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
The Bulwark Daily · 'The Hottest Circle of Hell Is for Those Who Stay Neutral' · 27 Dec 2024
podcast
Well, again, I live in this case in Brooklyn, New York, so I can vote and I do very vociferously as much as I can. I even sometimes talk locally, even sometimes at those types of meetings. And my vote doesn't really move the needle on anything because Democrats are 95 percent of my neighborhood. But I vote and I try and I do I do whatever I do.
But I'm not a member of a party and I don't think that it is right. I think it's perfectly fine to not be a member of a party, to not have a natural inclination to join one, to sit on your hands while your own party does things that are against your deeply held beliefs, which a lot of people who work in professional politics do.
Oftentimes, people who worked in Republican politics for a long time sat on their hands when there was the gay marriage debate that Sarah Longwell was talking about earlier, that they just sort of, even though they wanted this to happen, we're not gonna talk about it. I wanna avoid that. I want to reason it's been in favor of gay marriage since it has existed in 1968.
I think our first editorial was in 1971 on the issue. I find it more potent to be talking about those ideas and those policies without worrying, without calculating whose team I am on or I am not, And therefore my voice is not going to be silenced for even a little bit. I'm not going to hesitate. I'm going to be happy to talk to people who support those things, happy to criticize people who don't.
And then on the next issue, we'll change teams again. It's not to tell anyone else.
I reject the premise of your question. I'm, first of all, not smart. And second of all, I wanted Harris to win, even though I didn't vote for her. Yeah.
How about if in Nevada, none of the above had won, right? Because that's on the ballot.
Same way rich people are libertarian, they just decided to become libertarian. I mean, it's a set of ideas and beliefs about policy. It's also, you know, marginal on some level. Libertarians are never a huge part of the electorate, but one of the things, stories that libertarians like to tell and,
republicans back when they used to talk about this stuff um back when these guys were republicans um is that free trade to go back to the last question has lifted more people out of extreme poverty over the last 35 years than anyone has ever seen in the history of the world and that is an unvarnished great thing that we don't talk about nearly enough um and so
liberal ideas, meaning the classical liberal ideas, have been the best poverty eradication program ever. So I don't see any conflict.
So I'm going to leave you with one or two stories, bedtime stories. One is about a very successful billionaire, one of the most successful billionaires in the country who fashioned himself as a philanthropist, which he was and is, and also somewhat of a philosopher, thinking a lot about... Austrian economics and kind of big ideas. He even published kind of a book of his own, Sense of Philosophy.
And he had been a big, you know, multi, multi, tens of millions philanthropist in Germany,
Policy causes but had long said that I don't want to get into the politics of it I don't want to choose a side in politics as it reduces my effectiveness and I worry that it's going to make me dumber Well president is elected and the president that he sees as oh this could be An extinction level event for American democracy We're gonna see the bubble of American supremacy popped and this is a bad thing.
So he decided suddenly to throw a ton of money into politics to oppose this president, to create mirror institutions on his side that he saw the other side doing so well. And the funny thing is, I could be talking about both Charles Koch and George Soros, but for the sake of this, I'm talking about George Soros. And what did he create? What are these things?
This very storied intellectual, he really is, theory of reflexivity and all that. What did he create? He created Media Matters of America. And he donated tons and tons of money to Democrats for a long time. Did he make the world a better place even for his issues that he'd been caring about for a long time? I'm not so persuaded that it made him smarter.
I think it actually made him dumber and it made his activities less interesting. Last story, very short, is there once was a badly governed city called New York. People were mad. They thought, we need to get Democrats. Democrats out here, I'm just going to back whatever Republican is going to have an R on his or her jersey. Let's go. Let's do this.
And that is why we got, for at least a short little while, a congressman named George Santos. So that type of thinking is how you get some really, really bad people. Thank you.
Yes, and the remedy generally for DNA problems like this is you just retest the suspect. He can't change his DNA. His DNA doesn't change. There's a whole rash of these things, and they've been challenged, and they have repeatedly been shut down by the courts of appeal. And so the Koberger defense team, they're doing what they have to do. I have no criticism for them.
That's their job is to ensure that their client gets fair trial and to present whatever issues they can. But they're pretty dramatic about a lot of things they're doing. And I can tell you right now, that sounds good. It sounds good, especially to a lay audience, that the DNA on that knife sheath is going to be admitted against Brian Kloberger in that trial.
They're not going to be able to successfully suppress it, and it will be affirmed on appeal.
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