'The Hottest Circle of Hell Is for Those Who Stay Neutral'

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 6 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 3 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 2 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes. Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 8 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 6 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 5 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 11 I'm Peter Schuterman. I'm going to be your moderator tonight.

Speaker 11 And full disclosure, I do work at Reason, but I also appear on a podcast that is run through the bulwark so I'll try to be fair and not take sides.

Speaker 11 However that might be a little bit complicated given our resolution which is you don't have to pick a side in politics. So if I'm not taking sides, am I actually kind of taking sides?

Speaker 11 I think that's the sort of thing that's going to come up in tonight's debate. Now, because this is a debate, there will be a winner and that winner will be decided by you, the audience.

Speaker 11 The way this is gonna work is there are going to be two votes.

Speaker 11 The first vote, you've either already voted or you should vote right now, and then there's gonna be another vote after the debate happens, and the team that wins will be the team that moves the most number of people towards their position.

Speaker 11 So

Speaker 11 if you have not yet cast your vote, please follow the instructions on the screen and vote now.

Speaker 11 As you do that, I want you to think just a little bit about the resolution before us tonight. What does it mean to pick a side in politics?

Speaker 11 We are gathered here this evening in Washington, D.C., where national politics is dominated by two political parties that are constantly asking you to pick a side.

Speaker 11 When Americans go to the voting booth, most of them pull the lever for one of those two parties, and in the vast majority of races, one of those two parties wins.

Speaker 11 Fundamentally, voting in a democracy is about picking sides. The very structure of American politics all but forces you to do so.
And if you decide not to, are you throwing away your influence?

Speaker 11 Are you abdicating your democratic responsibility? Are you just shrugging your shoulders and saying,

Speaker 11 you know, it doesn't really matter who wins? But then there's the flip side of this. Doesn't picking a side make it harder to hold politicians accountable?

Speaker 11 It's often said that politics is a team sport. But if you have already declared your allegiance to one team or another, what incentive is there for politicians to change?

Speaker 11 Shouldn't politics be about issues and policies and governance rather than teams and partisan victories? There's a reason that people often praise bipartisanship.

Speaker 11 Americans tend to like it when politicians work together for better policy and better government rather than against the other side just so that their own team can win.

Speaker 11 And then there's that old saw about both sides. Press critics love to trash journalists who engage in lazy both sides, in creating false equivalences.
And look, sometimes that can happen.

Speaker 11 Both sides can be an easy way to duck controversy and avoid responsibility. On the other hand, just look at the dismal approval ratings for Congress and some of our recent presidential candidates.

Speaker 11 In the judgment of the American people, both sides are often pretty terrible.

Speaker 11 So why pick one? To discuss these questions tonight, we have four top-notch debaters. From the Bulwark, we have Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller.
Tim is a

Speaker 11 Tim is a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. Longwell is the publisher of the Bulwark, where she hosts the focus group podcast.

Speaker 11 From Reason, we have Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch,

Speaker 11 both of whom are editors at large. So if you haven't cast your vote,

Speaker 11 time's running out. Time's running out.
I think it's just about time to start the debate. So, we are going to start with opening statements from each of our debaters.

Speaker 11 It's going to go reason bulwark, reason bulwark the whole night. Reason will have the first word, the bulwark will have the last word.

Speaker 11 And we are going to start with Matt Welch, who will be defending the proposition: you don't have to pick a side in politics.

Speaker 16 That was tepid.

Speaker 16 Thank you, everyone, for coming out to this lovely, lovely place and to spend your time with us.

Speaker 16 It's a bit of an unfair fight, not just because reason is hosting this, but because of the proposition that you don't have to pick a side in politics.

Speaker 16 Of course, you don't have to pick a side in politics. We're not Cuba or even worse, Australia.
We are not forced to vote.

Speaker 16 We live our lives in the way that we want.

Speaker 16 And it makes sense. If you look all around you, there are,

Speaker 16 even even at the most five-alarm fire of an election, like in 2020, one-third of people who are eligible to vote don't in a presidential election. They choose not to.

Speaker 16 Catherine Maggie Wart's very, very happy about that.

Speaker 16 When people describe themselves to Gallup, they've been asking people now for decades to self-describe. Do you sort of feel self-identify as a Democrat or a Republican or as an independent?

Speaker 16 Independents have won that poll month after month, every month since 2012, and for most of the months before that. It usually polls somewhere around in the 40s, the earlier this year.

Speaker 16 51% of Americans self-identified as an independent rather than picking the side of a Democrat and Republican. And if you think about it even for a half a second, it makes total sense because

Speaker 16 Democrats and Republicans really suck.

Speaker 16 They are very, very, very bad at what they do, which is like attempt to govern or manage the monopoly on the use of of force through extracted taxpayer money and other libertarian things.

Speaker 16 But for example, of the ways that governance sucks, I know you people live in Washington, D.C., so you might have heard that they're doing the annual Cromnibus thing right now or talking about it.

Speaker 16 This is a tweet from today from former Never Trump heartthrob or occasional Mitt Romney, who I think Tim worked for at some point,

Speaker 16 says, what does President Trump want Republicans to to do vote for the continuing resolution or shut down government absent direction confusion reigns can anyone spot the problem with that let's just like think about it for a second this is Trump is not the president this is the job for Congress

Speaker 16 Mitt Romney is in that body and yet they don't do things like pass basic budgets they wait for some scary president to sort of tell them or president-elect to tell them what to do and they've been doing this for year after year after year when's the last time Peter Suderman, that they used the Congressional Budget Act to pass their 12 appropriations bills?

Speaker 16 There is a punchline to that story, I'm sure, but it's basically never. They don't do it anymore.
It's not something that happens.

Speaker 16 You look around anywhere you live, or at least anywhere I live, tends to be totally misgoverned by horrible democratic administrations.

Speaker 16 I live in Brooklyn, New York, where if you drive down the street, you can like hide an entire Volkswagen

Speaker 16 in the potholes out in front of your street. And everyone is taxed up the yin-yang, and nothing works.
Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., these are not well-governed places.

Speaker 16 So it's a rational thing to not want to collude with or somehow join one of those teams in spending your money really badly to do bad things and violate other people's rights and do it worse and worse year after year.

