Central Air - Rabbit, Rabbit

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

On this week's show: the arrest of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela and President Trump’s statement that we’ll be “running” the country now. What does the US stand to gain?Plus: a fraud scandal brings down Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and why both parties love to hate a VP figure. Megan makes the case that arts professionals should be wary of boycotting the “Trump Kennedy Center" — while Ben and Josh argue that this is exactly the sort of low-stakes issue where symbolic anti-Trump politics are healthy and welcome — and Josh's on-the-ground dispatch from communist-occupied New York, one week into the Mamdani administration.Sign up for updates from Central Air at www.centralairpodcast.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.centralairpodcast.com/subscribe

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post. Happy New Year, Megan. Do you have any New Year's resolutions? You know, I find the whole January 1st thing. Let's start over. If we lived on a planet with a longer orbit of our sun, we would make resolutions at a different time. It's sort of like the arbitrary like 100-year anniversaries thing. It's like, okay, great, we've got 10 fingers, but is that really a reason to celebrate? So, no, I do not do.

I do try throughout the year to do a little bit of light self-improvement. Okay, because I was going to say that's like a, you know, a way to avoid self-improvement by saying it's arbitrary when you would do it. But I guess you're doing it all the time. Then you're just better than everyone. No, because my base rate is so low that we're talking about really marginal improvements here. But I'm a big fan of, like, the two things rule. We're like every month I try to do two small things so it doesn't feel overwhelming. and I can stick with it.

Kind of arbitrary that you do that every month. You know, if the moon had a longer orbit around the Earth, he would do it less frequently. Indeed. Or if the Sumerians had not been so into the number 12. How about you, Ben Dreyfus here, who writes the Substack newsletter, Calm Down. What are you resolving to do this here, Ben?

Everything and nothing. I don't do the resolves because I have just such a bad track record at them that they just kept making me be annoyed with myself. So now the only thing that I do is on New Year's, when you wake up on the first, I try really hard, really hard to say rabbit rabbit because it's supposed to bring you good luck.

But I also have a very, bad track record with that. And so sometimes, it has to be the first thing you say. And so sometimes you'll wake up and go like, do to do. Oh, shit. I'm not familiar with this superstition. You're supposed to say rabbit, rabbit when you wake up. What culture does that come out of?

Western United States. Idaho culture maybe. It appears the Trump administration woke up on the right side of the bed with new vigor in the new year setting out to do more things. And now we're running Venezuela, or at least that's what the president says we're doing. We sent in Delta Force Commandos who captured President Nicholas Maduro and his wife. Maduro has now been taken to New York where he's going to stand trial for drug trafficking. Well, it's not entirely clear yet that the trial will be in New York, but that's where he's being held right now anyway. And for now, Delci Rodriguez, the vice president of Venezuela, Venezuela, a Maduro ally, is running the country. Now, of course, Venezuela had a series of fraudulent elections, and quite clearly Maduro's party had lost the last election. There's supposed to be an opposition party running at this woman Maria Carino Machado, who leads the party that should have won that election is in exile. She won the Nobel Peace Prize. There's been sort of this idea that she or someone associated with her would come to power if there was a democratic transition

in Venezuela. But the president says that she lacks the respect that is needed to lead the country right now. And I think that between the lines thing there is, you know, we got Maduro, but his regime is still running Venezuela. We don't have tens of thousands of troops on the ground there. And so while we got Maduro out, we're not yet able to impose a new government on them. And so we have the incumbent regime in this sort of gunboat diplomacy where we're threatening, you know, we'll do various things again unless you start behaving better in various ways to do with drug trafficking in the oil industry and relations with countries like Russia. And so I guess the first big question is, is this even going to work? Or do we just have the Maduro regime Sons Maduro still running this country?

I mean, define work, right? If by work, you mean Nicholas Maduro is out and very little has changed in Venezuela, but Donald Trump got to go on television and have a press conference, then it absolutely worked. Is he going to make Venezuela better for either the Venezuelans or for us, much less clear. That sounds right to me. I guess when the news of this broke, everyone immediately, obviously, jumped to the conclusion that he was putting lots of people on the ground and was going for, like, the higher ceiling change or regime change, which has a higher ceiling, right?

Well, I personally was surprised that it was possible to send in just a few guys and get Maduro. So I guess, you know, on some level, that's impressive. I'd sort of assume the president wasn't going to do this because I didn't think this sort of surgical thing was possible. But so I guess apparently it was. I mean, one of the things that's interesting, right, is that the Russian, we've now had to, both in Iran and in Venezuela, the Russian air, you know, anti-air systems just proved totally inadequate to repel an American attack, surgical strike, invasion, whatever you want to call it. And that's interesting information. But I'm not really clear what the logic was of this.

And it became clear that maybe, aside from his rambling press conference where he suddenly said we were going to be running Venezuela and everyone was like, oh, God. Then he was actually just basically kind of going to grab Maduro and then let the rest of his evil regime hang out with just like this, you know, tacit pressure of a gun to their head that we could always snatch him again. I guess like in that situation, as Megan said, like if that's the goal, yeah, it does seem like I'd be willing to take the bet that this works and doesn't lead to like a quagmire as opposed to, it's, it's. just depends. Like, you know, it's not going to transform the society into this. It's not going to fix everything. But if it's just that we've gotten rid of a guy who is a very bad man, well, good work. Well, but so what are our objectives here? I mean, obviously we have allies that are not democratic. Nobody elected MBS in Saudi Arabia. And we have certain confluences of interest. And sometimes that relationship works out well for the United States. The president is very focused on letting U.S. oil companies back into Venezuela. Venezuela has really significant crude oil. deposits and has there's been a decline in production over the last 20 years in significant part because of the tremendous mismanagement of the oil industry by the socialist regimes there, is the idea to, you know, let U.S. companies back in, and that's going to somehow reduce gasoline prices, reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East, and that we can achieve that without a broader

liberalization in Venezuela? I think that's how Trump is thinking, and I think this is totally bizarre, because it's not 2003. We are not dependent on imported oil from the Middle East. We are, in fact, the world's largest producer of oil now. We also, you know, we have large reserves of shale oil, which do not necessarily benefit if you bring Venezuela's reserves online. And it's also true that, well, Venezuela says it has these huge reserves, and in some sense, maybe it does.

My understanding is these are self-reported. So, you know, how much do we trust those reserves? But also their reserves are extremely heavy. There was a guy on Twitter who is an oil expert who was like, this is basically pavement that hasn't hardened yet. It's not what you think of with, like, you know, oil gushing out of the ground and in the vivid movie moments. And so it's not necessarily good for the United States to bring Venezuelan oil online. It's good for individual oil companies that get the leases. and it's good for refiners who actually may want done as well on heavy crude because, A, they're set up to refine it, and B, you can get, you know, like each kind of crude that you refine. You get a somewhat different breakdown of what parts you can refine it into. And while you can slice and dice that different ways, depending on what the market needs, it's easier to get some bits out of some kinds of crude than others. I have now reached the limits of my technical knowledge, as you can see, by my use of the scientific terms, bits. But,

And so it's not really clear that this is like a net win for America. In fact, I would argue it isn't. And the other thing to remember is that it will take a fantastic amount of money to rebuild Venezuelan oil production. It's not just that, like, Dave managed it badly. If we put some better managers in there, they could figure things out. It's going to take a ton of capital investment, a ton of repairs, a ton of new drilling, you know, cleaning out old wells, putting in new equipment.

and with oil prices where they are right now, it's not clear how much people are going to want to make that investment, especially because you've got considerable regime uncertainty. The problem for any oil company when they're dealing with a developing country that doesn't have a really strong rule of law is that the economics of this are you do a ton of upfront investment and then that equipment's there and it's extremely hard to move.

