so overwhelmingly left leaning or democratic leaning shows that it is time for some kind of major action. And I just don't know, I mean, I don't know what that major action would be like the major action is like start truth social or whatever the major action is start whatever the University of Austin University. What's that thing called? But that's great, right? Like start a thing. Start your own thing. Start your own thing. I know that it like start your own thing is out of fashion now, but screw you guys. I'm always out of fashion. So let's do it. And and then beyond that, I don't think there is a huge amount of remedy. You can take seriously the fact that the bias exists and that that's going to inform outputs like everybody group thinking their way to banning this story. But I also think the deeper problem is just like people want to believe in their guy. I mean, this is a perfect parallel to the National Enquirer Trump, you know, revelations early in the in the first campaign, where people who already liked Trump said, oh, the source is incredible and who knows, and it's all rumors. And anyway, it's probably not relevant to the election by and then never thought about it again. And that's what people who liked Biden hoped would happen with the Hunter Biden stuff. Twitter, as is predicted, threw out the Taibi thread. We have people over and over and over saying, guys, this is going to cause a backlash. It's going to do the opposite of the thing you hoped. And that did turn out to be true. But people are on a team, but everyone's on a team. We're on a team. Like, you know, I'm team neither of these jerk faces in this particular case, but makes it hard to print uniforms. You know, we are we reason staff is also overwhelmingly part of a shared a shared ideological bent. Now we say it out loud on purpose. We put it right there on our cover. And I think that's a better way. But yeah, I don't think it's that surprising to learn that Twitter is super, super, super biased in that way. And humans are making some of these decisions. So that's going to matter. The Jersey is just it's two jerk faces with a no sign around it. Yeah, smoking sign. I do think it's a real, you know, there's a real move to dismiss this as a, you know, this is nothing, you know, we've already seen this. Let's move on. I mean, it's, you know, it's the it's just a dress with a presidential semen stain on it. There's nothing new here. Let's just get on with our lives, this type of thing. It's really great to see inside the skunk works of how the hive mind and the group think at Twitter played out because there are corporate structures that could have been put in place or business practices that would have served as more checks on that. Like, you know, obviously, every system is prone to failure and everything like that. But, you know, Twitter is not is not an ideological monthly publication. You know, it's supposed to be if only something that allows people to communicate in real time. And I actually did part of the most important thing that Matt Taibbi wrote is, you know, the beginning, you know, like the throat clearing, as you called it, Matt, where he was talking about how, you know, what Twitter did is it allowed real time, you know, a real time mass media audience to form around particular topics. And that's what was so exciting about it. And that's what was so meaningful about it. And kind of getting back to something like that would be fantastic. And hopefully, that'll happen under Elon Musk. I'm not sure. But you get in the way when you have people who are like, I don't like this story. And so we're going to, you know, we're going to create a system where we're all like timid and scared and full of shit and end up censoring a story that's both real and relevant. So I do think that Twitter and Musk are to be commended here for just for the transparency, even if the form is somewhat frustrating and even if the revelations are maybe somewhat less than people had hoped for. The group that comes off worst out of all of this is the Russian paranoiac intelligence community that was warning that Hunter Biden's laptop was obviously Russian disinformation. If we go back just a couple of months to September, Olivia Nuzzi had a great story in New York Magazine, sort of going back over this, in which she contacted James Clapper and Michael Hayden, both of whom had signed a letter that got published in Politico under the headline, Hunter Biden's story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former Intel officials say. And she asked them, so what do you think now that we know it's real? And both of them basically just got really mad that she was asking about it. She should have asked Jonathan Shate while she was at it, that would have been pretty sweet. He wrote a lot of articles. One of the odd and unanticipated outcomes of all of this is Hunter Biden has become more humanized, I think. Partly he obviously had his own memoir and things like that, but somehow the story has shifted to him as gripless, meth addict with a whore problem as opposed to the useless son of a very well-positioned politician who's going to China and Ukraine and elsewhere to just make lots of money. He went from being Billy Carter on meth to being kind of a lovable presidential fuck-up to like Roger Clinton or something like that. This is a very particular interpretation of events, Nick. I'm not sure that America joins you in seeing Hunter Biden as a lovable fuck-up. We can check some polling data. He's