Speaker 16 But it's not to say that the inverse of what we're talking about is true. It's not me and Nick or libertarians general saying it's bad to be in politics.

Speaker 16 There are perfectly good people on all sides in politics, and I'm glad that there are.

Speaker 16 I'm glad that there are people who are going to be doing good work in the Trump administration, even though Lord knows I didn't vote for the Trump administration to go in.

Speaker 16 What I would like to suggest to all of us is that sometimes you can achieve those goals that you'll, even those of us who are cursed to pay attention to national politics, you can achieve political goals sometimes better through the outside, which Nick is going to talk about a little bit more.

Speaker 16 And you don't have to either apologize for your own side when when they do misdeeds or to sit on your hands when you know they're doing something against

Speaker 16 your own desires. And this is what happens in politics again and again.
It's morally corrupting in ways that we'll talk about more.

Speaker 11 And that is your four minutes. So.

Speaker 11 Thank you, Matt. Welch.
Since you brought up the Congressional Budget Office, I will just say that I am the moderator, which means I have the, which means I'm asking the questions, not answering them.

Speaker 11 But it has been about 30 years since we passed all 12 appropriations bills. Sarah Longwell, would you like to make an opening statement? Step on up to the podium.

Speaker 17 I don't usually have notes for things, but I do this time. I read this to Tim before we got started, and he told me it was too mean.

Speaker 17 So I dialed it back.

Speaker 17 a little bit. We'll see.
And actually, look, I actually kind of agree with you that I don't think voters have to choose. I listen to voters all the time.

Speaker 17 And one of the things I do, anybody who listens to the stuff around focus groups, knows that I am a big defender of what people call somewhat derisively low information voters, because I believe that people should be able to go out and live their lives and not have to be obsessed with politics all the time, right?

Speaker 17 And if they decide that a quick scan of the candidates, choosing between them, neither one is going to materially make a difference in their life, then fine. They don't have to choose.

Speaker 17 But if you're a close political observer, or say, editor of a magazine devoted to politics, with a clear lens of liberty and freedom, I think you should be capable of an accurate threat assessment with regard to

Speaker 17 which candidate would do the greatest harm to the freedom agenda. And look, I'll admit, I was always kind of a libertarian myself.
I mean, then I grew up, but like I was a libertarian for a while.

Speaker 17 Sorry, sorry, sorry, just kidding, just kidding. And to be fair, I was sort of more like a right-leaning independent who thought that I was, you know, nominally pro-choice.

Speaker 17 I was definitely pro-weed, and I was definitely pro-gay marriage, and I went and got one. So that made me sort of a libertarian when I was young here in D.C.

Speaker 17 And I think where libertarians get in trouble is that they know perfectly well that Donald Trump presents the greatest threat to freedom and the American Constitution we've seen in our lifetime.

Speaker 17 And I'm just going to throw a few at you, just in case you don't believe me. Tariffs and hostility toward free trade, corporate subsidies for favored industries, which is anti-free market.

Speaker 17 Trump wants to strengthen qualified immunity and bring back stop and frisk.

Speaker 17 We hate that, libertarians, deploying the military to suppress opposition and generally trying to crack down on protests, attacking the free press.

Speaker 17 He's suing a pollster because he didn't like her poll, and threatening to pull broadcast licenses. Also hate that, libertarians.

Speaker 17 RFK's nanny state in food and health, when I worked in Washington, D.C., we saw call it the nanny state big brother.

Speaker 17 We were super against those things, but now we take the Democrats and we install them in our government to do those things.

Speaker 17 Trump is generally supportive of right-wing cultural war issues, like, you know, we're against drag things, you know, these free expression things against trans people.

Speaker 17 He's increasing the national debt with spending increases.

Speaker 17 Donald Trump, everybody, they did the, they looked at it, and Trump was going to double the amount that he was going to raise the debt over Kamala Harris.

Speaker 17 He says he's going to execute drug dealers without trials. I mean, Kamala was a cop, but Trump says we're going to execute drug dealers without trials.
So cool.

Speaker 17 Letting states ban abortion rights, cozy relationships with dictators who are complicit in global repression, deporting millions of immigrants being raids, via raids, weaponizing federal law enforcement to go after his enemies.

Speaker 17 He's doing that with Liz Cheney right now. One-year prison sentence for burning American flags.
I definitely thought we were free speech as libertarians.

Speaker 17 He wants to expand executive power and limit checks on his authority. Said he would suspend the Constitution.
straight up and then lied about the 2020 election and tried to overturn an election.

Speaker 17 So that's just to name a few of things. Other than that, how's the show, Mr.
and Mrs. Lincoln?

Speaker 17 So I think that, 40 seconds, but libertarians are often tribally of the political right, and they're addicted to heterodoxy for heterodoxy's sake, which leads them to plead neutrality so they don't have to defend the side they've actually chosen.

Speaker 17 And this is my point. They do choose a side.

Speaker 17 They are perennially anti-democrats, and they're so anti-democrats that even when the biggest threat to freedom is standing right in front of them, they can't acknowledge it clearly or with the right threat assessment, namely being, this is the biggest threat.

Speaker 17 Trump is the biggest threat. Nick tweeted recently that he was glad Kamala Harris lost.
And so I'm saying you do choose.

Speaker 17 And when you are an editor of a publication or part of the political elite, you decide who you fire, who you hire,

Speaker 17 what articles you publish, what articles you spike. And when you make those choices, you choose a side.

Speaker 17 And I will just end by saying the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

Speaker 11 Nick Gillespie?

Speaker 13 Don't stick to these hotels,

Speaker 13 I told you about that.

Speaker 13 Step up to hell.

Speaker 12 I want to say it's a good thing that I don't believe in hell.

Speaker 12 And I don't think anybody here does.

Speaker 12 I just want to point out, you know, what we just, what we've heard tonight is one of the weakest, most pathetic arguments i've ever heard and i'm talking about your opening remarks matt of course

Speaker 12 what i want to make the case for you know if if you're talking about trump and harris and that's the limit of your horizon hit the bar now okay uh because you you're already lost in a fog

Speaker 12 What I want to make the case for is saying that you don't have, I want to rephrase the proposition. You don't have to be a partisan.

Speaker 12 You don't have to pick a political party in order to make meaningful impact on social, political, and economic issues.

