Just Asking Questions

"We're in dark and uncertain times, but we've made it through worse," writes Peter Meijer in a November 6 announcement that he's running for a Senate seat in Michigan soon to be vacated by Democrat Debbie Stabenow. Meijer is a former Republican representative for Michigan's third Congressional district—a position once held by Justin Amash, the Republican-turned-Libertarian congressman. Amash recently announced that he is launching an exploratory committee and may enter the Republican primary for the open Senate seat as well.  Meijer joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to talk about his run for Senate, what the prospects are for a candidate who voted to impeach Trump for his behavior on January 6, and how he hopes the GOP can change for the better to usher in "a new American century." They also discuss how Democrats funded ads to help a Trump-backed candidate defeat Meijer in Michigan's 2022 primary, the hypocrisy of groups proclaiming to "protect democracy" while fighting against ballot access, and what Meijer thinks about the prospect of running against Justin Amash this year. Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher. Sources referenced in this conversation: Justin Amash on X: "I've been humbled in recent weeks by the many people who have urged me to run for Senate in Michigan and to do so by joining the Republican primary. Peter Meijer, a Republican Who Voted to Impeach Trump, Is Running for Senate in Michigan - The New York Times Democrats Aid Far-Right Candidate Against Republican Who Backed Impeachment - The New York Times Matt Welch at Reason: Presidential Ballot Will Be Crowded With Third Party Candidates Meijer's farewell address to Congress.   Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below. Zach Weissmueller: We'll start with your campaign announcement where you say, "We are in dark and uncertain times," but that we need bold leaders to usher in "another great American century." Tell us more about what you see as the darkness of this moment and what you think it will take to escape that. Peter Meijer: I think if we look around the world and we look at the effects of a United States that seems to have receded—terrorists and authoritarians that have kind of seized that moment. The barbarism that we saw that Hamas conducted against Israeli civilians and military personnel on October 7. We have the continuing grinding conflict in Ukraine. We have the Houthis threatening to shut down—and succeeding in at least discouraging—a lot of international maritime transit. Even Pakistan bombing Iran, right? We're in a position where everything seems far less certain, where we don't know what's going to happen, where events could easily spiral out of control.  Then you look at a homefront where some of the economic indicators are more positive than they were a year ago, but in the minds of average Americans, they're still thinking back to where their expectations were for how much they were going to pay for their mortgage. And if you have an adjustable rate, mortgage interest rate increases have led that to double. The effects of inflation and some supply chain uncertainties have continued to see elevated grocery prices. That's something that's very near to my heart coming from a family grocery chain in our family's background. And that's before you get to those significant drivers of cost-of-living challenges that have remained elevated: housing, health care, and education. American families that I have talked to, families in Michigan, they feel uncertain about what the future's going to bring. Younger families or those who want to start one are nervous about how they're going to be able to make ends meet and also support raising children.  When I say dark and uncertain times, it's just a feeling that the stability and the foundation that many people have relied upon, that maybe they have grown up feeling that, that isn't there anymore. When I talk about a new, a second great American century, [I mean] how do we get to a point where by 2050, we again feel that in the United States is not just a superpower on paper, but we feel that sense of forward momentum, that we have policies at the federal level, and we have government officials that care a lot more about what the results of their policies are going to be. And again, to be able to look at objective, demonstrable policy outcomes in a clear and rational way.  I spent two years in Washington. That is not a lot of time, but it was enough time for me to realize and understand that all the problems I saw from the outside are the consequence of other problems that you need to kind of peel back the layers of the onion of dysfunction in Washington in order to figure out how to get down to some core governing principles, how to not just get in the position of playing whack-a-mole when we have all these events that come up and make us feel like we're lurching from crisis to crisis. There's always going to be areas of disagreement. There's always going to be division. That's a reality of politics. But my God, we should be able to agree that crime is bad. So what are the policies that promote safer communities? We want to have a strong national defense. How do we do that in the most cost effective way? And what should our international engagements be that play to our strengths rather than promote weaknesses (as I think a lot of our post-9/11 military adventurism ended up ultimately doing)? And what is it that we want to see the U.S.' role in the world be? And how do we make sure that we're continuing to build on the areas of core agreement?  So I'm running for Senate because of that desire to not only put family concerns first, an outcome oriented mentality, but also to make sure that that is not just a flash in the pan idea. It's not just, "Oh, this is an easy talking point." Let's have a real conversation about the systemic ways that we can address this. Because I'm someone who enjoys the difficult art of understanding complex systems and how to improve them, not somebody who feels a high going on a cable news show or having a tweet go viral. The dopamine addiction that I think has permeated our society, has permeated our politics. And that's how we are left in those dark and uncertain times. Liz Wolfe: That's a good way of putting it, the dopamine addiction permeating our politics. I think that's pretty true. But are we actually in exceptionally bad times? You just talked about the post-9/11 period and our military adventurism then and the sort of uncertain foreign policy situation of the early and mid-aughts. And then I'm also thinking about the late '70s and early '80s as a time of extraordinary inflation, where many of the same things you were talking about in terms of it being very difficult to afford a decent life today, families dealt with that then too. So are we really in uniquely bad times right now? Meijer: I would say for the modern moment, I think there's a feeling of uncertainty that we probably haven't experienced this millennium since maybe the 2008 financial crisis, with the amount of sectors that are struggling and the amount of uncertainty going forward. Now to your point, on the political violence front, I am quick to emphasize in the 1970s, you had hundreds of pipe bombs going off a year. You had domestic violence coming from groups across the political spectrum. The 1960s saw periods of intense social upheaval and unrest, the assassination of a sitting president, of a leading presidential figure, and the leading civil rights figure of our time. This is not the worst time the United States has been in. I don't want to be a Cassandra around that.  It's the fact that a lot of our challenges we're dealing with, in my view, are far more manageable. And so if they're more manageable, then we don't have a good excuse to just shrug away from them or take a path of minimal discomfort, rather than being disciplined and diligent and focusing on them. I don't want to come across as pessimistic, but at the same time, the feeling I get when I talk to people, the concern and that sense of unease. It's not fear. It's not paranoia. It's not terror. We've had moments of extreme, profound fear in this country, [like] that immediate post-9/11 moment. It's just a sense of "I want to feel hope again that we're on a good trajectory." And it feels like everywhere I look, I don't see something that gives me a reason to hope. Wolfe: Is it weird that you'll potentially be running against Justin Amash? He's launching an exploratory committee. Meijer: For the listeners' awareness, I succeeded Justin Amash. He was in Congress. He had left the Republican Party. He was officially an independent/Libertarian during his final term or the latter half of his final term in office. I've known Justin for a while. I solicited his feedback and thoughts on legislation because I think he's a very thoughtful individual. Again, that doesn't mean I agreed with every comment or suggestion, but I think he's somebody who thinks deeply about issues. And that is very much a rarity in our political process. I'm not sure what he's going to do, whether or not that exploratory committee will turn into an actual filing. But, generally speaking, I think the more folks who are engaged in our politics and putting forward thoughtful, principled ideas, is a good thing. Weissmueller: You both are kind of out of step, maybe in slightly different ways, with the modern Republican Party. Is there something strange about the district to which you were elected that made it possible for both you and Amash to hold that seat? Meijer: I think a lot of people commented there must be something in the water in west Michigan. We have a fantastic water filtration facility that takes it directly from Lake Michigan, near Grand Haven. But, you know, Gerald R. Ford represented this district prior to being elevated to the vice presidency, before Justin it was, Vern [Ehlers] and Paul Henry. There were a number of officials who had represented it who I think were independent-minded in their own way. I think it's very much a close-knit community.  It's a wonderful place; it's home. So perhaps there's something in the water, but I think it's better to have members who are in office who are looking into things and not just following the crowd. That's the easiest thing to do in Washington: Look up at the board and say, "Where's everyone else in my party going? And I'll just follow their lead." I can say from experience, and I'm sure Justin would say the same thing, it's far more difficult to say, "OK, how do I approach this issue in a consistent way that can be defensible?" rather than the inherent reactionary polarization that you'll usually see. Weissmueller: You gave a really interesting farewell speech in the House that I want to play a little bit of, because it lays out some of what you were alluding to earlier about your view of the current state of our government. And I also think it raises what I consider to be one of the most important political issues of our time. So let's roll that excerpt from your 2022 farewell address to Congress. Clip of Peter Meijer's "Farewell to Congress" on C-SPAN: I rise today for the last time as a member of the 117th Congress. I do not seek to dwell on the circumstances of my departure, although it does bring to mind a few lines from Yeats' Second Coming. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Perhaps it takes a cataclysm like World War One to capture the naked and malevolent cynicism of our politics. Yeats also well captured the harrowing consequence of elite ineptitude that precipitated the slaughter of tens of millions. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. I read and reread those words while flying out of Hamid Karzai International Airport last August, during the shameful end to 20 years of America's war in Afghanistan. What I saw on the ground during that waking nightmare exemplified some of the best of the American men and women in uniform, but it also reflected the helplessness and incompetence of American policymaking. The failure of our war in Afghanistan, a failure abetted by decades of Congress's lax oversight of the president and his Department of Defense.  To solve this, I push for Congress to take back its war powers, to take back that constitutional responsibility. But even when it comes to Congress asserting its own prerogative, this body has shown itself unwilling to do its job. The current budget negotiations taking place on the other side of the rotunda, also show a Congress unwilling to confront the very basic task of passing a budget on time. The last time we had a budget passed before the fiscal year started, I was in second grade. When Congress is incapable of solving problems of its own making. How can the American people have any faith that we can tackle the problems arising from the broader world? What hope do we have of outcompeting China, of winning this coming century? If we can't even get out of a mess of our own making? We need the best to regain their convictions. To set an example of what clear-eyed leadership looks like both at home and abroad. We need to hold the worst to account and reprise the moral resolve that has led us through dark times in this country many, many times before. Too many have sacrificed too much for us to squander the opportunity before us, the opportunity to rise to the challenge of this moment, to set aside petty squabbles. The opportunity to build on the promise of limited government, economic freedom and individual liberty. The promise that underpins the American dream. Wolfe: How do you feel rewatching it? Meijer: Those were the moments where I was still aggressively campaigning and petitioning and spending a lot of time on the Senate side to get the Afghan Adjustment Act passed, to try to get that into the [National Defense Authorization Act] or into that omnibus that was being worked on because that was a deeply personal issue. It was something that we were so close to being able to get. Ironically enough, it got zero attention. The Afghan Adjustment Act would offer some stability and kind of certainty for the folks who had supported U.S. forces in Afghanistan, that we had evacuated, some of whom we're still in the process of kind of reevaluating, evacuating, and resettling, to give them some permanence as opposed to the kind of temporary status many of them are on. And it's an unholy mess of a kind of bureaucratic conundrum there. I would say that was my main focus. I hadn't even kind of thought about it. My campaign launch video hit a lot of those same themes. I probably should have done some of my research and looked back at those words. There's a lot of folks who think the chaos in our system right now is the product of political chaos, because of how chaotic our politics are and how our government can't function. And that's what I thought going in today. I'm a big believer that it gets the causality backwards that the more our government screws up, the more you know. The American people feel the consequences of inept policymaking: the more they reach for replacements for alternatives, for explanations for why that individual, when they got into office, couldn't do the things they promised to be able to do. This guy didn't get the job done, so we're going to vote him out and send in somebody who's even more emphatic that they'll do it. So much of the challenge though is that the power has been stripped from many of those offices in Congress. Either Congress has let the executive take it, has given it to the executive, or the executive is just taking that over. The basic kind of mechanical function of our government is broken. That's where you have that promotion of extreme new and ever more chaotic politics.  