The Ricochet Podcast - Tariff Tiffs and DOGEmestic Disruption

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

The Trump administration’s days of thunder roll on while just about everyone outside the DOGE team struggles to keep up. While many see little more than nonsense and mayhem, today’s guest, Daniel McCarthy, recognizes a sound strategy in tariff threats, iconoclasts heading executive agencies, and even the baffling Gaza Strip pitch, to address America’s mounting challenges at home and abroad. Plus, Steve, James and Charlie discuss the meltdown over USAID cuts; the dismal national report card; and the “Orwellian nightmare” facing… federal bureaucrats. Audio in this week’s open: NBC’s Hallie Jackson describes the panic of federal workers and Sen. Eric Schmitt (R - MO) talks about USAID on the floor of the Senate

It's always a successful podcast, James, when you manage to work in the word flounce. Did I get in flounce? Did I get flounce in there? You got in flounce. I love the word flounce. I do too. Yeah. Okay. Next week we won't flounce, we'll swan about.

That's a good one too. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lawlix, and we have Stephen Hayward and Charles C.W. Cook, and we're going to be talking to Daniel McCarthy about tariffs, Trump, and other things. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Other federal workers not revealing their names because of concern over retribution.

Describe to NBC News fear and panic, an Orwellian nightmare. 70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland. 47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia. 32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru. This is what they're mad about. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, part of our Boeing series this year. It's number 727.

I'm James Lollix in Minneapolis, which is due to get about 10 inches of snow in the next couple of days or so. And I'm talking to Stephen Hayward and Charles C.W. Cook, who I assume are at their polar opposites, one in Florida, one perhaps in... Well, where are you, Stephen? I know this is of great interest to everybody. Well, I don't know about that. I assume, are at their polar opposites, one in Florida, one perhaps in, well, where are you, Stephen?

I know this is of great interest to everybody. Well, I don't know about that. I'm in California, out at the coast, but it is raining, so it's not snow, but we are getting some rain. There's that. Well, wherever you are in this country, I'm sure that you've heard, of course, the nailing, washing, gnashing, ganashing, and rending of garments that is attending day 18 of the Tasmanian devil-like activity going on from the Trump administration at Doge and whatnot. And I'm here to tell you, I spent a lot of time, not a lot of time, but I go to Reddit a lot because it's interesting. It used to be one of those places where, oh, here's a niche community that I like. Let's talk with some like-minded fellow citizens about this, that, or the other.

But every single subreddit has been infected by a level of craziness I haven't seen before. There is an utter conviction that we are basically in 1934 Germany. It's going to get worse. We are under the boot of fascism at the moment. And it's interesting how it manifests itself in one subreddit they were noting that uh a whole bunch of subreddits had been turned off had been banned now they were porn subreddits you know r slash r slash feet r slash teens stuff like that but the general consensus was was this was a switch that had been installed by the administration or the reddit administrators on the orders of the administration to test how easy it would simply be to just shut reddit down

because as we all know donald trump paces you know the the oval office at two o'clock in the morning worrying about what reddit is doing um and you think well that's paranoid nonsense let's go over here to where we're talking about the best ways to store all of the videos and books and things that we've downloaded and there they are talking about the fact that it is necessary for everybody with a conscience to um to download as much information as possible from federal government websites because it's all going to be taken down in the interests of installing the imminent fascist regime. I don't want to go to the comic strip history one, because I am relatively certain that there will be an argument about banning Twitter links. It's crazy. Well, now, hold on a minute, James. I had this more than vague recollection of a few years ago, either during Obama or during Biden, there was all this talk of the federal government having available to it a kill switch for the Internet so they could turn off the whole thing for some national emergency.

And, you know, boy, a good thing we didn't get that because, you know, Trump would use it, of course, on 1201, 18 days. Only 18 days, by the way. It seems so much longer, which is what's so glorious about it. Charles, it seemed like a year. Right. Some highlights, perhaps, if you will. What's instructive about all this is I don't know if you guys know what the state of Minnesota looks like. When you think of Minnesota, do you have a picture of it in your mind, Charles?

Tim Walls, my favorite. Well, that's an image. I mean mean geographically what would look like we know that there's that pointy edge we know that there's that sort of irregular edge that nestles and cuddles with wisconsin and a fairly sharp and discernible border with iowa but way up in the north there's this little promontory that pops up, some remnant of an ancient map-making dispute. It's a little tiny part that pokes up into the butt of Canada. And I like to think that USAID is like that. It's a very small thing. But yet, how illustrative and defining of the entire organization, the government, it truly is.

What we are seeing is the tip of the iceberg, the Minnesota part that Jets indicate. We're seeing the curtain has been pulled back on the smallest of plays and all the things we're finding. Where to start, James finding where to start james anywhere to start it's difficult with this because it is being talked about as you have noted in these hyperbolic terms and yet it is extremely complicated it's extremely complicated on the merits it's extremely complicated on the merits. It's extremely complicated constitutionally. It's extremely complicated even within the executive branch. And people keep asking these questions that are simple.

Do you think it should exist? Well, which bits? Do you think Elon Musk should be able to audit it? Probably, but it depends what you mean. Do you think that this is the beginning of a constitutional crisis? No, but it would be if the president were doing things that it doesn't look as if he's doing. And then you've got some of the illustrative elements,

as you noted, where whatever is found, however stupid it is, the rejoinder is, well, it's only X percent of the federal budget, which is not a defense it's just not a defense for a start if you took that as your excuse every time you'd never cut anything ever because you would say well this is not very much okay fine second the fact that it's not very much doesn't necessarily matter because aside from what things cost, there is the question of should the United States be doing it at all, even if it were free, even if it made money.