Speaker 12 Your right of exit from any given coalition is exactly the thing that helps keep that coalition or that group or that movement focused on what they're trying to achieve.

Speaker 12 And I want to talk about that in the context of Martin Luther King, Gloria Steinem, and Bob Dillett. Forgive me, I'm a boomer.
I have trilogies

Speaker 12 that speak to boomers. Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 12 was scrupulously nonpartisan in his political associations because he knew the minute that he said, I'm a Republican, which would have made sense for a variety of reasons, or I'm a Democrat, which would have made sense for particular reasons, the civil rights movement and the cause that he cared about the most disappears.

Speaker 12 It becomes part of another special interest group. Gloria Steinem, who helped create modern feminism, and I hope people here are feminists.
Can we have it?

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 12 You know, it's a powerful movement. She pissed that away, maybe standing up, when she wrote her one free grope op-ed in the New York Times.

Speaker 12 And she said, you know what, whatever Bill Clinton does, it's okay because it's more important that we back him rather than the other side, who was, what, Bob Dole, you know, around that time.

Speaker 12 And it reduced feminism and the feminist movement to a mere special interest group among Democratic, you know, the Democratic Party.

Speaker 12 And you lose power that way because then you're suddenly your issue is not that important. And then there's Bob Dylan.
How many of you like Bob Dylan?

Speaker 12 Okay, well, I was expecting a different crowd tonight. But,

Speaker 12 you know, here's the thing.

Speaker 12 Bob Dylan is arguably the most significant, certainly the most significant artist of the past 70 years, one of the biggest figures in American culture, was part of the civil rights movement,

Speaker 12 was a born-again Christian, et cetera. Does anybody know what his politics are

Speaker 12 and there it is he's still making a huge difference in our lives continues to without being a rank partisan because what happens when you become a partisan is you have to sign on and shut up in order to push the other side in the direction that they want we might ask is the bulwark more

Speaker 12 uh powerful now that it is so anti-trump that it's going to align itself with every democratic cause that comes along along? Or would it be better? And I guess you guys were Republicans, right?

Speaker 12 So you could have stayed in the Republican Party and worked, you know, tried to work from within? I don't know, but you're not making

Speaker 12 your

Speaker 12 influence does not grow when you join a side in partisan politics, for the most part.

Speaker 12 I think the proper stance is not to choose sides when it comes to Democrats and Republicans, but to stand for principles and policy, not politicians and not partisanship. Thanks.

Speaker 13 Tim Miller.

Speaker 13 Feels like you clapped louder for Sarah. That's okay.

Speaker 13 I love being at the Howard Theater. I had some great jazz brunches here back in the day when I lived around the corner.
This is an awesome venue. Thank you for hosting us.

Speaker 13 I also love libertarians, by the way. Libertarians are so cute.

Speaker 13 They're so cute, you know, talking about the power of the state and all the terms. And I just, I really do.
I enjoy libertarians.

Speaker 13 And I kind of, I was excited about doing this debate because I like to have fun. And when I heard, when Peter told me about the premise, I was like, this is so silly and frivolous and libertarian.

Speaker 13 Like, I don't know. I can have a couple drinks up here and we can talk about this.

Speaker 13 Because the reality is that...

Speaker 13 Grown-ups in politics have to make a choice about things. Politics is not about

Speaker 13 our self-actualization. It's not about, you know, deciding to feel good about oneself.
It is about the process by which we organize our society.

Speaker 13 We organize our society to best ensure that our fellow citizens are able to live and prosper and achieve their dreams and be free.

Speaker 13 And that's what we often do. We get together and we create, we create these systems and these systems are imperfect and they're kind of broken and often they suck.

Speaker 13 They suck in Chicago and San Francisco, as you point out. I live in Louisiana.
Let me tell you, not knocking it out of the park with the government down there.

Speaker 13 Potholes, not great. All right.

Speaker 13 So the systems suck. You end up with choices that aren't great.

Speaker 13 But if you want to have a say in the process,

Speaker 13 you have to pick a side. It doesn't mean you have to be a tribalist.
It doesn't mean you have to unapologetically be on one side.

Speaker 13 I mean, last year, I voted for a Republican that was running for governor of Louisiana that was obviously going to lose because he was running against a worse Republican.

Speaker 13 But I chose a side in that race. In the presidential election, we obviously chose a side.
And I thought that, as Sarah pointed out, one of the options was very clearly unacceptable.

Speaker 13 But in local elections

Speaker 13 for your city council, sometimes you're like, eh, I don't know. I can't tell the difference between these two sides.
And maybe it's not worth it to get involved.

Speaker 13 But most of the time, you make a choice that most aligns with your values and you think best will achieve positive results for your fellow citizens. That is the whole point of politics.

Speaker 13 Like, that is what we are doing here. And

Speaker 13 I find it kind of weird that, like, this is the only area of life where you face two choices, they're imperfect, and you decide that the high-minded thing is to say,

Speaker 13 I'm going to fuck it. I'm going to do nothing.

Speaker 13 I'm not going to decide. I mean, I think about, for example, over Thanksgiving, I've got to go to rural West Virginia to see my in-laws.
Not great. The in-laws are great.

Speaker 13 Rural West Virginia, not great. Also, the governing,

Speaker 13 they're not knocking out of the park either.

Speaker 13 But we can either drive 11 hours or we can fly and pay $1,000 and then drive two hours over the hills that make me nauseous where there's no cell phone service. Neither option's great.

Speaker 13 And it's kind of like Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Speaker 13 It's not kind of like Jeff Landry and Sean Wilson. Like neither option is great.

Speaker 13 But I've got to decide. I could say no and not go see people for Thanksgiving, not involve myself in society, and that's fine.
But guess what? Thanksgiving comes up the next November.

Speaker 13 I've got to decide again. You know, if you are living in a neighborhood with a bad school district and you have children, you can say, well,

Speaker 13 I can pay money to send them to private school. Maybe I can't afford that.
I can make that choice. Or I can send them to the public school.
That's kind of shitty. Those aren't great choices.

Speaker 13 A lot of people, that's a challenging choice.

Speaker 13 You can opt out and say, I guess I'm going to homeschool. But the reality is you have to to make a choice for your family.
You have to make a choice that's better for your kids and your grandkids.