If there were fewer things that the government was screwing up—there'll always be people who are dissatisfied—you wouldn't be fertilizing the same ground. I think it's a complicated thing because you start talking about legislative supremacy and notions of subsidiarity and generic concepts. It's challenging to get that done. Not impossible, but challenging to get it done in Washington because every legislator will look at a policy and need to see a very concrete upside because the downside is always theoretically exponential. If it's not broke, don't fix it or if it is broke, try not to fix it, because no matter what you do, if you get your fingerprints on it you might be held to blame. The art of government is trying to say, okay, politics is the art of the possible. How do you find ways in which you can make a concrete, lasting effort? It's a lot easier to do that if you're getting at some of the structures underpinning responses to issues than if you're just getting distracted by the issues at hand. You need to deal with and react to those issues but you also have to be able to get out of that reactive mindset to be able to put forward a vision and also a backward plan. How do you get to that vision from where we are? What is that pathway? Weissmueller: Could you talk about the structural issues as it pertains to foreign policy and the balance of powers?  Meijer: I approach a lot of these with sort of a policy-agnostic, but process-obsessive mindset. If you think about war powers, oftentimes it's within the context of why we need to end this war, and that's why we need to repeal it. I mentioned the example of the war on terror in 2001 and thereafter, you had that authorization for the use of military force that was passed shortly after 9/11, had that sunset every two years or four years or six years? Probably six is too high. But two years, three years, five years, something within that band that's not necessarily saying that nothing would happen after that five-year period. It's saying that there would have to be far more frequent engagement by the Department of Defense, by the national security community with Congress. And Congress would because they'd have to cast a vote, senators and representatives would have to be casting an affirmative vote, either in favor of continuing or in opposition to continuing military efforts. They would be asking better questions. They would feel more of a sense of ownership. They would have to articulate and defend. But in the process of asking those more difficult questions, the Department of Defense would also have to sharpen its pencils. Policymakers on the national security side would have to more firmly articulate and align their efforts with what they were saying.  This notion that if we're just going to be hands-off and everything will be fine, has become so detrimental and so ruinous because you have a defense policy establishment that essentially looks at Congress as a body to avoid. There were a couple of times when I would be getting a classified briefing and I would say, "Oh my God, thank God we're finally getting a briefing on an issue. I've been waiting for a while." And then I turn around and realize they're trying to sell you a timeshare. We need your support on this bill or this authorization. So we're telling you how big of a problem is going on in this region. Not because you should be aware, or not, because it should be informing how you were approaching something, but because we're going to have to ask you for something. If the executive had to ask Congress for more, the amount of transparency would be higher. The feeling of responsibility among members would be higher. I think things would just function better again. Would that lead to less or more? I think there's arguments to be made in either direction. But if we look at the strikes that the president has just conducted recently against the Houthis, against Iranian-backed groups in Iraq and Syria, both are picking from a variety of different authorizations coming from the Constitution. Whether it's article two—defense powers of the president in a self-defense capacity—or article one—authority from authorizations for use of military force that were passed in 2001 or 2002. Again. It's doing an end run. It is failing to engage, and I think it allows the American people to check out because their representatives are checked out. That type of lack of transparency, of lack of attention, lack of concern, I think ultimately only dooms those projects to failure because then, when people start to pay attention after something bad happens, they catch themselves up on 20 years and in the span of a two minute TikTok video. That's probably not going to be conveying an accurate reality. Weissmueller: How is this rubber stamping–type approach particularly insulting to the people who serve in the military? Meijer: It just shows a disregard, right? By way of background, I was in Iraq as a soldier doing intelligence operations in 2010 and 2011. Then I was in Afghanistan, as an [nongovernmental organization] conflict analyst with a humanitarian aid community. So no uniform, no weapons, neutral living on the economy from 2013 to 2015. I think in both of those conflicts, we found ourselves with allies of convenience that just looked at the U.S. as an entity to exploit. We didn't necessarily have any specific strategy or objective or goal we were going towards. Or if we did, it would change frequently enough that what we were doing was never aligned towards any specific intent. That notion of a self like an ice cream cone. The reality is that the entire time you're there, there's a risk that you're undertaking. American service members are dying.  I don't reflexively say you got to bring everyone home, or there's no scenario in which we should be in some of those areas. But, our policymakers sure as hell need to articulate why those risks are being undertaken. To what end? What are those terms? How often would those be reevaluated? Because I think the majority of the war on terror, or at least our kind of post-9/11 moment, has been this linear sense of engagement where it's like, maybe some sanctions, then we're going to have some airstrikes, maybe a special forces raid, maybe the Marines are going to be there temporarily, or maybe we're going to hold and build with kind of large conventional forces. To what end? What's our goal? You can't even measure if they've been effective if you don't have a consistent goal or you keep changing it. And again, lives hang in the balance. Civilian lives or military service members' lives are lost and the taxpayer is footing the bill for all of that. Weissmueller: I pulled a couple clips from your campaign announcement that I think can give your viewers a sense of the issues you're running on. In this first one, you talk about the importance of making more babies. Let's roll that clip. Clip of Peter Meijer's campaign announcement: I'm Peter Meijer, and I'm running for U.S. Senate. And I want to let you in on a secret, most politicians are terrified of the media, of saying what they actually think, of proposing things that are big and bold. We should be making it easier for people to get married, buy a house, and just have more babies. My wife and I just had a son, and I can tell you babies need to be the vision for our future. And when those babies go to school, parents should never have to worry if their children are guinea pigs in someone's social experiment. Parents deserve a say and choice. That's why we need a regime change in education. We need to expel the anti-Semites and activists who are poisoning young minds with hate. We need to hold universities accountable when they swindle students by hitting them and their tax free endowments. Weissmueller: Why is making life better for parents top of mind for you? Meijer: You could look at our demographic issues that we're facing as a country, but a lot of this I just boil down to a simple question: how or what is our government doing to make the American dream within reach? What are they doing to further complicate things? The number one frustration I have is when every policymaker, your legislator or politician, reacts to a problem with a new set of legislation or a new law. As opposed to saying, "what are we currently doing that is either helping or that is hurting?" If it's helping, maybe do more of it. If it's hurting, let's stop it. The easiest thing for the government to do is to stop doing things that are demonstrably ineffective or that are making the problem worse. That's a lot easier to do than proposing something new that's uncertain.  Our role as policymakers, the role of our legislature, and specifically the role of our federal government is to be able to get out of the way, to resist that urge to always tinker and fiddle. When you look at our housing policy in particular, that is where a thousand good intentions have been the individual bricks in a road that has led straight to an unaffordable hell in our current market. That is geographically dependent, but all across the board, that is a massive major strain. You have more folks who are unable to afford to buy a home, are kind of locked into renting, aren't building up a base of assets, or postponing having families for financial reasons. I'm very skeptical of what the government can do in an affirmative sense, but starting with getting the government out of the way, I've yet to have anyone who's pushed back and said, "Oh, that won't work."  Reducing the regulatory burden on the educational side is largely a state and local issue, but at the federal level, there are all of these strings attached. There are these compliance and reporting incentives that both raise costs but also can be used to tweak our education system away from sort of demonstrable objective outcomes. You kind of wake up and look at that San Francisco school district that gave a quarter million dollars of taxpayer funds to a "woke kindergarten." From a parent's standpoint, they step back and say, "Hey, you know, maybe there's a conversation there that should have taken place with those parents." But the idea of removing so much individual consent or individual notion from every single dynamic of a government that continues, oftentimes not in a malevolent way but just out of a sense of hubris and arrogance to presume they know better and drive or incentivize outcomes that, stray from objective standards and into the realm of social experiment.  I very much respect the libertarian non-aggression principle. You should be very, very humble and understand who can do what, our technocrats need to be humble, our government policymakers need to be very humble in appreciating what the unexpected outcomes of something may be. Because if you don't and you are reckless and arrogant, you know there's going to be a reckoning and that will be socially challenging. The bills come due, we're going to have to pay for it one way or the other. So let's have some humility on the front end, so we're not surprised on the back end.  Wolfe: There are some libertarians, and I would probably count myself among them, that are a little bit more concerned about what our fertility rate looks like over time and whether or not we're going to be emulating Japan with their sort of graying population. How do you look at these thorny questions? How would you convince a skeptical libertarian or a libertarian who's antagonistic to your idea that baby-making is important? What would you say to them if you had 30–60 seconds to make your case? Meijer: I would certainly agree that the government shouldn't be in the position of promoting a specific agenda. That's where I come back to policymakers also being very humble because a lot of well-intentioned policies, especially including in the pro-nativist camp, can lead to outcomes that are far from intended. Boiling down to that affordability question, you don't achieve higher affordability through subsidies that can have a temporary impact, but eventually, the market will adjust and it becomes a dependency. There are some things that I think are relatively objective social goods that if the government is maybe not in a position to be able to affirmatively promote or where they're promoting a policy could have negative effects, it should be doing everything it can to make sure that it is not operating contrary to that social good. Wolfe: Why does it matter at all in the first place? Why does it matter that we have children running around and attending schools and on the playgrounds vs. a situation like Korea or Japan? Meijer: Anyone who's interested in the long term fiscal sustainability of the U.S. should care or anybody who wants the U.S. to continue to be a growing and thriving country should care. Our social security system was set up when there were 14 workers for every retiree. Now the ratio is  2.1 to one. At some point, the math just kind of runs out. I'm very skeptical of the heavy-handed role of the government, what it could do in terms of affirming those policies and why I say the number one thing is, if we agree that this is good, we should be able to agree that the government shouldn't be doing anything to prevent that. The more you peel back those layers, that should be a place where you can reach bipartisan consensus and where it's aligned with just general limited government principles. Wolfe: I find myself generally torn on this issue. I appreciate the ability to, in a sense, play devil's advocate and promote the libertarian side that's maybe more antagonistic to your thesis. I have a 16-month-old. I am extremely soft on the issue of babies, and I think that we should probably all have as many of them as possible.  