And some of the things that we're uncovering, the United States should just not be doing. Now, I'm not including in that PEPFAR, which I think is a good program, but I don't care if the encouragement of Papua New Guinean tribesmen to become transgender makes the United States a billion dollars a year. I don't want the federal government doing it. And so this is getting obfuscated, I think, in this broad now. This is partly the fault of the people who are investigating it, because they have quite rightly made a big deal out of how much money they're going to save,

and that's all very good. But they should have said at the same time i think in marketing terms they should have said yeah we have a dual mandate one to find waste and fraud and abuse and corruption and some of this really is basically log rolling for progressives and we're going to find things that america should not be doing at all and you know that the excuse oh well it's not very much money just doesn't address that side of this yeah it's a great distraction to focus on the amount of money involved you know i've been hearing for years going all the way back to the reagan years from appointees to usa id that it was not so much corrupt and and a slush fund for liberal activist groups i think that's been growing in probably since ob Obama is my hunch about

this, but that it was just ineffective, wasteful, not thought through, and so forth. I have a hunch that what happened here is there may be some career people inside USAID who raised the flag for the incoming Trumpers, that you really ought to look closely at how some of these AID slush funds are going to activist groups. By the way, I think most Americans have probably never heard of USAID until five days ago. What they're hearing, I think they don't like. But last thing as an opener is the latest figure I saw just this morning from the Columbia Journalism Review, certainly not a member of the right vast right-wing conspiracy that usaid grants supported over 6 000 journalists over 700 different news outlets and as the way they put it 279

media sector civil society organizations that's a euphemism for something bad in more than 30 countries one of the publications we've heard about politico and a few others but i'm shocked to learn that one of the publications that has somehow gotten some usaid money is christianity today it's a whole separate story that they've sort of been moving left for quite a while but you've all thought of them as you how in the world is christianity today getting money from the usa id i want to learn more about that, but this looks like they really, and there's gonna be more of these kinds of things in other agencies, EPA, regular state department. I remember going through the COVID relief bill in 2021 that was passed in haste. And I found in there, you know, a grant of $3 million for gender education in Pakistan. So it's not just USAID, it's everywhere.

And good for them for rooting this out. And I don't care if it only saves a dime. It's the things we used to make fun of. Yeah, we're spending a lot of money for transgender operas in Ireland. We make these ridiculous examples and they turn out to be exactly what they were doing. You mentioned the Politico thing, of course,

and I think it is interesting. It's been defended by a lot of people who say, well, no, they need access to this. Interesting that people in government in Washington need to pay money to learn what's happening in Washington and government. But set that aside, if you will. Charles Wright, it's does this. The part that fascinates me, and you mentioned slush funds, is there's a Twitter account, X, called Data Republican, I think is her handle. And she's developed all kinds of tools that allow you to drill down.

You enter in various codes and whatnot, and it spits out, thanks to AI, these marvelous little graphs that tell you exactly how the money flows. And the boxes that are marked red are the ones that receive federal government money. And almost every single instance here, it's all red on the left. And then on the right, where the money eventually ends up, it's some NGO, it's some private enterprise or the like. And you see how these institutions, how these organizations, the NGOs get grants, and then sort of wash them through an educational facility. So that Ford gets the money and gives it to Vanderbilt, and Vanderbilt then gives it to Tides Foundation, which pops up a lot,

and Tides gives it to some local entity, which sounds perfectly wonderful, doing marvelous things for the people and the rest of it. But you just see this money as it flows from the state to the private enterprises, getting less and less as it goes along, of course, because everybody's got to take their cut. And when this visual is repeated over and over and over again, it is hard not to assume that there's just a tremendous amount of inefficiency going on here. And I think, yes, the idea is to zero it out and build it from scratch and justify anew every single one of these things. Now, you could say that's just simply too much work.

I think we got enough people in Washington who could probably work nine to five figuring out exactly how to do this and put it into a bill. So that instead of having this big sloshing vat of money that goes everywhere, that you have specific lines and specific laws that empower and instruct instead of the blob. And Charles, I know you're with me on this, and Stephen too, that it's not that we're opposed necessarily to spending United States government money on philanthropic efforts. We just want something rigorous, something codified, so that Congress does its job that we have a budget not a continuing resolution but a budget and do you think we might actually get a budget out of this after two years or does trump lack the discipline to actually keep going and follow

this to its natural conclusion can i can i rant about something for a second that's making me insane rant rant okay so i have for the last 13 or 14 years written over and over again that we need congress to take back its powers that delegation to the administrative state is a problem that the back and forth we get every time we have a new president, because so many of the decisions that should be made by Congress have been farmed out, is unstable.

And I've done this irrespective of whether the president was a Republican or a Democrat, because it's a structural question, not a partisan question. Most notably, I think, given the scale of the usurpation, I spent a couple of years shouting at Joe Biden for trying to spend $400 trillion, billion dollars, not 400 trillion, that's next time, $ billion dollars bailing out student loans with public money that he was not allowed to do and i did not see this as a partisan question and i opened my arms and

asked other people to come in with me on the endeavor and say no the president's not allowed to do this democrats republicans independ, independents, whatever. Just please accept that Congress is supposed to do this. And you know what I got? I got nothing. I got absolutely nothing. In fact, you got the usual suspects. Either stayed quiet about it or said, no, he can do it. Or, well, it's nice.

