Source: The Wannabe Assassin’s Manifesto Was Uncomfortably Normal Channel: The Reason Roundtable Published: April 27, 2026 | Archived: May 2, 2026

Video: The Wannabe Assassin’s Manifesto Was Uncomfortably Normal
Channel: The Reason Roundtable
Published: April 27, 2026
Duration: 1:04:59
Views: 4,843
Category: News & Politics
Video ID: x-3hQGnTdyg

Description

This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and the media coverage that followed. They examine the shooter’s manifesto, why it struck some observers as uncomfortably normal, and what that says about the mainstreaming of extreme political rhetoric. The panel also considers President Donald Trump’s renewed push to build his new White House ballroom in the aftermath of the attack.

Next, the editors turn to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan for city-run grocery stores, whether government-backed supermarkets can fairly compete with private businesses, and why critics may have helped turn a campaign talking point into actual policy. Then, the panel discusses reports that the Trump administration is considering a bailout that could leave the federal government owning most of Spirit Airlines. The panel then turns to Iran, where uncertain diplomacy and mixed signals over the Strait of Hormuz suggest the conflict remains far from resolved. Finally, a listener asks what the libertarian view of redistricting should be and whether fair maps are ever truly possible.

https://reason.com/podcast/2026/04/27/the-shooters-manifesto-was-uncomfortably-normal/

0:00—The White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting 18:49—Mamdani’s city-run grocery store plan 27:42—Spirit Airlines bailout 37:06—Listener question on redistricting 43:23—What is the endgame in Iran? 48:58—Weekly cultural recommendations

Producer: Paul Alexander Video Editor: Ian Keyser Illustration: Adani Samat

Tags

White House Correspondents' Dinner WHCD Donald Trump Ballroom Manifesto Political Violence Assassination Attempt Zohran Mamdani Socialism Socialist City-run grocery New York City NYC Spirit Airlines Bailout Iran War Libertarian Reason Roundtable

Transcript — YouTube panel (English (auto-generated)

) (human-authored)

0:06 A gunman targeted President Trump at administration officials at the White House correspondents dinner this weekend and he left a manifesto. So, is he just another crazy person or is this a worrying trend toward politicized left-wing violence? What about the media’s role in all this? What do we think about the coverage? Welcome to the Reason Round Table. This is your libertarian review of news and politics from the editors of Reason magazine. I am your host Peter Sudterman and today as always I am joined by my colleagues Katherine Mangi Ward, Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie. Katherine I want to start with you. So obviously this is the White House correspondents. There are a lot of journalists in that room. Did anything stand out to you about the coverage of this event?

0:50 Yeah, I mean for a room full of journalists, there sure was a lot of um confusion and bad coverage in those first few minutes. And I say that understanding that it was the fog of war. And also I say that having been in that Hilton many times and knowing that the layout is especially conducive to confusion. Like it’s hard to navigate in that Hilton when it’s just a regular old rubber chicken dinner, much less a attempted assassination. So I get it.

1:15 Um, but uh I kind of wish that some of the journalists had pointed their cameras at the action and not at their own selves to make Instagram reels of their reaction to the action. Okay. In defense of the pointing it at yourself, there wasn’t much to see if you were in the ballroom. There were a bunch of Secret Service agents on the stage with guns pointed outward. There was the brief moment where Donald Trump was uh was evacuated and that was about it because the security incident the because the the shooter went through the security uh area upstairs like to in a totally different zone, right? So there wasn’t a whole lot to see and if you want to talk to people, you talk to the camera. Yes. And this is not a new thing, right? like having the reporter be the face of the story and having the reporter’s emotional reaction be the story like Anderson Cooper long before and many many others before him. But I I that’s why you send a weatherman, right?

2:18 Hurricane in this in the you know the parka to get like real wet and then he’s like hey guys it’s real wet out here in the rain like thank you breaking news. Um but I think just because it is a long-standing thing does that mean it’s good? Like what what happens then is that the story is here’s how I feel about being in the room and I that’s not the real story. The real story is what’s happening out in front of Hampton’s in. I think we’ll all Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Do we need to do a a Michael Tracing side quest right now? No, I don’t move as my baseball coach used to say. Somebody somebody was acting a fool. And in general, right, it’s like I I think the idea that the story here is what happened to the journalist or what’s happens with the journalists is wrong. I hope that we do not spend the week doing that. Instead, we should probably talk about why somebody tried to shoot up a bunch of members of the Trump administration. Yeah, there was a manifesto that explained why, Matt. I assume you read

3:14 it was published in the New York Post. What’ you think? I think that the New York Post is the country’s greatest newspaper, and I think we all should have a moment of silence to acknowledge that. It’s the one good thing Alexander Hamilton had to roll it. Uh besides deciding to duel Aaron Burr, it was the right decision. That’s right. He called the duel. Yeah. Is the is the problem. Um uh a kind of early Michael Tracy.

3:40 Suicide by vice president really. So I think um uh was struck by reading the manifesto was how absolutely normie it was. It was the normiest. Hey, I’m gonna do a mass shooting of the senior administration from the top rank to the lower rank excluding Cash Patel for reasons that we don’t even need to say. I I don’t think we have to explain that. It’s pretty self-evident. Yeah. Um he’s a hockey fan. Um clearly, but uh the uh No, it sounded like um you know, many or at least several friends of mine on their Facebook page, you know, Trump is a pedophile, rapist, traitor. in that order which you repeated twice although he didn’t say Trump specifically. He he in fact did not name Trump in the manifesto at all. Yeah. Uh it was a reference to Trump.

4:30 I’m I’m I’m a thousand% we can assume that but we should just say like that wasn’t you can just say that and that and welcome to it. But um uh the pedophile uh rapist traitor uh I I’m confident in believing is uh Trump. And also if you look at uh the stuff that he was excited about retweeting and posting on Blooki and uh and wherever else he lurked um no this is a guy who was a Caltech grad and uh a you know teacher of the year tutorer whatever that means and um and he wrote in coherent sentences compared to a lot of the nutags who shoot things up and shoot people up. Um it was pretty coherent and for me that’s a little bit a lot of bit even kind of chilling. Um the only in some ways the the thing that separates him from a lot of people is the real courage of his convictions. Like you say all of these things, but you really really do mean it. That he’s a threat to the republic, that he’s locking up people in ICE, which he is.