disappearing. He's moving. I mean, he should be, but because it's really ultimately not about him. That's true. In fact, the malfeasance of those around him with respect to his fuck-ups was actually on so much of a larger scale that that became the story, but that's not, to Hunter Biden's credit, that's to the discredit of those who managed to fuck up even worse than leaving their laptop full of incriminating evidence somehow for Rudy Giuliani to find, which is a pretty substantial fuck-up. I think at this point, I don't know if Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton are still driving around the country taping podcasts like they were a couple of weeks ago. It would be great if they got Hunter Biden to join them in the car and maybe they pick up Rudy Giuliani at a Sinclair station somewhere in the petrified forest or something. And somehow Jeff Flake starts cutting coconuts bare chested just to tie the room together. Jeff Flake must be very upset that he ever left that island. Yeah. We all are, honestly. I want to share a particularly ridiculous headline. I have found a lot of the media reaction to this to be just telling on itself this comes from the rap, which is a Hollywood-based thing. Elon Musk is turning Hunter Biden's penis into a constitutional crisis. No joke. No. None of that. Stop it. You don't have to do that. It's not. No. There's an attempt at the minimization of the story to make it all about Hunter Biden's very visible if you're going to go through the various files of penis. But the thing that makes the story newsworthy is that he was involved in all kinds of overseas deals worth millions of dollars with unsavory people. And he was making references to people and that we would like to know who those people were. Hunter Biden does not come off as a guy who has some kind of natural winning business acumen. And yet got himself some pretty good jobs. It's worth looking into like fundamentally. I want to make sure that we touch on this notion here because I read the Donald Trump quote at the top here. There is a notion not just from Trump but from a lot of his supporters and maybe even people who are lukewarm towards him but who believe that the 2020 election that there were definitely thumbs on the scale. It was the outcome of it was impacted by decisions by social media companies and also by media media companies to suppress this story in particular and that it affected things. It is a similar accusation that one heard a lot of in 2016 and after 2016 when it came to Facebook and Russians and ads and Cambridge Analytica. I forget what they do but somehow they did it. I think they sell encyclopedias door to door. Yeah, I hope so. It's a... You can learn where your epididymus is. Do you guys remember that? It's Jimmy Whales' side hustle actually. Yeah. My question to the group that we can do quickly is do we think, Catherine, you can start, do we think that this impacted the 2020 election and do we think that the Facebook, Ruski, whatever impacted the 2016 election in any measurable way and how do we assess that? I think it's really hard to assess that. I think the baseline question, hey, what if Twitter's internal governance decisions did impact the election? It's okay if they did. I didn't enjoy it. I don't think this was a maximally healthy way to do fact finding about our candidates but the whole thing around political speech, the whole thing about the media and social media is that many of us are out here talking about what might happen in an election and who deserves to win an election and what the policy implications of that would be and what the personality and character implications of that would be and if it so happens that a private company made a decision or published or didn't publish speech that swayed an election, that's legal. That's okay. Now, again, the thing that I was looking for in this TaiIbi thread that was mostly not there and that I will be interested to hear if we learn more about other less hot button instances of kind of promotion or suppression of certain types of content, especially COVID misinformation, quote unquote misinformation, but this was not government chilling or prohibiting or censoring speech. That would be wrong, bad alarming, etc. Russians buying a couple of ads showing Jesus arm wrestling Donald Trump in 2016 on Facebook, I don't think that impacted the election, but if it did, that is no different than candidates running ads. That is no different than newspaper endorsements of candidates. That is no different than standing on the street corner with a sign. This is all protected speech and should be. Isn't there a difference when it's a foreign government buying the ad, especially when it's a foreign government pretending not to be a foreign government buying the ad? It's technically illegal. Yeah, that's my question. It is technically illegal. My smoking hot take, I guess, is like, I don't think it should be. I don't know. It's not enforceable. And also, we let foreign individuals speak in this country. In general, I find campaign finance restrictions of all kinds to be largely in violation of both the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment. I get it. I get why those laws exist, and I want to take, you know, that's like very low on my list of laws to eliminate is the thing that prohibits Russia from purchasing every ad in Times Square on the day before the election or whatever. That would be so great. It's like arm wrestling pictures. These all these things probably did