Katherine Mangu-Ward

This is an iHeart Podcast.

Guaranteed human.

Of course.

Thanks for having me on.

You know, I actually have said in public, in fact, that I told you so doesn't usually win arguments.

But what I discovered is that there is an exception here, which is when the I told you so is also kind of validating in the readers, in this case, the readers of The New York Times, something they had been telling themselves to.

So part of what this piece is about is, you know,

libertarians have been making this sort of thoroughgoing, consistent case against the rise of executive power and kind of the imbalance that that's creating.

But a lot of folks who identify as kind of mainstream Democrats or the kind of imagined reader of The Times are skeptical about those things when it comes to a bunch of the places where Trump has suddenly started pushing hard.

So we're talking here about trade, we're talking here about immigration, that kind of thing.

There was already a lot of commonality there.

So in some ways it was more of a remember how you're a little bit libertarian to my friends and readers.

Well, and you do see this in some unexpected places as well, like in Utah, where, of course, the politics are often quite dominated by Mormons, but where they do actually quite a good job of protecting minority rights, probably because of the backstory of Mormons, among other things, right?

So their RFRA laws that protect religious freedoms, for example, are surprisingly libertarian.

You see a lot of school choice out West for similar reasons, sometimes with bipartisan or kind of mixed support.

um in terms of who's sending libertarians to the hill right now though kentucky um you know we have both of all places who are um neither neither i would say are you know as libertarian as i would like them to be every day all the time but pretty clearly deserve the title of of most libertarian on the hill yeah i think they're culturally you know it's always culture where that i think gets

Right.

Yeah, I think that's true.

I also think, you know, there's a version of this piece.

We can get into the details a little bit more.