 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your weekly libertarian, mostly peaceful oasis of thought and sanity in a world going increasingly mad, brought to you by the magazine of free minds and free markets. I am Matt Welch, joined by Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Catherine Mangue Ward. Hello, everyone. Howdy. Hey, Matt. Happy Monday. Before we get started, a somber note of condolence to our great pal, Suderman, here, who lost his big guy, Blake, bullmastiff, on Friday and has written very poetically about it on his podcast and the substack and et cetera. Peter, we're very, very sorry for the loss of your pal. Thanks. I miss him. And quite a few of these podcasts were recorded at my house in my home office with Blake sitting on the couch behind me. So I lost a good friend and a podcast buddy. I mean, he wasn't making noise. That's a large animal to not make noise during a podcast. One of the great things about bullmastiffs is that they are quiet. As a breed, in fact, we're bred to be quiet because they were bred to help the game wardens on big British estates and their job was to protect the estates from poachers. And so their breed nickname is the Game Wardens Night Dog. The whole thing was that they wanted a dog who was a little bigger than an English bulldog so that he could knock somebody down, but smaller than an English mastiff so that he could run real fast to knock somebody down. And so they are non-legal property protection dogs. They are great libertarian dogs. They have a great appreciation for private property. But also, you know, their job is just to knock somebody down and then wait until their boss comes over and says what to do with that person. But that means that they are very, very quiet because you don't want the poachers who you're sneaking up on and trying to knock over to hear you. It's terrified that there's a breed that's larger than that. Oh, yeah. The English mastiffs are literally, they weigh more than me. It is very common for a boy to weigh 220, 230 pounds. Good. They don't weigh more than me, I guess. All right. Let's get straight into that's a joke, by the way, people. Get straight into the news over the weekend in a telegraphed act of retaliation for Israel bombing the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which killed 16 people, the Islamic Republic of Iran sent more than 300 combined drones and missiles, including 120 or so ballistic missiles into Israel, making the first ever direct attack from Iran to Israel. After decades of proxy wars all around the Jewish states, remarkably, almost none of the missiles hit their intended targets, military and civilian. Most were reportedly intercepted by a combination of Israel's vaunted Iron Dome and Arrow 3 interception systems with additional military assistance from the United States, Jordan, France and maybe even Saudi Arabia. Iran pretended this was some kind of major victory and then said it considered the matter closed Israel does not necessarily subscribe to that point of view and is saying that they will think about a manner of retaliation in a time and method of their own choosing. President Joseph Robinette Biden II said that the United States stands steadfastly with Israel, but also the White House is whispering very loudly, please don't retaliate too much, Israel, we will see what happens there. This is all nerve rattling stuff, Nick Gillespie, so why don't you lead us off with a quickish round of reactions of what's a takeaway that you have from this weekend's fireworks and what it might or might not portent? I think the biggest takeaway is when you see the way Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, have been condemning Iran is that there's a growing recognition among Arab neighbors of Israel and countries in the region that they have more in common with Israel than they do with Iran and I think this may well be a turning point towards normalizing relations among Arab countries in Israel in a way that certainly Iran when it was pushing Hamas to commit terroristic violence against Israel was not expected. Peter, I see that speaker, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and I do remember his name, it's hard, he should have a more memorable name, has now said he's going to sort of speed up House consideration of aid to Israel as well as Ukraine, which has been kind of on the back burner for a while. Do you have a sense there in Washington, D.C., where you are of what, if any, kind of political fallout there is from this? I think it's easy to remember his name if you just think of his nickname as being big. I don't know exactly how this is going to play out in Congress, because right now there are two very distinct ways to view this event. And the first is as a sort of a bit of war theater on the part of Iran as a theatrical attack that was not really designed to do a whole lot of damage, but instead was designed to be maximally showy, to be something that they could be seen doing, right? And that, you know, the evidence for this is, well, you know, they sent the slow drones and virtually, you know, 99% of the projectiles that were sent in were shot down. There was, you know, for an attack of this size and scale, there was relatively little damage. But then the other way to view it, which I also don't think is unreasonable, is they sent ballistic missiles to attack major population centers and military outlets, military installations in, you know, a rival state. And this was not done by proxies. So I should say this was not done solely by proxies. The Iran, the Iranian state did this as a state actor. And that is that is an act of war. And if another country fired missiles, even missiles that were kind of sort of intended to be shot down or intercepted at Washington, DC or at New York, I think I would probably at least very much sympathize with the people who said, you know what, we should probably strike back and stop them from having the capability of firing again. So exactly how that debate plays out, which is it's this is not just a debate between right and left. I think this is a debate between within amongst the right of center here in America, exactly how that debate plays out and who wins and what perception ends up winning out is going to determine to some extent how the aid package debate plays out in Congress. Catherine, your old friends, the neocons don't really exist so much anymore. If it was the good old days and the bad old days combined, they would all be about let's get Israel to preemptively take out the Iranian nuclear program using bombardment and other things like that. Do you hear any noise from those chapters and or just what is your kind of a big takeaway from this weekend? The main thing that I keep thinking about is the sort of all the reports have contained the same line of like, well, there was one known real major casualty, which is this seven year old Bedouin girl. And it just it's like too metaphorical. It's like too aggressively metaphorical that these major powers would be, as Peter said, you know, is it all theater? Is it real? Will it be theater that turns real? We don't know, but meanwhile, this girl is bleeding from the head, wrapped in her Mickey Mouse blanket. And I just, you know, that's that's what