influence the election. That's how we do elections. Everyone tries to influence everyone, and then we see who wins. Anything to add, Gents? Yeah, you know, I don't think it was determinative, which is a different way of saying what Catherine's getting at. Everything kind of matters. The fact of the matter is that Biden smoked Trump. He beat him handily. It was not close, and this story had it gone out as done because it did get a huge amount of attention. I don't think it would have been the difference maker in this, and that doesn't mean I am more worried about the way in which corporations or large platforms, large media outlets, either that our news focus like CNN or Fox News do things or places like Twitter, which presume and present as if they are arbiters of fairness and are just kind of letting people go. They need to do better. Twitter absolutely needs to do better. This is one of the reasons why I like Jack Dorsey in congressional testimony. He said, this was a mistake, and it won't happen again. Obviously he's no longer in charge of the company, but it was bad. But it didn't change the outcome of the election any more than Fox News broadcasting all of the Swiftboat vet stuff, which was mostly horse shit against John Kerry in 2004. That's not the reason why John Kerry lost. He lost because he kept running over secret service while snowboarding in Guistat. You didn't salute hard enough, Peter. Yeah, so I think it's hard to know whether it was determinative in the election. If I had to bet, I would bet that it wasn't. And here's the thing. Twitter made a bad decision, but Twitter's bad decision did not keep the information from getting out into the world. It was not actually suppressed from public discourse. The New York Post still published the story. The New York Post's story ran and was available online. People were able to talk about it. Even in some cases on Twitter, there was one person who published the story as a tweet thread and somewhere or another got it through, at least for some of the time. Yes, there was absolutely bad decision making on Twitter's part, but it's at least possible. Like you can imagine. It's hard to know because it's a counterfactual, but you can imagine that Twitter making the decision to suppress the story and then having a whole bunch of discussion about the suppression of the story actually meant that it got more publicity and more people heard about it. And so I just think that it's bizarre to suggest that this, this one bad decision by by Twitter's corporate management was the thing that changed the election and like that determined the outcome of the election. And like Catherine, I also believe that if it was, then that wouldn't necessarily be a problem. All right. We're going to get to our listener email of the week here in a moment. But first, friends, you might think you've done everything in your power to ensure your family in the case of a medical emergency. But what many of us don't realize is that health insurance won't always cover the full cost of, for example, an emergency medical flight. 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Okay, reminder to send us your pithy emails to roundtable.reason.com and thanks again to everyone who sent all those wild and woolly emails that we tried to plow through for the bonus videotaped Webathon episode of roundtable last week. This one comes from Jason H who writes in part, here in my hometown of NYC where apparently the carpet bagger Gillespie has chosen to make his home. Just earlier today, the Adams administration stated its intention to increase involuntary hospitalizations for homeless individuals suffering from severe mental illness. Essentially, they are seeking to expand the interpretation of the legal standard from hospitalizing those who are likely to cause serious harm to themselves or others to those whose mental illness prevents them from meeting their basic survival needs of food, clothing, shelter or medical care end quote. Notwithstanding the legitimate concerns over the state and involuntary hospitalizations appearing in the same sentence or nightmare scenarios about who may be labeled unable to meet their basic needs, perhaps someone consuming a large soda, would the roundtable care to weigh in on where the line may be here? At what point, if ever, should the state involuntarily hospitalize and or medicate someone to protect themselves or those around them? Nick, since you were invoked, why don't you go first? Yeah, I will get to the substance of the letter, but I just want to point out, unless Jason H is older than 59, I was loading diapers in the Flatlands neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1963, pal. So not a carpet bagger. I'm going to choose to imagine you, Nick, as a baby just like putting pallets of diapers on a truck. That's how I'm sure I was. I was precocious. I'm going to imagine you with one of those T-shirt launchers that they use it, like basketball games, except you're loading the T-shirt launcher with cloth diapers. You betcha. Loaded diapers, which I believe isn't that the name of the older brother's band in middle school, the worst years of my life. Or maybe in Diary of a Wimpy Kid? It might be in Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Yeah, one of those, yeah. You may now answer the question. Oh, yeah. I'm actually, well, a couple of things. And I suspect on this call, as well as in Libertarian World more directly, I am more sympathetic to involuntary commitment of homeless people or