We have had a Republican president for, what is it, 15 days? 16 days now? And that Republican president, as far as I can see, is exercising powers that were delegated by Congress. Now, I don't want them to be delegated. I don't think it is a good idea for Congress to say, here is a massive tranche of money, you go spend it as you see fit. I'm totally with you, James. If Congress has done that on any of these issues, I will be the first person to stand up and say I'm sorry President Trump but you can't cancel it but thus far we seem to be in a situation

in which the president is just auditing what he is able to spend and in some cases saying I'm no longer going to spend it I'm no longer going to use the discretion that I have been given that every president has been given and what is the the press saying? It's a constitutional crisis. So what we have is a scenario in which when presidents, Barack Obama did it with DACA, Joe Biden did it with student loans, where the executive branch is literally stealing the power of Congress, is literally usurping the constitutional authority that has been given to Congress. These people are silent or endorse it and the second that a president starts to use the delegated authority that they have actually been given in a way that they don't like they're saying this is the coming of hitler this is the end of the republic this is a constitutional crisis this is this is insane

this is making me so cross because i've been standing asking these people to come help for 10 15 years and they won't do it and then the second the president is actually doing what he's been allowed to do agreed he shouldn't be allowed to do it but he is it's a constitutional you have got to be kidding me you have just got to be kidding me the constitution met the constitution matters when it matters and it doesn't matter when it doesn't and if the president on the way out can just say oh by the way this uh this amendment is part of the constitution now uh he can do that although we've forgotten about joe bide it doesn't mean the constitution is living and breathing or is uh you know if they want to graft another limb onto it in the sternum then they'll do so if they want to hack off a foot they'll do yeah i i take all of their

protestations of constitutionality with a bag of Morton's salt. But I don't have an awful lot of salt, actually, because salt, I understand, isn't good for you. I'm one of those people who's crazy about it, like, oh, don't have salt. I love salt. I love fat. I love all kinds of things, as a matter of fact. And you know what? I'm going to be heading to the gym for a little while, and I'm going to be hoisting a lot of metal, and I feel good about that for my age and all that. But one of the things that I do make sure that I know about is what my metabolism is doing. Because your metabolism has got to work properly and you will feel the benefits in every aspect of your life if it does. I have a valuable tool that gives me insights to create a healthy

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going to lumen.me slash ricochet to get 20% off your Lumen. That's L-U-M-E-N dot me slash ricochet for 20% off your purchase. And we thank Lumen for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age, vice president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and contributing editor to American Conservative and The Spectator. You can find his writings in countless other publications. You can find them on X at Tory Anarchist. Daniel, welcome. Thank you. Delighted to be here. Well, Monday, you had a piece in the Post, New York, called Trump's Canada Tariff Tiff. And I think that should have just been

Trump's Tariff Tiff for alliterative purposes. Tells America's friends to get real on defense spending. We don't usually think of Canada when it comes to defense spending. We're looking at Europe and what they are or are not doing. Explain exactly how that relates relates because a lot of people may have looked at that and said why canada uh maybe it's fentanyl but there's something else going on yeah there are a whole constellation of issues that we have with canada one of them being canada's role in nato and the fact that it's one of the relatively few nato members now that is still lagging behind its defense commitment so nat NATO members are supposed to commit to spending 2% of their GDP on defense. That's obviously for their own defense. It's also making sure that the entire alliance is financed. And Canada is lagging significantly behind that.

Canada spends about, I think, 1.3%, 1.7%, somewhere between those figures on its defense right now. I think it's actually 1.3. It's significantly less than 2. And Pierre Trudeau is just not serious about meeting his obligations. And he said it's actually going to take until the 2030s before Canada is able to reach the mark that we expect from our allies in NATO. So I think Donald Trump is using tariffs here to put pressure on Trudeau, pressure on Canada on a whole number of issues, including this one of Canada being a free rider on national security coming from the United States and the NATO alliance. Dan, it's Steve Hayward out in California. By the way, you could have

just stopped a moment ago by saying Pierre Trudeau is sorry, Justin Trudeau is not serious. I mean, he's such an unserious person. Look, I want to ask you three or four things. You have, for quite a long time, staked out a position on the, I think, the non-interventionist camp. I'll call it that way, right? And against, I have a lot of sympathy for this, against foreign entanglements and military adventures overseas. I think that viewpoint has caught on with a lot of people. But two things in particular right now. Well, let's start in reverse chronology. So the last couple of days, Trump has let fly

this idea that we ought to take a role in rebuilding Gaza and moving people out. And we'll have a, I don't know, it's like a real estate deal, an ownership stake in the resorts that will be built. What do you think of this prospective entanglement? Do you like this? How do you, are you enthusiastic for it? Or does this violate the McCarthy proviso? Well, I think Trump likes to state a maximalist position and oftentimes a shocking position right from the beginning of a negotiation in order to completely shake up the existing position. So, you know, I mean, there's a kind of almost ritualistic element to the way foreign policy negotiations are typically conducted. Everybody knows exactly where everyone else stands, and all the maneuvering involves a

lot of not saying what everybody knows. In this case, Trump has, you know, kind of thrown the chess pieces in the air. Nobody knows where they're going to land or what's going to happen. Now, that said, I really don't think Trump is going to send troops to Gaza. I don't think we're going to have a military occupation. I do think he's saying, you know what? First of all, I mean, it's been interesting to see typical hawks like Lindsey Graham now suddenly having to sound like doves as they say, wait a minute, this proposal goes too far. So, OK, now he's, you know, sort of testing the limits of where the more hawkish side of his own party will stand. Second, he's also telling the Gazans, wait a minute, why the heck do you want to come back to this, you know, land of yours, which has been reduced to rubble?