Speaker 18 And that's what politics is.

Speaker 13 At the end of the day, you have to make a choice for what's going to be better for you and the people around you.

Speaker 13 And it doesn't mean you have to put on a team jersey and defend everything that your choice does, but it does mean that you got to decide.

Speaker 13 I flew. We landed in Roanoke.
It was really unpleasant.

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Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 6 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 3 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 2 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes. Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 8 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 6 One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 5 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 11 You will have an opportunity to ask questions of the debaters a little later, but now we're going to move into a segment where the debaters are going to be able to ask questions of each other.

Speaker 11 However, as the moderator, I'm going to

Speaker 11 take this opportunity to ask two questions first. And the first question is going to go to Matt and Nick, the reason side.

Speaker 11 So I think the strongest argument or one of the strongest arguments that I heard from the bulwark was that in the age of Trump, who is deeply anti-libertarian, and Sarah gave us this incredibly long list of anti-libertarian ideas and policies that Trump supports, don't you have to pick a side against him?

Speaker 11 Nick, Matt, what do you say to that?

Speaker 16 I wrote a magazine cover story called The Case Against Donald Trump.

Speaker 16 So I might be a little bit ill-suited or perhaps properly suited to answer the question, which is to say that nothing about the proposition here is that you can't decide which candidate is better or worse.

Speaker 16 Decide all the time.

Speaker 16 I vote happily all the time and make lots of decisions, and I have an unblemished record of never voting for whoever wins as president, and I will surely have that for the rest of my life.

Speaker 11 You should just poll you and then find out who's going to win, but it's somebody else.

Speaker 16 I agree.

Speaker 16 My idea

Speaker 13 is.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I mean, does Nate Silver incorporate you into his models?

Speaker 16 I can't speak for Nate Silver.

Speaker 16 But

Speaker 16 choosing a side is ultimately, if you have a team that you're carrying water for, that puts you in the awkward position of saying either that the 2016 election was rigged or sold by social media companies or the 2020 election was rigged or stolen by social media companies, it turns you into a maroon.

Speaker 13 Okay, so to try and make sure that I rebut that just briefly, I just, I just think it's a broader point.

Speaker 13 I don't think that it turns you into a maroon to have to decide between options and to identify what the worst thing would be for values that you care about, whether it be freedom or something else.

Speaker 13 Like, again,

Speaker 13 I gladly chose Kamala Harris when Joe Biden was going to be the nominee this time. I was going to happily choose Joe Biden.

Speaker 13 Sometimes you have to pick one that is obviously better, that is obviously preferable. I think Joe Biden was very selfish to decide to run again.
I think he has made

Speaker 13 some mistakes I really disagree with. Here is where.
And yet, it was pretty easy. And I criticized him publicly.
I wasn't like, ooh, I love everything about him.

Speaker 13 We said this publicly all the time.

Speaker 12 Well, this may,

Speaker 12 you know, I don't know if this fits into the constraints of the topic or whatnot, but the fact of the matter is, is like, yeah, you can vote for whoever you want.

Speaker 12 If you decide to be, if you pick a side and you become a tribalist, which seems to be the case of Republicans and Democrats now, that they are like, okay, I got to buy all in.

Speaker 12 No, you can't brook the orthodoxy of the party, which is one of the reasons why Joe Biden was running, even though it was clear that he was past his ability to function. I mean,

Speaker 12 I guess he's still the president. But

Speaker 12 if we actually lived in a world where instead of picking sides and saying, we've got to win the next election or else extinction, there probably would have been a different Democratic candidate.

Speaker 12 And also after he was unmasked as unfit for office, there would have been some kind of Democratic primary or something like that.

Speaker 12 So to get back to this question of nobody's saying like, you shouldn't vote, or I'm not saying you shouldn't shouldn't vote. I love voting.

Speaker 12 Like Matt, I have an unblemished record of never voting for anybody who wins at any level of any election, going back to my third grade vice president, you know, election.

Speaker 12 But it doesn't mean you don't participate and you don't vote and you don't voice things.

Speaker 12 But it's, you know, one of the reasons this election was so screwed up is precisely because people picked sides and were like, no matter what, I've got to beat Donald Trump.

Speaker 12 So I'm going to stick with Joe Biden no matter how long and how hard I have to drag him into the podium.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 17 I don't know that there was anybody who was losing their, you got some bulwarking people here.

Speaker 17 To the point of much of their annoyance, nobody yelled louder about Joe Biden deciding to run again than I did because it was all over the data that voters didn't want him to. And so the idea, and

Speaker 17 it's interesting. I think Matt and I might end up agreeing more than

Speaker 17 I thought we would, because I don't think what we're talking about right now, or I did not take this proposition to mean that voters don't can't sometimes decide that they don't like either option.

Speaker 17 I took it really to mean, what is our responsibility as people who other people look to for political analysis and judgment? And my beef with sort of

Speaker 17 libertarians in general is I think because they have been tribally of the right,

Speaker 17 they found themselves unable to go hard against their tribe, actually.

Speaker 17 And I think they got boxed into a place where they felt like they could criticize Trump enough for some CYA,

Speaker 17 but not to actually say, and this is where, I guess, I don't understand your point, Nick, because it feels like, look, if we're talking about McCain Obama, yeah, man, either way, right?

Speaker 17 Choose who you want to choose. I think the question is whether or not we decided that Donald Trump was something different, whether or not there was something unique about the threat that he posed.

Speaker 17 I would say, and now, Matt, you did do a little bit of like classic both sides of some because I don't feel like 2016 I didn't have to say that Donald Trump won because of what did you say?

Speaker 17 I don't remember, but it's like it was because of a Russian YouTube operation or Facebook or whatever.

Speaker 12 It's such a novel argument that you just came up with, right?

Speaker 13 Yeah,

Speaker 12 we haven't just spent eight years of hearing about Russia all the time, right? That Russian interference is the reason that Donald Trump won, or the Electoral College, or whatever.

Speaker 13 But this is where you're going to be able to do that. Those things happen.

Speaker 13 What? Sorry. What did you say? I just, I mean, Russia did interfere in the election, and

Speaker 13 he did lose the popular vote significantly. So, like, those things happen are people not allowed to say that.