5:27 Um that uh the administration is doing dastardly things, which I agree that they are, but then all in this incredibly hyperbolic kind of existential threat terms, and he followed through on it. And I can presume that there’s going to be uh uh a at least a minor uh fan club out there for the guy. Um and that’s that’s troubling to me. Um it’s I don’t think people are in a mood to ratchet down their totalizing negative views of people and political parties and gigantic blocks of human beings in the United States right now. Um and uh and that’s worrisome especially on a week when you know how what were people talking about for the three days before that it was about like Hassan \[ \_\_ \] uh arguing over whether it’s okay to shoplift and or murdering it’s called microl looting now microl looting and macro shooting apparently is the is the combination um there’s a there is a problem with violence apologetics uh on the left absolutely and it’s and it’s happening in ways of of actual violence violence

6:31 and in actual attempted violence. Nick, I want I want to ask you about this, but like in the context of Reason’s coverage of mass shootings over the past 10, 15 years. Unfortunately, we’ve all witnessed a lot of these. And one of the things that’s happened that’s been really consistent is you’ve had shooters who have left a paper trail of some sort. Some sometimes it’s a manifesto, sometimes it’s just online postings, maybe on a forum somewhere. Think about somebody like Jared Laughofner. And the media has tried to apply a clear and like coherent political lens to these things. And our argument has always been in most cases not these things are not coherent. You can’t read anything that makes any kind of sense. These people are just obviously disordered and disturbed. And this is different. This is as Matt said something that is quite clear. It like just reads like the a pretty average blue sky post. And so in light of the Charlie Kirk assassination, in light of the Luigi Manion killing, right, both of

7:23 which read polit pretty discernably as like lefto political gripes, should we be concerned about this sort of thing? Uh, no. I don’t think so. I, you know, this it’s a terrible act. It’s a good it’s a good thing that he was apprehended before he was able to do any real damage. And the one law enforcement person he shot apparently is doing okay. Um but you know we can say because he doesn’t have the hyperbolic language of some other people uh you know that he’s not nuts or whatever but you know he invokes his Christianity and what he is saying is nuts like there’s you know it you know he comes to a logical argument for political violence. Good for him. But the act of trying to kill a bunch of people in that setting I think is kind of definitionally nuts or or it’s off.

8:14 So like he’s not some new normal person. We know very little about his biography but when you look at the arc of he was at Caltech, worked at a startup for a while or worked as a mechanical engineer then a startup then was tutoring uh you know seems to be spinning his wheels. you see I think somebody who who’s 31 um it’s very likely that this is somebody who as more comes out we’re going to learn more about the various kinds of mental illnesses and kind of deteriorating personality which is totally in line with his age and you know I I think kind of the words on the page. So I don’t I don’t see this as auguring in a new age of political violence. Matt and I have talked about this and I think we disagree. I don’t think we’re in a new age of violence per, you know, at all. And we’re not in a new age of uh political violence. And I also don’t think we’re in an age if if we’re if we want to keep talking about

9:07 this about left-wing political violence. The most screwed up rhetoric coming out of American politics in the past couple months were all of the people who were celebrating American citizens being shot in the face by government agents uh in Minnesota during the winter. uh you know where I you know when I was on Twitter which I don’t mistake for reality but everybody was like oh you know they deserved it more people should be shot in the face so um having said that you know this is a bad thing we should all be appalled by it but I don’t think we can draw all that much more uh you know meaning or significance from it one reason that everyone’s obsessed with figuring out the rhetoric stuff though is because it in theory it could be predictive Yeah, right. Like the the reason that we’re like going back and looking through his blue sky posts and the reason that we look for these manifestos and the reason that we go through the Discord, you know, postings of the of the shooters is because we

10:07 want to try and make a pattern where we could see this coming and predict it and stop it, right? And we can’t. And I think this kind of goes to to Nick’s point of, you know, this is normie rhetoric and not normie behavior. The thing that is different is the behavior, not the rhetoric. Right? I’m annoyed with people on Blue Sky quite a bit, but most of them, in fact, virtually all of them except this guy are not trying to assassinate the president. At the same time, I’m not sure it’s actually about um I’m not sure it’s actually about trying to uh predict what’s going to happen. I mean, maybe that’s a little bit. I think it’s about trying to establish who the enemy is and who the bad guy is and to say that all the all the blue sky types, right, they’re causing this to some degree and therefore it’s okay to hate them and maybe to sanction them in some way. Yeah, my thing is the good faith version and your thing is the bad faith version, but they are both occurring. I mean, I

10:57 think it’s a normal thing to look at uh who’s trying to commit political assassinations and uh and other acts of political violence and kind of walk backwards and encourage people not to. And I don’t think that it’s I don’t think that denying that it’s happening in numbers that were not we didn’t see between 1982 and 2016 is helpful uh to that. I mean, there was a congressional shooting. um a guy who was a Bernie bro volunteer took pot shots at Republicans and shot a whole bunch of them uh or at least three or four um on the congressional baseball field. We had the January 6th mob violence on Capitol Hill attempting to forstall the transfer of power. That was pretty traumatic and bad. We had like the George Floyd riots afterwards. Very politicized. People died, lots of them. We had months after months in Portland of property damage and physical uh damage, even murder uh happening there and a bunch of the way that people talked about it and the apologetics that were engaged with it after October 7th. A lot of the street

12:03 violence that happened and the protests back and forth. I think that it is a different era than it was between 1982 and 2016. And it’s worth confronting that head on. And Nick is absolutely right when he talks about like just the insane rhetoric that comes out of like Steven Miller every day for example. Um and uh that is not helping either. I think we if we look in our hearts and ask ourselves what will we do if we wanted there to be less political violence. Um I think one of the things that we’d want to do is to slow our role before we declare an entire block of of people an existential threat to our to our literal existence.

12:41 I I agree with you completely, Matt. And obviously nobody on this podcast, I don’t think anybody at Reason participates in that kind of stuff. There’s I think there’s two larger dynamics that are worth thinking about. And one is in the in the biggest terms possible. And if you compare uh you know contemporary times uh and political violence to uh stuff happening particularly in the 70s and the earlier first half of the 70s. there is no broad-based uh uh kind of consensus that political violence is the only way forward. Uh when you look back at places like the New York Times, uh you know, they would run glowing profiles of people like Hrap Brown or or or reviews of his book and other revolutionaries who would say, you know what, we have tried we’ve gotten as far as we can with the democratic process, with electoral politics or with exiting systems. the only way forward is through revolutionary violence. Um there is no big support for that. When you look at and you know all of us we we kind of

13:43 argued about one battle after another. We know that you know the revolutionary violence of movies and and novels and things like that that play with that. It’s a nostalgia act. Um, and that’s really important and really powerful because we should not mistake lone nut jobs who are doing absolute violence that needs to be absolutely, you know, condemned and and we should be trying to talk people out of like indulging in that kind of rhetoric. But that big overarching uh defense of revolutionary violence as the only way forward to affect real political change or or social and cultural change is dead and that’s good and we should keep that going. And then the other thing is that we should look at these instances and it’s like you know the the Steve Scaliz shooting or the the baseball game was very strange. You know the first uh uh World Trade Center bombing in 1993 was nuts and it did not get discussed enough

14:39 as it should have been. Um you know so we should take advantage of episodes like this. But with something like this, I think you know the the response so far has been exactly as it should be and it and it typically is that like violence is condemned uh and then we try to get to a better place politically and culturally. Katherine Matt, you want to respond or should we talk about the ballroom? Talk about the ballroom. We have to talk about the ballroom.