And if you do come back, how is it going to be any different than last time when you guys launched an attack on Israel? So, I think that too is, again, getting to the core of the dispute here and is kind of forcing negotiators to be more honest about what they actually want and are willing to do yeah i mean i think it calls the bluff of all the arab countries who say they're pro-palestinian and won't ever do anything to lift a finger i like that aspect of it uh the nadir one perhaps for you i think is a prospective attack on iran's nuclear facilities uh and uh i i can't remember if you've written on that or not i know tucker carlson and other people are saying, absolutely, no, no, we should not go along with Israel

in any kind of military action against Iran. Where do you land on that? I think Israel's quite capable, as it has before, of taking out Iran's nuclear capability by itself. So I'm not too worried about the United States having to be involved in that, and it really is a matter for Israel to decide what's appropriate for its security. Obviously, as a neighbor of Iran, it's got the most skin in the game here, and so I think the United States should, you know, not be actively involved in that, but also should not be telling

Israel that this is something they can't do. We're not Israel's keeper. They are a sovereign nation. They can act according to their own interests. Well, but isn't it in our interest? I mean, Iran has declared that the two great enemies of the world are israel and the great satan that's us i mean you know they threatened us we know they sponsor lots of terrorism uh i'll leave aside the question of whether israel can do it alone i know there's disagreement among military experts on that but it seems to me that trump might do it and if trump does do it what does dan mccarthy say well i don't think trump's going to uh you know be having the united states take the leading role here and i don't think the united states is going to be

uh acting uh directly with israel in order to take out iran's nuclear capability that they're trying to develop i think uh you know again israel has a very good track record of being able to keep iran in check and so i expect that to continue now if that's not the case, you know, then again, it's a different chessboard and you have to actually look at what's happening. I would be very skeptical of the ability. I mean, we can certainly, you know, have missile strikes. We can do a number of things. I think if we get into regime change and occupations, then we'd have a real nightmare on our hands. So it's all. And the other thing, too, is that it's very hard to tell. Obviously, there are signs that the Iranian regime is weakening. There are

signs that, you know, it is indeed, its oppressions have reached a point where the people are showing their discontent. On the other hand, it's hard to know exactly, you know, how deep that reaches into the countryside in Iran. So, I'm kind of optimistic, actually, that, you know, Iran's regime, like the Soviet regime, you know, in the 1980s, is not necessarily going to be around for that much longer. But that said, I mean, containment, I think, is the right policy for the U.S. there. And if something more than containment is needed, I would think Israel is the best person, the best state to undertake that. Yeah, okay. Well, I certainly agree with you that we don't want to be contemplating boots on the ground or an Iraq-type regime change strategy. I think we've

learned our lesson about that. I've got one more sort of challenge to you before I turn it over to Charles. So I was enjoying your most recent article in The Dispatch, where I didn't think I would see Dan McCarthy writing anytime soon, but you're paired off with Andy Smarek on Trump's appointments, especially of Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr., and you give a good spirit of defense of those. I could pick some nits with the way you characterize Reagan, but I don't want to bore listeners for that. But I do want to pick one nit.

You mentioned briefly that, oh, National Review in the old days of fusionism went tilted too far in accepting expert social science. And I don't think that's correct. I mean, yeah, they used to have Ernest Vandenhag, but he was usually trashing the established social science so i i thought you were being a little mean the national review there which seems to be a popular sport these days and i'm doing this for charles benefit so he doesn't have to be put on the spot but i'm an old guy's been reading it forever um but maybe

the last point is uh or maybe to turn this into a question is yeah i share all of the uh sort of russell kirk and other conservatives disdain for social science on very deep levels but i'm also a consumer of it and there's you know some of the best social science in the last generation has been by people like charles murray and james q wilson and you know when our guys do it well or back to ernest von den hogg 40 years ago when our guys do it well we clobber Ernest Vanden Haag 40 years ago, when our guys do it well, we clobber the heck out of the left. So maybe can I get Dan McCarthy to say just the tiniest little thing in favor

of decent social science, or is that a bridge too far? Well, I wonder if I came off the wrong way in that article, because I wasn't trying to say that social science doesn't have a place on the right. And in fact, I wasn't even trying to say that National Review had tilted too far towards social science. I have a line in there, I think, about James Burnham having a problem with Richard Weaver, thinking that Weaver was too literary, too philosophical, you know,

perhaps too Southern even. So that was the kind of contention that I wanted to get at. Also, the other thing being that, obviously, James Burnham had a long-standing feud with Frank Meyer. Meyer thought, you know, conservatism needed to be an ideology or kind of, you know, a well-articulated philosophy. Burnham thought that conservatives should be more empirical, more Machiavellian even. So that's the kind of dispute I was getting at. And in fact, National Review was a lot of fun. And I think, you know, to the extent that comes through today can still be a lot of fun when these kinds of clashes between different methodologies among conservatives arise. That said, I do think that the vast majority of social science is absolutely worthless. And the idea, the fundamental idea that if only, you know, we put science in government,

that if we have the right technocrats in charge of our bureaucracy, we're going to get wonderful outcomes. I think that's wrong. And even conservative, you know, conservatives from think tanks and, you know, who have social science credentials or, you know, credentials in, you know, even economics and things that are relatively more grounded than most social science, I'm just skeptical of their ability to actually govern and maneuver the country in the direction they want to go. I think there's actually, and that's, you know, one reason why I favor a much more decentralization and also just you know more of a sense of dealing with human beings as the essence of politics rather than dealing with sort of benthamite abstractions of maximum utility yeah we're in heated agreement on that uh dan benthamite