Weissmueller: One other thing that jumped out to me from that ad, which is an issue that's very important to Michigan voters, I presume, is when you're talking about manufacturing and competition with China. Let's roll that clip. Clip from Peter Meijer's campaign ad about competing with China: Do you know that China is graduating ten engineers for every American engineer? This is not a time where we can afford to play nice. I'm a free market guy, but if corporations want favors from our government, then they better be investing here. If we're going to have to pay for electric cars, then we better be building them in Michigan, not Mexico. And we should be using supply chains that are American, not Chinese. Weissmueller: What I heard there was "I'm a free market guy but…" But what? Could you explain that a little bit further?  Meijer: The reality of our current economic climate is that we are a free market with a heavy asterisk around so many different areas either from heavy-handed federal policy or regulatory jawboning or just objective pieces of legislation that have been passed. Washington is picking winners and losers. We are making determinations. Plenty of companies come to D.C. for handouts. The ideal world is to peel that back and to get away from it. If we have this world and I want to deal with the world as we have it, I would like to see us get to a world, where we do have far less federal policies that are creating a more challenging business environment, especially those that are not readily defensible on grounds of safety or just objective environmental components, but are around more nebulous goals, strings attached to dollars. In my state of Michigan right now, we have made so many parts of our state regulatory apparatus burdensome that the only companies who are coming here are those that we're forking over hundreds of millions of dollars to incentivize them to come. At that point, they're oftentimes the only companies that don't want to relocate or won't be received well anywhere else. And many of them end up having Chinese economic ties. This is where untangling that web is essential. But where do we have that web having some very clear understanding of where we are opening up liabilities with our dependence on Chinese supply chains? I'm certainly not somebody who has any issue if our pool floaties are made in China. But if the majority of our prescription pharmaceuticals are coming from outside the country, and in the event of a disruption to global trade or international shipping or anything we saw along the lines of COVID-19, now we're in real trouble. I think it's about reducing those vulnerabilities, appreciating those vulnerabilities, and not just having a reflexive, what I think we've seen all too often, a reflexive notion, and even incorporated into American policy that ends up hurting our own ability, that we can go from buy American policies to the Jones Act to a handful of other places where you can just align what the stated intent of the policy was, and demonstrably show that the policy is not reaching it. That worries me. That's where I'm highly suspect of affirmative policies. But when we're looking at how our system is being managed at the moment, being very clear that we should not be permitting or accepting taxpayer dollars, that maybe shouldn't be going there in the first place. But if they are, then those should be focused domestically. If we have these policies, then they should be promoted in such a way that is doing minimal damage while we still have them. Weissmueller: You're known as one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for his behavior on January 6, 2021. Given what the GOP has become, we've seen Trump on this glide path to the nomination. How big of a problem is that for you in terms of being viable in a Republican primary? Meijer: I frankly don't think it's much of a problem. I was just having this conversation earlier. There's an interesting dynamic and I'm not labeling Reason as a sort of "media." You are obviously a media organization, but in the broader media narrative, everything can be reduced down to these kinds of polar dynamics. Right? You're either pro or anti; you're on one side or the other. I never called myself somebody who was anti-Trump or never Trump. I took serious issues up to and including obviously voting to impeach the former president for his actions on January 6th. I thought that that was worthy of both condemnation and also worthy of adjudication in the Senate. Because that was a dark and shameful day. The American people deserve to hear the facts presented and for the then-former president to make his case. The reality that escapes so much of our politics and where it becomes challenging is that I don't accept that you have to be all one thing or all the other that you know, you're in either the black box over here or the white box over here. I try to call balls and strikes. I try to be as honest a broker as I can of not excusing something that I would have condemned had it been, somebody of the opposite party doing. I think that's something I grew up despising politicians for—watching John Stewart back when he was actually funny and seeing him playing clips of a member of Congress arguing against the two-year prior version of themself on the same issue, with the only difference being who was the president and they supported it when their guy did it and they opposed it when the other person's guy did it. I think that leads to the cynicism we have. So that's who I try not to be. I try to have that consistent approach to try to call balls and strikes and be an honest broker. I can honestly say I would vastly prefer my least favorite Republican candidate to a second Joe Biden administration. Wolfe: Why were so many of your colleagues such cowards when it comes to the impeachment vote? Meijer: There were certainly plenty of folks who had what I would say are sincere and reasonable objections. The vast majority of folks will just, and this is not limited to that vote, and almost everything it would say there is safety in numbers, where is everybody else going, I'll just follow suit. Wolfe: Am I missing anything or is that a pretty clear-cut situation where there's just an extraordinary moral cowardice problem among Republicans right now?  Meijer: The sort of line is you never have to explain why you voted no on something. But, if you vote yes, somebody will always find something to blame. I had some colleagues who would agree with everything you said, but they read the article of impeachment and they were uncomfortable that it was alleging a criminal action, not a criminal process. But that didn't have a kind of broader dereliction of duty. There were Republicans who were trying to work with Nancy Pelosi on having a more limited article, who had committed to voting in favor of it. But she said, "No, we're going with what we drafted," because her goal was to have as few Republicans and support as possible.  I'm going to save a lot of that for a memoir. The way I look at things, change the party, change the person who's doing it from somebody who's on my side to oppose or somebody who's opposed to me to being on my side. If that changes how I view the action, then my ethics are clearly only situational, and I should find something that I can be consistent about. There's going to be things that are at a sticking point to you in the minority you might be comfortable with if you're in the majority or vice versa. But the sort of just reflexive approach where it doesn't seem like anybody actually believes anything, I don't abide by that. I don't like that. I saw plenty of it, but it disgusted me. I enjoyed quietly being like, "Now, no, you voted this way in the effort to hold Eric Holder in contempt. But, how are you making the distinction between this, and just one of my colleagues' credit?" They would say, "Okay, I can find 2 or 3 distinctions, but I don't really believe in it." Some of this just comes down to shirts and skins. Weissmueller: You would support even your least favorite Republican over another Joe Biden presidency. We can possibly put Donald Trump into that category. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but, why is that? Meijer: To me, the two most pivotal days in my time in Congress were January 6, 2021, and August 15, 2021, when Afghanistan collapsed. Both were moments where a lot of folks that I had thought better of or systems I had thought that had some competency—the shine was totally off. Both of those respective apples, one on the domestic political side, the other and our kind of incompetency of our national security apparatus, and the unwillingness of a lot of people to gauge and react to appropriate risks.  Weissmueller: Is it fair to lay the disaster of the Afghanistan withdrawal completely at Biden's feet?  Meijer: I want to be very clear. I felt very much betrayed and felt like that was sort of a betrayal by proxy of a lot of the folks who had hinged on us when Biden announced that he was going to withdraw by then said September 11th, and then it was moved up to September 1st. That was in April of 2021. I was supportive of that or supportive of Trump's effort to withdraw. We immediately had a bipartisan group of us working in Congress saying, "Okay, we still got a lot of folks who supported us, the Special Immigrant Visa program. What can we do now that we have a time frame, now that we have sort of a final clock, that should light a bit of a fire to go and process all of this?" It was roadblock after roadblock. Those flights only started leaving on July 29th. And it was 200 people a day. Not every day. Then within two weeks, the entire country collapsed. And we were left with the mass evacuation that we had.  When I say we encountered roadblock after roadblock, some of it was just bureaucratic incompetence, making sure everything goes through the interagency process, yada, yada, yada. There was also a great fear on behalf of the Biden administration that the evacuation of Afghans, which was supported in a bipartisan way and was very much not controversial would end up getting compared or draw light to the problems that we were having on the southern border, which at that time the Biden administration was aware of and were paranoid of that becoming a larger media focus because they thought it would be so politically damaging to them or raise uncomfortable questions. Now that fear that led to basically the evacuation of Afghans who had supported the United States forces, that we had a commitment to, that ultimately was really the inflection point that tanked his approval rating. I both have a deep feeling of kind of personal betrayal from that and just a kind of a knife in my gut that I still feel very sharply.  Weissmueller: Like the insane post-COVID spending bills? Meijer: Like the American Rescue Plan was probably, I think the consensus estimates that at least three to four points, or at least two to three points of the inflation that we saw could be solely attributed to the $1.9 trillion coming out of that. We're always going to have some inflation just with COVID. I think there were some well-intended policies that I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt. When you're passing policies, when there's very clearly no economic imperative to do so, and it's just all sort of a partisan grab bag that buck stops at the president's office. But the broader challenge and issue that we have, I mentioned sort of legislative supremacy, and our executive branch is far too powerful. The fact that we feel like if you elect the wrong president, the country is going to take a nosedive. A lot of that problem is because of the office. I think the office of the president is one of the most dangerous institutions in the Western world right now because of how much power, both through Supreme Court decisions and through legislative ineptitude or inattention has ultimately accrued into that office. That to me is far more important than who the individual office-holder is and what their policies are. Wolfe: I sincerely appreciate the argument that you're making and the pragmatism that you're talking about with regard to how Joe Biden has actively made the inflationary situation so much worse in a way that harms people's budgets. But I'm still struggling with this fundamental idea that, if push came to shove, you would feel more comfortable supporting Trump than Biden, in seeking another term. How do we know that it's not going to get worse in a way that fundamentally threatens American democracy and our institutions? Meijer: Let me try to have a consistent standard again, that notion of being consistent. Understanding the components and depths of a problem. The numbers of Democratic voters who viewed the 2016 election as illegitimate were the mirror image of Republican voters who viewed 2020 as illegitimate. That doesn't excuse Republicans from doing that. Obviously, the post-2020 election period was dramatically different from the post-2016 election period. But to me, it says that the problem that's underlying this is more widespread, right? The violence on January 6th and the violence that we saw over the summer of 2020; neither excuses nor should allow anyone to condone one while condemning the other. I think both are worthy of condemnation. Both may have degrees of difference in various attributes, but the common thread is a large group of people expressing a frustration that they felt could not be resolved within the system, so they engage in activities that were attacking the system from without rather than working from within.  