this whole war feels like. And, you know, neocons have never had a good answer to that girl. And they don't now. I do think that there is this sense that there was a kind of a line of like, you know, the American intervention clearly defensive, right? But still active intervention in the in the theater could be a seal that's broken. And I think that to the extent that, as you say, neocons exist anymore, they're a little excited about that in a way that's kind of unseemly like, oh, God, we're finally in there. We're finally shooting something. And so I hope that they are they are wrong about the momentum behind that action. My feeling about this is, in part, just the moral weirdness or strategic weirdness, or I don't know what of symbolic bombing. Like symbolic bombing that you know is not really going to work because there is this massively superior missile defense system. And Nick and I are old enough to remember when everyone said that missile defense systems would never work. And these ones really seem to work well. Finally, 40 or 50 years later after this was originally something that was talked about, but it's so strange. And I think it also led up in the run up to October 7th. You know, I mean, there's been Gaza continues to fire rockets actually haven't looked in the last week or so. But throughout after October 7th, Gaza and Hamas from Gaza just sort of routinely fires rockets into population centers in Israel and almost none of them land, but occasionally one or two of them do. That's weird. And what happens to both the fire of impotent weapons that are sent towards civilian population centers and the defenders? Like, you know what? We got this. It's not that big of a deal. It's just such a weird thing. And it's weirder still when you think that Iran doesn't really have that much of an air defense system. Like if there are people who wanted to send planes over Iran and they were mad and wanted to bomb things, they would succeed if they were pretty good. All of that is just strikes me as a strange, strange and kind of pathological calculus. I don't have any great ideas about how to to break out of it. But it's just but it's just odd. And I mean, as is the possibility, I wouldn't say probability that like Iran is right. Like, OK, we consider this matter closed. I threw a glove on the floor and I danced around it. And now we're done with this particular exchange of things. And sorry, it's seven year old Bedouin girl. It's just. Yeah, it's obviously not the same, you know, in a sort of one to one kind of analogue way because there are real munitions and sometimes real deaths involved. At the same time, we see this sort of performance oriented, you know, politically, political, imperative driven kind of theater in politics all the time now. And this is a huge amount of what politics has become over the last 10 or 20 years is we're going to we don't actually want to do the thing we say we want to do. We just want to be seen doing a performance of that thing. And again, I don't want to, you know, don't don't take this metaphor too far because it's very different when you're passing a resolution of disapproval that isn't actually designed to have any real legislative effect versus when you are firing a rocket that actually, you know what, maybe it hits somebody house, somebody's house. I don't want to say that those are exactly the same thing. But there's a way in which these exist on a kind of a continuum in a spectrum and in which this war is being this, you know, sort of low key war between or or semi secret and now not that secret war between Iran and Israel is being fought, at least part partially as a as a form of theater and performance, not to not to actually engage in war, but just to appease the people who want war so that they can see that something is warlike or sort of that sort of feels warty is happening is happening. Well, and it's worth remembering that Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism and that they were just implicated in in past attacks on in Latin America that supposedly were from Israelis and things like that. So this, I mean, I don't think we should be trying to read into too much of what Iran is doing to dance around war because, you know, they were clearly part of the Hamas attack. They've been giving money to, you know, they are supporting the Houthis. They are an exporter of chaos in that region. And so for them, you know, like, I don't I don't think we should be like, Oh, well, you know, but they don't really mean it. They do. Yeah, Nick, and also just, you know, they're literally encircling Israel from from all sides, with the exception of the Mediterranean in constant harassment and deadly harassment. So yeah, it's not some kind of minor thing, even if this particular thing didn't hit a lot. I want to stick to the broader issue of foreign policy and defense. If we can, the House of Representatives on Friday by a vote of 273 to 147, so a comfortable margin, reauthorized the notorious Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, also known as FISA, through the year 2026, it'll go to the Senate, it'll get signed into law probably by President Biden. Section 702 allows for the government to warrantlessly collect the digital communications, i.e., almost all of them, of non Americans on foreign soil. And if those non Americans just happen to be communicating with Americans at the time digitally, then well, maybe all of those communications will be collected by the National Security Administration or whatever agency as well at the time. Again, without a warrant, that's just collateral collected, is the way that we sort of treat it. And maybe we'll take some of that information and share it with the FBI. As part of their domestic investigations, things that we've learned ever since the Edward Snowden revelations 11 years ago, lawmakers did have an opportunity last week to add an amendment requiring a warrant for that collection to happen on Americans. And so therefore be more in line with, I don't know, the United States Constitution and the Fourth Amendment Protection. It's thereof that amendment failed by a vote of 212 to 212. There was even a representative who said that she would have voted to have that but couldn't make it because she was sick. Katharine, can you explain out there slowly to skeptics about why exactly libertarians are not serious about defending this country? Yeah, we are, we are the worst, that is totally correct. And, and it's definitely going to be our fault when the terrorists win or something. No, I mean, this is this, you know, FISA has to be reauthorized every four years, I guess now it has to be authorized, reauthorized in two years. And that is the only silver lining of this is that we do get to keep having this fight because it's really a very important fight. Like this is, as you say, this is a law that allows Americans to be surveilled unconstitutionally. It's it's just it's manifestly unconstitutional. And it's wild to me that we can't get Congress to see it that way. I do think it's interesting that the the MAGA folks who oppose the reauthorization in this case, see it as sort of the FBI needs to be reigned in and that the deep state needs to be checked. Not wrong. Not the way that I would emphasize that on