abstractions i believe is going to be the name of this particular podcast for mass appeal although i i love that locution so what interests me is defining success for this trump administration and i think daniel you and i don't have the same politics although it overlaps in some areas i have confused i think some readers recently because you know on day one i will will say, well, Trump's done this great thing, and I really like it, and I'm so glad that he did it. And then on day two, I say, ah, don't do that. And because we're in this honeymoon period for Trump, it is, sort of looks odd to some, because they want to be all in, right? So, I wonder what, from your perspective, would a successful second Trump presidency look like, right? Neither of us is in a cult, so neither of us is sort of tied to Trump or

so angry with Trump that we will reject it when he does things that we like. So if you were to look forward four years, what would he have to achieve? Maybe two or three things in the next four years for you to say, well, that was a really good presidency, and he moved the country and the right and the Republican Party in the direction that I, Daniel McCarthy, like. Sure. So in terms of foreign policy, what I would say is that you need to have our allies being capable of providing more of their own security, more of their own defense. So I'd like to see NATO members. Trump has said perhaps NATO members should be contributing 5% rather than 2% of their GDP towards their defense. I think it can be a mistake

to look purely at, you know, those percentages. It's really a matter of the threat environment. And when you have Russia engaged in an invasion of Ukraine right now, obviously Europe should be spending not just 2%, but a lot more trying to keep their neighborhood as peaceful as possible. So one thing I want to see is more of a kind of tiered defense system where our allies are contributing more for themselves. We are still there, but we are the provider of security of last resort rather than what we are now, which is more or less the kind of sugar daddy that everybody goes to for their first line of support. In terms of social policy, I think Trump is already making tremendous advances. So getting rid of the federal government's role in affirmative action, DEI, all these other things,

that's exactly the right move. I tend to think that Trump is actually right strategically for the pro-life movement in terms of saying that you have to focus on the local before you can hope to do anything at the national level. So I think Trump is correct to keep abortion as much as possible in the states rather than trying to make a federal issue of it right now where pro-lifers would certainly lose. And then in terms of taxes and domestic issues and economics, I want to see first of all that DOGE continues to do the fantastic work it's doing right now, stripping out this entire ecosystem, this class system, whereby the federal government takes our taxpayer dollars, gives them to mostly left-wing NGOs. These left-wing

NGOs, of course, then take that money and spread it around their friends. It upholds an entire ecosystem of progressivism that I'm very happy to see defunded. I like to see tax cuts. You know, I'm not one of these conservatives who thinks that suddenly there's something virtuous about taxing the American people more. We're taxed enough already. In terms of trade policy, I kind of like what I see from Trump so far, where he's willing to use, you know, the threat of tariffs to get, you know, various kinds of concessions, to open negotiations, you know, from a position of strength. I do think that if he suddenly slapped 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, maybe on Europe, I mean, who knows who else would get those kinds of tariffs. If you do that too suddenly, you're going to have price shocks, you're going to have supply

problems, all sorts of issues. Now, whether you could have a more gradually implemented large-scale tariff plan that i think you know is probably something you and i would disagree on yeah but i i'm a gradualist i'm a conservative i'm someone who tends to look with a certain degree of anxiety upon uh sudden drastic shifts from one direction to another that said i think trump so far is not so much trying to do something uh you know uh grabbing the steering wheel and suddenly turning the car 180 degrees i think what he's actually doing here is setting up a very interesting set of moves for negotiations. That's funny. I agree with almost everything you just said. I think we probably do disagree on

tariffs in your last point, but that's pretty much what success would look like to me as well. It's interesting, though, you didn't mention the border. Yeah, I take that for granted, perhaps, that obviously cutting down, you know, not just illegal immigration but i think trump is exactly right we need to um first of all the way in which uh so-called birthright citizenship has been interpreted by the supreme court and is defended by all the progressives uh it really has a very flimsy grounding and we know the supreme court has made you know mistakes in the past so i think it's time that we get the supreme court to revisit

the idea of birthright citizenship and give it a more constrained definition. Clearly, you know, the notion of what it constitutes to be subject to America's jurisdiction, which is the, you know, the wording that is used to say, well, look, anyone, you know, on our territory is subject to our jurisdiction, including illegal immigrants, including legal immigrants. Therefore, they must be covered by birthright citizenship as well. But, you know, being subject to the jurisdiction actually means different things for American citizens, because we're still subject to the United States' jurisdiction even when we don't live in the United

States, because we are taxed even if we're living abroad. And obviously, no Mexican citizen, either a legal immigrant or an illegal one, is subject to that kind of jurisdiction. So, I think there is, you know, Trump is doing the right thing to question this building block of kind of illegal immigration and of leftist, you know, promotion of mass immigration in general. And then, you know, I do want to see legal immigration limited as well as illegal immigration. And I think that, you know, I tend to side more with the critics of Vivek Ramaswamy on H-1B visas than I do with, you know, Ramaswamy himself. Although I acknowledge, you know, certainly when you have absolute, you know, Olympian level talents, when you have Einstein level geniuses, yes, you want to bring them into your country, but you don't want to have, you know, a kind of indentured servitude for tech workers with H-1Bs. I want to get back to tariffs for a second, because I don't like them, but that's just me. We talked before about what he wants out of Canada. It's kind of obvious what he wants out of Mexico, which is do something about the cartels and immigration. But China, we have, if I understand this correctly,

the revocation of the de minimis, the idea that they can just dump a whole lot of stuff here directly into the country. They don't have to pay any tariffs on it. The other day, I was making eggs for breakfast, as is my wont, and I have this wonderful little egg beater that you push down on it and it whips your eggs. It's the second one I bought because the first one after two or three months started leaking black oil into my eggs. I bought another one within two or three, and mind you, this was a different one from a different company on Amazon that had a list of consonants for its name, the XK5372, as opposed to the other one, which was made up brand names. It's all coming from the same Chinese factory. And I'm using it, and it dumps black oil into my eggs.