of picking them up. And this is partly borne out of having lived for part of the pandemic in Los Angeles, particularly Venice, where there was no attempt to even assess the mental health needs of people or help them get off the street in a voluntary way. In New York, they are fairly stringent. They house a lot of the homeless people at night when the temperature goes below a certain amount. They have people who come around and actually coax people and say, hey, do you want to stay somewhere, et cetera. They move them to shelters and things like that. And it's one of the reasons why the homeless population in New York is not as problematic as it is in places like LA and San Francisco that refuse to do that. This involuntary commitment has to be a very, very high bar. But by the same token, I think the complete unwillingness of many Libertarians to talk about mental illness in public spaces and the effect that that has not simply on the individual itself but on actual quality of life is a problem. We need to be talking about this more just the other day in a subway station. There was a semi-naked guy on a big piece of cardboard in a train station shouting and screaming at police officers. Incoherently, I don't know what happened, but I don't think that person... Yeah, after they put me in jail and gave me some drugs and shock treatment, I really, my memory is just not so good anymore. All I think about is loading diapers. No, but seriously, I didn't stick around to see how that ended, but that's an issue. And the mental illness that is actually real needs to be addressed when it starts moving into the streets and threatening people as well as harming the people who are evidencing it. Catherine, will you let this pro-involuntary commitment sentiment stand? I mean, I'm not sure I can make Nick sit or stand any kind of way, but yeah, so I will say I actually have become increasingly sassian as I get older. That is increasingly convinced by at least parts of Thomas Sass's argument, which is pretty deep in reasons DNA, that in many cases, diagnoses of mental illness or allegations of insanity are sort of become tools of state power. And also the sort of more extreme version, maybe a caricature of his view, depending on who you listen to, said mental illness doesn't exist at all, that there's literally no such thing as mental illness. I do not think that, but I do see, I can see in front of me, partially thanks to some original reporting by reason that very clearly we do use diagnoses of mental illness as weapons of state power, that we do imprison people, I think we can see this in the way that we handle sex offenders, where kind of criminal conduct and mental illness overlap in confusing ways, the kind of interminable commitment in which there is no clear way out for many sex offenders, especially in California. That makes me very, very wary of saying anything that sounds anything like, maybe we need to be doing more of this. And I agree that the kind of, whatever we're calling it these days, urban disorder often powered by people who are not fully in charge of their mental state. But again, just very, very, very, very, very hesitant to say, we should lock people up. We as libertarians, and I think it's just like compassionate people, should absolutely consider that the last step. I'm not saying Nick is not doing that, but I think that the seeing this in front of you, seeing kind of, for reasons like, I don't think people are more mentally ill than they were, five years ago. There are other factors that are pushing people into the streets right now. There are surveys showing that at least amongst people who are sort of, let's say, somewhat more functioning, not homeless, there is actually at least more self-reported mental health disorders happening right now. COVID-related depression and whatever is leading someone to be screaming naked on a subway platform, I think are mostly unrelated. With that person though, because I don't think we're talking about like, you have, and I have an aunt who had this in the 40s. She was kind of mouthy and she ended up getting shock treatment. Because it's like, what's the fuck? That's one scenario. That's pretty messed up. When you have somebody who is standing on a street corner, and I've seen this on Bleecker Street in Lafayette, taking a shit in the middle of the day on the street corner, are you just like, hey, you be you, but you be the best you you can be? Or do they get arrested? Do they get a summons? I mean, like that's what I think most people are talking about. I agree, but this is where I actually think that we have to address the root causes. People are right. I mean, there is the sort of specific acute moment, but why are there so many more specific acute moments right now? It's not because more people are schizophrenic. It's not because more people are suddenly desperately seriously mentally ill. It's because of a bunch of other things that are going on, including economic factors, including the way that there's all kinds of stuff here, the way we handle zoning, the way we handle welfare benefits, the way our medical system is working and how overtaxed it is right now. Yeah, but Catherine, you've got to remove the pooper. You've got to remove the pooper. You know, I'm not going to go hard on you can't arrest the pooper right now, but I really... And then it's like, remove. Remove where? And then it becomes an interest. And you know, and I'm Stasi, I'm Stasi and plus Foucauldi. And so I get almost all diagnoses