Let's look at what is underpinning some of this. What is the problem beneath the problem? Because if we don't address it, if we don't get at some of those issues of institutional trust, if we don't have a government that feels like it is representing everybody, that there are minimal incompetent moments that are going to be highlighted. If we reduce the amount of times when someone looks at the government and says, what are these? Trying to swear less, but insert your profanity of choice guys doing. Then maybe we can get to the point where that temperature is boiled down. The challenge is from one partisan position to the other. Let me condemn all the things that I can on the other side and then find convenient ways of rationalizing my own.  Wolfe: When you first learned about Democrats backing and supporting the person who was trying to primary you—and was ultimately successful in doing that—who was very far to the right of you, what did that feel like at that moment? Meijer: I wasn't surprised. I was surprised that it came through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. That was actually their first independent expenditure of the 2022 midterms. It was blunt, paid for by [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee]. I have my own conspiracy theory behind that, that they make a blunder to basically send the bad signal to Democratic voters in the district to say, "Hey, you know, there's really no competitive Democratic primaries you can vote in either." Now, I don't think that had a large impact. I think I called it sanctimonious bullshit on CNN.  Again what do you actually believe in? Very few things that happened while I was in Congress came as a surprise to me in terms of me just objectively being like, I can't believe this is happening. So, a lot of my worst assumptions or worst predictions, or just my lowest estimation assumptions ended up being affirmed, but I was really surprised. Weissmueller: There's very likely going to be a sizable percentage of voters that are voting for neither Trump nor Biden, possibly covering the spread. That's got the Democratic Party and probably the Republican Party panicked. Is there any antidote to that kind of establishmentarianism? Meijer: No. To me, the strongest method is having trusted, objective folks who can look at a situation and just say, "Okay, you know, Democrats are railing about gerrymandering and how the Republicans are being evil down in Texas. So defend what you guys are doing in Illinois and defend what you're doing in New York." I think it needs to be called out. It needs to be pointed out.  It cracks me up the amount of times when everything is the most important. This time is different. We need to throw the rules out the window up until the time when we want those rules back because they protect us. Up until the next time is even worse. And now, trust us now. If you look at the way in which President Biden every single time, he wants to blame Republicans for something, it's always MAGA Republicans. It's always extreme MAGA republicans. It can be Susan Collins and Mitt Romney and they are extreme MAGA Republicans. I think that is certainly not helpful. Weissmueller: What is the GOP that you, Peter Meijer, would like to see? Meijer: To me, that party is one where you can look at a Republican-run city, you can look at a Republican-run state and say, "Gosh, that kind of seems like a place that I want to live." Where folks are moving and voting with their feet. That they're already doing that with the amount of outflows from California to Florida is telling, but having more opportunities to see policies in action.  I think that grounding or policy discussions within communities and focusing on those outcomes, it improves trust, it improves confidence. When you have subsidiarity, right, you have lower levels of governance that folks can get engaged with. Then they feel they have a voice. Then they don't feel like what is happening is something happening to them, but something that they are a part of that is a government of, by, and for the people. But that requires the right structure, that requires the right setup. It requires, you know, conservatives getting back to a fundamental idea of conserving the values of the founding and conserving the principles of the Constitution. I think it's behind a lot of the fears, a lot of the frustrations, and a lot of the anger in the Republican Party today. It's all about giving it direction. Rocket fuel can take you to the moon with the right nozzle, or you can blow up on the launch pad. We have the fuel, we need the nozzle, and we can go far.  This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. The post Peter Meijer: Can the GOP Change? appeared first on Reason.com.

A recently published document reveals "smoking gun" evidence of COVID-19's lab-based origin, according to Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers and one of the earliest proponents of the lab leak hypothesis. Ebright is referring to an invoice that shows an order for a particular enzyme that he believes scientists used to stitch together the genome for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. However, Alina Chan, a microbiologist affiliated with MIT and Harvard and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, says that because the documents in questions are from early 2018, they do not constitute direct evidence, meaning there still "isn't enough to say a lab accident happened beyond reasonable doubt." Emily Kopp, a science and health reporter working for the public health watchdog group U.S. Right to Know, obtained and published this latest batch of documents—which she obtained through a FOIA request to the U.S. Geological Survey—on January 18. The more than 1,400 pages are communications about and early drafts of the DEFUSE proposal, a grant application seeking funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to collect and manipulate bat-borne viruses. EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit group, authored the grant, which they proposed as a collaboration between U.S.-based virologists and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab located in the city where the first known cases of COVID-19 appeared. DARPA ultimately rejected the proposal as too risky, but critics like Ebright believe that the work likely continued on in Wuhan anyway. Kopp joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller to discuss the documents on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions. Also joining them was mathematical biologist Alex Washburne, who co-authored a pre-print in October 2022 arguing the genome of SARS-CoV-2 had a "fingerprint" indicating that it was created in a lab. The virus that scientists proposed creating in the newly released DEFUSE documents shares several characteristics that Washburne and his colleagues flagged in the study, such as unusually uniform segment lengths and the presence of the enzyme that Ebright flagged as a "smoking gun." In this conversation, they discuss the documents in detail, the ways in which they validate predictions in Washburne's paper, the remaining unknowns in the COVID origin case, comments from EcoHealth Alliance founder Peter Daszak seemingly downplaying that most of the proposed virology work would be done in China, and the difficulty of getting the scientific and media establishments to take new evidence pointing to a lab origin seriously. Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.   Sources referenced in this conversation: U.S. Right to Know: U.S. scientists proposed to make viruses with unique features of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan DEFUSE: PREEMPT Volume 1 no ESS HR00118S0017 EcoHealth Alliance DEFUSE  Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2 | bioRxiv Kristian Anderson criticizes Washburne's study: "Poppycock"  New Research Points to Wuhan Market as Pandemic Origin | The New York Times The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic | Science House Minority Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Committee Report on Origins of COVID-19 Pandemic The post Do New Documents Prove a COVID Lab Leak? appeared first on Reason.com.

Marcos Falcone, a political scientist, project manager at Argentina's Fundación Libertad, and podcast host, joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to watch and analyze Argentine President Javier Milei's speech at the World Economic Forum's annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. They also discuss the political agenda of the World Economic Forum and the anti-libertarian comments of its founder Klaus Schwab. They conclude with a conversation about what's transpired in Argentina since Milei was sworn in as president on December 10. Falcone describes his policy approach as "an offensive against crony capitalism," which has sparked a massive strike organized by the country's largest union to protest Milei's deregulation, labor reforms put on hold by the courts that would allow workers to more easily opt out of union dues, and aggressive proposals to downsize the government. Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.   Sources referenced in this conversation: Klaus Schwab's anti-libertarian comments at the World Government Summit 2017 Special address by Javier Milei, president of Argentina | Davos 2024 | World Economic Forum Transcript of remarks by Javier Milei, president of Argentina | World Economic Forum World GDP over the last two millennia - Our World in Data Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go? - Our World in Data The post Milei vs. the WEF: Who Wins? appeared first on Reason.com.

Matt Welch, editor-at-large for Reason and podcaster on The Reason Roundtable and The Fifth Column with Kmele Foster and Michael Moynihan, joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to discuss the recent Iowa caucus results and talk about what it means for the 2024 election going forward. They also talk about where libertarians and independents are leaning in the presidential race and some of the increasingly glaring divides within libertarianism that have led different factions to pursue very different strategies and hold widely divergent views of political candidates like former President Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher. Sources referenced in this conversation: Iowa caucus results: The GOP presidential field narrows as Ramaswamy and Hutchinson drop out | NPR Matt Welch at Reason: Vivek Ramaswamy Really Wants You to Know He Thinks January 6 Was an 'Inside Job' Rand Paul announces he's "Never Nikki" on X.com Libertarian Party of Iowa poll results Dave Smith on libertarian populism on Just Asking Questions The post Matt Welch: What's Wrong With Populism? appeared first on Reason.com.

 Aaron Sibarium, a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon, whose work has been widely credited for exposing the plagiarism of former Harvard President Claudine Gay, joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to discuss Gay's downfall, as well as its implications for the Ivy League; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and writers and thinkers of all kinds who can now have their work subjected to AI-powered plagiarism detection. Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher. Sources referenced in this conversation: "Harvard President Claudine Gay Hit With Six New Charges Of Plagiarism," Washington Free Beacon "Excerpts From Dr. Claudine Gay's Work," The New York Times Bill Ackman on X "Claudine Gay: What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me," The New York Times Christopher F. Rufo on X The post Aaron Sibarium: Did Harvard's Plagiarism Scandal Doom DEI? appeared first on Reason.com.

"To be a sane and happy parent, you need to be counter-cultural in our family-unfriendly culture," writes Tim Carney in his forthcoming book Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. Carney, senior columnist at the Washington Examiner, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the father of six children, talked with Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe about declining fertility in America and worldwide and why he thinks it's time for "governments, employers, and other institutions" to "abandon the idea of neutrality and instead take a side: the pro-family side." They also discussed how governments make it harder to afford large families by implementing counterproductive housing and labor regulations. The conversation delved into the role that technology might play in increasing fertility in the future, the enduring cultural relevance of Mike Judge's 2006 movie Idiocracy, and their reactions to clips about DINK couples ("double-income, no kids").  Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher. Sources referenced in this conversation: Americans' ideal family size is smaller than it used to be | Pew Research Center Childstats.gov - America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2023 - Demographic Background Building the New America: Urban Reform Institute, September 2023 World Fertility Rate 1950-2024 | MacroTrends World Population Prospects - Population Division - United Nations The post Tim Carney: Why Aren't People Having More Kids? appeared first on Reason.com.

When Russ Roberts, an economist and host of the podcast EconTalk, received a job offer to become president of Jerusalem's Shalem University, it seemed like "a no-brainer," he wrote in his 2022 book Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. Giving up his ability to work from his home in America on whatever interested him intellectually as a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution? "Only a fool would take the job," he wrote. But that was only if one considered the opportunity using a purely utilitarian pro/con checklist. For Roberts, this was a "wild problem," one that required him to consider "who I am and who I want to be." And with that in mind, he said, "It was a no-brainer in the other direction." He took the job and moved to Israel in 2021. Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel here or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher. Reason's Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller spoke with Roberts about Hamas' October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and their aftermath. They discussed how the attacks have transformed Israeli culture and politics, what it's like to live within a 90-second missile trip from Gaza, how a free society should respond to openly anti-Jewish rallies and actions such as tearing down hostage posters, and what the relationship between the United States and Israel has been and should be. The post Russ Roberts: Life in Israel Since October 7 appeared first on Reason.com.