the way I would message it, I think it's the privacy of American citizens, the constitutional rights, the civil liberties of American citizens need to be protected. But this has been a way in for a tremendous amount of FBI and other law enforcement overreach, and it should be stopped. And I guess we're going to try again in two years. Yeah. And to follow up on that, just, you know, since since this program became public because of Snowden revelations. In 2013, there were about 90,000 targets searches done in this material under 702 section 702. In 2021, that number had increased to 232,000. So there's a massive increase in the number of searches going on. And then we don't know how many Americans get wrapped up in that kind of stuff. But in 2022, it came out that because of overly broad searches, a US senator had been included in the material that the FBI was kind of pouring through and things like that. So there's a real serious issue here of overreach by our intelligence agencies, who consistently fail to show how, you know, abrogating the rights of American citizens somehow makes us safer from terrorism. That's, you know, that is what Catherine is saying, like we need to focus on that. But it is also true. This is the deep state or the or the, you know, the national security state at work here. And the FBI and the CIA and the NSA have done nothing to assuage fears that they just do whatever the hell they want. And then don't even apologize for it later. I mean, this goes back to the seventies and the revelations from the church commission and things like that. So it's good that this came up for a vote and that at the very least that, you know, the reauthorization period has changed from four years to two years, but it should be struck down. Nick, I think you're just not convinced because you don't have access to the special intelligence. Yeah, no, I'm joking, but I'm also sort of like I'm annoyedly serious here because, you know, Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, Mr. Big, used to be against reauthorizing FISA in this way, right? Like used to be one of the critics of this. And now he whipped votes for it. And his explanation for his flip was, well, you know, I got access to more sensitive intelligence. He won't tell us what it is. They won't ever tell you what it is that's convincing them. They won't ever show you the proof or the results of any of this stuff. And when you do see it because then everybody would know. I mean, because that would be also Trump Trump is like this to where Trump authorized this in 2018 when Paul Ryan went to him and said, Oh, you we really need this. Trump was originally against it. And the reason the Republicans voted against it on mass this time is because Trump said simply kill FISA. And then when he thought that it was somehow implicated that this rule was implicated in the the you know, actions against Carter Page has aid, but they weren't. But wait, Trump misunderstood how legislation works. No, and it's also a situational situational libertarianism, right? And so we got to take it where we can. We take it when a UFC fighter invokes Mises and loving America at the end of a successful fight. We'll take this. Yeah, he also said here. Go ahead. No, just I think one lesson that's worth sort of highlighting out of this conversation is that on this issue, the normies, the centrist types, they are wrong because who whipped this vote? It was Speaker of the House Johnson, right? And then it was the Biden administration, which spent a huge amount of effort over the last week or two, but doing behind the scenes lobbying, trying to get Democrats who some of whom were you know, wavering on this, some of whom have civil liberties concerns trying to get Democrats on board, and particularly with the warrantless part of this, right? And to be clear, the Biden administration was against have the warrant requirements, and they wanted that to fail and they whipped votes to ensure that the warrant requirement that would have brought this in line with the Constitution would fail. And so this is a case where the chaos caucus, the weirdos, the MAGA types, the guys who are often like we disagree with them. I think they are in many ways not always productive legislators or members of Congress, right? And I think they are not, they do not always have the best interests of the country in mind. In this case, they are correct. They are the good guys. They're also the the the remnants, the last few stragglers from the Libertarian ish Tea Party generation, of which there's still some people, you know, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, they've all, Thomas Massey, you could say Chip Roy, too, if you wanted to stretch your neck a little bit out of the joint. Chip Roy was out there really complaining about Mike Johnson flipping his vote. He thought that Johnson was with him and he had back to Johnson for the speaker. There was about 124 Republicans voted against or voted against the or voted for the amendment, excuse me, and about 126 Democrats voted against it. So expect those numbers to shift depending if Trump, if this comes up in two years and Trump is president, the sides will shift again. Well, he also said over the weekend, and I think Eric Bain will be writing about this on our site prediction. I'm not this over the weekend. I'm not a big fan of FISA, but I told everybody do what you want. So yes, the situational libertarianism is not something that you can depend on remotely. And that also includes, I think, things related to Julian Sange, the WikiLeaks founder. This is a transition, but only a mild one. President Biden apparently last week under questioning in an interview said he was quote considering dropping the case against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Sange, the extradition case and the case and the extradition proceedings. He stands accused of violating the 1917 espionage Act by publishing classified U.S. documents. I don't know at all if that means that there's any hope for that happening. It's better to hear him say that he's considering it than that he is not. I think Trump in the past has said that he might consider things and then he didn't do anything either. Catherine, can you just walk us through again why libertarians are in favor of espionage, but more seriously, why is this an important basic free speech case and what we should hope for Julian Sange to have this case dropped despite his haircut and his dancing? Yeah. So this is, I mean, just another case where, you know, somebody made it possible for the American public to know what the what the state was up to. And this is, you know, this is something where it seems so obvious that the pursuit of Sange, the kind of very aggressive stance that previous presidents have taken toward him and toward extradition, are just so clearly kind of self-serving in terms of the state just protecting itself, that there is no public good in pursuing him. In fact, there's public good in WikiLeaks and in the work that he has done. Americans deserve to know what their government is up to. And that is not 1917 espionage. That's the first amendment. Catherine, how much more pro-Essange did you get when he was played by Benedict Cumberbatch? Tragically a bit more. I mean, I hate to