Speaker 17 But also, like, we didn't, we weren't there being like, Donald Trump's not president. And, you know, none of us, nor did Democrats.

Speaker 17 I mean, they've like did hashtag resist, but they weren't like, we're going to march to the Capitol, storm in there with guns, and carry the banner of our leader, Donald Trump, while we do it.

Speaker 17 And so I think that that the sort of very weak both sides-ism

Speaker 17 is a plague of folks who are tribally of the right and who lost the ability to, for the sake of their audience, be able to distinguish between something that was uniquely bad and uniquely a threat to your wheelhouse.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I disagree with you because I'm not of the right.

Speaker 12 I recently, I went to an event in Greenwich Village with Donald Trump and badgered him about the amount of money that he added to the debt before COVID.

Speaker 12 And that doesn't even get into the fact that his COVID policies were disastrous. He's the reason we locked down.
He disowns the vaccines that he helped produce in record time.

Speaker 13 I'm not, you know, of the writing, I'm not covering my ass.

Speaker 12 Yeah, but so, you know, and Donald Trump presents unique challenges. He's a horrible human being.
He is probably going to be something of a disaster, but he is not an extinction-level threat.

Speaker 12 And if that is what we're going to hinge everything on, is that Donald Trump, uniquely among American presidents, is the person who's going to bring it all down.

Speaker 12 I mean, that is on you guys to explain why that didn't happen

Speaker 13 the first time. Well, how do you know he's not an extinction level threat?

Speaker 13 I would say this.

Speaker 13 If we drove, if we flew back, if we got a little DeLorean and flew back to 2014, and we all came here before Shaw had totally gentrified and we met together at a bar and I said, Nick, I have this photo of you.

Speaker 13 I have this photo for you.

Speaker 13 And it was a photo of people of Trump flags over the Capitol building, smoke above over the Capitol building, cops being just like this attacked by people waving American flags, the blue line, or Confederate flags.

Speaker 13 I showed you a series of photos, and I was like, this will happen in five years from now.

Speaker 13 If we elect Donald Trump, you would have looked at me like I was an insane person. You would have looked at me and been like, no way.
And then I was like, get this. It'll happen.

Speaker 13 And then he'll run again. And you won't pick a side.

Speaker 13 No. Why do you have to go? That would have been like, Tim, no way.
No way that could possibly happen.

Speaker 12 So you're definitely reaching the plurality of American voters who voted for him and said, hey, you know what, Tim?

Speaker 13 I'm not trying to convince everybody. I'm just trying to tell you what happened, man.
I'm just trying to tell you what happened. This is what happened.

Speaker 11 Okay, so we are about halfway through this segment, and it has been dominated by talk of Donald Trump. And that's appropriate.

Speaker 13 I understand you invited the Bullworlds. Yes,

Speaker 13 work.

Speaker 13 Could have invited somebody else.

Speaker 13 Could have invited Mother Jones.

Speaker 13 Talked about climate change.

Speaker 11 I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad, Tim.
This is exactly the energy I wanted, but I also want to think about this.

Speaker 13 We could have talked about cancel culture. Oh, man.

Speaker 11 Let's keep it to the people who are actually on stage. And I want to see if we can shift this just a little bit to thinking beyond Donald Trump.

Speaker 11 Again, I don't think it's inappropriate to be talking about him. He was president.
He was elected president again. At the same time, this question isn't just about Donald Trump.

Speaker 11 And one of the things I heard from the reason side of this argument is that Americans obviously

Speaker 11 don't pick a side in many cases. Something like what? Is a third of Americans don't vote because they don't have to.
And in some ways, that just supports the reason case.

Speaker 11 The Matt Welch argument here is that

Speaker 11 the resolution is correct. You don't have to pick a side.
That's obviously true simply based on the fact that many Americans do not.

Speaker 17 Yeah. Okay, so let me tell you a quick story.
I was in the Czech Republic one time, and I was talking to Matt Welch loves the Czech Republic.

Speaker 13 Me too.

Speaker 17 I drink a lot of absinthe.

Speaker 17 I lit a bar on fire one time accidentally. But when I was there, we got to go and meet some of the senators, right? And I was very young.

Speaker 17 I was still a libertarian. And so

Speaker 17 we were there, and I got to talk with a senator, and she said, I knew that we had, it was after the Velvet Revolution, but and she's like, I knew that we had reached a stable place

Speaker 17 when the number of people who were voting went down.

Speaker 17 And if you think about it, I move in a lot of democracy circles and they're always like, oh my God, people don't vote and it's terrible. And I'm like, actually,

Speaker 17 voting's as high as it's ever been. Do we think things are going better?

Speaker 17 No, we don't, because the reason that people are voting at such high rates now is because they think things are existential at every level across the board.

Speaker 17 And so so I don't think that it's more voting is representative of us being in a better place.

Speaker 17 I do think that an unwillingness to admit that Donald Trump presented such a unique threat that it was worth taking a side

Speaker 17 sort of is at the center of this debate, though.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I guess, and I would just say. It is axiomatically true that you do not have to pick a side.
So maybe I've conceded the debate already to the other side.

Speaker 13 So yes, like random people don't have to pick a side.

Speaker 13 What do you do now?

Speaker 12 Like Donald Trump won, so what do you do now?

Speaker 13 Well, I think.

Speaker 12 Do you fight and do you like push your causes?

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 12 So you're on this side of the debate. Nobody here, I haven't heard you, Matt, say, well, Donald Trump won, so now I'm going to become a devotee of Donald Trump or his coalition.

Speaker 17 And I'm not going to become a devotee of the Democrats or their coalition.

Speaker 16 I think one of the ways of thinking about this, you brought up sort of like, what is the role for people who are editing political magazines or who are hyper-focused on this stuff, as all of us are in some way or another.

Speaker 16 I, being of a more libertarian mindset, don't like to tell people what their role should be. But I would like to defend my own, which is to say that it is journalistic.
I find

Speaker 16 you have been saying that libertarians are, and like reason itself is sort of a default right wing.

Speaker 16 I, like Nick, just reject that. I don't come from that.
That's not where...

Speaker 17 I said, you live in the tribal space of the right.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I don't.

Speaker 16 I live in fucking Brooklyn.