And I said, all right, that's it, twice bit and thrice whatever, stupid me. But I'm kind of used to like buying cheap junk from China. And it's like, I'd rather pay a little bit more and have quality goods made right here that employ American citizens, if such a thing is possible these days. Is that what Trump is trying to do? What does he want out of China from the tariffs? Does he want disengagement? Does he want people to just simply move their factories elsewhere to India or Vietnam or heaven forfend Indiana? What's the endgame with the Chinese tariffs? that does not necessarily follow either ideological tracks or predictable ones that other folks might envision. He's an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur has to be able to kind of envision and make a future that doesn't even exist yet. I think decoupling is clearly a major component, however, of what Trump's trying to do here. He wants to encourage the taking of industry and of trade away from China and putting it anywhere else possible,

ideally here in the United States with more manufacturing. But friend-shoring is better than having a trade dependency on China. So I think one of Secretary Rubio's accomplishments in visiting the Caribbean and Central America in the past week has been to try to deepen trade friendships and relationships with the nations of Central America and the Caribbean in order to try to, you know, create more of an industrial capacity, more of a trade base here in the Americas for both the goods we want to sell to them and also for their ability to develop and sell to us. And of course, one of the reasons... Let me interrupt you for a second because you mentioned the Caribbean in the area. Panama decliningama declining to re-up with belton road i'm waiting for somebody to say well they

weren't going to do it anyway and rubio didn't get anything out of them uh is this significant i think it is uh i mean countries eventually wake up to the fact that this is not a good deal for them in the long run uh do you think that others and that this is is the beginning of a diminution of chinese influence and that well i do but you know bel that this is the beginning of a diminution of Chinese influence? Well, I do. But, you know, Belt and Road is the, you know, symbolic headline item. But the more important thing behind the scenes is simply the level of economic penetration, power, and especially technological infrastructure influence that China is able to wield over our nearest neighbors, the Caribbean and Central America.

And I think one of the successes of Secretary Rubio's visit has been to work on a lot of those things that are further down the agenda, saying that, you know, we need to have, you know, supplies, especially for, you know, high technology coming from America, 5G networks, for example, we want those to be American based 5G networks, we do not want Huawei to be, you know, the primary communications node for Central America and the Caribbean. So I think there's been significant progress there, and I'm hoping that's going to continue. And I think that, you know, most of the nations of the region do understand that it's much better to be, you know, America's friend, much better to have these dependencies if you're going to have them on America, don't have them on

Communist China, because Communist China really, you know, is going to use that in ways that are going to be harmful to the US, then the US is going to have to retaliate by, you know, limiting perhaps our trade and relations with people we'd like to be our friends, because they're our neighbors. A whole number of bad things will happen if China's economic influence grows in Latin America in general, but in the Central America and the Caribbean. Absolutely right. I don't know why anybody would buy their... I mean, I am reasonably certain that the egg beater I described that broke has an RFID backdoor into it that China can use to access my smart home network. Stephen? Well, actually, James, what we learned from your example is that you're a very rich man if you're using electric egg beaters because eggs are now you know a million dollars a carton whatever it is uh dan i got one last question for you uh you referenced early on uh what has

been obvious to me for a long time in that trump likes to make these outrageous seemingly outrageous and completely beyond the pale suggestions on gaza or the tariffs and all the rest of that and you point out rightly that this is a long- negotiating tactic of Trump. And I wonder if you're going to reach the point of diminishing returns, right? It is amazing to me that people have not figured this out about Trump, but it's still working for him like a charm. But you reach a point of diminishing returns. Doesn't he at some point really have to draw the line and really follow through. I mean, I don't know whether it's invading Panama or seizing Greenland. I mean, I think those are crazy ideas, but it does seem to be getting results, like you say. But what happens if he doesn't? Where do you think Trump needs to draw a line? I'll do the question that way. Yeah, I mean, at some point, somebody is going to call

his bluff and say, hey, I'm not going to give you any concessions because I know you're actually not going to follow through and slap us with tariffs. And I think, you know, Trump, he's certainly created a persona for himself, a public identity in the past several years here as a tariff man. He says it's the most beautiful word in the English language. I mean, that's something you didn't even hear from Pat Buchanan back in the 90s. This is, you know, certainly creating a public impression of being quite not just willing but eager to employ tariffs in a big way. So I think there will come a time when someone's going to call his bluff. And I think Trump is quite willing to use tariffs.

Now, he probably doesn't want to do it. If you have 25 percent on Mexico, 25 percent on Canada all going into effect at the same moment, that's a big disruption. On the other hand, if Canada doesn't get serious about what he's asking of Trudeau, it's entirely possible. Maybe we have a deal with Mexico, but we don't have a deal with Canada immediately. Tariffs go into effect for a while, and then the Canadians come back and say, oh gosh, we should have taken you seriously the first time. Now we're willing to make a deal about fisheries or NATO or other things. Daniel McCarthy, we thank you for joining us again you can catch him on x at tory anarchist where you can find that that zesty combination of words uh explained to you in a variety of tweets how often do you are you one of those sitting on the sitting on the app all day

or are you doling out a gem every fortnight or what what exactly is i do look at it uh rather more often than is healthy i think and uh i certainly participate uh to the extent that's reasonable so uh yeah wait a minute dan i mean you've got the tory part down but you were the least anarchistic person i can think of yeah i'm probably just stating on twitter a fair bit yes i think it's it's reasonable to say good we'll we'll see you there and uh and catch up on your insights and your observations thank you dan for joining us in the podcast today thank you you know the one thing that we haven't heard from donald trump actually um is that he sent out his minions to do his bin his bidding fly my pretties and the rest of it, right?