And for the country where that land is, there's always the eternal temptation to, like, let the oil companies do the upfront investment and then just take it. Or, you know, jack the least fees up to the point where they're not really making a time, they're not making good return on their investment. And Venezuela has played that game more than once. And at this point, I think, you know, if you look at this right now, who do you think's in charge in three years? Can Venezuela make a credible commitment not to mess with the oil companies any further if they do make the necessary investment? to get this stuff producing, and they are going to need multinational oil companies in part because Chavez basically fired. They used to have arguably the best run, definitely one of the best runs, state-owned oil companies in the world. But Chavez wanted to use it as a piggy bank.

And when the managers and the engineers resisted, you basically fired them all and replaced them with regime loyalists, which is one reason that production's fallen. And so you're going to need knowledge transfer as well as capital investment. That's also, like a key part of the history of the Chavez era is that he takes power and then has this tremendous luck that oil prices start soaring after he comes in. You don't want to say he had lucky timing dying of cancer in 2013. But, you know, he literally comes in when oil prices are bottoming out. He gets elected right at the bottom. By the way, that's one of the reasons he got elected is that Venezuela's economy is so tied to the price of oil that as oil prices fell after the Asian financial crisis, they were in, A fun fact for the kids listening. Oil prices were like $10 a barrel 25 years ago.

They were under that at one point. Not that much under, but they were under $10 a barrel in 1998. And so he comes in and they immediately start rising. They go into the stratosphere. Right before the financial crisis, they hit $140 a barrel or like just like there's like 139.74 or something. And so he, even though he is gutting the state-owned oil company, he's siphoning off a to their investment money to spend on social spending. And he's also, of course, firing the people who know what they're doing and replacing them with people who are loyal to his regime. So production starts falling. But because prices are rising so much faster, it's still dramatically increasing Venezuela's income. But the problem is that those high prices spurred people to look for

alternative supplies, for example, shale oil, right? The fact that prices went so high is why the shale oil revolution happened. And then around 2014, prices fall off a cliff. But by then Chavez had died and Maduro gets to preside over the simultaneously falling production and falling prices, which is a big part of how Venezuela got where it is today. That's one of the reasons that it's so interesting when you look at the, they have the world's largest proven reserves, right? About like 288 billion barrels or something like that, which is like 100 more than Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia has light crude. And when you look at like the chart of when Venezuela overtook Saudi Arabia in proven reserves, it's in like 2000.

10, I think, around there, which is right around this time when, like, it's suddenly, like, financially viable to go after all this, like, heavy sludge crap that was hard to get. But, like, it has to be, it has to be, it has to be in, oil has to be really expensive for that to be worth it. Something to remember, too, is that OPEC quotas, my understanding, are allocated by how big your reserves are. And so there is some incentive to inflate your reserves. But, yeah, I mean, Saudi crude, you basically, like, just go out with a straw. It has to be a plastic straw, not a cardboard straw. but you just like stick that in the ground and oil comes up.

Whereas in Venezuela, it's incredibly expensive to extract it. And then you've got to dilute it and refine it. And like there's specialized refineries that just my understanding is dilute it to the point where other refineries can handle it. And yeah, there's a lot of investment going on there. But the interesting thing about it is that like, you know, when Chavez took office, you know, at the peak of it, they were producing like three million barrels a day, right? Then that all declined. And now it's like less than a million. But like if you multiply this out,

there are a century away from every hitting some of those parts of that, you know, the heavy, the hardest stuff to get. At which time, like, demand decline and, like, the price of oil is going to be so much lower anyways just because of, like, what we now understand to be the, that we're never actually going to, like, run out of oil so much as we're going to actually, like... We're going to have electric space cars by then. Right.

It's not going to be worth it to go after a lot of this oil. But, like, those numbers in the higher part of their, like, proven reserve are just things we're never going to be going towards. It's hundreds of years off, and we'll all have wind-driven flying machines by then. You mean, like, kites? Can you travel around, kites? We're bringing them back.

What do we make of the rules-based global order and, you know, whether it was wrong to go in and snatch majority? I mean, you know, personally, I feel less bothered by going and arresting him than I am by blowing up the boats. Like, you blow up the boats and, you know, you're summarily executing people, some of whom are probably not even drug traffickers. You know, Maduro is a bad guy who was indicted in the United States. And, you know, we do have, you know, some history of doing things like this in Panama and that sort of thing. So I'm not, you know, the people are talking about, well, you know, if you do this, then, you know,

that sort of that emboldens Vladimir Putin to try to take over Ukraine. I mean, you know, he's already at war in Ukraine. Yeah, I mean, this is ridiculous. Like, if you do this, then Vladimir Putin will go back in time to 2014 and invade Ukraine. What this has really revealed is that the rules-based international order is basically a figment of America's imagination. It exists to the extent that America wishes it to exist. Because Europe can't project force beyond its borders, with the exceptions kind of France and the UK, although they also often. and rely on U.S. transport. And so it's functionally the question,

and because China and Russia don't really follow this international order, people keep talking about, which leaves America. And when America follows it, it kind of exists. And when America doesn't, it doesn't. Which is not to say that that's a justification for what we did, which I oppose. I think Maduro is loathsome. I assume then as well as better off without him, although you never want to make that assumption.

Could always be worse. But I don't think that this was a good idea for America. I don't think it was a good use of American force. And I do think that it is extra constitutional, far outside what the founding fathers envisioned, and bad for our country, even though I think Maduro is bad. And I am, on the one hand, glad to see him gone

and potentially facing justice for his not just... I mean, the narco-trafficking is the least of what Maduro has done to the world and the people have Venezuela. but I don't think that America should be doing things like this. And it disturbs me no end. But not because I think it means like the international, we violated international law, which is barely a thing, but because we kind of violated my moral rules for running a country. I mean, I think it is clearly like a violation of international law doesn't seem like they've even put forward an argument, really, for how it's not.

I mean, it's a violation of an imaginary thing, though. international law doesn't really exist. To violation of the UN charter, which like, you know, what does that mean, though? And everyone, we all understand that it means basically nothing unless we want it to mean that. The idea that, like, it's going to lead to them coming and doing the same thing to us seems absurd to me. And the now China's going to invade Taiwan thing seems absurd to me. But that doesn't mean that there aren't other reasons for, like, not breaking international laws willy-nilly, right? I guess the question is, like, you know, is this important enough for us to do it?