Speaker 17 I mean, intellectually, like you're people.

Speaker 16 But no, intellectually as well. You know, I wrote a book in 2008.
You know, there's a safe election to be on the right.

Speaker 16 I wrote a book called, or the magazine cover for a reason was Be Afraid of President McCain, was what my contribution to that.

Speaker 16 As someone who's interested both in ideas and for having a sense of protection similar to yours in one sense, like citizens should

Speaker 16 engage in self-defense against the people who would use power against us or in our name.

Speaker 16 So that exploration for me is done best if I am open to everyone's experience and I am not inhabiting the role of telling people who they should vote for.

Speaker 16 I'm very happy, and Reason has done this forever since 2004. We're like the only publication who does it.
We go through who the staffers are voting for, all their terrible votes.

Speaker 13 I love that article. It's

Speaker 13 like I voted for my asset dealer.

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 13 I'm voting for Cornell West.

Speaker 12 You know, that was the one vote I didn't waste.

Speaker 16 Vermin Supreme all the way down.

Speaker 11 In a way, it is picking a side.

Speaker 16 But there is some role to be had when you don't lose your mind all the time in

Speaker 16 partisan politics and the hysterias thereof. You can keep your wits about you and describe the actual threats as opposed to the imagined threats.
And the actual threats many times are worse. But

Speaker 16 the way that a lot of journalists, let alone people who are in opinion journalism, have reacted by sort of shrieking, they have dulled the ability to drill down into the things that are particularly threat level from Donald Trump.

Speaker 16 So I think there is a tactical advantage in having some amount of kind of comportmental neutrality as opposed to like telling people who they should vote for.

Speaker 13 Sometimes the times call for shrieking.

Speaker 13 Sometimes the times call for shrieking.

Speaker 13 I don't know why shrieking is necessarily a pejorative. I think that there are a lot of very dangerous things that are happening.

Speaker 13 I feel like I can both shriek and keep my wits about me at the same time. And

Speaker 13 there are some very, very real and serious threats that face us over the next four years. And

Speaker 13 if we get that, I think that we should think about them clearly.

Speaker 16 We can shriek and have our wits about us at the same time with the absinthe next door, I think, after the

Speaker 11 yeah, I'm voting for my absinthe dealer, not my acid dealer, as a cocktail guy. So, all right, let's let's move on to one final bit here

Speaker 11 for some crosstalk.

Speaker 11 I want you guys to talk about your insults to each other.

Speaker 11 Right, so

Speaker 11 Welch, you basically just said that these folks are kind of hysterical and kind of nutty, and you guys have consistently implied that libertarians are childish. So, are libertarians childish?

Speaker 11 Are you hysterical and way over the top?

Speaker 17 I believe America is underreacting to the threat of Donald Trump. Deeply Deeply underreacting.

Speaker 17 And I don't know what you mean by extinction level event. Like, does he have to nuke everything before we react? Or, or could he just refuse to accept the results of an election and do violence?

Speaker 17 Not like verbal violence, like the left kind of talks about. Not hate speech, like actually try to overturn an election.
Is that not enough? Yeah, I would.

Speaker 13 I would have thought absolutely.

Speaker 12 I would have thought that was a disqualifying action by Donald Trump.

Speaker 13 Okay, I would have thought

Speaker 12 the majority or the plurality

Speaker 13 that was a key part of the effort then, because that was a proactor.

Speaker 12 No, no, no. But what I'm saying is, like, you know, he left.

Speaker 12 He left office. He left office.

Speaker 12 You know, pathetically, he can't admit that he lost in 2020, but he left office and he didn't glue keyboard, you know, keyboard letters down and things like that.

Speaker 13 But

Speaker 13 just won.

Speaker 12 But he just won again in a fair and open election.

Speaker 17 Sure. And nobody, you don't see the Democrats being like,

Speaker 17 oh, well, no, it's, you know, this was stolen.

Speaker 12 Yeah. So what's your point?

Speaker 13 Point is that there's sometimes things that are worse than other things, and you can observe them directly and decide what to do. And do threats assessments and say.
What do you do now?

Speaker 12 Well, do you keep talking about how it's really a shame that Donald Trump won in the first place and then

Speaker 13 won in the second place? So here's something that I would do now in front of of this audience. I'd say, look,

Speaker 13 we have a threat in front of us, and that is Cash Patel running the FBI. I think he's probably the most dangerous pick that is out there.

Speaker 13 He's certainly not up to the task.

Speaker 13 He's not up to the task, but it's also. Not up to the task.
That sounds exactly the right.

Speaker 17 Exactly how I describe it.

Speaker 13 He was a key member of the attempt to overturn the election. He's demonstrated that he wants to act with vengeance against Donald Trump's foes.
He said so in the book.

Speaker 13 That goes against fundamentally against people's freedoms. And look, there are libertarians in the Senate right now.
Rand Paul, people should be saying, you should, you have to choose.

Speaker 13 You have to pick a side. Do you think that Cash Patel should be the FBI director of this country or not?

Speaker 13 I would think that a magazine that would supposedly, I would assume, would have some influence over the one libertarian senator might want to make some suggestions.

Speaker 13 Do you think that we want to pick a side here? That person is, so I think that they're proactive.

Speaker 16 I highly recommend reading Reasons Jacob Solomon who's written written three pieces about Cash Matte over the last week, going into at some meticulous detail all of these criticisms.

Speaker 12 You know, the question isn't what we should be doing, because we know what we're doing.

Speaker 12 We're fighting to limit the size, scope, and spending of government at every point, at every election, in every policy choice. What are you guys doing?

Speaker 12 And because you chose to be so anti-Trump in a particular way that you don't have any leverage with any.

Speaker 17 Oh, yeah, this is my favorite thing that you said was when you accused us of not having influence, says the libertarian.

Speaker 13 Oh, my God, Sickbird, bro. I have been influenced by the brain.

Speaker 12 I'm living my best life.

Speaker 13 So thank you.

Speaker 11 Okay, so we've got a whole bunch of really powerful Washington influencers up here. That's what we've established.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 11 Everyone on this stage is incredibly important, and that's why we are going to move on to our next segment, which is incredibly important and incredibly serious.