15:03 We got to talk about the ballroom. Okay. So look, the the policy upshot of this is that the Trump administration is saying, “Hey, because of this shooting, you have to let us build the ballroom,” which has been uh that a bunch of judges have basically said, “Oh, you you’ve got to stop work, right? Congress has to weigh in. There’s sort of been a bunch of legal proceedings here.” But like immediately we had all of these MAGA people after the shooting saying, “Look, the security situation there was kind of dicey and what we got to do is build the ballroom.” And Trump himself, the White House Twitter account, this is not just sort of something that’s coming up from the ether from from some Trump supporters. This is pretty pretty clearly a priority for the president. Catherine, I hate that and that’s dumb. Let’s talk about it. So the thing about it is there’s people with power want to build edififices. They love it. They want to do it. They want to have a big building that’s still there even after their

16:00 power is gone. And Trump is uh a sort of extreme version of this. I think he also is planning a triumphal arch of some kind. Um for what triumph? Unclear, but um this is just for being Donald Trump. This is a thing that people in power do and um everything else is a post hawk justification. Everything else like is the problem. We need a room in Washington DC with good security to hold events. Those exist. They chose not to have this event in one of those rooms. Yeah. This was at the Hilton that is known as Hankley Hilton shooting of a president. My god, people like does the does the bad ju guju mean nothing? And the answer is actually what keeps people safe in society is uh is trust and mores and good behavior and only secondarily security. But there are secure rooms in DC. We do not need the ballroom for this. Yeah, it just doesn’t make any sense at all. The White House correspondents dinner is not an official White House event. Probably wouldn’t even be held at the White House ballroom. Trump didn’t

17:07 even attend. That would be gross, right? Like one like the White House correspondents dinner for people who do not know who are living good and wholesome lives is an event where the press and the president weirdly pretend to be friends but also enemies and they joke about it. Although in this case Trump was expected to excoriate the press, right? So it would be quadruple bizarre to hold that event in particular in the White House bar. All right, speaking of quadruple bizarre, we’re going to have another couple of topics on this podcast after we take a break. Hey, Reason Round Table listeners. Do you know a student looking for a serious intellectual experience that strengthens the foundations of a free society? Reliance College invites students ages 16 to 24 to the 2026 Great Connection Seminar in Chicago from July 25th to August 1st. This year’s theme is reason and love. It explores the ideas

17:59 that shape character, choice, and human flourishing. Students engage directly with thinkers like Aristotle, Einrand, Alexis Dtoqueville. They’ll be in small dynamic discussion groups where every claim requires evidence and reasoning. They don’t just sit through lectures. They’re going to practice thinking for themselves. Outside the seminar room, students will have other activities they can explore. Chicago’s landmarks, analyze art firsthand, experience live improv comedy, and build friendships rooted in shared intellectual ambition. Parents, if you want your student equipped to reason independently, speak confidently, and contribute meaningfully to a free society, this program was built for them. Registration is just $900, and that includes room for the full week. Scholarships are also available. Visit reliancecol.org/reason to learn more and apply. That’s reliance.org/reason. New York Mayor Zoran Mdani is pushing

18:53 through his plan to call him \[ \_\_ \] Zamani. You know what? Wow. Speaking is hard. True. It’s difficult, right? So, he wants to own a open a city cityf funed grocery store. It’s going to cost $30 million. It’s going to pay no rent, no property taxes. Um, Nick, I I look at this plan and it just makes me think if it’s such a great idea to not for grocery stores to not pay taxes, why don’t we just have grocery stores not pay taxes?

19:27 Yeah. I, you know, nothing is good about any of this. Other cities have, you know, tried this and it, you know, it it never works the way it is. It’s uh, you know, it’s symbolism. Uh, and it’s even bad symbolism, not only because expensive symbolism. Yeah. And and you know the full roll out because each each burrow is going to have its own city-owned and operate or not city owned but city supervised and and uh and approved uh cheap uh grocery store by and the last one will be in in place by 2029. So you know Staten Island just hang in there baby. You know cheap below market eggs are coming. It’s this is mom Donny’s ballroom right. It is it’s very very uh it’s just it’s a waste of time. it captured some parts of the public imagination and um you know the I I would say the least the less said about it the better except that this is paradigmatic of what happens when you’re in a very expensive city um

20:25 and you can have these kinds of symbolic interventions. Uh it would be so much better to just change tax and business and regulatory policy in New York so that things were cheaper here. But I kind of feel like this is our fault, honestly. Like, speak for yourself. Yeah. Here’s here’s the theory. I I think Mdani said the stupid thing about the grocery stores, and it could have easily just been like a passing moment, right? Like that that like so many other things that he like discarded during the campaign as not actionable. This could have gone with it, but everybody, including us, got so up in arms about how dumb it was. I think he had to actually do it. Like I can never He’s a true believer. I really I think he he’s a true believer in a lot of things though. He would love he loves a lot of dumb ideas and he paired away a bunch of them and I think the grocery store survived because we all got our panties

21:19 at I think it survived because it is relatively less expensive, right? It’s just a line item $30 million plus the sort of ongoing cost. But the other thing is this is a handout to unions. It’s a handout to unions because he’s going to pay union wages to all of his workers, right? and uh and and this like it just this is all going to be funded uh you know by the taxpayer um with tax breaks with no rent right with with all of this and it just strikes me that this whole thing is designed for Mamani to say look union workers right the labor movement which is what he comes out of DSA is the the democratic socialist movement that he comes out of is so dominated by by kind of neoprogressive labor types that this was a priority for him and it was something that he could do because it’s not going to have. It’s going to be stupid and it’s not going to work, but it’s not going to have city-wide ramifications. Matt, what do you think? And also there isn’t unlike the other things that he climbed down on, there isn’t a concentrated and important