be true to my own cartoon of myself, but yeah, I was already quite pro-Essange, but that won me over even further. You know, the technical case is not that WikiLeaks merely published material that Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning leaked to WikiLeaks, but that he may have given Manning some pointers on how to crack certain kinds of codes. But let's assume that's true. Manning has been out for years. Julian Assange has clearly served whatever time would have been due, assuming the government's case against him, which I think is horseshit to begin with. And the overriding concern here is that the WikiLeaks dump that he is most in trouble for was absolutely powerful and meaningful in a great American act to say, you know, what governments don't get to do what they do in secret. They have to be transparent. And I would add, and this is what drives me nuts about like deep staters, in all of that, the American government came out so much better than every other government that was also in that, for the most part. You know, yes, we committed certain kinds of war atrocities. The US is not great on coming forward with that stuff, but we deal with it. But then in all of the diplomacy and other stuff that came out of the WikiLeaks dumps that Manning was involved in, we actually looked pretty good because we weren't lying. We weren't saying two different things like every other country. It's endlessly frustrating. And Julien Assange is, you know, he's a martyr for free speech and transparency in government, whether you like him personally or not. I think there's an under-acknowledged hinge point. I don't know if that's the right word, but like something changed in that moment. Barack Obama, let's not forget, ran for president because he was going to have the most transparent administration in history. He was given like a Golden Sunlight Award or something like that in his first year of office, not because of anything he did, but because of what he promised to do and how how pretty he was when he made these promises. It's like a blue Sky Color Award. Yes. Part of his promises were to publish all or release all of the photos from Abu Ghraib. Right. There's a first tranche of photos from Abu Ghraib that shocked the world and arguably changed American public opinion and global public opinion about the prosecution of the war in Iraq and the war on terror and so forth. But more importantly, it was just like, oh, my God, we're doing that. That's terrible. And he said he would do that. And like Mike Johnson, Mr. Big, is that what we decided, Peter? Like Mr. Big, Obama came into office, saw what would happen, maybe saw the photos and saw the terrible hard truths and the awesome responsibility of being president and pregnant and said, that's OK. No, we just actually we would put Americans at risk so we can't do that. And all of the people who've been putting in so much pressure and momentum towards a less robustly interventionist foreign policy and for a more transparent and less hyper-surveillance world, many of whom backed Obama immediately shut up and you stopped hearing that for the most part, not completely from the left. Then when the Tea Party Right came in to power in 2010 and 2011, you heard a lot of that and the Snowden revelations and that felt like there was a lot of momentum and that all kind of eventually petered out, too. It's very frustrating, because you could see in some of those moments, you could see a lot of enthusiasm for rolling back, what just really looked like it still does look like it just doesn't get the same amount of attention and encroaching all-encompassing surveillance state, taking advantage of digital technology to circumvent traditional constitutional protections. And it's a damn dirty shame, is what I am saying. And it feels like it's it's hard to imagine even getting back to what those possibilities of politics were 10 years ago and 14 years ago. And Obama is part of that story. All right, we're going to get to our listener email the week here in a moment. But first, a reminder that this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Friends, what's the first thing you would do if you had an extra hour each day? Would you add to your database of expenses that could theoretically be counted as tax deductible? Maybe teach your children Mandarin, do some Sam Harris yoga like Nick does every morning. Well, therapy can actually help you prioritize things that are important to you. I don't know Nick does that, by the way, that's so it was an inserted joke. So that time becomes less of an excuse for you to procrastinate instead of tackling life head on. That is where BetterHelp online therapy comes in. BetterHelp is an easy to use, super flexible, entirely online therapy service that has helped many listeners of this podcast, clean up their brain clutter in order to boldly face life's actually important ongoing challenges. All you have to do to use BetterHelp is to fill out a quick questionnaire, get matched with a therapist. And if you don't like the first one, you can swap them out for a second. Let therapy help you extend your effective days with better help. Just visit betterhelp.com slash round table right now to get 10% off your first month. That's better help H L P.com slash round table. Do it today. You'll be glad you did. All right, reminder, please email your short queries to roundtable at reason.com. This one, which is my favorite in a while, not just for the brevity, but of the wit comes from Eugene and Rachel Spagnuolo, who write what does the US government do well? And then they add no easy answers, you take money, spend money, keep the job all off limits. So hard answers, Catherine, you must answer my anarchist friend and boss, what does the US government do well? And I'm going to go to edit this out of context and spray it all over the internet. Go. Thank you so much for that. Yeah, the way I read this question and then the first 10 answers that I thought of were ruled out by the new easy answers proviso. Here's here's what I'm going to say. It runs elections pretty well. I know, I know it's a surprising answer, but I am taking kind of a world historical perspective here. And I think that the US government has done in its long history and even with a slightly messier recent variations, a good job of running elections and handing power off to the next guy each time. And that is maybe the most important thing. So yes, this last one, tough times, but we all make an occasional mistake. And I still think that this is in fact something, again, from a world historical perspective, the US government is doing far better than most, maybe even well. I've never pegged you before as a contrarian, Catherine. So you don't even like elections. This question was so hard for me, great to be on a curve. You know, nothing is an acceptable answer. It's not I really wanted to answer the spirit of this question. And that is truly my best answer. Peter, your status, certainly you can think of something. Yeah, so actually I want to give two answers that are basically the same answer. And the first one is Operation Warp Speed. It worked. It was good. It was pretty inexpensive for what we got out of it. I would absolutely take more Operation Warp Speeds as long as they had