Speaker 11 This is a big debate, like with real important issues, but it's also a reason debate. So maybe we're going to approach this in a little bit of a different way.

Speaker 11 We have asked each of our debaters to pick something, not a side, but a prop, and to make their case via a prop, something that they can show you that they believe makes their case.

Speaker 11 And they're going to get just 90 seconds to do it. It's basically going to be a TikTok video into their phone, except you are the phone.

Speaker 11 We are going to start with Nick Gillespie, who's going to go up to the podium and we're going to find out what his prop is. I have no idea what's going to happen here.

Speaker 13 Yeah, it's a very important

Speaker 13 thing.

Speaker 11 And I'm not sure Nick does either.

Speaker 12 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 13 Do we have a video to start?

Speaker 13 Please

Speaker 13 hit the video. This is Bank 2004.
Your host, Jim Blair.

Speaker 16 Welcome to the Cable Access Televised Debate between a giant douche and a turf sandwich.

Speaker 16 We'll start with giant douche.

Speaker 16 Let's make our voice in place.

Speaker 16 We've been given the right to choose between a douche and a tin.

Speaker 16 It's democracy in action,

Speaker 16 but you need to the tin.

Speaker 16 We'll pick that turf to the douche,

Speaker 12 So that's from a

Speaker 12 prophecy from a 2004 South Park episode. The question, we know that we are always choosing between giant douches and turd sandwiches.
The question is, how do we get to something better than that?

Speaker 12 And what I would argue is by breaking free and showing the political parties that are shrinking in mind share and market share.

Speaker 12 In the latest Gallup poll, 30% of people called themselves Republican, 26% called themselves Democrat, 42% called themselves Independent.

Speaker 12 We need to show our independence in order to get out of this scenario where we are constantly just voting for either a giant douche or a turd sandwich. Thank you very much.

Speaker 13 Sarah Longwell.

Speaker 13 Tim? Brepp in Colorado.

Speaker 13 Sarah Longwell, do you have have a prop?

Speaker 13 Oh, I see where this is going. Sarah's just bringing heat tonight.

Speaker 17 I don't know if you guys recognize these.

Speaker 17 They're little pocket constitutions.

Speaker 17 And here's the thing. On the back, it says the Cato Institute, which is a preeminent libertarian think tank.
And now, if, like me, you moved in the libertarian-ish movement

Speaker 17 or the center-right,

Speaker 17 here in DC, they mail you one of these like every year.

Speaker 17 I mean, and I just grabbed the first four I had because I got like 12 because the libertarians been sending me pocket constitutions since I was a kid out here.

Speaker 17 And I watched and this is so funny next clip.

Speaker 17 It's about 2004 when that clip made sense because now we're talking about a shit sandwich with glass and arsenic in it versus like chicken that's not that good, right? That's the choice.

Speaker 17 And so I don't know. I think a sentient being can make that distinction, number one.

Speaker 17 Number two, to have people so devoted to the Constitution that they mail you this thing and me liking it so much I kept them all only to have Donald Trump come in and they went

Speaker 16 Matt Welch what's your prop you have 90 seconds is it a water bottle let's see we're also using audio visuals here

Speaker 16 Garcon

Speaker 16 This is from, so Sarah was talking about the importance of making good decisions as a publisher and editor. This is, I think, the bulwark.
I've heard of this.

Speaker 16 I'll read it for those in the cheap seats here. It says, what unites Elon Musk and the United Healthcare CEO

Speaker 16 is their belief that laws do not apply to them. Unquote, there's a class warfare, populism out there waiting for someone to harness it.

Speaker 12 What the actual fuck is that?

Speaker 16 It's sort of a rhetorical question. What that is, is your brain on brain rot politics.
This is when you're doing either trolling out there trying to get clicks successfully,

Speaker 16 whether they hate clicks or love clicks,

Speaker 16 or Jonathan Last actually believes that there is a useful comparison between Brian Thompson and Elon Musk, because we don't like Elon Musk now. Brian Thompson is dead is very difficult.

Speaker 16 I only got to the paywall pardon. I couldn't go further afterwards.
This is what happens to people when you get into a life and death struggle about politics in every breath.

Speaker 16 Has Elon Musk to show someone here, has he gotten smarter since he's decided to get into politics? No. Has Rod Reiner gotten smarter since he's gotten more involved in politics? No.

Speaker 16 This is where people go. They get into this very oppo-research type of of mentality, and it leads you to some dark and morally kind of cretiness places.

Speaker 11 Tim Miller, you have a bag.

Speaker 13 I do have a bag.

Speaker 13 Do we want to know what's in that bag? You're about to find out. Who's hungry? Who's the hungriest person out here? All right.
Come on up here, sir. Come on up here, sir.

Speaker 13 Come join us.

Speaker 13 Come join us up here on stage.

Speaker 13 Can we get him upstairs?

Speaker 13 Let's let him stand right there, actually. That's much easier.
Here you go. I would like you to hold this.

Speaker 13 He's got a Sarah's always right sticker.

Speaker 13 I should have picked one of the reason people.

Speaker 11 I don't believe in health inspectors, but I do hope that one approved this.

Speaker 13 Here we go.

Speaker 13 I've got two items for you here. I've got this chicken Vienna sausage can.
It expired in 2022.

Speaker 13 I bought it at the corner store, and it's got chicken broth in it. I've also got these peanut butter crackers.
Not great, Kind of generic peanut butter crackers.

Speaker 13 Also, some really yummy cookies over here. And they might be pot cookies.
We'll see.

Speaker 13 So you have an option here. We're going to vote.

Speaker 13 You can choose between the crackers or the chicken Vienna sausage that's expired. Or, or,

Speaker 13 could I interest you in the pot cookies? But the crowd gets to decide which one of these you have to eat. Ooh.

Speaker 11 That could be fun. That could be fun.

Speaker 13 That's kind of interesting, right? It's like, I don't don't have to choose. I get to have a cookie.
But then everybody else gets to decide what I want.

Speaker 13 Which one, what would you like to go with, sir? I'd like to choose. Okay, what would you like to choose? The crackers.
Congratulations.

Speaker 13 Thank you very much.

Speaker 13 The good news is.

Speaker 13 The good news is I'd like to give Peter Suderman the Vienna sausage. Oh, thank you.