22:15 interest group on the other side of the issue. Yeah. Um like you can say a lot of stuff about criminal justice and stuff, but you’ve got to run the cops. Now, what do you do? Uh what you do is you climb backwards from what how you campaigned and suddenly sound more realistic. But uh is he really going to be upset about the supermarket association? No, not really. Um, he he wants this demonstration project. I mean, take him at his word. At his uh, you know, his inaugural speech, at his victory night speech, he always makes sure to like get Eugene Debs in the lead. Um, he wants to have this thing to say, “Aha, government can do this thing that the private sector cannot. Government is actually superior.” Um, look at the quotes that he that he’s given uh at these various events. He’s like, you know, uh you Oh, there’s other supermarkets. I welcome the competition. Bring it on. What a weird thing to say. You’re the mayor of a city. You’re like welcoming the competition, which is obviously

23:11 definitionally an unfair fight. You’re thumbming the scale about the taxes you don’t have to pay. Um and the revenue and the rent and the rent that you don’t have to pay. the uh an interesting element in a city journal article uh pointed out that there’s a foundational mistake at the you know at the mission statement of this which is that uh New Yorkers are facing you know that uh uh grocery prices have gone up 66% over the past x number of years and it turned out that they were misreading a stat about the amount of meals that people have at home that are you know kind of prepared at home so that you know this this is a teachable moment I was a teachable moment in Chicago. It’s been a teachable moment in other towns where, you know, cities have tried to own and operate or, you know, or subsidize heavily grocery stores. It doesn’t work. It’s worth uh, you know, it’s worth, you know, keeping tabs on this, but it’s it’s just a waste

24:05 of uh, it’s it’s a waste of everybody’s time and effort. Guy ran on affordability and he has shown an incredible persistent incuriosity about what makes things unaffordable. The presumption is corporate greed. Bad guys and billionaires. Yeah. Um and that’s just not how the world works, my dude. Um and he’s going to try to say that he has solved it. He has solved for greed and done the socialist experiment. Um and it just reminds me of a great scene in Jim Epstein’s upcoming documentary about Venezuela when it shows Hugo Chavez like uh talking about how cheap it’s the eggs are going to be in the Chavez supermarkets and how did that one turn out? Um too. So yes, I’m comparing Zoron mom Donnie think mom and then like Donnie Osmond Peter. Um but yeah, he’s the human what do you think the shoplifting policies will be? Because, you know, this does come on the heels of that awful New York Times podcast with Hassan \[ \_\_ \] and Gia Tolantino

25:08 kind of talking about how it’s moral and it’s, you know, it’s incumbent upon us to steal. No one will shoplift because the the the forces are all for good here. They won’t have any need to do this act of political protest. when all of us, and I I will speak for all of us, and please descent if you never shoplifted, but you didn’t shoplift because you needed it. You did it for the thrill. We’re all like Best Meerson, uh, you know, the first Jewish Miss America, who was Ed Cotch’s beard for many years, who kept getting arrested at, uh, high-end, uh, department stores in New York in the 70s and 80s for shoplifting. She didn’t need another Hermes scarf. She did it for the thrill. Nick, speak for yourself. I am Jean Bjon. I needed that Chakite bar the one time that I shot. Yeah. Oh, good. A little air in it. Oh, an admission of a crime on the Reason podcast. Uh, no. The the thing that strikes me I committed three felonies in my sleep

26:07 last night. I don’t know about the rest of you. Calm down, Harvey Silverlade. If you want to provide subsidized groceries to the poor, you know there’s a program for that, right? It’s called food stamps. SNAP. And in fact, 21% of the population of New York is already on it, nearly a third of households. So, we can argue about SNAP and about food stamps, but there is already a government program that is designed to make sure that people who are living in poverty can get access to free and reduced price crush. Speaking of the greatness of the New York Post, by the way, the New York Post, if they are fools, if they have not assigned a fulltime reporter to just sit in that grocery store and steal things, steal things. Watch like uh people on Snap get in fist fights with the clerks who don’t know how to operate the machines to do the I know what he’s doing. There’s going to be probably one of those machines that grinds the peanuts into the peanut butter and there’s they’ll terrible

27:11 things are going to happen there. Who knows? It’s going to be great. That’s a daily story in the post for the rest of time. And Peter, one little policy ad is just that uh several years ago, New York decided under Delasio, I think it was, to uh do wraparound services at their schools. One of the reasons why schools cost $40,000 per student per year in the public schools is that they provide uh food, breakfast basically for everybody for free. um because they were thinking that we live in food deserts and we have food insecurity and these kind of things. So, it’s a tremendous amount of food every day that is uh served to poor people in public schools. All right, speaking of uh large corporations and bailouts, Trump administration is in reported advanced discussions to bail out Spirit Airlines could include a $500 million loan. The end result could be that the US government owns 90% of the company.

28:01 Catherine, why does the US government need to own 90% of an airline? It sure doesn’t, Peter. Thank you so much for asking. No, this is it’s like installment 47 in the increasingly troubling trend of the federal government just taking a little nibble here, a little golden share there, a little final approval on the deal over here. And this has been going on for a long time, but it is very much accelerating. And the idea that we are once again somehow having a conversation about a government airline as if the every version of government airline subsidized, owned, you know, hyperreulated, supervised. It’s all it it’s all bad. It all works less well than just letting the market operate in this and all other areas. Nick, this is something that Trump has obviously done a lot, right? And we’ve talked about Republican socialism on this podcast a number of times. Eric Bam wrote a great cover story for a reason just about all of the companies that

29:03 Trump has invested in and that are now kind of quasi public even if they have not been fully taken over, you know, or nationalized. But this started before the Trump administration in some ways with the Biden administration when FTC Commissioner Lena Khan rejected a merger between Spirit and JetBlue. So, is this kind of the Biden administration’s fault or Lena’s fault? No. I mean, they they did their own terrible things, but nothing nothing that the Biden administration should leave us with the eventuality that the US taxpayer is going to own 90% of Spirit Airlines. Um, you know, uh, so and when you go back to that, uh, to what, uh, what was happening in the FTC, which was terrible under Biden because they were basically anti-all mergers. Um Gary Le, who is uh a libertarian writer who has a great uh blog about the airline industry and uh and all sorts of related travel perks and things like

30:00 that, uh called View from the Wing. Talked about how uh the the beginning problem in the Biden administration was that the Biden administration disallowed a deal between American and JetBlue to share certain kinds of routes. that led JetBlue to actually looking at spirit for various reasons even though it didn’t make a lot of sense. So it it gets more and more complicated. The one lesson that you can take away is that government intervention into things like airline uh routes and airline ownership and things like that is always bad business. But that you know Biden Biden was Biden. It’s terrible. Lena Khan is terrible. Uh Lena Khan lives on both in Mam Donniey’s New York as well as in JD Vance’s world. She was one of the people that uh Vance said was great that the Biden administration had. But the idea of bailing out not just Spirit but other budget airlines that are all tanking partly because of Trump’s war in the

30:58 Middle East which is jacking up jet fuel. Uh, it’s all bad and it all it never gets fixed by more intervention. Whether we’re talking about the Middle East or we’re talking about Spirit Airlines, I do look forward to when we take, you know, when when Trump is like, we need 90% of a sports franchise. It’s probably going to be the Mets if he wants to keep going with real bad franchises. Sounds like you’re just gonna throw that one to Matt.