Julian Assange was arrested outside England's Ecuadorian embassy after Ecuador's president revoked his political asylum. The U.S. unsealed an extradition request outlining Espionage Act charges, and U.K. authorities moved him to London's Belmarsh Prison in April 2019, a maximum security facility where inmates are held in small single cells. Amnesty International has drawn parallels between Belmarsh and Guantanamo Bay. Reports and statements from doctors emerged quickly after his imprisonment testifying to his deteriorating mental and physical health.  Stella Assange—an attorney specializing in international law, a human rights activist, and the wife of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, with whom she has two children—joined Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on episode three of Just Asking Questions to talk about the toll that imprisonment has taken on Assange and his family. They also discuss the threat to freedom of speech that the United States' Espionage Act case against Assange poses, why she believes that the Swedish sex charges against him were bogus, and why many in the U.S. media seem hostile to Assange and WikiLeaks.  Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.  Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.  Zach Weissmueller: Julian Assange was arrested outside England's Ecuadorian embassy after his political asylum was revoked and moved to Belmarsh Prison in April 2019. That's a maximum security facility where inmates are held in small single cells. Amnesty International has drawn parallels to Guantanamo Bay. Reports and statements from doctors emerged quickly after that imprisonment, testifying to his deteriorating mental and physical health. How is he doing today? Stella Assange: Well, as we film this, we're nearing his fifth Christmas in Belmarsh Prison, and he has been there for over four and a half years now because the U.S. has been trying to extradite him since April 11, 2019, and he hasn't left the facility to go to court since January 2021. That was the last time they allowed him to come to court for his own hearings. Since then, he's been participating remotely over video because they don't let him even go to the courtroom.  His physical state has obviously deteriorated over that time. He spends a lot of time in his cell, but he is able to receive visits. So once or twice a week I can go and see him on weekends. I can bring the kids and that obviously helps him a lot. He can call me from Belmarsh Prison during certain hours throughout the day. So we are in contact during the day for most days, unless there is some kind of problem. And that obviously keeps him sane and helps us both feel like we're not so separated.  Weissmueller: You're a mother, and you have kids together, how often are you able to travel to see him? And what is the personal situation like for you? Assange: Well, it's obviously very difficult. Our children, the oldest one is 6 and a half, and the youngest one will turn 5 in February. All of their memories of Julian are inside this one big visiting hall inside Belmarsh Prison. And I reiterate that Julian is only there because there is this extradition request from the United States. He's not charged with any crime in the United Kingdom. They're just holding him on behalf of the United States which is opposing bail. And so we're forced to interact within this extremely harsh environment. And that's all the children know, visiting their father inside a big, loud, monitored visiting home once a week, more or less.  Liz Wolfe: How do you explain that to your children? How much do they know about their father's situation? Assange: It's really a mix of the two. So I've tried to introduce context as they grow older. I didn't want them to understand what a prison was before for other concepts like freedom and fairness. Actually, it was our eldest son, Gabriel, at one point, I guess he was around 5, when he asked if Julian was in prison. This place that we went to, was it a prison? And I told him yes. Before that I would say, we're going to the big building where Daddy is, and it's not Daddy's home. He's just being kept there. And obviously, they experience the whole process of going through the prison security, which everyone has to go through. Everyone, including toddlers, has to be searched by the dogs. They look inside their mouths and so on. They get patted down. They've seen that, and they live it.  I explained that, yes, it's a prison, but that daddy hasn't done anything wrong. In fact, he's done good things, and he's being punished by bad people. I'm trying to explain it in age-appropriate ways and also trying to counter the immediate horror of the situation with the fact that lots of people support Julian and are fighting for his freedom. And sometimes I've taken them to protests and so on so that they actually see that there are a lot of people that support Julian and that there's something bigger going on. He's not just any other prisoner. And that's obvious from when you visit Belmarsh. There are huge banners saying "Free Julian Assange." At least once a week there's a protest. People go into the prison premises with loudspeakers and call for him to be released.  This is a unique case, and I think they can sense that there's something special about their dad. And I've told them it's not the guards themselves, who they see and interact with, who are holding their father specifically. It's the people above them, the people who decide. And they're the people that Julian made angry because he showed the world that they had done bad things. And they're angry about that.  That's generally how I try to explain it. And they understand. I tell them that Daddy's a hero. Millions of people around the world admire him. He spoke the truth. And sometimes it's difficult to tell the truth. And a lot of people will get angry and try to take revenge.  Wolfe: You first met Julian, if I'm not mistaken, when he was fighting sexual assault charges in Sweden. And you initially joined his defense team. What made you interested in that case? And what's your perspective on that whole case? Assange: I joined his legal team in February 2011, and Julian had started publishing the WikiLeaks publications that had been sent to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning in 2010, so a year before I joined his team. These publications from Chelsea Manning were the "collateral murder" video, the Iraq War logs, Afghanistan war diaries, diplomatic cables, and the Guantanamo Bay files.  These are the same publications that Julian is indicted with now that had happened in the lead-up to me joining his legal team. And it had also started prior to any preliminary investigation being opened in Sweden. And actually, there were never any charges in Sweden. None were brought. And that's quite amazing because it kind of defies logic, right? Because there was a big extradition case, and Sweden would say, "Well, we haven't decided whether to actually bring charges against him, but we just want to question him." And then there was this question about, well, "Why don't you just question him?"  Anyway, that Swedish preliminary investigation was dropped and resurrected multiple times. It was dropped four times, resurrected three. No charges were ever brought. It's quite extraordinary. The amazing thing about this case is that the prosecutor was refusing to question him. How can it possibly be that in a sex case where, of course, memories fade and it all depends on the recollections of the people involved, the prosecutor had to be compelled by the Swedish Court of Appeal, six years after the fact, to question him? The reason the Court of Appeal compelled her was that they said she had failed her professional duty to advance the case. And, of course, this is just one aspect of how that Swedish preliminary investigation was abusive. The reason it was abusive was because it took place in a highly charged political moment in which Julian was being actively sought by authorities because he was about to publish the Chelsea Manning leaks.  He had already published the "collateral murder" video and the Afghan [Diaries]. And it was one month before WikiLeaks started publishing the Iraq War logs that he went to Sweden. There's actually a Daily Beast article that's archived in which the U.S. reporter says the State Department was contacting its allies in Europe and urging them to find a way to stop Julian in his tracks, to arrest him on whatever because by then they had arrested Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning, and they knew that WikiLeaks had more major leaks coming out. And so they wanted to stop him in his tracks. They contacted the Australians. The Australians were looking to cancel his passport. And then there was an investigation by the Australian police, and then the Australian police recommending not canceling his passport thinking it would be easier to track his movements. And ultimately Sweden initiated this preliminary investigation, which was condemned by the United Nations as an abuse against Julian's rights as a defendant.  He was, in fact, never formally a defendant because he was never charged, which meant that he was never given access to exculpatory evidence of text messages that we knew existed. And so the U.N. special rapporteur on torture also did an investigation and in 2019 wrote to the Swedish and U.K. governments who refused to cooperate. He wrote a whole book about it. It's called The Trial of Julian Assange. And for any viewers who are interested in this kind of Swedish preliminary investigation, which also served to cast a shadow on Julian to treat him as an accused person without being formally accused, there's another book called Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies by Stefania Maurizi who is an Italian investigative journalist. Stefania Maurizi has done a lot of [Freedom of Information Act] work and obtained a bunch of correspondence, some of which had been destroyed by one party, which is the U.K. government, which is incredibly damning. And it shows how, in fact, there was a collusion between the U.K. and Sweden. The U.K. was telling Sweden not to question him, to extradite him, and that Sweden was going to put him in custody immediately and urging them not to progress the investigation unless he was extradited. This is extremely bizarre. Of course, denying a suspect the ability to defend himself is unjust. If you think this is just a regular case, then none of it makes sense. But once you understand the political context, then, of course, it all makes sense.  It even says in this correspondence that Stefania Maurizi discovered literally the sentence, "Please do not think that we are treating this as just any other extradition case." That's the words of the U.K. prosecution authority who was communicating with the Swedish authorities. And then when Sweden tried to drop it in 2013, the U.K. responded by saying, "Don't you dare get cold feet telling them not to drop it." So it's pretty clear. But of course, as soon as that was dropped, it was revealed that there was an indictment that had come under the Trump administration, and Julian has been in Belmarsh in relation to that extradition request from the U.S. since 2019. Wolfe: These are not the traditional circumstances under which most people meet their spouses. What was this like for you emotionally? How did you feel signing up to work on this case and then getting to know Julian, like what was swirling around in your head? Assange: Well, I was steeped in the documents surrounding this Swedish preliminary investigation, and there was no case to answer. From the beginning, it was pretty clear that the administrative use of the extradition request from Sweden was a way to trap him, basically to bury him in a legal quagmire in order to interfere with his publishing work. In Sweden, as I said, like the initial prosecutor who looked at the case said there, there is no crime of rape involved in these allegations. The Swedish conduct in this case also responds to local dynamics. The person who took on the case within days was also running for general elections in Sweden. He was tipped to become the new justice minister. Julian's case was in the media. There were a lot of motivations. It wasn't just the likely nudge from the State Department at the highest levels.  Julian's name was leaked to the press, which should never happen in the case of a preliminary investigation where the person hasn't even been formally accused. And as I said, he was never formally accused in those nine years. The U.N.'s working group on arbitrary detention, which looked at this case from 2014 onwards, saw the underlying investigation material. It was an adversarial process in which Sweden and the U.K. were unsuccessful in convincing this group of U.N. experts on arbitrary detention that they had conducted themselves in a lawful manner. They had, in fact, violated international obligations concerning arbitrary detention when it came to Julian, because, as I said, he was neither convicted nor even charged in relation to Sweden. And so it was this extraordinarily abusive nature of the Swedish allegations that was immediately obvious to me, as a member of his legal team. And so I could directly access the material of the case that we had access to to see that this was absurd.  And my own experience, I mean, as I got to know Julian, was to see how he was persecuted and maligned in all sorts of ways. Of course, the Swedish aspect was just one. It was an effective one because Julian had a lot of support from the left initially because these publications concerned, of course, the Bush wars and so on. And a sex case, even one without a formal accusation or a conviction or anything, obviously is going to alienate a portion of the left and a big portion of women. And there was a deliberate strategy as these FOIA documents show, to keep him in this position of not being able to defend himself, with not being able to clear his name because they refused to question him. Sweden refused to give him a guarantee that he wouldn't be extradited to the United States. Sweden, in spite of its reputation, was a participant in the CIA rendition program, it branded al-Zari and Agiza, two asylum seekers who were in the process of applying for protection, and instead they were taken on a CIA flight and tortured in Egypt. And this was one of the most obvious and one of the most shocking cases of CIA rendition. Since 2001, Sweden, I don't know if it's still true, but while Julian was still facing potential extradition, Sweden has not once rejected an extradition request to the United States. And this is different to the U.K., which has rejected extradition requests to the United States. So this was also a factor in Julian's decision to resist extradition to Sweden, which is a very small country and views itself as a very small country, certainly in relation to the U.S.  Weissmueller: There are people who were or are friendly to the WikiLeaks mission who say that Julian Assange is a problematic figure. It's a theme that you see in multiple documentaries produced about him, including Risk by Laura Poitras, who's sympathetic but takes this position that Julian's personal troubles are intertwined too much with WikiLeaks' mission. What do you make of that kind of criticism? Assange: It's really a dated criticism because that kind of criticism came about when the extradition case in relation to Sweden was alive. So a lot of people at the time were saying, "Well, he has nothing to worry about. The U.S. doesn't want to extradite him. This is all about Sweden, etc." And unfortunately, Risk fell into that trap. It's very dated now when you watch it, because obviously what happened was that Julian was indicted in relation to the Afghan and Iraq war publications and so on.  Look, a lot of these portrayals came about in the immediate aftermath of these publications. So what happened in 2010 and 2011 was that WikiLeaks came onto the scene and broke more significant stories than the legacy press had in 50 years combined. And of course, WikiLeaks had partnered with The New York Times, The Guardian, and three major European papers as well in Germany, Spain, and France to maximize the coverage of these big databases. And so they would publish the cables, the war logs, and so on, in coordination, doing joint investigations and so on with these big papers. Once the big papers had published together with WikiLeaks, then there wasn't much utility in that partnership, and they just distanced themselves. Julian was also a critic of the way that these major papers reported on the WikiLeaks publications, the way they redacted information that exposed them to lawsuits from oligarchs. WikiLeaks had already published on their website, so there was, from that perspective, no serious legal threat.  