And, you know, right, that's what I mean. Like, we broke international law when we grabbed bin Laden. But that was really important, you know? We really needed to go in and fuck Pakistan sovereignty that day. I don't know if this qualifies as that. But it's also not like unprecedented that the United States has broken international law in Latin America. So the people who were like, this is the end of this is the end of the 60s. The pop songs are over.

It's hell now. that sounds insane, but like Woodstock isn't over. Woodstock was all, we were always doing it. But I guess the other concern there is about whether the Trump administration views this as a proof of concept for some broader like, you know, great power spheres of influence thing. Because at the same time that we've done this, you have the president and his aides going on about Greenland and that we need Greenland and that we're going to have Greenland. And, you know, if the if the president's view is basically that the Western Hemisphere is ours to do with as we please, but where, you know, where he's choking. chosen to actually enact that is in removing this actually illegitimate leader in Venezuela. Is it limited to that sort of situation? Or are we going to have some? Because the Danes seem to be

taking this quite seriously when the president talks about the idea that we're going to take Greenland. You have the Danish prime minister, Meda Frederikson, saying that'll be the end of NATO if the U.S. tries to take Greenland by force. I sort of assume the president is just blustering when he talks about that, but it's probably not a totally safe assumption to make. Yeah. I, I, I also assume he's plus string in that because it would be the end of NATO, right? You can't, it's part of NATO. Everyone else would get mad. And also, there's not like the moral side of this.

Like, Maduro is a, even the people who think this is bad, aren't defending Maduro, unless you're Russia. And we have the access to Greenland that we need now, even though it's under Dana's sovereign. Yeah, I really want someone to sit Trump down with that true size of thing where you can drag countries over each other. Yeah. We just need to, like, get Barron to sit down with him, show him. show him the website and be like

honestly dad you know it's not that big and like but also I mean it's true that we do have like we do have it and the thing that they always talk about is that we need to build you know they have this

the missile fence thing that they're building and it takes like expanding these radar stations and stuff outside of that famous base that we have in Greenland Thule but I think they've changed the name to like space base now Thule is a cooler name

that was a mistake so they're going to going to have to, like, do some, you know, stuff outside the wire, I guess. But, like, I just seems much more likely that when it gets to the point that they're going to need to put this next generation, there, they're probably won't work anyways, out there, they're probably just going to, that's like a local thing, you know? They're just going to go and do it. And they don't need to, like, actually go conquer this, this Greenland. We're also, like, they don't really want us there any more than that.

Like, we could probably just solve all of this with money. since Denmark only even gives them hundreds of billions. It's just a large piece of ice. The only thing we can't get in partnership with the Danes is Greenland being colored in on the map as part of the United States, which I think, you know, to, I think to Megan's point, I think that is what animates the president. He wants it to look bigger on the map. It would make us bigger than Canada. We're already bigger than Canada and Russia if you count the moon. Sure, but.

I never know exactly how much stock to put in these. like extremely stupid accounts of what Donald Trump is motivated by. Because, I mean, you know, another thing this week is that he sort of booed the opposition leader, Maria Carino Machado, in Venezuela as, you know, not, you know, not having the respect needed to lead the country. And you've had people saying, well, the president is mad that she got the Nobel Peace Prize, which he thinks he should have gotten. And maybe if she had turned down the Nobel Peace Prize and said, really, this should belong to Donald Trump, he'd be trying to install her. But it looks to me like the situation is we can't install her because we don't have tens of thousands of troops

on the ground. And so maybe the president would talk about it more nicely if she had, you know, supplicated herself to him like that. But she wasn't, he wasn't actually going to do a full-scale invasion of the country to install her. So I think, you know, sometimes people sort of overthink this stuff about, you know, the president being as petty as possible. He, you know, he couldn't have put her in place anyway without doing something very different. I guess that sort of brings up, like, when, you know, the positive case for this of like, he just, we did it, we're in or out, and we were just going to be happy with that. and maybe some more pressure is I guess that like that VP in that regime can say a lot of things.

They can say whatever Marco Rubio wants and make lots of these commitments. And they can even do some of the oil stuff. Like maybe they can, you know, try to sweeten the deal to get Chevron and Shell to come and make these commitments and fix it. But eventually there's going to be an election. And like they're going to be tempted to steal it. And that I guess is when you might find the like rubber meets the road here of where like the preexisting. conflicts come back up. Yeah. Why don't we take a quick break? And I encourage listeners, go to Centralairpodcast.com. We did a live show just before the holidays, and we'll be doing another

one of those coming up pretty soon. If you want notifications about that sort of thing, and every episode that comes out, you can go to Centralairpodcast.com, sign up there, become a member. We'd love to have you. We'll be right back. So Tim Walls, just a few months ago, the Democratic nominee for vice president and considered by some people a rising star in the Democratic Party, not by me, but by some other people. He's had something of a fall from grace. He was going to seek a third term as governor of Minnesota. But this burgeoning fraud scandal about various social services programs in the state appears to have led to him deciding that it would be wise for him to retire. So he is not going to seek re-election. These fraud scandals, the story's been going on for a number of years, although it really sort of came to broad national attention in the last couple of months.

You had big fraud in some food support programs during the COVID pandemic programs that are intended to support children with autism. A number of these social services programs, basically people setting up fraudulent nonprofits or doing fraudulent activity through nonprofits, claiming to provide services that they were not actually providing and siphoning off. hundreds of millions or possibly billions of dollars. The view of the acting U.S. attorney is the fraud might be as big as $9 billion, which it's not clear to me what the exact size is, but we're talking, you know, somewhere in the billions in any case. And then you have the added element that a lot of this has been concentrated in the Somali American community in that state. You've had dozens of defendants charged and convicted in that feeding our future food program fraud, nearly all of them of Somali descent. And so that has become the hot button, the

Trump administration revoked temporary protected status for Somalis in the United States related to this, although nearly all the Somalis in Minnesota are actually U.S. citizens at this point. So that didn't specifically affect that many people. But this has become a major political football tied to those immigration stories. And it's, you know, it's not clear to me that the Democrats in the state really have a story here to tell other than Republicans are overstating the size of the problem. They're talking about it in a racist way. And, you know, maybe that's true. But you've still had this very large fraud that happened on Tim Walz's watch that the government in Minnesota does not seem to have done a good job of trying to detect and prevent.

Yeah, I mean, not good. It seems like Chris Rufos, one of the ways that they sold this was he tried to make the connection to, like, them sending money back to, you know, terrorists and Somalia. But his entire argument for that was essentially just by taking, like, the normal rate of return that people from Somalia send. And like, it wasn't to their family back home and then assuming that a certain percentage of that was being stolen. And so my only problem with it was just saying that they were, it wasn't clear to me that people were intentionally sending money back to terrorism. They were just stealing money and sending it back to their families that was then getting perhaps stolen. Basically what they're describing there is, you know, Somalia is a failed state. Al-Shabaab is in fact effective control of much of the country.