31:23 Yeah, Mets. Yeah, it’s the return of Ed Crane. The eternal return of Ed Crane. Um the uh America, United States of America um led the world in airline deregulation uh beginning in the 1970s and the world went, “Oh man, that sure works a lot better.” Um, I think I wrote a piece for Reason more than 20 years ago now, around 20 years ago, talking about how Europe, those commie bastards in Europe, um, had, uh, greatly outdist us in airline deregulation as of 20 years ago.

31:58 Um, and so it makes all the sense in the world that after all this really wretched policy, which included the bailouts for airlines after 911, which was bad policy, um, uh, and just what we’ve seen now with Trump trying to Victor Orban his way through managing the economy, uh, from a centralized point of view and seizing assets of people, all this crap. Um, yeah, it’s we’re we’re backsliding fast. Um, and congratulations to us. Katherine, what do you think about Trump invoking or reportedly considering invoking the Defense Production Act here, which he said he’d do he’d do it to save the jobs. It’s Trump quote, right? So that’s actually what I was going to say. The Defense Production Act piece of this of course is um novel in this sphere, but not novel in the Trump administration or indeed in administrations before his. the idea that somehow if you look closely enough absolutely everything is about national

32:54 security in the end that every power of the state is justified on national defense. I gotta say, um, the idea that Spirit Airlines is crucial to our national defense in any way, shape, or form. If you’ve ever flown Spirit Airlines, I think we can all agree we should go ahead and just assume defeat in all wars going forward. If this is how it is, uh, no, no. According to CBS, the Pentagon is going to use Spirit’s excess capacity for transporting troops, military cargo, other missions.

33:26 They’re going to be late. This is I was going to say if the 9/11 hijackers had been on Spirit, they would have got into fights with the staff. It’s I hope they got one of those air tags on the on the guns cuz they’re going to lose them. It’s not great out there at Spirit. So, this is an airline that deserves to go bankrupt that has gone bankrupt twice in the last two years. That could be great fodder for acquisition by JetBlue. Even if Spirit had been acquired by JetBlue, it still would have been less than 10% of the airline industry. This is not some kind of um you know antitrust thing going on and the idea that somehow all this is justified by um by national security which is somehow itself just general economic stimulus is um is maddening.

34:15 It’s if we may just say this what is deeply disturbing and you know Peter you talked about okay well is this just a hangover from the Biden administration into Trump and like you know what is is starting to come into view is a consensus that oh maybe we should be talking about the Biden Trump era because in the end when you say everybody’s got to come by the federal government and you know and and leave a tip or or hold their hat in their hand and beg for something and whether it’s undergrounds of antitrust under Biden or its tariffs or you know personal shakeddowns under under Trump. This is a really terrible thing like b you know the government should not the government should only get involved when there is an obvious issue to be raised. You should not have to do a kind of, you know, pre-publication review of your business activity any more than newspapers should have to run stories by the the White House or the government ahead of time. Like this, you know, this

35:12 is a really bad shift. And to the extent that we’re in a an era now where Republicans and Democrats are both like, no, you have to make your case to the government before you can go forward, this is a terrible, terrible way. And it’s the wages of populism. That is in fact what we talked about last week with our listener question which was about right-wing progressivism and left-wing progressivism. And we are going to be back with another listening listener question that is not about national security about voting and lobsters. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. So you know what makes people worry? Money problems. Financial stress. At the start of this year 88% of Americans reported feeling some form of financial stress. Money worries often bring anxiety, sleep disruption, even depression. Financial difficulties are also one of the leading sources of conflict for couples. If you are struggling with money or feelings of anxiety around your finances, that doesn’t mean you failed. It might just

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36:54 And that’s based on over 1.7 million client reviews. So when life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up. Get 10% off at betterhelp.com/roundable. That’s betterhp.com/roundable. All right, a reminder, we love to answer your questions. Please send your short, succinct, pity, and otherwise not very long questions to podcastreason.com. That is podcastreason.com. And thank you. Thank you all so much for putting listener question in your subject line. It really helps me out. Um, be like this week’s listener, Lisa, who writes from Virginia. Howdy. Howdy, Lisa. Howdy. As I write this, Virginia is voting on a new redistricting map to make elections fair. For context, I live in Blackburg, Virginia, and my current representative in Congress is MAGA and useless. But I repeat myself. The new map would place me with Charlottesville, the home of UVA of all places, and other college towns that have very little in common with

37:50 where I live. What is the libertarian view on redistricting? Should we limit it to only when there is a population shift? Katherine, you grew up in Virginia. You understand what I mean when I say that this is about lobsters. You want to explain? Yes. There is a new district that has uh been crafted that uh is lobster shaped. Uh this is in the proud tradition of gerrymandering since the OG gerrymandered district looked like a salamander just thus the mander in gerrymander. Uh we like to have a creatureshaped district. So here’s the thing. I think this letter is actually just a thinly veiled Virginia Tech versus UVA um rivalry situation because the letter writer casually mentions being in Blackburg and then like dismissively refers to college towns. Now, I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure they got a college, not their town, and go hookies and all that, but um you know, Blackburg and Charlottesville might have some things in common. That said, broadly, um the the gerrymandering

38:53 thing and the redistricting thing is is quite wild and it is an example of the winner take all attitude that everyone is taking toward politics. Now, there was there was uh just a map that came out right before we started recording showing proposed redistricting in Florida, which somehow all of Florida is red except for like teeny little blue spots and it would it would hand over a bunch of districts to Republicans. Um redistricting has always kind of been a very gental war of all against all. It’s always been kind of this thinly veiled uh Machavellian game and Virginia has just like peeled away a layer and leave it to Ronda Santis to be even less subtle and so we go.