or all categorization, whether it's by the state or a doctor or by a relative is a form of power to kind of control people's behavior. But you take that person, if you put them into, you know, the prison system or the criminal justice system, you know, there's a reason why there's supposedly, you know, like 300,000 mentally ill people in federal prisons alone because we're not treating them for mental illness or we're not giving them the tools or the drugs or something to come back. But I mean, you know, it seems like it's a real issue, you know, like the person screaming on the street corner can't be, can't just, you can't just let that happen all day long and all night long. I'm basically somewhere between Nick and Catherine on this, maybe not surprisingly. The thing that I want to add to this discussion that has not been brought up too much is that first, when you say we're going to expand the use of involuntary commitment, the more you, which is what Adams is saying right here is the more you expand it, the more power the state takes to do that, the more likely there is for abuse or misapplication, right? Because the street pooper and Nick's aunt exist in some sense on a continuum, right? Like on the one hand, there's somebody who's clearly not in control of their faculties and having like deep breakdown of their ability to function as a normal human being. And then on the other hand, there is a person who is a little bit annoying at a dinner at the dinner table. And somewhere in between, there's like the point at which the state stops intervening. Or I guess in this case, the state didn't stop at the annoying at the dinner table level. And you have to, and like it's very, very difficult to draw that line. And inevitably, I mean, just look at CJ Sierra Mela's reporting on Florida and some of the involuntary commitment abuses there, right? You just see that when the state takes more power to says we're going to do more of it, then that means there is more potential for abuse at the margins, even if most of the cases are people who we could agree are really having a lot of trouble in their lives. The other thing I would say is that during the pandemic and in the aftermath of the pandemic, we saw governments all over the country, local governments for the most part, shut down attempts by charities to house and help the homeless. And the Christian Britschke has reported on this for us to great effect and read his reporting. It is just incredibly infuriating churches, local community groups that wanted to have safe places where people could sleep in cars or wanted to build things to build facilities where they could house homeless people, got caught up in zoning rules and all sorts of stupid local politics and people just saying, well, you know, we don't want that in our neighborhood. And the result is that some neighborhood ends up with a homeless camp rather than rather than a shelter where people can actually sleep and be off of the streets. And so I think as libertarians, you know, we might we might say, okay, look, the guy who's flinging poo on the street, that guy, he should probably end up in some sort of facility. And you can say, right, like the extreme cases, maybe you can say that there's some sort of role for the state there. But the thing we should be most focused on the thing that I think that libertarians should pay attention to most are the ways in which the state is actually making is actually exacerbating this problem by stopping charities and then also by abusing its power to take in people who do not need to be committed. I will say I saw like just a really great, I can't remember it was a tweet or post of some kind, that was just like activist for mental health, you know, for for mental illness acceptance, wishes for a world in which there's more visibility and understanding of mental illness, the monkey's paw curls, right? Because we now have a world with like a huge amount of visibility and discourse about mental illness, both in this extreme example of kind of, again, I hate this term, I wish I could think of a better term urban disorder stuff, but also, you know, every 18 year old in America now has like disassociated identity disorder or whatever. It's kind of cool and trendy to be mentally ill. And the two sides of that spectrum and sort of the way that we are swinging between them is going to produce some really, really dysfunctional outcomes in terms of the policy sphere and maybe also in terms of the clinical sphere. So that I think we are still at the beginning of screwing this up quite badly. And so I just, you know, I don't want to look back later and say, hey, I'm a libertarian, but but like Nick said a bunch of butts in his answer and like those those butts, like I don't want to be a part of what becomes John Soliano moving. I don't want to be part of what becomes what could be a really, really damaging kind of return to 1970s style institutionalization. Eric Adams isn't calling for, you know, that hospitalizing the kids who have Twitter, you know, TikTok Tourette's, right? Like which is a thing that the kids like a go on TikTok and then diagnose themselves with Tourette's because they start doing a bunch of sort of weird vocal ticks that aren't actually Tourette's. But it's not actually all that hard to imagine that parents, you know, sort of get concerned about their kids and then report this, these, you know, report their kids to authorities. And then somebody says, well, look, we have expanded power to commit people