Matt Welch
speaker
460 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Matt Welch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Disgust. That's true. So they're obviously very confused as to who they are. They might be sort of intersex as a country. They don't know. They're the intersex of potential territories.
I mean, do we want Italy? I mean, you can want a lot of things. Yes, that we do want. You can't just take Greenland. You can't buy Greenland. You can't take the Panama Canal back from the Panamanians. I mean, there was a debate. There was actually a really interesting debate. And viewers, listeners should go check this out.
In the 1970s, amongst conservatives, actually, about the situation in Panama, and there's a very famous debate between Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley. And Ronald Reagan said we should... retain control of the canal because we built it. Actually, the French started building it. We finished building it. And William F. Buckley said, it's not a conservative position.
We should give it back to the Panamanians, which we did under certain conditions when it turned over to full control in 1999. And the Panamanians have reacted to this recently saying, no, We're absolutely not. And look, the thing about Trump is he shoots from the hip and he says things that sometimes the facts need to catch up with him.
This idea that he said with the Panama Canal, he's like, you know, our our ships are charged more to go through. That's not true. And it has become more expensive, of course, because the water levels have been lower and it costs more and it's slower to get ships through. So they've been raising prices. But that kind of thing is just the kind of natural market of these things.
I thought he was kidding about Greenland. And the more that I've watched this, he's like, well, we need it for national security and we need it for economic security, which I have to say is just completely bonkers. And I don't think this will go anywhere. But it is totally insane to say that we want to become like a local imperial power in the next four years. Like what? Seriously?
It's surprising.
Ten years later.
The fact that there's a king in Denmark and in Sweden and in Norway is believably hilarious because they don't do anything and no one cares. But I just want to say that it was interesting to come on the show today and find out that my partner in the fifth column, Camille Foster, has completely lost his fucking mind.
I'm saying that there are legitimate issues imperialist Camille let me say this as a sort of moderate student of the Cold War the way that you do this is not threatening to take people over or buy them and they say no what is happening in Iceland not Greenland let me write that down This is the art of Moynihan's deal. Stop threatening to invade people if you want to have a coalition with them.
In Iceland, playing with your name on the side of it, Moynihan. They talk about military pressure.
I mean, it's a slightly different situation than Louisiana. We were talking about Greenland at the same time. Which is not contiguous with America. But we have a military base in Iceland, in Keflavik, because we kind of talked to the Icelanders and they were like, okay, what do we get out of this? And it was just a deal. We didn't say we're going to invade you or enlist you.
Give us access to your hot springs.
Or I'll kill you. And then negotiate down. Or I'll shoot you in the back.
I think the right answer there, if you're asked that question, is, yeah, we can maybe turn the screws economically, but we're not going to invade. I mean, that would maybe be the right answer for me.
But Megan, you raised the point, which I think is a really interesting one, is that the number of people kind of on the isolationist right and the people who say, you know, the Buchananites of yesteryear who are kind of in the Trump coalition now, I've seen a lot of them freaking out on Twitter saying,
Because what Camille is saying is, you know, the China's Belt and Road policy going across the world, going into Africa and pushing their influence everywhere, that we need to respond to that.
And, you know, that is something that a lot of these people don't like, this idea of being an imperial power or this idea of, you know, threatening military action, whether it's dropping, you know, American troops or whatever it might be, or saying we need to station weapons here.
That's exactly the opposite of the rhetoric that you get from so many of the people that are on the kind of isolationist MAGA right. And it's really interesting because I think what happens with Donald Trump is that there's a lot of projection that people project what they want him to be.
And so I've had conversations with people that totally forget that he sent, what, 56 Tomahawk missiles into Syria, which in what, the first or second first year of his administration. And like that, that was the night he became president. Is that right? Oh, yeah. That was Van Van Jones, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. A great Van Jones. But that kind of thing is there's a lot of projection.
Showing 381–400 of 460 · page 20 of 23
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