So Julian has been critical of the major media players. And of course, he was an outsider. He's Australian. This is an internet publisher, an internet publisher that attracted very high-quality sources who entrusted WikiLeaks as the vehicle with which this information could reach the public. And the reason for that was that WikiLeaks has a very high-grade submission system which has since been copied by the mainstream. There's a very interesting paper by Jack Goldsmith, who was the former assistant attorney general under a Republican administration, I can't remember which, called the "WikiLeaks-ization of the American Media." And what he argues is that the American press adopted the innovations that WikiLeaks had pioneered by the mid-2010s. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, etc. all have the same or similar technology. They adopted the technology that WikiLeaks invented for using encryption to be able to protect sources when they communicate, and also the submission systems so that you don't necessarily, as the receiver of information, know who the source is. And so this became adopted by the mainstream press.  Another innovation that WikiLeaks brought was to create partnerships between media organizations. It was WikiLeaks who basically forced The New York Times to cooperate with The Guardian, to cooperate with Le Monde and El País, and so on. It had never been done before. It wasn't easy. And part of the reason why there was a distancing from Julian Assange was because they didn't like to work in a way that was not on their own terms, even when it was with other major media partners. And so when Julian came onto the scene, he was seen as a competitor, but also as a threat to the mainstream media's economic model.  This is like 2010. The major papers were publishing online, and their advertising revenue was down. People weren't buying papers anymore. Lots of people are being fired and so on. And here comes WikiLeaks. That has a completely different business model, which is it's small, has a lot of volunteers, and it's reader-funded. And of course, now we see reader-funded publications quite a lot. But at the time, apart from some bloggers perhaps, this was a real reader-funded publication that was unfettered by advertising restrictions. And that at the same time was having such high-quality sources come to them and having high impact and enabling it to enter into partnerships with the biggest media organizations, the biggest media houses, and basically being able to call the shots because WikiLeaks was the one that attracted the sources. And of course, once the legal trouble started and the financial blockade, Bank of America, PayPal, Western Union, and so on blocked the donations to WikiLeaks as soon as WikiLeaks had started to publish the State Department cables. This was also the time when Julian was arrested over the Swedish allegations. This all happened within a week, so it all came down at the same time. And then these major media organizations who had partnered with WikiLeaks then turned against Julian. And basically, I think the objective was to try to kill off WikiLeaks because it was a competitor, because it had such an important impact and was a newcomer. And a threat to the gatekeeper function that we all know. Wolfe: There is this line drawn between these people who are journalists over here, but these other people surely don't qualify. And therefore, their First Amendment protections ought to be different. How do you feel when you see MSNBC hosts treating Julian Assange in this way?  Assange: It's a bit disappointing because the criticisms that they use are just simply not true. You had Maria Ressa there. She was a CNN presenter. And then, of course, she's a Nobel Peace Prize winner and has herself faced political prosecution because of her journalism. And it's really disappointing that she says something like WikiLeaks dumping. This is one of the major distortions concerning WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks does privilege the publication of archives, but it doesn't just dump it. It provides context. It writes up context. It writes up analysis. It has redacted information and states the criteria for redactions and so on.  But even so, I mean, all of this is really irrelevant whether Julian's a journalist or not. The question is, is Julian accused of journalism? And he is. It is the activity that has been criminalized. Not whether he falls into a category or not. It's the category of the activity that is being criminalized. Receiving, obtaining, and communicating information to the public.  The use of the Espionage Act, it's very interesting because you see kind of lazy journalists, lazy reporters, talking about Julian as if he is being accused of being a spy. You enter into the realm of absurdity when you start talking about the allegations against Julian, because the first point is that Julian is Australian. He's not American. He's never lived there. And the use of the Espionage Act allows for this categorical laziness. And that's because the Espionage Act is a very broadly worded, indeterminate piece of text that was adopted in 1917, and that has been interpreted in an increasingly expansive way, and especially under the Obama administration. The Obama administration really ramped up the use of the Espionage Act against journalistic sources. Under the Obama administration, three times more people were prosecuted as sources of news stories than all previous administrations in the 100 years preceding it combined. And so this expansive crime that started under the Obama administration then continued and became even more extreme under the Trump administration.  So it actually took the U.S. eight years to bring an indictment against Julian, and it came under the Trump administration. I just found this quote that was really interesting. There was a case called the Morrison case in 1984, and this was a source who was indicted and convicted under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified photos to a British military journal. That was Judge Harvie Wilkinson, who in his concurring opinion, said that this would be limited to the role of the source because press organizations are not being and probably could not be prosecuted under the Espionage Act because of the political firestorm that would follow. So, in other words, he was saying that what limits the Espionage Act is political safeguards. It is the outcry. It is the reaction to the preposterous use of the Espionage Act against the press. And so what has happened is that the Espionage Act has been used in that way. It's been used against Julian. It's precedent setting. And the supposed outcry that was supposed to limit this kind of use of the Espionage Act has not followed. Weissmueller: A lot unfolded in 2016 between WikiLeaks and the U.S. government during the election. How do you think that changed the tenor of the conversation and the way that people view WikiLeaks? And what do you say to people who think that there's some weird relationship between Julian Assange and Russia?  Assange: I don't think there are any Russians who have worked for WikiLeaks. Well, Julian had a talk show that was licensed to a number of channels and Russia Today at the time, this was 2011. This is a long time ago. These allegations have never been substantiated because there is nothing to substantiate. The Mueller report, of course, came up with nothing. The national security directors in January 2017, already during a congressional hearing, said that in relation to the 2016 election material, they had no evidence of anything untoward concerning WikiLeaks. It's all been speculation. It's all basically coming down to Julian licensing a show to Russia Today in 2011. It's weak, to say the least.  Of course, in relation to the 2016 publications, there was a strategy by the Hillary Clinton campaign to talk about Russia as allegedly interfering with that election and so on. But when you look at the WikiLeaks publication specifically, they had nothing to do with this other stuff, the D.C. leaks and I don't know what, which others did publish. WikiLeaks published the [Democratic National Committee] leaks and the [John] Podesta emails. And earlier in the year they had also republished the Hillary Clinton emails that had been put up on the State Department website, which were not easily accessible.  So there were actually three Clinton publications. So the DNC ones revealed how the Hillary Clinton campaign had rigged the Democratic primaries and basically defrauded the Democratic donors who were being misled. The Bernie ones who were being misled because the candidate that they were supporting actually had no chance of becoming a nominee. The Hillary Clinton campaign, of course, afterward, when [it was] found out in Donna Brazile's book there was a secret agreement between the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign, and there was even a written agreement. They were colluding to basically undermine and ensure that Bernie Sanders did not get equal access to the media and so on.  And then the Podesta emails, which came in October, showed how the Hillary Clinton campaign had also basically rigged the Republican primaries in the sense that they had this thing called the "pied piper" strategy. They would get their mates at MSNBC and so on to get Trump on the airwaves, because according to the Hillary campaign, their view was that Trump and a couple of other Republican candidates were extreme and unelectable and would alienate the swing voters and so on. And if they gave Trump airtime and if they convinced their allies in the press to give Trump airtime, then Hillary would win. And of course, we know what happened after that. So these were, you know, incredibly important publications.  In fact, there was a court case that many people haven't even heard about. The DNC tried to sue WikiLeaks and Julian personally in the Southern District of New York in relation to the DNC publications. And that case was thrown out by the judge on First Amendment grounds. And in fact, he said that this was the type of publication that enjoys the highest protection of the First Amendment because you cannot think of a more important publication than that concerning political candidates in the lead-up to an election. That's a really important and strong judgment. The New York Times afterward gave an interview to the BBC saying, well, if they had received it, they would have also published it.  I think it raises important questions about whether it's really possible in the U.S. media landscape to be truly independent. Can you alienate Democrats and Republicans and still enjoy protection even under the law? Like the political heat on you, and on WikiLeaks, having published damning information both about Republicans and post-2016 about Democrats, has placed Julian in an extremely vulnerable position. Vulnerable in the sense that if the First Amendment protections are not robust enough, if the political climate is such where there is a push for censorship, a push for propaganda, for repression when it comes to speech, then this political restraint on the Espionage Act becomes ineffective. Wolfe: I want to take us back in time to 2010 for a second, which was when WikiLeaks made its first big release with the "collateral murder" video. It really exposed some of the horrors of war to an American audience for the first time. What was the impact of that video? And what is the broader impact of the WikiLeaks releases on the world? Assange: Well, it really marks a before-and-after concerning the Bush wars. It's 2010, right? This actual event depicted in the video is from July 2007. The war had started in 2003, and it had been going for seven years by the time "collateral murder" was released. And by then there wasn't much interest in the media anymore. There were embedded journalists traveling with U.S. convoys and going to press briefings by the Pentagon and so on. But there was no real insight. There were just body bags coming back from Iraq. There was real newsworthiness, let's say, in reporting about Iraq. And then suddenly this came down, and it had such an impact because it really contrasted with the curated information that was coming through the media. And it depicts a war crime. That's what you see. It's not just the gunning down of these individuals, to begin with, where two Reuters journalists are on assignment and get killed. One of them crawls to cover and then a van pulls up, and two good samaritans come out of the van and try to pick up this journalist and then bring him into the van. And then it gets shot down and everyone dies, except for two children who are shielded by the body of their father. So this is a truly horrific video. And it's horrific not just because you're watching it, but because you're listening to the conversation and the kind of jokey, casual conversation around war.  I think Chelsea Manning has said that in just 30 minutes you see the Iraq War in its essence. And it really captured the international imagination. And in December 2011, the Obama administration had the U.S. military removed officially, at least from Iraq, in big part because of what WikiLeaks had published.  WikiLeaks had a major impact on the way U.S. policy developed after that point of the publication of the "collateral murder" video. Also with the Afghan War, it took another 10 years or nine years for that to finish. And we all know how that ended. But it didn't just show the carnage in Iraq but the senselessness of sending soldiers to fight this war in Iraq and die and get injured. And of course, the epidemic of suicides that has followed and is ongoing. Weissmueller: For me, Julian Assange is a figure of world-historical importance because of what he unlocked with WikiLeaks. He demonstrated undeniably that the strategic use of technology like encryption would be shifting the entire global power structure. And he ushered in that new reality. He showed a whole generation that maybe resistance to these powerful super-states actually isn't futile. And if you have the right tools and you know how to use them, you can really change the world. And I think that might be a big part of why he's a marked man. But is there anything else that you want to say as we're wrapping up about his significance or his place in history? Assange: Well, I think Julian is a visionary and a pioneer, as you say. Many of his writings and his speeches have gone viral on the Internet. In relation to Ukraine, for example, he was talking about Afghanistan, but his kind of big-picture analysis and criticism of the drivers of war have currency now. And in fact, you know, I often go back to the things that he wrote 10 years ago because they have stood the test of time. He is a global figure and a thinker of our times and the type that is direly needed. Julian has to be freed not just because this is an enormous injustice and the precedent it sets affects journalists everywhere in the U.S., but also globally. It's an extreme overreach. It criminalizes the publication of true information of the highest public importance, but also because of Julian's position as a public intellectual and as someone who promotes truth and is a critic of war.  There's a House resolution that is being pushed but has been tabled. It expresses that regular journalistic activities are protected under the First Amendment and that the U.S. ought to drop all charges and attempts to extradite Julian Assange. The First Amendment is something that is quite unique in the world, and it defines the political culture of the United States, which is much more open and dynamic than other parts of the world. The vast majority of politicians who look at this case seriously will understand the dangers of this case, that it should never have come to pass, that the case should be dropped. I'd ask any viewers to contact their representatives and ask them to support any efforts to drop the case against Julian.  This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. The post Stella Assange: Why Isn't Julian Assange a Free Man? appeared first on Reason.com.