the same impact per dollar or even anywhere close. Operation Warp Speed gave us a good COVID vaccine more quickly than we would have gotten it and distributed it more quickly than we would have gotten it without Operation Warp Speed. There are a bunch of other things that the government did that made the vaccine roll out much slower than it needed to be. But the Warp Speed part of it was pretty good. Here's the other thing that comes to mind that is the most worthwhile Canadian initiative Washington, D.C. Beltway answer. But for the longest time, if you were a policy wonk type adjacent person, you worked at a think tank or whatever in the aughts and you were asked, well, what is what is the one good government program? Everyone had the same answer. And it was PEPFAR. PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This was a George George W. Bush George Washington Bush. George Washington Bush. That is that the hidden the unknown president. This was a George W. Bush program that spent some billions of dollars, actually quite a bit of money, but spent it reasonably well to help fight AIDS globally. And they did it worked like there weren't a huge amount of there weren't a there were not a lot of administrative and managerial problems with it. And it actually seemed to accomplish the goal that it set out to do, which was to reduce AIDS in the world in ways that there wasn't an obvious private market, you know, that was going to sort of come in and fill this gap. And so Operation Warp Speed, PEPFAR, those are government programs that I'm just like not going to spend a lot of time complaining about. Yeah, sure, you could probably find in 90 billion dollars of PEPFAR spending, almost certainly there's a couple of billion dollars that probably shouldn't have been spent on something dumb. But overall, it worked pretty well for a government program, like I'm going to give it a passing grade. Nick, I feel like Peter might have taken one of your answers. Am I right? No, he did not. But what I'm going to say is that what the government, if we include the courts as part of the government, which I think we should, it does a very good job of protecting speech. The Supreme Court in particular, against mob rule and against insanity has actually consistently for basically all of my lifetime, you know, has worked to expand the sphere and severity of speech, more power to commercial speech, as well as political speech, as well as expressive speech. That's great. And I will also throw in the federal government. You know, this is a law which it's no longer quite as heated as it was even a couple of years ago, but people still tend to hate it, especially people in government. The creation of Section 230 as part of the Communications Decency Act helped the Internet become what it has become. And I realize now everybody is against the Internet and everybody is against user generated content on the Internet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Without Section 230, you know, we would not have had virtually any of this. These are the, you know, it's the Internet's first amendment as Jeff Kossoff and other people have talked about it. I think that's, you know, really great and really important. And just to bring it back to the Supreme Court, it's basically the one part of all of the Communications Decency Act that withstood the Supreme Court, which struck down most of the other stuff, which would have regulated the Internet like, essentially like a broadcast TV or radio channel. So the state has done a very good job of protecting free speech. I'm going to give my answer and then talk about some Google searching I did about the answer afterwards. But my answer is whenever I've talked about this before and been more like Catherine in a public space, people have come out of me and said, well, actually, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration does some pretty good science. So I want to give a shout out. I don't know if that's true, but a lot of people who are smart tell me and swear that that's true feels like the US Weather Service does a pretty good job out there just as a consumer. I don't have any complaints. I'm sure Glenn Gilroy has briefed against it somewhere. But like, you know, it seems like it seems like that's OK. You love those hurricane trajectory gifts, right? It's like that little it's like strong the dotted line, right? This is a big dad in socks and sandals energy in this answer here. Did you see my footwear? I think he's sitting on a lawn chair. No, the fun part of this was OK, I did Google this morning. What does the federal government do well? And that was an interesting exercise for two reasons. One is that many of the first results of my search and it could be tied to my horrible dirty the searching history or something like that. But it all with all the answers came from 2011. It's as if a lot of people in 2011 were saying, you know what government sucks and people like, no, the government does good things too. So maybe that's where people started talking about the National Oceanographic, whatever the hell administration. That's that gets also a time that you update your operating system. Matt's whole Internet is from 2011 and it's glorious there. Honestly, you know what? That the search worked a lot better in 2011. Google rot is a real thing. Live it. Learn it. The other thing that I found quickly is this horrible site. By the SEC, the Security and Exchange Commission dot gov in honor of Public Service Recognition Week, which is totally a thing that exists in the world. And it is 50 ways government works for us. And I'm going to go ahead and say that I want to see this list with like Andrew Heaton do a repost after every single one of these. I'll just read a couple of this is ranked in order. Number one, social security payments help 51 million Americans. Peter. I'm not even sure you need Andrew Heaton to say anything. I actually think he could just read these and make faces. Oh, my God and brag. OK, I'm just doing like recent TV assignments here. Number two, college loan programs help millions who might otherwise not be able to afford higher education. Catherine three, the U.S. Postal Service. I swear to God, this is this is the ranks. Inspection programs help prevent mail fraud. By the way, those inspection programs, this is a completely underreported story are routinely used almost as if they are section seven or two because they can hold up your mail. This is true story. You hold up the mail to light and and look at it as long as they don't open it. And if they see any suspicious, they'll share that with law enforcement without ever telling you without a warrant. That's what they do. That's number three. Everyone reading this list used to park in a park because he could do his route in like an hour and then he would always catch him either sleeping or reading playboys in the neighborhood park and American hero in his Jeep. Yeah, everyone reading this list. He's 106, but he's still working. Everyone reading this list should go back and read Christian Britschke's excellent feature on the absolute shit show that the post office is. And it has one of the great reason headlines, at least of my time here, post apocalypse. Oh, gosh, that's like that is not a good