And if you send money back to Somalia, it's likely that al-Shabaab is going to siphon some of it off. But the fraud is a problem in any case, regardless of what's happening to that money in the end. I think Democrats need to say more about this, though. Honestly, like, it is, yes, it is inconvenient that now that he's stepped aside is actually an opportunity to kind of twist the knife a little bit. And I think the reason to do that is that you need to reestablish credibility. You know, we've talked about this over and over. You keep saying this, Josh, that like Democrats, if they want to do big government things, they need to assure the population that when they take the money and they spend it, it's going to be spent on something you want to happen and not just on. feather bedding and rewarding various Democratic constituencies. And that means Democrats need to not go quiet when stuff like this happens. They need to actually be out there and saying, like, this is not what we support. We're going to vigorously oppose this. I want, I don't know, a new auditor general, whatever it is, right? We're going to beep up enforcement. And they don't do

that. Instead, what they hope is if they stay quiet, it will go away. And I think that what the ultimate result of that is eroding trust in Democrats and the whole idea of government stuff happening. Now, look, I'm a libertarian. I don't necessarily want to do all this government stuff. But that said, I do want when the government spends, I would rather the government spend money on something that's worthwhile than than on fraud and on feather bedding by government workers. And so even I would prefer a vigorous enforcement and crackdown to what we have now. There's been something of a pendulum swing in the last few years with means-tested programs against vigorous enforcement. And I would note that there are arguments in any of these programs about exactly how much you want to do to force people to prove their eligibility and to prove what they're doing with the money because you have real costs that get imposed there when you have more reporting requirements.

And in particular, when the requirements are imposed on the individuals who are receiving the benefits, who are very often, you know, low-income people, who are, you know, face a wide variety of challenges in their lives. It's often difficult for people to comply with those requirements. And we see this stuff with, you know, work requirements and Medicaid and that sort of thing. So you end up with people who are valid beneficiaries not receiving funds because they're unable to comply with certain reporting or other requirements. Yeah. And look, I am one of the people who says that the optimal amount of fraud is not zero. And that in some ways government actually spends right now too much time obsessed with fraud. I know that I'm now like speaking out of both sides of my mouth.

But the way that we have set things up, government employees have so little discretion that it ends up actually making government much worse and also often costing us more money because of all of the administrative overhead where if the National Guard is at a work site doing something and there's no water available, the obvious thing a business would do is go into a Costco and get some bottled water so people don't overheat and like go to the hospital, which is very expensive. And the United States government has like a six-page decision tree for when you're allowed to buy water. And that level of overhead is actually really counterproductive. The fear that some government employees somewhere will get 50 cents worth of office supplies that they weren't entitled to, that has driven us on the procurement side to too much enforcement. And also during the pandemic, I wrote this article. It was very unpopular, but I think it was correct about the PPP. loans was that there was a ton of fraud in that system and the alternative to allowing like minimal verification and getting a fair amount of fraud was that you would not move the

money out the door and a ton of businesses would have failed and everything would be much worse now. But the flip side of that is you then need extremely vigorous post hoc enforcement. Right after it has happened, which is what's happened with PPP. After it's happened, you need to go in with the hammer and send a bunch of people to jail. We're seeing some of that. But the fact that Minnesota really does seem to have stalled on cracking down because they were afraid of offending a powerful local democratic interest group or being called racist is a huge problem. And Democrats need to own that and address it. Well, I mean, yeah, it's the other program besides PPP that was even abused worse by the fraud,

right? Where there was a lot of unemployment fraud also. Yeah. And it was they'd actually like, you know, the SBA had said, you shouldn't, you should let us like do some various checks before we give the money out and there had been a conscious decision in that first COVID bill to not do that. And they said, we need to get the money at the door. So just like lower the checks below what's smart. And then when you look at the IG reports, there was like six months later and they saw all the money was getting stolen. And they were like, all right, okay, you can check. You can Google their names first. But then that led to so much fraud, right, that even though they were aware of it and they were dealing like the IGs were dealing with it and there's all these now investigations

have gone into it, that it darkened the name of this idea of just like getting the money out. the door is fast. So to Josh's point that it creates this backlash that then leads to there's been a pendulum swing and how you sort of think about it. The other thing, though, is there's, it's not just about this question of what is the most efficient way to approach this and balance the cost of these reporting requirements. There's also, I think, among Democrats, an increasing opinion over the last few years, basically, that you have to assume good faith on the part of the people who are participating in these programs. And even an idea that, you know, if the program is misadministered, the money is probably going to, you know, someone who is needy, so to basically

not worry too much about fraud in these programs. And I don't, I don't think that that's Democrats thinking it's fine, that there be massive fraud because it's being siphoned off into a community that's a Democratic voting constituency. I don't think that if they knew ex ante that this was what was going to happen here, they would have said, well, that's fine. The Somalis are poor. They need the money. But I do think that there's this sort of, I've said before, the thing I miss most about being a Republican is that I feel like Republicans have a basically accurate view of human nature and are appropriately suspicious of people and that Democrats assume far too much good faith on the part of people and sort of assume that you can, you know, just put things out

and people will only take them if they need them. But I think that, you know, there were some valid reasons to have suspicion about certain kinds of enforcement and that led Democrats to go a little bit overboard here. And so I assume that there will now be a correction. And that, you know, appears to have already been underway in Minnesota, although too late. But, you know, the party is going to have to say that this is not only unacceptable, but that we're going to find ways to prosecute it and prevent fraud in these programs in the future if we hope to continue to get people to want to pay taxes for them. You have this added issue where the way this came to broad national prominence. The first indictments came down all the way back in 2022. The Biden administration

did a lot of these prosecutions, but you had more indictments. that came down related to more programs beyond just the food programs this fall. Then you had coverage in the New York Times. Coverage was frankly pretty hostile to the Walls Administration about how they had incompetently allowed all of this fraud in these programs.

And then it also got picked up by conservative influencers, including one named Nick Shirley, who went around to various daycares in the Minneapolis area, knocking on doors and being like, are there children here? And the way he frames it in this video

is I went to all these daycares and there's no children. Now, I'm certainly very open to the idea that there's fraud in the government subsidized daycare program in Minnesota, given the way that the programs have gone. At the same time, if you show up with a camera at a daycare center and knock on the door and demand to see the children, it makes sense to me that the operators of the daycare will refuse to show them to you. And, you know, the Minnesota Start Tribune, then sent a reporter and, you know, found it at least at some of these sites that there were, in fact,

children where Nick Shirley had said that there were no children because he didn't see any. But this has been part of why it's been impossible to have a productive conversation about this because Democrats' reaction has basically been, well, you know, this guy's harassing these Somalis and, you know, harassing the children at these daycares and therefore trying to talk past the question of, you know, is there fraud in these programs? And you meanwhile, of conservatives assuming that, you know, everything in this video is true just because they saw it on the internet, even though it is not, in fact, a fully convincing demonstration that these daycares are all empty. Now, the state of Minnesota, the state says it's looking into these 10 daycares and

figuring out whether they are, you know, complying with the rules and whether they're, in fact, providing daycare in exchange for the subsidies they're receiving. But, you know, the way conservatives talk about this is that, well, you know, they have to do this because the mainstream media doesn't cover this, which hasn't really been true. I mean, again, there was a New York Times feature about this back in November. Just because you didn't read it in the paper doesn't mean it wasn't covered in the paper. Well, now, I think that, like, I think when people say that the mainstream media doesn't cover something, and this is like, this is a complaint on the left as well as the right very frequently now, they're not,

they're not actually saying that literally it's never been mentioned, right? Because often they are like literally showing you a link from a mainstream media story. What they mean is that if this went the other way, if it was an issue that made some group that the mainstream media is not associated with, whether you believe that the mainstream media is biased left or right, that if this went the other way, if this issue made Republicans look bad, it would be getting full court press and instead it got one story in the New York Times. right? That's what they mean by the mainstream media is not covering it. And that, that complaint isn't always entirely unfair. For example, I think it was extremely fair about Joe Biden's age. The mainstream media did cover it, but they covered it in this incredibly weird way where it'd be like, people are saying, and then they would immediately flip to some aging expert who was like, age is just a number. You can't know whether it's on it. And it was like, okay. And then they would also run these articles about, like, cheap fakes.