39:37 Matt, uh the I like the idea of you uh every 10 years based on the census you reortion. That’s basically how things have mostly worked. Uh Donald Trump tried to jump that line this time around. That’s why we’ve been in this tit for tat for tit fortat. Um it backfired in Indiana. Republicans in Indiana told him to get bent and then he’s now tried to campaign against all those people and they’ve forgotten why they’re mad at each other now and it’s all kind of gonna kind of blow up in his face. California did it as well. Um I think that’s bad. It’s an in indicator of our kind of low trust moment and the assault that we place therefore on anything that smacks of being uh kind of impartial or fair though that should be in theory although never is in practice. Um, if people want to be serious about reform, I recommend starting with the work of Walter Olsen, who’s worked about on this a lot, um, at the state of Maryland level. Um, his work is archived

40:32 at the Ko Institute. Um, no more snakes, more turtles, uh, more dustpans, less rakes. Um, and, uh, what about just squares, man? Squares if if need be. Um but uh yeah, I think the idea of having you Michigan and Colorado have um in their uh redistricting rules of discussions of perimeter. You kind of want to have a better shaped um uh district. That seems to make sense to me, but I think it starts with let’s just slow your rule. Do it every 10 years. Nick, it should all be a grid, right?

41:05 Like in Tron. Uh uh well uh you know I uh come from New Jersey where uh there’s a long uh sea coast for sure which has radically different needs than uh people who are inland in uh places like the Pine Baron. So there are going to be weird shapes under any legitimate redistricting plan that tries to put people with similar needs or or realities together. But two things on this. One is you can do structural changes saying things like these changes do not come into effect until 5 years in the future or something like that to make sure that you at least dilute the self-interest of the people writing the new districts and things like that. Doesn’t get rid of everything, but it helps. You can outsource it to independent commissions which tend to have better results.

41:57 Again, not perfect. As Katherine was talking about, you know, this is something that goes back to the very early days of the republic. It’s never going to be great. The thing that I want to highlight here is uh work by Arnold Clling among others. that one of the problems here is that we have uh the number of people in Congress and this is mostly about congressional districts has been capped at 435 since 1929 when and in 1930 each congressman representative you just do a like basic division about 280,000 people nowadays they represent 760,000 people uh but we still have the same number of members of Congress we should have something like 1,200 if we were keeping pace with 1929 if that was representative, you know, uh to have congressional districts of 282,000 people. And the reason why I like this is that if we tripled the number of Congress members, I think it would open up the ability for all sorts of

43:00 coalitional politics that would really uh obiate away from the polarization uh and the two-party, you know, uh the duopoly and the stupid winner takes all uh kind of mentality. So that’s what I would call for is as much as we hate Congress now, imagine that there were three or four times as many people to hate, it would be a better world and probably a more representative one. Well, you would dilute the hate if we the hate stayed basically the same. The hate per capita. Yeah.

43:31 Yeah. Right. It’s like inflation. You can inflate the debt away. That’s what they always used to say. All right, let’s check in on Iran. Speaking of two sides, Jesus. Yep. We gota we got to do our Iran check-in every week now because it’s still happening, right? And we’ve got we’ve got the United States government, the Iranian government, and they’re kind of dancing around each other. Uh Iran just offered a deal to reopen the Straight of Hormuz, which is the major sticking point in a lot of ways without any kind of nuclear agreement at all. Does anybody here think that this is a good idea? So it would revert back to what it was before Donald Trump started bombing, right? Yeah, that actually would be better than what we have now. So, at the very beginning of this war on the the podcast that we did when the war started, I made a little point about the fact that Reason seemed to have been better prepared than the administration and Congress for the start of this war because we had like pre-written an

44:25 article that was like, I guess we’re at war with Iran. We had a meeting. We had a meeting. We talked about it. We planned. We assigned someone to watch it. That kind of thing, which no one in power seemed to have done. I will now say uh the print issue of the magazine which is out which came out on Friday with the cover line a pointless war uh we weren’t sure when we put that issue together we were like oh maybe stuff will happen and by the time the issue was printed uh this will somehow feel out of date but you know what here we are in a pointless war maybe forever and it sucks to be right again it sucks to have done a good job of timely coverage of this stupid pointless war again and you can ask us a question at the end of every podcast every week for the next several weeks and we are going to say and you’re going to and we’re going to say I don’t know still seems bad might do it at the beginning of the podcast sometimes. Uh the one other thing I wanted to ask about um Matt uh

45:21 this Trump is cancelling the there was Kushner and Witoff were supposed to take a trip to Pakistan and Trump was like no they’re not going. It’s an 18-hour flight. They can call us, right? Uh the quote is we can just do it as well by telephone. The Iranians can call us if they want. We are not going to travel just to sit there. This is what he told Axios over the weekend. Uh, is this is this like kind of a reasonable way to approach these things because in fact the telephone call is just as good or is this a sign that Trump is kind of checking out of this process? Meeting could have been an email. Uh, it could have been an email. I I think the great Jack or could have been an email from the history of the Americans podcast had a tweet three weeks a or so ago um saying his prediction for the future is that um both sides they’re like we’ll not ever really have a treaty. it’s going to be a sitskrieg. They’re just going to sit on their

46:15 hands. Um because neither side really wants the war to happen again. Um but they also kind of don’t want to like do the messy stuff. And so we might very well see never really an agreement come out of all of this. In which case then the uh yeah, okay, let’s just reopen the straight of Hormuz. Um might be the this is like a the Seinfeld version of a war. It’s about nothing. Uh like what did we accomplish here?

46:40 Ultimately, it’ll be that we we degraded the Navy and we limited their ability to project force outside their borders, which is not a small thing. Um, and we acted crazy. Um, so if that’s a good thing, then we did that. Um, I would argue that’s not necessarily a good thing and that it’s damaged our relationship with a lot of people in the world and made the place world more unstable. But there are arguments and I’ve heard them of of how this has um, you know, in limited ways improved certain things. Um, and that’s what they will rest their hats on, I think. Um, and uh, yeah, I don’t I don’t really predict there’s going to be some grand breakthrough. It’s more a cashmere sweater with a tiny spot on it. That’s disturbing is uh, you know, this is the time for diplomacy. And you’re not going to get that when you send two real estate agents over there to negotiate things. Um, and uh, you know,

47:31 that’s what we’ve been doing. And it would be it would be great if we had a State Department, you know, and this is something we’ve interviewed people over the years. The State Department was made subservient to the Defense Department decades ago. And this is kind of what you get with that is that you don’t have an ability to actually start working through things diplomatically. Um, and it’s it’s a it’s a bad thing. It’s it’s horrible for the people of Iran. I mean, not only have they, you know, they’ve had 10 or 30 or 10 20 30,000 of of their own killed by the regime, which now has more of a lock on its population than ever. Um, you know, we uh we we have uh caused all of our allies as well as military bases in the region to be bombed uh through our actions. There’s uh you know, the world supply or 20% of the world supply of oil and and gas is crippled. um you know it’s not good and we we need diplomacy and obviously that is not one of Trump’s strong suits

48:29 whatsoever. So we’ll have an indefinitely extended uh peace negotiation. In fairness to Kushner and Witco they also were involved with the Abraham Accords which I think were a nonalloy. Uh well yeah I I agree. Um but that those were also multi-party. Uh this is part of the problem is that the US uh you know in in a multipolar war if the US is going to consistently say no we alone get to decide all terms and things like that it’s just not going to work very well. All right I alone get to decide the segment is over let’s move on to our cultural consumption uh what we have been watching reading otherwise consuming in the cultural realm.