headline. That's a school headlight. It's 1990s. It's a 1990s headline, like Otspun headlines, which Nick and I did none of. Zero. That was 90s here. That's 90s around number four. Peter, this is for you. Social security. You're not reading all 50. I am. No, I'm not. I'm going to tap out of five. Right around the block a couple hundred times. Social security disability provides benefits if you become too disabled for work. Peter, that's exciting for that at least the next five years. I'm very obviously eligible. Why is the SEC doing that? That's fine. That's exactly it. Is they in their own top five? Like I have so many questions. I guess that's just honesty. I will throw a link up in the show notes. It's filled with those in search your own. I thought you were going to say it should be to the tune of the Paul Simon song, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. I'm not that obvious. The one I got to number 13 is where I like, OK, I'm glad this exists anyways, which is and that's the first one. Bank regulations limit your loss to $50 if someone steals money from your account with your ATM card. They're probably odd. Be a law for that. But whatever. I'm not unhappy that that exists, but that's number 13 on your list. Boy. Wow. I have so many questions. It's the greatest list in the world. Have these people ever heard of reinsurance markets? No, not the people reading this list, probably. Fred C.I. Smith did not evangelize enough for the beauties of reinsurance. All right. So we should absolutely make fun of stupid government programs a lot on this podcast. I really want to I want to start by emphasizing the most fun we can make of them. We should at the same time, good leadership in government is something that we need, that there is a vacuum of. And if we if we treat it entirely as a joke as something that is that is just that cannot possibly be good, then I think we are going to end up with terrible people who do not respect the office. We're going to end up in a situation like we have now where there is a real a vacuum of leadership and seriousness in government. And it's a it's a real problem. I mean, again, I'm not I'm not against making fun of this stuff and I will continue to do it on this episode and every episode going forward at the same time. This is just something that has really been sort of gnawing at me is looking at our leaders in America right now, especially at the federal level, far too many of them are just posing preposterous idiots and it's both sides. Right? Yes. Yes. I mean, because to be totally clear, this is not a partisan distinction. Absolutely. Somebody like Alina Khan, who thinks or an Elizabeth Warren, maybe who thinks the government should be doing everything. Yes. The government should be doing nothing. But both of them kind of come down on the side that government should be doing things badly. All right. At the risk of introducing a French goodbye into a podcast in the guise of a lightning round, I do want to acknowledge that there was some pretty significant abortion politics last week in which on one hand, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a twenty twenty two law which put the time at fifteen weeks, the limit at fifteen weeks under which women can have an abortion, that that law did not preempt an eighteen sixty four law back when Arizona was twelve people named Goldwater and a donkey. It didn't preempt that law, which basically outlawed abortion. People are all at an outrage of it, including most Republican politicians in the state of Arizona. Please read Jacob Sullum on the textual reasons for the the decision, but it definitely through politics of that state in the country into its usual cattywampusness of abortion politics. And also Donald Trump on Monday, I believe it was of last week, gave out his latest idea about what federal abortion policies should be, which was essentially it should kick down to states and we'll see from there. And I don't want to tell you the details of it. That's his point of view, not mine. Catherine, you're a lady. I go to you first always on these questions, but also you might be brief. What do you make of just the the state of abortion politics right now in light of those two bits of news? I mostly associate myself with Elizabeth Nolan Brown's analysis on this, which is in part that what the state of abortion politics right now is revealing is that people are pretty moderate on this issue in general and that those people include like Donald Trump is a very normal American in maybe only this way, maybe exclusively this way. Also his taste in fast food. He just he he has held every position that you could possibly describe. I mean, I was listening to some recording of him from from, I think, you know, the late eighties where he says he's I'm pro-choice and he refuses to even rule out partial birth abortion. And he's, you know, I'm the greatest pro-life president you'll ever have. And now he's kind of like, I guess he's a federalist today. This is this is how a lot of Americans are. They have kind of wavering complicated intuitions about abortion. And it was never the right decision for the Supreme Court to just decide this and lock it all down. It's created horrific distortions in our politics for decades. It is continuing to create horrific distortions in our politics. But I guess I'm kind of weirdly a teeny bit helpful that a true abortion federalism will reveal that Americans are kind of in the middle and that our laws should probably be kind of in the middle. I mean, I am radically comically insanely pro-choice. I think I think all abortion should be legal everywhere and always. But I recognize that I am an outlier and I am. You know, I but I don't think that I don't think that most Americans want this entire debate to be shut down by a federal 15 week limit, which is now kind of the Holy Grail for pro-life activists. I think that that will just generate a mirror image of the Roe v. Wade. The Roe v. Wade situation that we had before and it will not be good. It's worth noting that Americans have at least according to polling become more pro-choice since Roe v. Wade was struck down and that the at least the vast majority of the efforts to institute really restrictive abortion rules in states have have failed when they've gone up for popular referendum. And the you know, the initial part of Trump's remarks was him sticking up for IVF, which again makes him extremely like everyone in America. Just him saying like, hey, you know, I'm glad we we as president, I made it possible to overturn Roe v. Wade and I'm really proud of that. But Jesus Christ, if people want to have a kid, we should let them have a kid. Isn't that what being pro-family means? Like that's of that's what people in this country by enlarge believe and and that's correct. Yeah. And he's he and Carrie Lake, who has also you know, reworked her staunch opposition to all abortion to try and become more electable in an Arizona setting. You know, the fact of the matter is that most Americans are in favor of most abortions and at the same time are allowing them to be legal. And at the same time between 1981 and 2020, the abortion rate among women dropped by more than more than half. It went from about 29.3 women per 100,000 to 14.4. So we were getting