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
And it's really funny to watch the response from people who say we're going to look inward, a kind of Ron Paul vision of the world. And he's like, who are we going to invade locally?
They already invaded Panama in 1989, so this would be a second go. He formally ruled out Canada. He did say it would be amazing.
He was like the Canadian Al Jolson. It was like, he totally was. Yeah. I don't know if you've heard. Yes, you've waded into this debate before, haven't you, Megan?
The Bulwark Daily · 'The Hottest Circle of Hell Is for Those Who Stay Neutral' · 27 Dec 2024
podcast
That was tepid. Thank you everyone for coming out to this lovely, lovely place and to spend your time with us. It's a bit of an unfair fight, not just because Reason is hosting this, but because of the proposition that you don't have to pick a side in politics. Of course you don't. have to pick a side in politics. We're not Cuba, or even worse, Australia. We are not forced to vote.
We live our lives in the way that we want. And it makes sense. If you look all around you, there are, even at the most five alarm fire of an election, like in 2020, one third of people who are eligible to vote don't in a presidential election. They choose not to. Catherine Maggie Ward's very, very happy about that.
When people describe themselves to Gallup, they've been asking people now for decades to self-describe. Do you sort of feel self-identified as a Democrat or a Republican or as an independent? Independents have won that poll month after month, every month since 2012. And for most of the months before that, it usually polls somewhere around in the 40s, the earlier this year.
51% of Americans self-identify as an independent rather than picking the side of a Democrat and Republican. And if you think about it even for a half a second, it makes total sense because Democrats and Republicans really suck.
They are very, very, very bad at what they do, which is like attempt to govern or manage the monopoly on the use of force through extracted taxpayer money and other libertarian things. For example, of the ways that governance sucks, I know you people live in Washington, D.C., so you might have heard that they're doing the annual Cromnibus thing right now or talking about it.
This is a tweet from today from former Never Trump heartthrob or occasional Mitt Romney, who I think Tim worked for at some point.
says what does President Trump want Republicans to do vote for the continuing resolution or shut down government absent direction confusion reigns can anyone spot the problem with that let's just like think about it for a second this is Trump is not the president this is the job for Congress Mitt Romney is in that body and yet they don't do things like pass basic budgets they wait
for some scary president to sort of tell them or president-elect to tell them what to do and they've been doing this for year after year after year when's the last time peter suderman that they used the congressional budget act to pass their 12 appropriations bills there is a punchline to that uh that story i'm sure but it's basically never they don't do it anymore it's not something that happens you look around anywhere you live or at least anywhere i live uh tends to be totally misgoverned by horrible democratic administrations i live in
Brooklyn, New York, where if you drive down the street, you can hide an entire Volkswagen in the potholes out in front of your street, and everyone is taxed up the yin-yang, and nothing works. Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., these are not well-governed places.
So it's a rational thing to not want to collude with or somehow join one of those teams in spending your money really badly to do bad things and violate other people's rights and do it worse and worse year after year. But it's not to say that the inverse of what we're talking about is true. It's not me and Nick or Libertarians General saying it's bad to be in politics.
There are perfectly good people on all sides in politics. And I'm glad that there are. I'm glad that there are people who are going to be doing good work in the Trump administration, even though Lord knows I didn't vote for the Trump administration to go in.
What I would like to suggest to all of us is that sometimes you can achieve those goals that you'll, even those of us who were cursed to pay attention to national politics, you can achieve political goals sometimes better through the outside, which Nick is gonna talk about a little bit more.
And you don't have to either apologize for your own side when they do misdeeds or to sit on your hands when you know they're doing something against uh your own desires and this is what happens in politics again again it's morally corrupting in ways that we'll talk about more and that is your four minutes so
I wrote a magazine cover story called The Case Against Donald Trump. So I might be a little bit ill suited or perhaps properly suited to answer the question, which is to say that nothing about the proposition here is that you can't decide which candidate is better or worse side all the time. I vote happily all the time and make lots of decisions.
And I have an unblemished record of never voting for whoever wins as president. And I will surely have that for the rest of my life.
I can't speak for Nate Silver. But choosing a side is ultimately if you have a team that you're carrying water for, that puts you in the awkward position of saying either that the 2016 election was rigged or sold by social media companies or the 2020 election was rigged or stolen by social media companies. It turns you into maroon. Okay, so typical work.
I think one of the ways of thinking about this, you brought up sort of, like, what is the role for people who are editing political magazines or who are hyper-focused on this stuff, as all of us are in some way or another. I, being of a more libertarian mindset, don't like to tell people what their role should be, but I would like to defend my own, which is to say that it is journalistic.
Showing 401–420 of 460 · page 21 of 23
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