"I have a history of being the only vote that was a 'no,'" says Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). "I've developed some trust with my constituents on those lone votes." In the second episode of Just Asking Questions, Massie joins Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe to talk about his recent votes against aid to Ukraine and Israel, as well as a controversial meme that he posted on X (formerly Twitter), which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted as "antisemitic, disgusting, dangerous." Massie says charges of antisemitism are "simply not true" and that his objectives are to avoid "open-ended support" for Israel's war and resist encroachments on free speech. They also discussed Massie's attempt to force an in-person congressional vote on a $2.2 trillion COVID-19 relief bill in March 2020, a move which prompted former president Donald Trump to label Massie "a third-rate grandstander" and demand he be kicked out of the Republican Party. Massie defeated primary challenger Todd McMurtry 81-19 less than three months later. "I was just trying to get people on record," says Massie. "The reason I was trying to get people on record is I knew this was one of the worst votes in history and nobody was going to be accountable for it… Here we are three years later, every bad thing that I said would happen as a result of [passing the $2.2 trillion relief package] has happened." Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.  Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.  Zach Weissmueller: I want to talk about something that's unfolding in D.C. right now, which is a vote on the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act. As part of that, the reauthorization of something called Section 702, which essentially allows the government to surveil communications between American citizens and foreign targets without a warrant. Though, after some resistance, a clean reauthorization of that is unlikely to happen. They're attaching it to the National Defense Authorization Act, which is kind of like the defense budget for the year. And they're trying to slip a more temporary extension into that. Could you tell us what is at stake for Americans with this issue? Rep. Thomas Massie: So we're not trying to eliminate the FISA 702 program. It was established to allow our intelligence agencies to spy on foreigners without a warrant. In order to qualify to be spied on without a warrant, you have to be outside of the country and you have to be not an American citizen. If you're inside the country, or if you're an American citizen outside of the country, you can't be spied on by this program. Sounds great, right? But we've got 250,000 people on that list that we're collecting information on. If you talk to a businessperson in France, for instance, your emails and stuff may get caught up in this data collection. Well, what they've been doing is going into this giant ball of data and they put in your name. They can put in Zach's name and search it without a warrant, without reasonable suspicion or probable cause. They are using this not to investigate suspects, but to create suspects. Let's say that you and Liz are at a protest and they develop some nexus. They say, "Well, we think these protesters were inspired by Russia. We're just going to run all the protesters' names through this database." Now, even though the Intel community doesn't concede that they need a warrant for this, they've admitted that they violated their own protocols hundreds of thousands of times when they searched for U.S. persons data in this haystack. They say, "Well, it was created legally, so we don't need a warrant to go search it." There are two proposals to reauthorize this program. By the way, the only chance you ever get to reform these programs is when they expire. So it's important that they do expire occasionally, and this one expires in January. And in the Judiciary Committee, which Jim Jordan chairs, and on which I serve, we've marked up a bill that would require them to get a warrant. It would create criminal penalties for people in the executive branch who abuse the program. Because there's never any culpability or blowback for anybody that's abused this program. So we created this reform bill. And then the Intel committee has created a bill which is less than ideal. It doesn't have a warrant requirement. It doesn't have many of the reporting requirements back to Congress that the judiciary bill has. And in fact, it expands their ability to collect information. For instance, if you had free Wi-Fi at a cafe, that service provider would be treated like Google or Verizon now. And they would have to create a direct pipeline to the intel agencies for any of the communications that go through that.  So you've got two proposals out there, and we're running out of time. What Speaker Johnson has proposed and some senators have proposed is "Let's just keep the old program in place for a little bit longer." Your basic congressional kicking the can down the road exercise that's going to be passing the Senate probably today unless Mike Lee and Rand Paul can stop it. Then it comes to the House probably tomorrow.  Now, an interesting thing here is I serve on the Rules Committee, and Chip Roy and Ralph Norman do as well. And we told the powers that be that we can't go along with this. So they couldn't pass a rule to combine the FISA program with the NDAA. That's how they're going to try and get it through, attach it to must-pass legislation, the National Defense Authorization Act. Well, we said, "Nope, this shall not pass the Rules Committee." So they're going to try and do this on suspension. There's a House rule that says if you want to suspend all of our regular rules and expedite something, you need a two-thirds vote of the House. So this is going to be interesting to see if they can get effectively 290 people to vote for it. Weissmueller: It is interesting because if you think back to when a lot of Americans were first awakened to this with the Snowden revelations about a decade ago, there were some lonely dissenters and most people just rubber-stamped this stuff. It does seem as if now there's more resistance. I assume some of that has to do with the way FISA was used against the Trump administration. Do you feel the political tides have shifted somewhat to the advantage of people who care about privacy and government surveillance? Massie: The tides haven't just shifted, the stars have aligned. We've never had a chairman of either the Intel Committee or the Judiciary Committee who made reforming this program one of their priorities. So with Jim Jordan, we're very lucky to have him as the chairman of this committee. And one of his signature agendas is to get this reform, because we have seen abuses that have been used against President Trump.  So a lot of conservatives have woken up to the fact that this program is being used against them. You have liberals who are upset about the program. Obviously, the FBI's using this against Black Lives Matter as well.  So you do have this coalition of the left and the right. It used to be a coalition of a dozen people, Right? It was me and Justin Amash, Zoe Lofgren, and Tulsi Gabbard, maybe who were concerned about this. We used to come together and we would offer amendments to try to fix this in the funding bills. We would try to defund some of this stuff, which is a really blunt instrument. It's a lot easier to write legislation that affects the laws than it is to just defund something. And they would pat us on the head and say, "Well, you know, we appreciate the sentiment, but this isn't the time or place to do what you're doing. And you shouldn't be mucking around with the funding." But now is the time and place, the program is expiring. We've got a chairman who's sympathetic to the cause. You know, this reported out of the Judiciary Committee 35 to 2. There were only two dissenters.  Liz Wolfe: Congressman, I want to ask about foreign aid. This week, Zelenskyy came to Washington and made his pitch for why the United States, in his eyes, ought to be funding Ukraine's war against a horrible invasion by Vladimir Putin. There's also obviously a terrible foreign policy situation in the Middle East right now between Israel and Hamas. You have called funding Ukraine and funding Zelenskyy, "economically illiterate and morally deficient." Make the case for why you oppose this form of funding.  Massie: Well, the "economic illiteracy" is in reference to a letter that the White House sent to the House of Representatives last week. And in two or three of the paragraphs of the letter, they espouse the virtues of spending money with the military-industrial complex and sending that to Ukraine as a job creation program. That it would reinvigorate our military industrial complex. You've got to believe in the broken window fallacy to think this will be an economic stimulus for the United States.  Meanwhile, the moral deficiency comes from some of the senators who have said that this war is a great deal for America because all we have to do is supply the weapons and Ukraine supplies the soldiers and that we're grinding down the Russian army. We're degrading their capacity to do this elsewhere or to commit war against us. The problem with that is the number of people who are dying. Zelenskyy allegedly told the senators that he's raising the draft age to 40 and admitted that they are running out of soldiers either through attrition on the battlefield or from people who've defected and left the country.  You would think if this were a war about the existence of Ukraine and protecting a democracy and such a fine government that people would sign up, would volunteer to fight for their country. But the reality is hundreds of thousands of them had the means and the money got out of the country. Some are dying, trying to escape over mountains and through rivers to get out of the country. And far too many have died on the battlefield. We can keep supplying them with weapons. We can keep depleting our treasure, but they're going to run out of fighting-age males pretty soon. Wolfe: Do you take that as an indictment of Ukraine's democratic system or more of a sense of leaving the country because they see it as a war that is totally unwinnable? How do you look at that situation? And more broadly, how should libertarians look at parallels, or lack thereof, between the U.S.'s involvement in funding Ukraine and the U.S. funding Israel? Massie: Well, to your first question, I think it's both. They lived in a country where they know that bribery and corruption are part of the culture and the current government isn't immune to that. And so if you're fighting for your country, that's one thing. But fighting for the government that's in charge of your country is another thing. So I believe that's part of it. Obviously, self-preservation is going to be part of it as well.  When it's over, there's going to have to be some negotiated peace settlement. And nobody, I think, believes Crimea is going to go back to Ukraine. So why spend all their lives when the lines are going to be where they were when it started? Just realism is a third factor.  Weissmueller: Let me pick up on Liz's second point there, which is about Israel, because you've been kind of on the lonely end, certainly on the Republican side, of several votes pertaining to Israel. Could you explain your stance on Israel, where you're coming from, and what you think some of these critics might be missing about your position? Massie: Sure. That was the first of 19 votes. Today. We're going to take our 19th virtue signal vote here in Congress. But I guess I got off on the wrong foot early and have been voting consistently ever since. The title of that bill is wonderful. I have no disagreement with the title of that bill, but there are 4 or 5 pages that go after that title. The first objection I had was that there is an open-ended pledge of military support for Israel. We never declare wars anymore. The administration just kind of goes and does it. And Congress keeps funding it, but they find the imprimatur for their activity right there in these resolutions. So the open-ended guarantee of support for that war that's contained in the text of that bill, but not the title, could have implied boots on the ground. And that may be the only vote we get to take in Congress on whether we're going to do that or not. So, number one, I don't support that notion.  