to fewer abortions because women were more in charge of their reproductive you know, cycles or whatever you want to call it. And anti-abortion activists who were extreme won the battle and they lost the war. More people are in favor of legalizing abortion because they recognize the alternative is a bad outcome for most people. All right, let's get to our end of podcast, what we have been consuming in the cultural arena. Peter Sutterman, do you need or do you not need? No. Satisfaction. No, just that's more guns and roses erasure. I'm not here for it. What did you watch, Peter? I watched Alex Garland's new movie, Civil War. And so it's kind of an interesting movie because you think it's going to be ripped from the headlines because it is about a near future or present day civil war in America, right? And it sort of comes after he wrote it, you know, as cities were kind of erupting into riots in 2020 in the summer of 2020. And as there has been increased discussion about the political polarization in the United States and even, you know, op ed columns and that sort of thing about how maybe America is closer to the brink of civil war than it has ever been. But what's interesting about this movie is the way that it totally resists all normal political interpretation. There is absolutely no way to turn this movie into a New York Times headline, you know, the I thought I imagined a future civil war for America. Here's what it was like, right? Like you can't get that out of this. You cannot get the Twitter take out of this movie because it simply declines at every single point to tell you what the specific political issues are that are driving the conflict. So just two kind of clever twisty ways that it does this are that the main force that is fighting the the president who one thing we know about the president who's played by Nick Offerman is that he has stayed in for a third term. Now, is that just sort of unilaterally? We don't know. Maybe that was elected, right? There was a law that changed sort of term limits. We have no idea, but he's there. He's overstayed his second term and the main force that is fighting against him is the Western Front, the WF, which is made up of California and Texas. So how exactly are California and Texas aligned with the movie? Never bothers to make it like even give you like a hint as to exactly why it wants you to sort of look at that and go, OK, we're not going to figure out what their issues are. They're just mad here at the president and they are fighting. The other thing that it that it does is the movie is actually in some ways more about journalism than it is about politics. The main characters are all are all journalists who are on a road trip from New York to Washington, D.C., where they are going to see the final invasion of the Western Front as the Western Front takes the White House. The final battle scene is really just riveting and incredible. Some of the some of the most stirring and engaging and kind of frankly shocking sequences of wartime battle staged to in a way that really looks like it's just happening on 17th Street right outside of the White House. But the one of the the main character is a famous photo journalist who is famous for her photos of the Antifa massacre. Now think about that for a second. Was that a massacre of Antifa or by Antifa? Movie never tells you. It does not. It simply does not let you know because the whole point is we are not going to engage on that on that level. We are not going to make this about whose politics are right. Instead, we're what we're going to do is we're going to show you what the world is like after all of the norms of civilization break down and people start firing guns at each other. And it's gross and it's horrible and it's awful. And it's something to be avoided at all costs. Is Ron Swanson or is Nick Hofferman playing Ron Swanson like in his final elected office? It might be the only thing to get me to watch that thing sounds like there is something government does well. You're just going to have to watch it. Yeah. So the answer is no, I'm not going to. Nick, what did you consume? I watched a recent entry into PBS's American Masters series, which is now in its 38th season. It was called the it's a documentary series in this year. Other people in this season include documentaries about Floyd Abrams, Max Roach, the jazz drummer, Jerry Brown, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Floyd Abrams and Cesar Chavez. I watched the incomparable Mr. Buckley, which was a two hour documentary about William F. Buckley and his role in kind of creating national review and the post war conservative movement. It's a mixed documentary in many ways. It's too familiar, both in its good points and bad points about how the conservative movement came to be and Buckley's role in that. So you see footage from his debate with James Baldwin, for instance, in some of the, you know, tight situations between him and Gore Vidal and things like that. I wish it had looked a little bit more at his later years. It kind of ends somewhere around the time that Reagan gets elected president. And, you know, by the time Buckley retired from national review in 2004, he had, you know, shifted profoundly on a number of things, including civil rights. He had acknowledged or he said, you know, that there was no way the country would have evolved out of civil, out of legal segregation, that the federal government had to take a role in in busting up segregation. He was a critic of the Iraq war and things like that. So there was an interesting kind of both evolution and de-evolution of Buckley's life over the course of it, which was longer than this documentary really pays attention to. But from the point of view of somebody, you know, who's part of a libertarian movement, who's part of a magazine culture, it's always fascinating to look at Buckley and the way in which he created a movement out of a lot of, you know, ill-fitting puzzle pieces. And it's powerful to look at the role of the national review. I don't think it does this anymore. I think it's a, you know, it just no longer plays the role that it once did. But it's fascinating to look at how do you create an ideological movement that affects the culture and then ultimately the politics, you know, the period between Barry Goldwater, which National Review pushed for and he got blown out, you know, by a then record level of, you know, loss to Ronald Reagan being elected, you know, a couple of elections later, and they had a big role to play in all of that. So it's fascinating stuff. Katherine, what did you consume? I consumed some ribs. I ate some ribs and in particular, I had some plant based ribs. They are ribs from. OK, so we hear me out. What are the bones made out of? There are bones in them, Nick. OK, what are they made out of? They're not real bone, right? You wanted to hear about the ribs and you don't want to hear about the ribs. OK, so. We just want to rib you. Is called Juicy Marbles. And for that, I am so sorry. And they make they make bone in ribs. It is made. They're made from soy and sunflower seeds. So that is like the perfect convergence of like if you're like an anti soy boy, seed oils, person like these ribs are not for you. They're so good. I'm starting to