who are who are mentally ill now, maybe, maybe we can use that power. And you end up with with kids who are just like going through basically normal kid adolescent stuff committed because of this. Yeah, I think that's always a serious concern. But and I'll go to Matt, because I know he likes any, any reference of a Van Halen, you know, discography. But I personally know people whose lives were saved almost certainly saved by 5150s, you know, where they were perceived to be a threat to themselves or others, and they were involuntarily held or they were held in a hospital for, you know, 48 or 72 hours when the original hold gets expires. They do have to make a recommendation and there is oversight, you know, of illegal nature. That is one way to make sure that something that is actually good and useful and is a use of state power is not abused. There's not a good history of this because the, you know, throughout certainly throughout the 20th century, you know, psychiatric evaluations have always been used to control unruly populations. But there is a subset of people in that who are violent to others or violent to themselves that really benefit as the society from applying, you know, certain types of interventions in a really, you know, consistent, systematic and supervised way. Quick points here. 5150 is both a better album and album name, certainly than OU812. To refer everyone to CJ's piece from about this, Eric Adams' plan to involuntarily hospitalized mentally ill homeless people will face legal challenges. The headline, Annie goes through a lot of the legal questions. That's very interesting. I know that you desperately want to move on, but you're not allowed. I have to say one more thing, which is that I did my senior thesis in college on whether or not there would be a legal way to write contracts for people with cyclical or recurring mental illness to establish the terms under which they could be committed. And it was like an attempt to solve some of these problems in the context of a philosophy degree. So a spoiler, I didn't solve any of them, but maybe you caused them, but I think that there is something there like that we are we are under exploring ways in which people who do have periods of clarity, periods where they are a mass and periods where they're okay to establish their own terms of when they want to be helped and in what way sound available for everyone, but more people than we think. Continuing my answer, Catherine. Dive her down. I'm sorry. Once you start talking about Van Halen, I'm asleep, so sorry. No, but that you mentioned bad policy outcomes, I would argue we have one right now, which is that there is not a day that I go out into the society where I live and go on a subway station where I don't see. Where you do not defecate, Matt Welch? Where I don't see a jabbering lunatic who I think might be a threat to him or herself or to someone around them. And that is the status quo that Eric Adams is addressing. I think that for sure, Suderman is right that it will be used badly. Where in New York, things get used badly by cops. That's kind of what happens. And also, it is an actual problem. I think the my standard is, and I don't know where to draw the line to answer the actual question, but is that there should be a notion towards that of public disorder, disruption, intoxication, craziness, that there's a line in between where there's a huge gap in between just removing someone from a public situation in which they are doing the sort of threatening either to themselves or other people type of things and then one flow of the cuckoo's nest. There's difference. You can, okay, come with me. We're going to go over here and we're going to have someone look at you doesn't necessarily mean involuntarily hospital commitment. It's worth looking at and we live in a society. We live in a place, in a public place. And I think there should not be the default expectation that you're going to get a sense of menace in public or just a grotesque kind of filth. And I don't know what the solution is, but I think that identifying it as a problem is fine. Anyways, let's go to our end of podcast, what we have been consuming. Nick, do you want to lead us? Yeah. And can I just point out, Matt, that one flow of the cuckoo's nest McMurphy is a statutory rapist who then chooses to fake mental illness to get into the insane asylum because he figures it's an easier gig. And one of the big reveals is that almost everybody in the ward has signed themselves in. So it's a complicated picture of even a total mental institutions and badly for almost everybody involved. And my mother worked at the place where they filmed that. Wow. And Salem Oregon. So what I have been consuming and torn because I saw a fantastic magic show by Aussie Wind, which I think I'll talk about next week. Instead of this week, I am reading Matthew Dalek, the historians, Birchers, how the John Birch Society radicalized the American right. It's a history of the John Birch Society and of Robert Welch, the candy magnate who founded it in the late 50s with a kind of murderer's row of wealthy industrialists, including Fred Koch, the father of Charles Koch and David Koch, to fight communism and moral perversion and a variety of other kind of insane conspiracy theories. And what is great about Dalek's book is that it kind of explains how the society came to be and how it actually ended up informing a lot of the right. He debunks the notion that national review and particularly William F. Buckley wrote