And don't, you know, who are you going to believe your lying eyes or the, you know, advanced senior discrimination expert from the University of Ohio, who I just quoted. And that coverage was not, I think conservatives had a real complaint there that the mainstream media was effectively not covering Biden's age because the way the stories were slanted left people with the impression that some rando out there might think Biden was too old. but all these 17 experts I just interviewed, think he's awesome. There was also just, there were fewer of those articles than they're really ought to have. I mean, we know what aggressive coverage around that would look like because it emerged following June 27th, 2024. I mean, that's when the media decided that this was a real big story. And, you know, in part because I think they were embarrassed that they'd been caught unaware. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm embarrassed about the way that I wrote about that issue before June.

I didn't pay enough attention to it. And so I think that there was partly a correction for that. And it was also partly the partisanship of the media where, you know, the interests of the Democrats went from, let's not talk about this too much to let's talk about this as much as possible so we can get Joe Biden off the ticket. Right. And I just think that that's what people mean when they say the mainstream media isn't covering it, although I agree that the words, the mainstream media is not covering this are not an accurate description of what they're complaining about. I do think that there is something that can at various times. I mean, like the left has many complaints about stuff the mainstream media did not cover. about the Iraq war and they were right about those complaints, right? But actually, I don't think they were right about those complaints. No one's ever right about these complaints. These complaints are always just people who are upset that public polls don't back up their

thing. And an easiest thing to do is complain about the media. It can't be right that the media never misses a story. No, no. I mean, they obviously miss stories. I mean, one of the better complaints about like after June, right, why did they change? Why did the media suddenly like change so much about it was because they noticed it and they saw it and everyone else they were following public opinions.

They were following public interest as opposed to creating public interest, right? People who make these complaints about the media are often saying, why won't the media create the interest? Why won't they tell them in advance? To bring it back around to the Minnesota story, I mean, I think part of why we focus so much on the Joe Biden age thing is because it was the media's most egregious failure of this sort in the last decade. And so that was, you know, an area where the mainstream media performed especially poorly. this government spending scandal in a mid-sized state that had, you know, a New York Times feature about it, and that, by the way, has been the subject of prosecutions for some years at this point. Was that actually undercovered by the national media? I think in some ways it was overcovered, right?

The irony is if he hadn't run for vice president, the odds that this would have happened to him seem low to me. I think the Star Tribune has been in writing about this stuff as the indictments have come down, right? It's not like this has gone uncovered in Minnesota. But what happened to him was because he ran for vice president, the New York Times wrote a feature on it. And then a bunch of people who read the New York Times and do not read the Minneapolis Star Tribune picked it up, turned it into an online thing. And from there, it raced through the media and the alternative media and led to Waltz resigning. And had it not been for that, I think the national media wouldn't have picked it up. Because indeed, like, we cannot cover it.

every fraud scandal in every state and locality, there are too many of them. Why did Tim Walls become such a hate figure for, I mean, I have my own theories about this, but like, Republicans really, really dislike him in a way that goes beyond the reaction to other national democratic figures. I mean, I, you know, I just, I find him to be just a mediocrity. In addition to the fact that, you know, his government clearly mishandled this specific policy issue, I think he was just a poor political performer. as the vice presidential nominee. I think he got picked because the groups, quote, unquote,

looked to Minnesota as the sort of government where walls had been a total pushover for whatever it was that the, you know, the nonprofits wanted done there could be done. And that may have been one of the reasons why the state was ineffective on enforcement in these areas. But there's real personal animus, I mean, including the president,

accusing him grossly of having been, you know, involved in the assassination of one of his political allies, Melissa Hortman, the former speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives who was murdered last year, you had the president recirculating these conspiracy theories claiming that Tim Walz was behind that. But there's real animus there. I mean, you know, they're literally like, you know, going by his house, like shouting that he's retarded, quote unquote. I guess, you know, Walls was sort of like, you know, he was calling the president weird and sort of trying to make the politics more personal in a way that activated some liberals. But that's, you know, calling someone weird is not that. big in escalation. It's interesting to me how much Republicans really hate the guy. I actually think it's for the same reason that the left is in many ways more energized about J.D. Vance than they are about Donald Trump. Apparently, it's that that's that J.D. Vance beat Tim Walts in a debate. But a lot of it is that they both ended up as the kind of the enforcers for their campaigns, saying the things that their principles couldn't, right? So J.D. Vance is out

there with the cats and dogs. Although, I mean, saying things Trump can't. It's really quite an achievement. You know, Walsh made that gross couch joke about J.D. Vance. And that's actually where I saw a lot of conservatives just turn on him because it was gross. Like there was a stupid meme going around. The J.D. Vance fucked a couch. Yeah, the J.D. Vance in his memoir had said he did this, which he did not. And Waltz made a joke about it in public at a rally. And that really was, like, gross and inappropriate and incredibly nasty. And fits with a broader vibe of a bunch of progressives who like to pick on J.D. Vance because he was nerdy and unattractive in high school, as many of them. of us were. And that really tease conservatives off. I don't think that's the only reason, but I think that's a big part of it is that he was saying that stuff. Well, Kamala Harris kind of floated above it. Well, if you are, if you are throwing the poo, then people are going to want throw some poo back. I mean, the VP, I feel like always has been the one who says stuff while the candidate above them floats above it, except in the case of Donald Trump. Yeah, but the stuff has gotten a lot

meaner than it used to be, right? You're right. I don't talk to lots of conservatives about their inner dark feelings and their therapy sessions. But like, I would imagine that one of the reasons that they're talking, why they get off so much on this scandal with him, is that it's playing the hits, you know? Like, the last year hasn't gone great. It's nice to remember that big election they won in 2024. Kamala Harris hasn't really done that much. She hasn't been in the news that much, you know.