lactate. Just hearing you describe the ingredients. So delicious. The thing that this company does correctly is that the meat has fibers in the way that like a lot of other fake meat does not seem to have. And not only do they have bones in not only are the bones fairly realistic looking, you can also eat the bones. You can just snack on the bones afterward. They're not that good, frankly, but you you can't eat that they have kind of like a beef jerky ish kind of texture. I'm just saying I'm living here in the future and I had these ribs and they were delicious. They are comically expensive. But juicy marbles, bone in ribs, made entirely out of plants. Are they prepared? Like I mean, do you just heat them up and they're already soft and things like that? No, they're like it's just like the way you would buy the meat. So I like put a little rub on there and put them under the broiler. And they they were like crispy on the top, juicy in the inside. They also make little fillets that are very, very good. So I could smoke these on my big green egg. You could. Could I do the three to one method with the braise in the middle? I am a woman. We're going to have to have a conversation after the prize that the fake meat market, which has some very good products in it just did not pop like everybody was predicting it. I don't know. Were you listening to the last two minutes? You are speaking too soon, my friend, I think. I mean, but like impossible burger and beyond beef or beyond meat products are struggling even after being in fast food and stuff. So maybe it's just I think there's a couple issues and one is the just the cost relative to other meat, especially with inflation. Two is that the people who want something that tastes just like a hamburger tend to like hamburgers already. And three is I think Catherine is right that this is just too early. This is the pets dot com era, right? Where it seems like this is failing and 15 or 20 years from now, this stuff is going to be much more widely available and probably something in an iteration that is a little better and a little more accessible to more people. Matt, would you like to meet explain to me as well? No. That was for Nick. I know you know this, Catherine. Some del taco, face meat, tacos. Here's what I would like to do. I would like to die. No, bravo to Catherine for living in the future. I as an old person, I'm living in the past, increasingly, including consuming it just a really worrying amount of Ken Burns documentaries. Ken Burns, who I once booed at a national and sandals, which is one of my best boos. Like he threw out the first pitch. I sit up and booed him like did he reach the plate? I forget he had the haircut. So that's all I really cared about. He had the Pete Rose haircut. The ball just slowly panned over the plate. Yeah, do more fun. Yeah. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about I saw a film, a movie, a fiction biographical, though, called Hyde Park on Hudson that came out in 2012. It's about a whimsical little tale, a small movie about FDR. That's the Hyde Park on Hudson, entertaining the King of England and the Queen, King George VI, the stuttering one in up in his Ryan Beck adjacent states in 1939 in the run up to the war to kind of the King was hoping to was the first visit, by the way, since the revolution, which is at least they said so. I don't know if it's true. Trying to to shake some money free and some insurances from FDR that he was supporting in the war. It's the movie is about and told from the perspective of an affair that FDR had with one of his fifth cousins named Daisy something or other. Stuckly. Played by Laura Linney. Very well. FDR is played by Bill Murray. That's I should have like not buried the lead. If you want to see Bill Murray as FDR and like be totally fine with it, he's really good. Then it's a pretty interesting small little movie. It could have been great and it wasn't. It ended up being a good deal less than great because it kind of fell off a cliff. And I think maybe it should have been and I don't want to give too much away about it. But a lot hinges on whether and how you can spoiler, Matt, come on. It's about a lot of hinges on whether 70 years and how the king is going to eat a hot dog picnic and who and who's going to deliver it and in what condition. It's a real meat hot dog. I gather it's a juicy marble right there. If you're going to like already bend kind of facts because we don't exactly know, but we're pretty sure that FDR had an affair with this gal as well as everybody else. I think you just go whole hog and make it a Machiavellian story about how Bill Murray played FDR, used a fifth cousin to humiliate not only every woman around him, but also the King of England in order to establish American dominance in the world in the 20th century. And the movie is almost that, but it doesn't quite like live up to it's it's not as nasty as all that. I'm going through an FDR or I'm going through a Roosevelt hate binge right now, watching the Roosevelt Ken Burns documentary. So I'm all there for for anti-Rosevelt content. So it movie just sort of like falls off at the end. And it's frustrating, I think, probably to watch it from a female point of view is my prediction. Yes, Nick. I have the ultimate FDR program for you then. It's by Chris Elliott and it was an early showtime special shortly after Chris Elliott first left the David Letterman show. It is called FDR, a one man show. And it is Chris Elliott playing FDR. And then there is Color Commentating by Marv Albert. I will put a link in because it is up on my dark corners of YouTube. And it is the ultimate performance. It's it's right up there with I mean, that's got to be on Bill Burrow's attack on FDR, sodomizing the Supreme Court in a world of plant based ribs. Will people know what it means to go whole hog? That seems like a stupid joke. That is a closing dot. If ever I heard one. Holy crap. Yeah, that's all the really bad, saved up dad jokes we have time for. I'm hurting. I'm sorry. Don't make me feel sorry for you. Thanks for listening to the reason round table and supporting Peter Suderman and all of his problematic habits. And listen to us in all of our podcasts at reason.com slash podcasts. You can go if you want to donate money to help us do things, you can go to reason.com donate. Nick Gillespie, I have the impression I could be wrong that we have a lot of upcoming events in addition to Reason Weekend, which is happening in Boston from May 16th May 19th, which we talked about in last week's episodes. What are some events in New York City that you would like to point to? On May 8th, I'm going to be talking with the head of students for sensible drug policy, Cat Murty, also a co-founder of Feminist for Liberty, late of the Cato Institute, talking about the role that young people, particularly students, are going to be playing for drug policy reform in the coming thousand years. And then on May 21st, we're going to be doing a live interview with Glenn Greenwald, also known as Glenn Greenwald in my adult brain. But for both of these, go to reason.com slash events to get information and to buy tickets, because these things are selling out fast. Very good. All right. Thanks again for listening. We'll catch you next week. Goodbye.