the John Birch Society out of the growing conservative movement that was building steam around Barry Goldwater. He points out that Buckley cut out Welch, but not really the Birch Society and that that's typical of many people who ended up moving from Goldwater into Reagan and beyond that they publicly kind of attacked some of the people in the Birch Society, but they believed many of their conspiratorial theories, especially about stuff like sex education in school and that the Trilateral Commission and that globalization was a problem. The most interesting thing about the book is that he talks about how the John Birch Society is a joke now. I mean, it's no longer a powerful potent force of ideas in its current form, but that it actually, through people like Papu Canaan and people like Ron Paul, many of its chief ideas and slogans such as ending the Fed and building walls to protect us from an onslaught of mostly Mexican immigrants have become and that all trade agreements are somehow capitulation to international communism, even if it doesn't exist anymore, that those ideas are alive and well in the contemporary Republican Party. A fantastic book filled with lots of interesting, weird, short vignettes as well. So, Birchers, How the John Birch Society Radicalized American Right by Matthew Dalek. Hi, I recommend it. Catherine, what have you been consuming? You know, I realized that I had neglected to mention a book. This sometimes happens when people are nice enough to send us early copies of books. I read them, and then I say, I'll talk about that when it comes out, and then I forget. So, a while back, I read Tim Sandefur's new book, Freedoms Furies, and we have a review of it upcoming, but it's a delightful book about the three first ladies of libertarianism, Isabel Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand. I do think we talked about this book briefly maybe on the podcast. I was trying to remember, but I didn't want to be sure I mentioned it because it's good if you're into a little bit of libertarian history. There's not been enough biographical work done on these women, and they are fascinating weirdos. I will say a bunch of people on staff have made the joke. Every time you see this title, you do think it's Freedoms Furies, which is a whole different book. It is not that book. I'm happy to report. Yet to be written. Yet to be written. Yet to come into being in our lives. But yeah, very good. I did give a blurb for this book, which I must have taken some ambient and then written this blurb because it's like the most ridiculous. It's about Valerie Jarrett. I'm going to carry this book around in my purse and hit people upside the head with it when they ask me why there are no libertarian women is something like, what the blurbs this? And it's like, I absolutely stand by it, but I'm not. I don't know. I don't know what. What is the, does he explain why the libertarian movement is headed by like women or these three women or what drove them to come up with this joint philosophy? He offers many themes and no definitive answers, I would say. I'm not sure there is a definitive answer when we are attempting to generalize about demographic groups, but the book is delightful and in many ways a better look at particularly the work of Isabel Patterson than anything else that I've read, even including introductions to collections of her work. So it's a Cato book. You can grab it. And I do think there is also a panel that was held at Cato last week featuring reason's own Elizabeth Nolan Brown talking about the book as well. So you can get your libertarian lady content in whatever form you prefer. A fun fact about Rose Wilder Lane, today is her 137th birthday. Hey, happy birthday, dude. Peter, what have you been? I was just going to say I'm looking at the cover of Freedom Spheres, which is a Cato book, and I'm disappointed that neither the statue of Liberty, Uncle Sam, or a crying eagle is on the cover. There's no eagle perched on the Capitol dome, so it is disappointing. Yeah. I watched The Fableman's. It's the new fictionalized semi-autobiographical film by Steven Spielberg. It's kind of like a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, right? Like one of those comic book movies where they're all connected. You know, it's like filled with sneaky Easter eggs and references and fan theories, except the universe in question isn't a comic book universe. It's Spielberg's life and the formative films of the 1970s and 80s that sort of made his career and the careers of his contemporaries. For example, there's a whole extended sort of allusion to Brian De Palma's early work, blow up in particular, and just references to like E.T. and Indiana Jones, Martin Sorsese, George Lucas, all of the sort of new Hollywood kind of figureheads, as well as a whole recurring bit about John Ford that just pays off really wonderfully with a delightful kicker scene. And so but mostly this is a movie about Spielberg's upbringing and about his parents. And so in some ways it's an attempt to explain himself, but he doesn't really attempt to explain himself directly. Instead, he sort of, he suggests that his work is defined as sort of as the interplay between his parents, between his engineer brain dad, who was a sort of California computer scientist, and his art brain mom, who was a sort of classically, who in this movie is a classically trained pianist who sort of her art was stifled and she never really got to perform. And it says, if you asked Spielberg, tell me