Number two, in that resolution they mentioned Iran. In the very first resolution, they're already trying to expand the war and incorporate as much of the Middle East as they can. There's some people that just can't wait to attack Iran, and they want to use this as the nexus to get there. So that was in the resolution, a condemnation of Iran. I think we should be trying to constrain the conflict, not to expand it in the first resolution of support that we passed.  Part of that resolution wanted stronger sanctions on Iran. And I don't support sanctions, never voted to sanction a sovereign country in the 11 years that I've been in Congress. I think it leads to war. Sanctions actually create crimes only for U.S. citizens because we're not going to put somebody in jail in another country who trades with Iran. What we're proposing to do when we pass a sanction is to make a federal law that would result in the imprisonment of a U.S. citizen who trades with Iran, and it hurts the people who are in the country. I think it actually edges us closer to war instead of getting us out of war. Even though I support Israel and I condemned Hamas, I did that on my own. I put out a statement. I support Israel's right to defend itself and I condemn these attacks. But that wasn't enough.  Weissmueller: You've taken more heat for what you would describe as a "virtue signal bill." It's essentially the House reaffirming the state of Israel's right to exist and recognizing that denying Israel's right to exist is a form of antisemitism. Where are you coming from on these sorts of bills that aren't even really directly tied to any sort of military aid? Massie: Well, I recognize Israel's right to exist. I have to preface all of this stuff with that because people would imply from a vote that I don't. But when they passed that, I said, "You're basically saying that anti-Zionism is antisemitism." And people argued with me about that. What's interesting is the next week they passed almost the same resolution and they replaced Israel's right to exist with Zionism. So maybe I'm just giving them clues for how to write their bills more directly because the next resolution said that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who disagree with that statement. In fact, Jerrold Nadler, who's the most senior member of Congress, who's Jewish, went to the floor and gave a five minute speech, which is a long speech in the House of Representatives. But, he gave a five-minute speech on why that's untrue, to say that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.  There are a lot of people who are antisemitic who are also against the state of Israel, but you can't equate the two. And I think these 19 votes, after today, are sort of part of the war effort for Israel to make it hard for anybody in the United States to criticize what they're doing.  Every two or three days here in Congress, we're taking these votes that a lot of what's in the resolution is just obvious and doesn't need to be stated. It's kind of like Black Lives Matter. You have to say "black lives matter." They're doing the equivalent with Israel. Now Israel matters. And so I agree that Israel matters, but we don't have to take all these votes. And some of them are going into campuses and trying to limit free speech by withholding federal money.  I've been called antisemitic for merely not supporting the money that goes to Israel. American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent $90,000 in my district running ads implying that I was antisemitic and then in a tweet, said that I was "antisemitic for not voting for the $14.3 billion to go to Israel." Even though I've not voted for foreign aid to go anywhere. Weissmueller: Chuck Schumer has accused you of being antisemitic. He's blasted you on Twitter. Here's the tweet, he said: "Representative Massie, you're a sitting member of Congress, this is antisemitic, disgusting, dangerous and exactly the type of thing I was talking about in my Senate address. Take this down." And what he is referring to is the Drake meme, where you're saying, "No to American patriotism, yes to Zionism, Congress these days." What was your reaction to this?  Massie: Well, we ratioed him on that pretty soundly. I quote tweeted him and said, "If only you cared about half as much about our border as you care about my tweets."  It's just simply not true. By the way, in the replies to him, you'll find somebody who pointed out that of all 535 members of Congress, this cycle, he received more money from pro-Israel lobby according to Opensecrets.org than any other member of Congress. So it rings hollow when he says that. He's even in disagreement with Jerrold Nadler. And I'll admit memes are not the most precise way to convey a point. But they can be effective. There's nothing in that meme that implies those two things are mutually exclusive. And that wasn't my intent. It's okay in Congress to be patriotic for Israel, but you can't be patriotic for America. That's considered nationalism, which American nationalism is a dirty word. And I know it's loaded. There are a lot of people that have attached themselves to it. But if you take it in the generic sense, it's pride in your country. Pride in America is looked down upon right now. It's out-of-fashion. But pride in Israel is something we have to vote on two or three times a week now in Congress. Weissmueller: You have this reputation in your own district and nationally as the guy who's willing to make the meme and take the unpopular vote. I think that one of the prime examples of that is back during the depths of COVID, in March 2020, everyone was pushing for this $2.2 trillion COVID relief bill, including the president of the United States. And it was Representative Thomas Massie who was saying, "If we're going to have a $2 trillion vote here, let's follow the Constitution and have everyone come back to D.C. and actually do it in person."  And for that, going back to Twitter, President Trump's response to that was "Looks like a third-rate grandstander named Representative Thomas Massie, a congressman from, unfortunately, a truly great state, Kentucky, wants to vote against the new Save Our Workers bill in Congress. He just wants publicity. He can't stop it." He goes on to say that "the Republicans should win the House, but they should kick out Thomas Massie." What was that like having the Eye of Sauron on you for insisting on an in-person vote in March 2020? Massie: I'll have to write a book someday. But those tweets happened about 60 seconds after a phone call ended between me and President Trump, where he basically burned my ear off, screaming at me for probably three minutes and said he was coming at me, he was going to take me down. That's a sobering proposition when you've got a primary election eight weeks away and you've been trying to keep the president out of your race. The person running against you says you don't support the president enough. And the president had a 95 percent approval rating among the primary voters who were going to vote in my election. But I just stood strong. I said, listen, if truckers and nurses and grocery store workers are showing up for work, then Congress should show up for work too. And that was, I think, an unassailable message. Because, ultimately, I was just trying to get people on record.  The reason I was trying to get people on record is because I knew this was one of the worst votes in history and nobody was going to be accountable for it. Here we are three years later, and every bad thing that I said would happen as a result of doing that has happened. And even my colleagues here in Congress, a lot of them admit to me that they were wrong about that. They won't say it too loudly lest anybody hear it. The reporters came up to me as I walked out of the chamber that day and said, "Your own president just called you a third-rate grandstander. What do you have to say?" And I said "I was deeply insulted. I'm at least second-rate." And they didn't ever come back to that. Wolfe: How much COVID policy remorse is there among your colleagues in Congress?  Massie: Not enough. Not nearly enough. The policy isn't just the spending, the vaccine mandates, the shutting down of our economy, the compulsory masking, the way people were treated like cattle. There should be far more remorse. But frankly, that's a reflection of the voters as well. If you poll this, most people have moved on. Even a year ago, most people had moved on.  I mean, look at Ron DeSantis. That was part of his signature issue. But he most famously opposed a lot of this COVID nonsense after it became obvious what we were dealing with. And he rode that wave and he was polling better than Trump. But I think people have moved on and they've got other issues to think about now. People have just moved on and so have my colleagues. And I think it's really unfortunate. And I wished that I had been able to get that recorded vote that day. We'd have a lot more people who wouldn't be back here in Congress perpetrating bad ideas like FISA.  Wolfe: You were elected during the era of the Tea Party reining in government spending. We care about our fiscal health. And so as a result, we can't just have the money printer constantly print money forever more. We have to be prudent because the bill always comes due. Do you think that message has any hopes of having any sort of revival in the coming years, especially given the runaway inflation that we've seen? Or do you think it's just a totally lost cause and we're all screwed? Massie: Let me assign a 95 percent probability to that last proposition. I'm here with a 5 percent chance that we can save it. And in the 30 percent chance that if it all goes to hell in a handbasket, I can still be here and have some credibility to put it back together.  I think what's starting to curb the appetite for spending and bring some realism into the discussion is the only thing that was ever going to curb our appetite for spending, and that is our creditors are starting to balk. The rates at which the government can borrow money now aren't what we want them to be. When we go out to do an auction or a sale for treasuries or bonds what we're finding is the appetite isn't there, even at 4.5 percent, you know, to get a guaranteed 4.5 percent return on your money from the government backed by the U.S. military? That's not enough to loan that money to the government. They want 5 percent. That's an indicator that when the private sector and the other countries, the sovereign funds, usually have the appetite for our debt when they're losing their appetite, that's a sign that things are going south.  I wear this debt clock that I built in Congress to remind people of it. And one side effect of me wearing this is the rate at which the debt is increasing is going up. So for the math nerds, that's the second derivative. And today, the debt per second is $78,000. I don't think people realize. It feels like we're going over Niagara Falls right now. The rate of these bad things happening is increasing now.  This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. The post Thomas Massie: Why Not Vote 'No'? appeared first on Reason.com.

Dave Smith, leader of the Mises Caucus, discusses the definition of libertarianism and its core principles. The podcast covers topics such as the role of America's military, the perspective on state power and monopolies, and the feasibility of a stateless society. It also delves into the strategy of the Mises Caucus, internal problems of the Libertarian Party, motivations of government actors, war propaganda, and breaking the monopoly of mainstream narratives.