And Tim Walls is they get to go and feel, feel as good. as they did back in November of 2024, which isn't crazy, I guess. I feel like Democrats did that with like Paul Ryan and stuff after 2012. And people do stuff, even though in reality, like, I didn't give much of a shit about Paul Ryan, right? I know a lot of people do get off on, I'm on being mad at J.D. Vance in a way. But I don't actually see it comparing to like the profound visceral, like, organizing hatred that the Democrats have for Donald Trump. You know, like that. I mean, I would just say that like he gets way much.

more attention than a vice president usually does. And that is because he's the guy who floats the trial balloons for the Trump administration and people don't like that. Yeah, he tweets a lot. Well, he also seems intent on keeping sort of the grossest, racist aspects of the Trump coalition inside the tent. Sure. In a way that other Trump officials and other Republicans seem significantly less solicitous of these people than Vance is. I think we are vehemently agreeing, right? That's the stuff he's doing that they really don't like. And Tim Waltz was doing the stuff that Kamala Harris want to done but didn't want to have her fingerprints on. And that makes people mad. Like, my, my take on Tim Walts is that he's kind of an amiable dupus and that he had bad policies, but it seems

like an okay person, maybe a little too eager to go along with other people and make his tribe happy, which I think is really how you get this fraud scandal. But I don't get emotionally in any way. The Republican reaction, I am just reporting what I think. is driving it. I think it's just funny, though, like, Tim Walts has had such an interesting arc since, like, August, 2024 or whatever it was. When, you know, initially, it was, he was the left's VP over, like, centrist, liberals who wanted someone else.

And so they were like, oh, how dare you guys worry about that it's going to be a problem that he lied about, like, what he did in China, you know, that's not a problem. It's just, oh, just words. And they would just get mad at, like, people like me. Now it's like Republicans are trying to own the, like, like the centrist Dems by going after him. When did we ever get custody of Tim Walls? I'd disclaim that.

I don't want custody of him. Like, he was just, he seems like a fine person I don't know much about. He didn't seem like a good VP pick. I think he seems like a dope. I think he's actually not very bright, which is why he was so bad in that debate with J.D. Vance. But the other thing is just the origin story of how he got on the ticket. It was partly because he was, he was clearly the preferred candidate of progressives who

thought that he, you know, wouldn't think for himself and wouldn't question their policy priorities in the way that Josh Shapiro might have. But the other thing is that he was supposed to be the, you know, the quote unquote code talker to rural whites. And he, you know, he represented a rural district in Minnesota that now is Republican leaning before he became the governor. So well done there. There was this idea among Democrats that this was the sort of persona that would actually have crossover appeal, that because he, you know, he had coached football and he, you know, drove a truck that that meant that he would, he would appeal to voters who would ordinarily prefer Republicans, and that seems to have been drastically wrong, that not only did that not work,

it's that he seems to have been an especially repellent figure. This is the John Kerry theory of politics, right? Where you're like, hey, he was in the military. You guys love that sort of thing. And it's like, yeah, you might have picked someone who didn't, like, throw his medals away, except he didn't actually throw his medals away and protest against the war. If that's what you're, if that's the vibe you're going for, you want to pick someone who just served and then came home and was happy about it.

And also someone who has, you know, policy views that are at least somewhat tailored toward the people you're trying to appeal to. I mean, like Josh Shapiro, a Jewish guy who observes the Sabbath with four children living, you know, who grew up in an upscale suburb of Philadelphia, he's not someone who has like a bio that's like that's what really appeals in central Pennsylvania, but he has an alignment of values and interests with voters across the state of Pennsylvania that have gotten him to this 60% plus approval rating. I think people are way too focused on these biographical details and, you know, superficial similarities to certain kinds of voters. versus, you know, being able to show that you agree with them on things and that you care about their values and are going to advocate for the things they care about, that's what gets you those inroads.

And so how we ended up with walls on the ticket is partly, you know, I think from the subsequent reporting, it's not clear that Josh Shapiro was even interested in being on the ticket and that he would have had certain personality conflicts with Kamala Harris. But if you wanted a Rusbell governor and you decided that Shapiro was unsuitable for whatever reason, the next best option was Gretchen Whitmer. But there had been this arbitrary decision that because Kamala Harris is a woman, that you needed a white man on the ticket because that's what voters really care about. And I think that has been greatly disproved. And so, you know, if they'd widen the lens and said, well, you know, we could have a governor of any gender, then we could have had Whitmer on the ticket. If you read Kamala Harris's memoir, which I must say I do not recommend doing. But if you're going to read the memoir, you will come across her description of the process. And the thing is, like, when she picked walls, I had a perhaps uncharitable thought.

But there's an adage in business that A is higher A's and B's higher C's. Yeah. That people who are okay at their jobs but not great or afraid to surround themselves with stars because they're afraid that the star will outshine them. And that's how he got to be vice president. He was the most unthreatening governor you could find in the country. And that was not a good reason to choose someone to be your vice president. Well, great.

I do think it's funny that the Democrats are like, we just need to find a small town guy from, you know, some flyover shithole and small town, maybe they'll be like a coach or whatever. And the thing is, like, if you're ever in a small town flyover shithole, the one people that they, like people feel really strongly about enough and hate,

is the other fucking little league football coach. You know, like, you might like yours, but you're going to have very strong. They don't all get along. Yeah. Let's take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about the Kennedy Center or the Trump Kennedy.

Center. This is Central Air. So I'm just amused by this story of the fighting over the Kennedy Center, in part because the stakes are so low. Donald Trump has, you know, made himself the chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center, stacked the board with these conservatives, greatly alienated all of the people who have been involved with the Kennedy Center for a long time. A lot of performers are pulling out, ticket sales are down. He does at least seem to be renovating the building, which is the one thing that everyone on all sides of this seems to want is an improvement to the physical plant of the Kennedy Center. And then, of course, he stuck his name on the building. Now, the quote-unquote Trump Kennedy Center. And there's been this, you know, people are saying, well, the law doesn't authorize him to change the name of the Kennedy Center.

Nor does basic taste in decency, but that's, I guess, a side point. Right. I've been interested, Megan, because you've been arguing with some people about this, basically saying that, you know, the people in the arts who have pulled back from the Kennedy Center shouldn't be doing that. No, that's not what I said. That is not what I said. That is not what I said. Okay, sorry. What did you say? So Kat Rosenfeld, who is a friend, you know, Kat is against the politicization of the arts.

And that is her big beef with this, is that, like, you are basically continuing this. Like, let's all ostentatiously signal our politics all the time. And that's her beef with it. That's not my beef with this. And I don't even really have a beef. I made an idle comment that turned into, like, a three-day internet thing. My point was just that you should think about what are the downstream impacts of this, right? What happens?