49:10 Catherine, you want to start? All this redistricting talk has made me actually want to recommend just a a Tik Tok channel that is extremely good and it is called Cooking with Congress. I don’t know if you guys have ever seen this guy. He uh he does a running series. Um there are actually subseries within it. So he also does eating like a president and eating like you. and he takes a typical like a member like a person in each of the 435 congressional districts and he takes like writeins I don’t know but he also eats from presidential um like menu lists cookbooks that kind of thing and my friends you have not lived you have not lived until you have been scrolling through Tik Tok and suddenly been forced to stop and watch this man make and then consume wild fish aspic, which is apparently an Andrew Jackson favorite. It’s what it sounds like, guys. It’s fish jell-o. And it’s not even fish jell-o in the sense that you might think of like the jell-o your grandma made where she opened a bunch of cans and just dumped it in. No, no, friends. It’s

50:18 a whole fish in the Jell-O. And wait, so it’s it’s fish flavored Jell-O, not no fish that has been transformed into Jell-O. It’s a It’s a literal fish embedded in Jell-O. And then you Is it a jello shot? Like is it full of mezcow or something? No, there’s no booze in there. Although there is a lot of booze in this series. And one thing that you learn from watching this series is every president was drunk. Many congressmen are drunk. America not as drunk. Drinking a lot of energy drinks. America is consuming more zero sugar energy drinks than I had understood previously. I think um the series that’s because you never worked at a seafood restaurant in Florida where I did not where the uh vodka Red Bull situation was right off the charts. America has a vod vodka Red Bull situation. Um no truly there is also a Millard Filillmore aspect. Um so there’s a lot of there’s a lot of gross gelatin. There’s a lot of like um you know uh weird glasses of

51:21 milk in places you wouldn’t expect them. Um it’s perfect. It’s delicious. It’s so weird. And uh the combination and contrast of a person from each congressional district in the present, presidents of the past, Congress, just glorious. Uh the dude who makes it is a professional comedian of some kind, and it shows. Um but it feels very sincere. He kind of gives you like a wrap-up at the end of the day of how he feels, and um and it’s often not good, and I feel like that explains a lot of our politics. Is that because he eats fish jello? Yes. Because he eats all the food. He eats he eats as these people eat in a day. And uh and it it just feels like you know like the Andrew Jackson menu is half like crazy highutin stuff like fish jello and half like country boy food.

52:11 And in the end he’s just like I feel confused. I feel disgusting. I feel like I would be a bad president. And I think that that that makes sense. It’s like us at the end of the podcast. Cooking with Congress on Tik Tok, wherever you get your videos. You know, Millard Filillmore is Buffalo’s own Millard Filillmore. Was that a chicken wing in aspect or in aspect or what for me? A variety of aspects. I think there was maybe more than one in that episode.

52:41 Yeah. No, that’s brutal. Um, I uh ended up I am watching a bunch of very interesting shows and uh Peter and I I guess all of us have talked a little bit about things uh shows like uh Your Friends and Neighbors and Beef Euphoria’s uh third season is is in full swing and it’s very good. I want to get to those and a couple novels I’m working on. this weekend, given how der and awful everything was, I wanted to uh put a word in for the London Marathon, which had uh just an bananas level of unbelievable results. Um it has for a very long time people have been trying to to break the 2hour mark in a marathon, running 26.2 two miles on the the right type of course that’s a closed loop that isn’t cheating or advantaging the runners in somehow to break the 2hour mark. Um it’s been done under fake circumstances before. But in London uh this weekend, Sebastian Sao uh broke that record. uh he uh and another guy,

53:46 the second place runner also broke two hours and the third place male actually broke the the standing world record, you know, until this day. And then the woman who won her race set a new world record and it is just amazing to think about when something like the 2hour marathon mark uh I ran a marathon in 1988. Um, and back then the record was like around 220 or something like that. And people were like, “You cannot get faster. People’s bones will dissipate. You just cannot do it.” People talk this way about the 4-minute mile back in the 50s. And then, you know, people edge up to it and edge up to it and then when they break it, like suddenly things go haywire. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re down to like, you know, 155 or 150 over the next 18 months. But it is just a spectacular. We’ll put uh some footage in of the finishing of the finisher. Uh and it’s it’s just like an incredible testament to human ingenuity, training,

54:47 science, uh decolonization. All of the marathoners now and and the top three men are all from former uh English and Italian uh colonies. Uh you know, that 70 years ago were under the heel of a colonial impre oppressor and are now just kicking ass. Uh it’s it’s just a totally fantastic thing. The London Marathon, just watch the last 30 seconds. It’ll make you feel good all week. I mean, a lot of this is about um fitness science, right? Like both not just about bodies, but also about equipment and specifically about shoes. And the winner was wearing a pair of shoes that it was not available to the public uh when the race was run. I think it’s going to be available to the public very shortly here. It’s a $500 pair of Adidas that is like the lightest running shoe ever. 3.4 4 ounces or something when like just a couple of years ago the average was something like 9 ounces for you know a top tier running shoe and it’s incredibly soft and springy but also incredibly light

55:46 and so this is part of which technology story right no it’s on every level on every level it is just determination ultimately because you know you’ve got to want it and you’ve got to put in the things but then it’s training better technology um you know uh running techniques have changed uh when I ran you landed on your heel. Nobody has done that for 20 years. Um it I mean it’s just if you care about progress um and what goes into progress looking at athletics and particularly something like running because it doesn’t give you you know traumatic brain injury or anything. It’s fascinating because it’s all of these things including product design.

56:26 Uh all right. So, I watched a movie that uh was not under two hours is Michael, the Michael Jackson bio uh biopic, which a lot of people watched and made a huge amount of money. It’s the number one biopic ever at the box office. Um nearly $100 million uh in domestic, over $200 million global. It’s going to be a huge hit. And I hated it. I hated it. Now, part of the reason that I hated it is because I’m not a big fan of musical biopics. I just I don’t love the sort of let’s just go through all the moments uh kind of you know sort of there’s going to be an up and then there’s going to be a down right like sort of and then he’s going to figure it out at the very end.