who you are. And instead of saying things directly about himself, he just replied by telling the story of his parents and who they were and the difficult dynamic between them, because that's how he sees himself or at least that's how he presents himself here in this movie, right. And so whatever that is between his mom and his dad, the troubles they had, the difficulty that that created for Spielberg and his siblings, that is how he defines himself as this sort of marriage of art on the one hand and kind of engineer brain on the other hand. And you can see it in his films, if you're a fan of his work, right, is that on the one hand, you know, he has this very sort of saccharine emotional streak. And on the other hand, he's just totally obsessed with the technology of cinema and sort of and the material sort of physical stuff of it. The movie is a little bit too long at two and a half hours, but it hit me pretty hard in part for personal reasons, but partly because it's a fairly effective portrait of the interplay between art and life and the ways in which art can be an escape from life's pain and difficulties as well as a healthy way of dealing with them. One of the things that comes out when you watch documentaries about Steven Spielberg is that he blamed his dad for the dissolution or the dysfunction of his parents' marriage, thought that he stepped out on on mom and then discover pretty late in life that it was the opposite, like made a bunch of movies about how dads totally suck early in his career. And they're like, whoops. So I'll be curious to see. So that it was in this movie, the teenage version of him, Sammy discovers that as a teenager. And in fact, that diploma sequence that I was referencing, it is a sequence of him putting together home video or I guess home film, cutting it together and realizing through the power of cinema that he is seeing something that's happening with his mother and with his family that he couldn't see otherwise. Because cinema reveals the truth, man. Does his hilarious comedy 1941 Matt's favorite Spielberg movie get mentioned at all? It's the only Spielberg movie. I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that that's the movie at the heart of Spielberg's conception of himself. Yes. Speaking of Spielberg, I watched a movie that was produced by his younger sister Nancy Spielberg, documentary called Above and Beyond, great little tiny little documentary from 2014 about the development of the Israeli Air Force. And I know that doesn't sound very interesting, but it is. It's basically birthed in the founding battles wars of Israel's formation in 1948, mostly American Air Force vets, World War II vets who'd flown, some of whom had the tenuous at best connections to Judaism, let alone the state of Israel, which didn't really exist. But they were pressed into or persuaded into serving, and just like a ridiculous amount of scheming to try to get any kind of airplanes into the country. At the time, there was a guy named Al Schwimmer, a Wheeler dealer in like Burbank, California, who like invented a fake airline. And then they flew parts inside of a big plane and went to like South America and then like Brazil and Africa and up here and ended up training a very small unit in Czechoslovakia post war. And from there, finally snuck into the country right as five neighboring countries were invading Israel in May of 1948. And it's just delightful, a little like story of and they get a whole bunch of the pilots and the people, including Pee Wee Herman's dad. They don't get him, but they get Pee Wee Herman and his mom talking about totally crazily handsome father and the development of this mostly foreign air force that turned the tide in some of the wars at crucial moments in very, very unlikely formation. This tiny little thing above and beyond 2014. You can get on Netflix and Amazon and elsewhere. Check it out. I enjoyed it. All right. That's all the time that we have. Again, there's the final hours of the Webathon. I think there's another match going on by the time that you hear this. So where you can double your donations or someone's offered to double the donations within a certain amount of money, et cetera. Get in there while they're getting good, reason.com slash donate. And thank you for that. And thank you very much. People were filling out the donation form. A whole lot of people said nice things about the round table. And it wasn't just because I told you to volunteer stuff and a little bunch of nice stuff about reason and interesting things too. And appreciate all of that. The great feedback. Very fun. We'll have a post growing up soon that corrals some of that together. Listen to all of our podcasts at reason.com slash podcast. Nick, do you have anything to advertise speakeasy wise or any other events in New York City? Yeah, sure. On Wednesday, we'll actually be rolling the video and audio of the last speakeasy with Caitlin Bailey of Old Pros, a sex worker rights group that seeks to decriminalize and destigmatize sex work. It was by common acclamation the best of these live events that we've done. She's just a fantastic presence. And so it's, you know, very entertaining, but also edifying. And then on January 4th, Wednesday, January 4th, we'll be the next speakeas and we'll be talking with Andrew Tatarski, who helped pioneer the concept of harm reduction rather than prohibition when it comes to drug treatment, drug laws and kind of drug policy. All right. Thank you again. We'll catch you next week. Goodbye.