Because I think the thing that we saw during the pandemic, and something that I kind of vaguely knew before, but I think it's the most vivid illustration, is that changing people's habits has a lot of big effects that you didn't necessarily predict from doing that. So, for example, I would have thought, you know, we're not having school for a year, or maybe there'll be a little bit of learning loss. What I would not have predicted was huge upticks in truancy, huge upticks in road rage, huge upticks in all of these other behaviors that were, I think, not ex ante predictable from pulling so many people out of society for a year. And so similarly for the Kennedy Center, like, I think there's a potential where this just does long-term damage to the Kennedy Center. Now, maybe you think that is worth it to signal that your dislike of what Donald Trump is doing, which is really gross, although I should say the minute a Democrat comes in that name's off the building and I doubt it ever goes back. So this is a very short term gross, undemocratic, against civic norms, all the rest of it, but it's a pretty short term problem. What are the long-term effects of doing that? You should think about that rather than just thinking like, I am going to signal my solidarity. Yay us, right? Because there aren't that many entertainers.

venues in the Washington area. The Kennedy Center itself, like Lincoln Center and other big performing arts centers, is a morass of cross subsidies where your musicals are, you know, subsidizing things like the symphony or the opera. I don't know what the internal numbers are, but I doubt that everything that's performed pencils out. So do you want to have a place to do this? Do you want to do something that is going to break customer habits, change the economics of this place? I don't know. Maybe you do. But you should at least just think about that. I don't think people are. I think people are just, as has happened, over and over and over and over again for the last 10 years, they're getting caught up in the moment in the joy of solidarity and expressing your disgust for someone. They're not thinking about any secondary impacts of what they're doing. And when you suggest that maybe they should, they say, who's the bad guy here? Donald Trump is the bad guy. There's no question about that. But that's not actually relieve you from the obligation to choose responses to his bad. badness that like make the world as minimally bad or maximally good in the future as possible.

Look, I mean, I'm generally an agreement with you about the phenomenon that like people should think about how they shouldn't just do things just out of protest just because it makes you feel good or whatever. And that that is bad. But in this case, I have to just agree with Josh so much that this is such a low stakes thing that you know, who gives a shit if the opera in fucking one little unimportant city is if people maybe go to it a little less, if the tickets get a little cheaper or whatever. Like, that risk is so, so little and so, so not serious. That I actually completely agree that artists should, it is completely reasonable for them to not need to think about that. For them to decide, actually, I will feel like a horror if I go and work under the Trump

Kennedy Memorial Senator because it's, you know, I'll wait until Trump's dead to go and do that. because like at least that it'll be memorial like it's completely fine to not ask them to debase themselves because this is so low rent you mean you you can say that like trump is saying go fuck you to these people and that these people are saying fuck you back and like maybe that doesn't lead us to heaven and happiness but if you tell people that every single time someone tells them to go fuck themselves they need to smile and bear it because that's what is for the greater good eventually they're going to lose it and say go fuck you at the wrong time they're going to, like, respond poorly when it really matters.

In this case, it doesn't matter. Let people not go and work under this banner that offends them and is literally, like, designed to offend them. I am personally indifferent to the fate of musicals or anything else at the Kennedy Center. I go to the opera occasionally. But other than that, I have never been to a performance at the Kennedy Center. I will probably never go see a musical at the Kennedy Center.

I haven't seen a musical in the theater since LeMay's in, like, 2003. And I think that people who are in those shows are actually not personally indifferent to whether one of the largest cities in the country has a viable theater business for these sorts of performances that is as robust as possible. I think they actually do care. So did they not decide to come because they didn't care and they didn't think this through or because they care so much and are going, ah, but they're making their wrong choice? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I have watched progressives not think it through for like 10 years now. and I don't think they thought it through because there has been no evidence at any point that anyone making these gestures was thinking it through. But most of these people don't live in Washington, D.C., almost all of them don't live in Washington, D.C. A lot of them are in traveling or run traveling companies, right?

Right. But there's a lot of markets. I mean, you know, the idea that, you know, they need to be so focused on the health of the regional performing arts economy in the Washington D.C. area in which this is sort of an anchor institution, that they need to corral their political expression to ensure the long run financial health. of the Kennedy Center. I just, you know, I think it's perfectly appropriate, even if they care broadly about the financial health of the arts to say, you know, it's not worth it for me to involve myself in this thing that is built around to fuck you to me. The news coverage of this, there's, there's a great Sean McRish article about this in the New York Times about all the, the Philistines that they've brought in to run the Kennedy Center. And there's some dancers who, one of the Trump appointees looks at this dance troupe and is like, you know, these dancers are great. they could perform on a cruise ship.

And this person who works on dance programs at the Kennedy Center is like, to this day, I don't know whether that was intended as a compliment or whether it was intended as a dig. I can't even tell. They've really, you know, tried to alienate the people who are in the arts space. I think it's fine for them just to be like, well, you say fuck you to me, then I say fuck you back to you. And by the way, for the long-term health of the Kennedy Center, he at least is doing that renovation. And so, you know, if you're concerned about the long, you know, the fact that they will come out of this with a better building is at least a partly offsetting thing to the fact that, you know, there

will be some reputational damage that will fade. Although one thing I do want to say about the name on the building, I predict that Republicans are going to try to use some appropriations bill to keep that name on the building. Because, you know, 20-some years ago, there was the whole fight over renaming national airport for Ronald Reagan and all these local politicians were upset because, you know, it's strongly Democratic area. They don't want their report named after Ronald Reagan. They put in federal law, that not only did you have to rename it, but that the subway system had to change the name of the subway station there to put Reagan on it if they wanted to keep their funding. So, you know, we've got three more years of the Trump administration.

I think they may try to enshrine that name in law. And I don't know about the extent to which Democrats will pick a fight over that in a broader, you know, I don't think they're going to shut down the government over that issue. But I think they will try to keep his name on the building. I would not put that past them. I do think the Democrats, the minute they control Congress, that name will be gone, justifiably and correctly. We should not name anything after living presidents. But I just want to reiterate. I don't care, right?

Like, I made an offhand remark that because Blue Sky wanted to have a fight got turned into, like, Megan McArdle is leading a crusade. I am not leading a crusade. If you want to give the middle finger to the Trump Center, go right ahead. Oh, now we're taking Kennedy's name off the building. It's just the Trump Center. Yeah. So sorry. Sorry. I don't know if we should leave that in or take it out. If you want to stage this, I don't care. I was merely making a general remark that this kind of politics, people don't think it through and they should think it through. And I would also say this, that like giving people the middle finger back does not matter. And so the people, well, I think you are correct that probably the net impact on society of this in any way is going to be small. But the other people who were like,

This is how we fight fascism. Like, no, this is not how you fight fascism. This is like, this is like somehow lending legitimacy to Trump's regime. It is not lending legitimacy to Trump's regime. None of this matters. But the alternative side of like, as somebody who constantly sees every boycott and thinks, this is stupid. Like, one other thing about it is, is that if you don't care about it and people should be allowed to go and do it, and I wouldn't be mad at people going and performing there is that, I don't care. If people don't want to go, because they don't want to stand under it and they're personally vended by it.

like that's a pressure release for them and that's fine. People can make that individual decision because it's so low stakes that it has no reasonable consequence for society that I need to concern myself with. And, you know, as long as I understand that the worry about touring companies in second rate cities being able to do well. But as long as Republican Congresswomen are giving hand jobs during Beetlejuice the musical in Denver, I think that those shows are going to be fine. I think we need to end the segment there. I can't go on after that. By the way, that scandal, did you know they have night vision cameras in the theaters? Oh, yeah, I do.