57:00 Part of the reason I hated it um this movie just has absolutely no insight into its central character at all. It is an it is an amazing feat of anti-insight. I came out of it feeling like I knew less about Michael Jackson than when I went in part because they had to rejigger this movie. initially was over 3 hours long and they had to uh remake it basically almost not entirely from scratch but heavily rebuild it uh delayed the release by a year because the third act was going to be about the child molestation allegations uh for Michael Jackson and it turned out that they didn’t have the rights for that that like because this film was blessed by the Michael Jackson estate the the estates agreement with the um with the victim here it’s basically said you can never make uh you can never make anything where you’re going to profit off of using this person’s name. And so they found that out after they had shot and put together the entire movie. And this caused 10 to$20 million worth of

57:58 re-shoots that they had to do. They also then cut this movie down to about two hours, but now they’re going to release a sequel. And so there’s going to be two of them here. But it is just absolutely bland as hell. Says nothing at all about this fascinating weirdo controversial character. you just sort of get scene after scene of hey, you recognize this thing happening that you’ve sort of heard about before and then it just happens and it’s like but but oh here here he is in a the like the child wing of a hospital and he’s given them he’s like talking to them and he seems to have a close oh next scene nothing about that nothing else right just nothing at all and so this movie just says nothing and there’s an argument that maybe what the real appeal from a film like this is the music and I am a huge fan of Michael Jackson’s 80s albums, Thriller in particular, which is, I think, arguably the best pop album of all time.

58:48 Certainly one of them, and it’s in particular, it is one of the best sounding albums of all time. I did not become a fan of this until I got a great pair of speakers and a copy of Thriller on vinyl. Yes, it makes a huge difference to hear this because this is a Quincy Jones album, right? Quincy Jones, given nearly unlimited budget, basically told, “Go make the best thing ever.” And he did. And it’s just incredible. If you want to hear this music, go find your pal with a great pair of speakers and an amazing record player and listen to it. But don’t watch this movie because every nearly every song that they play from Thriller, they step on. There’s dialogue that comes over it, right? They like get the the the Van Halen solo uh that is so famous, right? They’re kind of talking over it.

59:32 They barely don’t even show Eddie Van Halen coming into play uh that that that bit. It’s just no interest in the actual production, in the actual sounds that are so that are so crucial to the Michael Jackson image um to his to his persona and to why people still care about him all these years later. This should have been an opportunity at the bare minimum to hear this music on a great movie theater sound system. It’s not even that. Don’t go see it. Matt Welch, do they do they cover uh Ben uh Michael Jackson’s 19 brave 1972 uh power ballad to a killer rat and an interecies love that dare not speak its name, Peter? No, but they do they have the llama, but I’m not going to see it.

1:00:17 Yeah. No, that’s that’s done. So, the llama shows up for like a minute. The giraffe is there. The monkeyy’s there. Bubbles, right? But then there’s just these weird scenes that are like, “Oh, he loves animals.” That’s the insight that they have. He liked animals. John Melanie’s interview with Bubbles was disturbing. I’m sure Katherine has watched it three times, which was also disturbing. Um I read um a delightful book by Gordon Wood called Revolutionary Characters. What made the founders different came out 20 years ago. Gordon Wood probably the the preeminent uh revolutionary war historian uh kind of by a claim or close to it in the conversation. Certainly a really delightful writer. Um this is just you know profiles of eight or nine or 10 of the founders greatest hits. Um but they’re not the they’re arguments about little aspects of or you know important aspects of their character and how they intersected with the revolution itself

1:01:12 and just sort of revolutionary time and founding time. Um and he throws in Aaron Burr at the end too as a contrast. It’s like um part of the thing that’s that’s really valuable for it is that he’s just sort of like effortlessly great at the intellectual and historical context of kind of everything that he’s writing about. So the intro and the outro of the books are phenomenal reading like give you a sense of from when the revolutionary generation came what made them I mean you look at them and like my god how is it possible to have been Thomas Jefferson? He was a little bit a little bit too accomplished for for a young person and also uh with some pretty glaring you know he didn’t do a lot of housework Matt he had a lot of free time didn’t do a lot of housework well depends on what you mean by work but um uh at any rate the he he sets them in their time and then argues pretty convincingly that they created the time

1:02:12 um that immediately succeeded them that was therefore kind of untenable for them to be living in. Like they were disappointed by the results because the results were so radical, more radical than in fact they were themselves. Uh such was their accomplishment. Um which is just a really interesting kind of insight. Um and just the little arguments about them uh each of them uh really great. Um I I can’t recommend it highly enough. One of my favorite revolutionary books that I’ve read in the last uh few years. So revolutionary characters, Gordon Wood. Um it’s not going to be it’s not going to be mini bios. It’s just an argument about how did James Madison change his mind about the structure of government in 1792, which is interesting.

1:02:50 Who’s the who’s the guy that um pops out, Matt, that uh you you hadn’t heard about who’s like, “Holy cow, this guy really It isn’t It isn’t a hadn’t heard about uh book? Um it’s all it’s all Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Burr. Um uh so they’re all there. What popped out that was different was uh because I’m I guess uh behind on my Benjamin Franklinology um uh is the extent to which he was just a relentless much more than I even thought um like persona wearer. He was just constantly wearing masks and his turn towards the revolution is actually kind of portrayed as a surprise, a late breaking like 1770s era for an old man kind of surprise. Um, and that the Ben Franklin that we think of now is largely a 19th century invention, um, this sort of like, you know, uh, wise homespun old character, um, who was also part of him, but that he was just much more kind of like crafty and hard to hold, hard to pin

1:03:52 down, uh, than before. So, probably that was the biggest like, oh, he’s a little bit different than I suspected here of all the guys. I need to add an important um, fact check to my note. Um, Miller Filmore, not a lot of aspect. Mock turtle soup. That’s what was happening there. I believe that’s the shape of a new congressional voting district. Why? Why mock turtle? Because didn’t they have tons of turtles back then? I thought mock turtle was like, you know, for postw World War II. Why eat a turtle when you could eat a bowl full of boiled organ meat that vaguely approximates the gelatinous quality of turtle? Nick, you question. I withdraw the question. Yeah. Well, a foolish point here. Sorry.

1:04:35 You’re welcome. We’re done. No mock turtle soup for you. Yeah, that’s the show, folks. If you like what we’re doing here, you can donate at reason.com/donate. If you like the foundation, the podcast, reason.com/donate. Give us your money. Thank you so much for listening and for watching the Reason Round Table.