But when we hear about layoffs at the EPA, where 1,000 people were laying off, something like that, a whole bunch at the IRS and in the works, but we haven't actually heard Trump say, you're fired yet. That's his classic line. That's his tagline. We need him to say it. But if you're an HR person,

or if you're somebody who needs an HR person, you know, those are hard words to say. They're tough. You're a human being at the other end of that sentiment. So if you're a business owner, have you ever felt actually kind of lost when it comes to HR? You know, it's okay. It's okay. It's not what you do best. I mean, it's not supposed to be.

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Well, here we are again, closing up another episode, but plenty of time to chat amongst ourselves. There was a description of Twitter that I saw the other day, a wonderful little exchange that included a news report, then John from commentary weighing in,

and then Selena Zito. And it all began, I think, with somebody who was saying that they were facing, quote, an Orwellian nightmare. I believe that was what it was, because they no longer knew whether or not they had the lifetime protection

that a federal job afforded them. Hmm. And it was pointed out to this person that actually this is what most people call real life in a dynamic economy and also the people the federal government didn't seem particularly interested in the plight of the people who were having their industries destroyed downsized or made irrelevant by various government decisions nobody asked to call everybody told the coal miners to learn to but nobody seems to be we're supposed to have sympathy for the

somebody who lives in suburban D.C. and has been sitting at home for four years tapping away with a cat in their lap. Yeah, you know, I remember a story. It's not quite about federal employees, but I don't think federal employees losing their job will create mass sympathy for the American people. But if you go all the way back to Proposition 13 in California in the 70s, that was the big property tax cut measure that was the signal opening salvo of the tax revolt. And I remember someone quoted in the newspaper, a local government person saying, if this passes, it's going to devastate our budgets. It's going to require huge spending cuts. It's going to be terrible for government in California.

And the person said he looked out at the audiences at Rotary Clubs and wherever, and all he saw were people smiling. And, of course, Prop 13 passed by a nearly two-to-one margin. And it was at that point the guy said, I changed my mind about Proposition 13. Well, I think something similar is going on now. I think there's no sympathy for people who – well, the bargain's always been kind of phony. We need to have higher salaries and lavish pensions for public employees at the state and federal level because they don't have, you know, to compensate for the lack of, you know, pensions and stock options and things like that. But of course, when you look into

these things, you find that the pensions, it's bankrupt in chicago and illinois and so forth and california is also way behind and uh so this is long overdue and it keeps amazes me how democrats want to die on all these hills they wanted to spend the transgender business uh you aid the media groups and all the rest and uh and i'll end here the democrats revealing that they really are the most incompetent political party republicans may be the stupid party but democrats seem incompetent it's also now a violation of the original deal you go back a hundred years to when the federal government was hiring in this case because of prohibition the treasury department had to hire 2,000 staff to enforce the Volstead Act.

The deal, the explicitly advertised deal was you will make less money than you would in the private sector, you will get less benefits than you would get in the private sector, but you have better job security. Now, government workers, especially at the federal level, have both the job security, insane levels of job security, and pensions that can't be matched in the private sector, and salaries that are on average higher. Now, you have to be careful how you parse that between mean and median and so forth, but the deal that was once offered has been essentially reworked so that government

employees win on both sides of the coin and one of the reasons for that is that the public sector unions have put themselves in a position in which they get to play both the employee and employer. Under Franklin Roosevelt, who was hardly a mean right winger, the idea of a public sector union was deemed to be ridiculous. It was only in the 60s under Kennedy, via an executive order, that public sector unions became permissible. And the reason was obvious, is that if you have a private sector union, and I think the way the government puts its thumb on the scales is outrageous, but just in theory, if you have a private sector union, then you have two people in the equation that have an interest in meeting one

another in the middle, because you have a guy who owns a business and he needs things to be done. And if he doesn't get his employees or employees on side, then he'll go out of business. But you also have people who have jobs and they don't want to lose them. They don't want the company to go out of business either. I don't think it always works exactly like that.

I'm not that naive, but the idea makes sense in theory. You have these two sides. That's not true here. So we've ended up with this absurdly sprawling, largely useless federal workforce that gets to set the terms of its own employment by bullying the people who employ them with its votes that should never have existed in the first place in that setup

and that violate the original deal, which was come here for the job security, but you'll make less money. I mean, it's just something that's got to be done about it. Well, it may take somebody to cut through the Gordian knot. Is Elon Musk our dollar a year man, as they used to call them? Because you remember back in the, I think, in World War II, they would bring in a dollar a year man, somebody from private industry who would take no compensation, but do this because he had the know-how and because he had the patriotic spirit patriotic if you wish um to do the right thing what i'm looking forward to um because all of what we've been seeing with usa id is just a tune-up

it's just it's it's it's you know it's the overture it's giving us the themes that we're going to be hearing the operator to come but the department of education is in the sights now because every day it seems like the administration wakes up and says all right we need another galvanic seismic tectonic shift shock you know nobody's talking about greenland anymore because invading occupying and rebuilding green rebuilding Greenland, that's so a fortnight ago. We're so far beyond that. These things will be dropped, depth charges, and then everybody will absolutely freak out about them.