Like, it was dark in the theater. They caught that on surveillance, which they can really enhance the brightness of those things. So watch what you do in the theater was that lesson from Lauren Bobert there. Do you guys want my report from communist occupied New York City? Absolutely. I want to, I mean, have the, has the rationing started yet? There still appear to be plentiful bagels all around the, this city. One week into the mayoralty of Zoran Mondani, you know, my take on this during the campaign

was that he had shown an unusual political talent for appealing to people who, by all rights should think that he was, you know, a crazy, scary extremist. He's very charming. He's very good at, you know, having respectful conversations with people he disagrees with. He's changed his mind over the years on some issues, especially having to do with housing development in a way that I think acknowledges the importance of the market. And in fact, one of one of his signature policy issues that, you know, he wants to lower the price of food from, like, chicken and rice carts in the city. He has a deregulatory agenda there where the city is supposed to hand out more permits and the market will bring down prices. So, you know, I don't, I'm not

terrified of Zaron Mandani. But the question had been, you know, once he's actually mayor and having to make tradeoffs and difficult decisions, what's he going to do with that? And I think a week in, it's still too early to tell. It's interesting to me, he picked some very low-hanging fruit. He came in to office. And on like his second day, he goes and he does a press conference. on this street called McGinnis Boulevard in northern Brooklyn. It's an arterial street that leads to a bridge to Queens. And there was a bike lane redesign.

They were going to take it down from four lanes to two and put in a protected bike lane, you know, the sort of thing that liberals always want and that people who drive complain that, you know, the city's having a war on cars. And there had been a corruption scandal in the Adams administration where the owners of a studio business along McGinnis Boulevard really hated the redesign, thought it was going to be a real problem for their business.

And that they allegedly tried to bribe a top Adam official by giving her a cameo role on a TV show, Godfather of Harlem, Ingrid Lewis Martin, this like deputy mayor type figure, got two lines on this show and then got indicted over that. But anyway, she had killed part of this redesign. So he's there on McGuinness Boulevard saying, you know, we're going to put the whole bike lane in all the way to the bridge. And so it's both, you know, the sort of lefty transportation agenda. By the way, like my most left-wing positions are basically about street design. I'm in favor of all the traffic. calming and the bike lanes, even though I do own a car and drive in the city. So it's that.

And then also, I'm not corrupt like Eric Adams. So that's the easy stuff to do. The difficulty is going to be, you know, he wants a rent freeze. You have a lot of landlords who are on the verge of insolvency in New York because of reforms that were done in 2019 that really tightened down rent control and tens of thousands of empty units that can't be rented out at a profit. And he nominally understands that if you want to freeze rents, you have to do something about cost control for landlords. And because New York has all sorts of stupid expensive regulation, there is room to reduce the cost of doing business here and make it possible for rents to be lower. But you have to take on various lobbies. If you want to reform property taxes, you probably have to raise taxes on homeowners.

If you want to cut insurance costs, you have to take on the trial lawyers. If you want to, you know, get rid of the scaffolding that festoons New York in a unique way, we have all these facade inspection requirements that other cities don't have. And there's this whole industry around putting scaffolding around buildings for this. You can actually reduce building operating expenses by something like 3% if you go to a normal scaffolding regime that might pay for a year of rent-frees. But you literally have this lobby of the scaffolding companies that has fought in the city council for decades and has kept these rules in place. So he's going to have to have some of those political fights. And we haven't seen yet what decisions he's going to make about that. But, you know,

he remains charming and he's hired this wide range of officials, some of whom, you know, you have leftists crying on Twitter because he, you know, has developers inside the tent and he reappointed Eric Adams' police commissioner. On the other hand, it's like tenants' rights appointee has like a long history of like communist anti-white posting, even though she herself is white. So we'll, you know, we'll see what that team of rivals does. But I have, you know, the, the means of production has not yet been expropriated here in New York. Do you think she's going to last the tenant woman? She seems to have enough of a history of really embarrassing social media posts and just generally, and also now it turns out videos.

I haven't seen this. What did she say? Give me an example. What did she say? Homeownership is, does she call it fascist or something? But she basically talks about how like home ownership is bad and we need to have less of it. Just in general? Just in general.

Because it creates the wrong political incentives for people. But also they like, we need to stop thinking about homes as something you own and instead think about them as a collective good. How. And a lot of stuff about. like how like we need to defeat the white middle class because they're everything that's wrong. It's really whiteness is bad and like whiteness is responsible for all the evils in the world. And, you know, communism means no whiteness. It's really, it's a treasure.

And well, and I suspect that like partly because this position doesn't matter that much. Like what is the benefit of the Mondani administration of keeping her? I think she is going to survive. And, you know, there was one prior appointee who did get withdrawn over past social media posts. So it's not. What did that person say? It was full frontal anti-Semitism.

Oh, okay. But so, I mean, C.O. Weaver, the tenants rights appointee, is relatively influential on these issues and, you know, on, you know, tenant reforms in Albany. She's a fairly prominent activist. And also, interestingly, like, you know, some of these tweets where she's saying, you know, framing them in anti-white stuff. It's partly trying to push her leftist coalition against trying to block development, basically saying, you know, the key to protecting tenants' rights is rent control.

And what we need is tighter, tighter rent control and don't stand in the way of new housing construction. So there are partly there, there's some of these splits on the left where they're actually less anti-capitalist views that she has compared to some other people in the coalition. But I think she's an important enough voice that she's going to stay there. But because it's this, you know, specifically tenant, you know, they're basically. basically focused on trying to prevent landlords from breaking the rules and abusing tenants. And there's a lot for the city to do around that. And there are real violations, you know, buildings that are not fixing repairs that are legally required, not providing heat that's required by law. I mean, I think that's right. But let's be fair. They're also basically focused on not letting landlords evict people who have stopped

paying their rent or trashing the apartments or an otherwise breaking the rules themselves. Right. But so I think that she will stay there in a position that is focused on, you know, ensuring that the laws as they are written are available to tenants, including, to Megan's point in situations where that might cause problems in the market. I think she's important enough coalitionally that she'll be there, but she's not the sum total of the Mondani administration's approach to housing, which overall does seem to understand the importance of private capital. I don't think that they're about to, I mean, you know, there's some homeowner interests that they should take on. The New York City property tax system really is biased in favor of homeowners compared to rental apartments, and it would

be easier to operate a rental department building if you equalize that taxation. And maybe that would go toward the stated ends of C. Weaver on Twitter, you know, that if you fairly tax homeowners, then that, you know, that that tilts political power a little bit away from them. I don't think that they're going to actually take on the very powerful homeowner lobby in that way, even if she's their tweeting like this. But my guess is that she will survive. And, you know, there are, he's a very left-wing candidate. He came out of the DSA. There's a lot of people in there who think things like this. They need to be kept in the coalition, much in the way that the Trump administration needs to manage the fact that a lot of its coalition has ideas that are unsavory to a majority of the electorate. Mom, Doni has that political pressure, too. He has to keep some of these people around. The question is, will that make it impossible for the city to actually add housing units as it needs? And will that make it impossible for the city to cut operating expenses as it needs in order to pursue the stated goals that it has on housing? I think that's the very unclear thing at this point.

I think we can leave that there this week. Ben, Megan, thank you for a good conversation as always. Thank you. Thank you, Josh. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Fay. We are a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swaddock mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Joshua Mosher. Thanks for listening and stay cool out there.