And then necessarily something has to be done about them, and perhaps necessarily something will be. The Department of Education, I began this hour by talking about the shrieking on Reddit and the rending of garments. The reaction on Reddit to the elimination of the Department of Education, or even just paring it back to its statutory confines, which I believe that they can do by executive action,

you have to get Congress to get rid of the cabinet, is uniform in that this is a concerted effort to stupefy the American people and make them dumb so that, I don't know, I guess 10, 18 years hence, they willingly accept the fascism in which they've grown up, that they're not critical thinkers anymore, that the idea that if the Department of Education does not exist, there is no education in America. That's it. That's kind of what they believe, which does not speak well for all these kids who grew up under the Department of Education and didn't get the basic civics lessons, because that's not the point. And then simultaneously, some of these people

will be coming in from r slash teachers or public school Reddits, where people are talking about the inanities and the horrors that they face trying to teach an uneducatable generation which has nothing to do with the amount of federal spending and has everything to do with cultural events and the rest of it so i mean the idea that education right now is dependent upon a the federal teeth and b federal instruction is nonsense because we've lived under this and we've seen what's happened. We've cratered. We could be better. We saw the latest reading scores came out, what, 10 days ago with dismal results. And, yeah, I mean, I've been raising the question here on Twitter and elsewhere. Can anyone point to any international development trends that USAID has been a principal agent of?

And likewise, can anybody point to any improvements in public education since the department was founded in 1979? And if you look at the data, the answer is resounding no. The problem is too many Americans are sentimental. And I think how it's about education. The EPA is environmental protection. And we like all those things. And so it's sort of a labeling thing. But, yeah, I'll just add this other thought, which is I am watching again another perhaps example of Democratic incompetence on this.

They're all attacking Musk. Who elected Musk? To which you ask, who elected all these bureaucrats that he's reviewing right now? And people are also saying at some point Trump's big ego and narcissism will cause him to have to break with Trump because Trump's richer and getting all this press. And I think they're missing that Trump is sorry, that Musk is such a useful lightning rod for Trump. And he's confusing and dividing the opposition that otherwise would be focused wholly on Trump and Trump alone. And so I'm just sitting back and popping more popcorn and enjoying the whole spectacle. Again, leaving aside the constitutional questions, it does take Congress to abolish the Department of Education, although not as you say, popcorn uh and enjoying the whole spectacle again leaving aside the constitutional questions it does take congress to abolish the department of education although not as you say james to

make it sit within its statutory limits which it doesn't if the department of education were to disappear tomorrow i truly believe that nothing of value would be lost this is why there is this great disconnect in politics at the moment because leaving aside again the the debate over structure the people you're discussing on reddit and many people within the democratic party honestly seem to believe that if you even let one bureaucrat go the whole thing will fall apart and i think the opposite is true i think you could fire half of the federal workforce and no one would notice it would make the country better to do that and you know this is the problem that the democrats have republicans will suffer if they if they seem callous or they go too fast but the problem that the democrats have is that reaction that was just mentioned

with the proposition remind me which one it is steve uh in california 13 13 right yeah it's that reaction is that if you look at polling on this the sob stories that i keep reading in the new york times that people say i have to go in for a third day of the week. I can't even imagine it. I cried myself to sleep this morning. Just sounds completely insane to people. Yeah. But they don't know that because they don't talk to anyone outside of that group. During the height of the last tech bubble, when there was just so much money sloshing around and everybody had their nice little show place office buildings, one of the things you used to see a lot on Twitter, as it known or reels perhaps or vine even was my day at the twitter office in which some young 20 something would show up with the you know and and flounce through the wonderfully appointed atrium and go

to their desk and get their get the cappuccino and a little eclair and then have a meaningless meeting with a couple of other people they're staring at screens and talking about something and then lunch on the deck in the sun with the sprouts and the and then it would be some other pointless and then it would be yoga and then it would be then they would take their dinner home and the rest of it and it all looked like this ridiculous experience i mean very very nice to live i, but producing exactly what? Twitter did one thing. It took in tweets. It gave out tweets. It was back and forth.

What they were talking about, I don't know. Musk comes in and fires 85% of them. And Twitter somehow staggers on. Somehow you could get rid of all of those people who are having all-day meetings about this, that, or the other thing, and it turned out not to be essential to the thing that they were doing so charles is now twice as profitable did you see this its revenues have been cut in half but its expenses have been cut

to a quarter of what they were right right which you know is the model that he was seeking and now i will grant that the advertising on twitter is extremely low quality compared to what it used to be. It used to be all the big brand names, right? They were all out there. And then they all pulled back because Musk is a fascist and turned it into a right-wing cesspool, which I find an interesting comment because I am on Twitter a great deal, as our previous guest said, more than I should be. And I find the amount of left-wing invective or arguments is precisely what it was before. What I don't find are the throttling of ideas and opinions that are at the moment unpopular and deemed to be hurtful disinformation that we have to do something about. That's the other part about this. One of the notes

we have here for the podcast is how basically the resistance appears to be rudderless that you have a democratic party having learned nothing putting david hogg as the vice chair of the dnc that you have uh these rallies where people are waving the flags of other nations which does not necessarily endear them to the population amongst which they wish to live. And that you have all of these people hyperventilating on the steps of various state capitals, insisting that fascism is on the way. Or here, as in Minnesota, one of the placards said, there are no illegals on stolen land. Okay, make that argument and see how that goes for you. So you want to say, say well you know what uh got them on the run they'll never be able to pick it up and figure it out but of course perhaps

they will or can they is there a clinton out there waiting to be born who can triangulate and get them back that may be a whole another podcast that we should have we kind of got to go it's been an hour i gotta get lunch i gotta go to the gym. Anything else, guys? Or are you just content to let me go with a self-indulgent peroration and leave it at that? No, that was a good one. I don't want to try and top that. It's been great talking with you, James.

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