Speaker 11 There you go. I will not be eating these on stage, but I will be putting them in an old-fashioned later.
Okay, so

Speaker 11 this, maybe a martini.

Speaker 11 They're super great when you just put weird shit in them. Okay, so this next segment, we are going to bring the audience into the equation.

Speaker 11 Actually, so you got there first, right? So

Speaker 11 if you have a question for our debaters, line up in the middle right here. We've got a microphone.
You have to come up. You have to come up and speak your question into the microphone.

Speaker 12 Can I just ask, is anybody going to get those cookies?

Speaker 13 We'll see how you behave. Not you, Nick.
We'll see how you behave, Nick. We'll see how you behave.
All right, all right.

Speaker 12 I see how it's going to be.

Speaker 11 All right,

Speaker 11 let's start with some audience questions here.

Speaker 21 Sure. My question for the bulwark is, would you change your position if our choice in November had been the South Park choice of Trump versus Biden?

Speaker 21 My question for reason is, would you change your position if the LP was a viable political party capable of winning?

Speaker 13 Okay, start with a bulwark.

Speaker 12 Well, now you're just in the

Speaker 12 range of total fantasy and speculation.

Speaker 13 I'll answer very briefly. I would not have changed my position.

Speaker 13 My loathing and contempt for the selfishness of the current president of the United States, frankly, has only cost us subscribers to the ball,

Speaker 13 usually gets people throwing tomatoes at me. But he still would have been vastly preferable to Donald Trump for all the reasons that Sarah Longwell laid out, and he had a capable vice president.

Speaker 16 If the world's dreamiest libertarian, if Javier Millet comes down here, he's the current world's dreamiest libertarian,

Speaker 16 I would be enthusiastic to vote for him. I would probably write nice things about him and I would not take a side because I'm a journalist.
I don't take sides.

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Speaker 13 Next question.

Speaker 13 How would that work?

Speaker 13 Can I ask a quick follow-up? How would you enthusiastically support and and write about somebody that you

Speaker 13 support?

Speaker 16 Didn't say support.

Speaker 16 I would be interested in writing about him. I would cheer him along, but it's like,

Speaker 13 I am not telling people to Javier Millay versus Bernie, you would not choose a side in that.

Speaker 12 No, but when Javier Millay did something stupid, you would point it out.

Speaker 17 Okay, but is that the knock on us? Because we, I mean, anybody who listens to the bullwork will tell me, they'll tell you, we do plenty of knocking on Democrats when they do something stupid.

Speaker 17 It's the deepest theme after Donald Trump is definitely very bad.

Speaker 11 I appreciate how this has become a kind of joint editorial meeting. Let's get to

Speaker 11 that.

Speaker 13 That's all over those, right?

Speaker 11 That's why we got into this job is to have editorial meetings. Let's have another audience question.
Hey, what's up?

Speaker 12 I'm trying to reconcile the thought of

Speaker 11 you don't have to choose a side, but I think I don't remember if it was, I'm assuming it was Nick, was kind of saying you should stand on your principles, right?

Speaker 11 Like reason, free marines, free markets. To me, that's, I feel like this rhymes with choosing a side.

Speaker 11 And so I guess, is there some way to reconcile like standing on principles and choosing a side?

Speaker 11 Because I feel like the bulwark, I'm more of a reasoned person, but you know, from what I've heard on stage, that the bulwark is saying, well, we have principles. These principles lead us to,

Speaker 15 I don't know much about you, never Trump.

Speaker 11 So I guess, is there some reconciliation made between these two ideas? Don't your principles pull you to a side?

Speaker 11 Is the question.

Speaker 13 Matt, Nick?

Speaker 13 I think you're stroking out. No, I'm not.
I do. Don't really understand the question.

Speaker 13 Reason dial is.

Speaker 11 Is that the answer? Because we can go on. We've got a lot of questions here.

Speaker 13 We can get out. All right, stroking out.

Speaker 13 I'm so annoyed that I hadn't seen Michael Steele when I called a person up here for a prop. I wanted to get you.
I wanted to get you some of that vana sausage. Yeah.

Speaker 13 I'll share. Hello.

Speaker 22 I have the privilege, I guess, of being a leader of our local citizens association where there are no parties, there are no sides.

Speaker 22 And every time an issue comes up, we have to talk about it this way, that way, round and round, more meetings, more meetings. Kind of, I guess it's a Loya Jurga style

Speaker 22 government. So, how would the reason people, how would you have run the 2020 presidential election in your best life?

Speaker 13 Oh my God.

Speaker 13 Would the presidential election have happened in your best life? Absolutely.

Speaker 13 I mean,

Speaker 16 that is such an impossible to imagine thing.

Speaker 22 And I just don't understand the difference between we're going to organize ourselves. There's going to be parties.
They're not great. We're going to have to choose one of the other.

Speaker 13 I'm happy.

Speaker 23 There is no organization.

Speaker 22 There are no parties. We're all going to do what we want to do.

Speaker 16 I like the sound of your meetings, except for the part where there was meetings in them. Everything else sounds really great.

Speaker 22 So So we're just going to have tribal warfare.

Speaker 13 No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 22 That's the way we're going to decide.

Speaker 16 No,

Speaker 16 there are political parties. There should be political parties, and I should not join any of them.

Speaker 16 That is

Speaker 16 been my view my entire life.

Speaker 22 So you, again, will just be left with what everybody else mans up and decides.

Speaker 23 You're going to live with it.

Speaker 16 Well, again, I live in this case in Brooklyn, New York. So I can vote, and I do very vociferously as much as I can.
And I even sometimes talk locally, even sometimes at those types of meetings.

Speaker 16 And my vote doesn't really move the needle on anything because Democrats are 95% of my neighborhood.

Speaker 16 But I vote and I try and I do whatever I do. But I'm not a member of a party.

Speaker 16 And I don't think that it is, I think it's perfectly fine to not be a member of a party, to not have a natural inclination to join one, to sit on your hands while your own party does things that are against your deeply held beliefs, which a lot of people who work in professional politics do.

Speaker 16 Oftentimes, people who worked in Republican politics for a long time sat on their hands when there was a gay marriage debate that Sarah Longwell was talking about earlier.

Speaker 16 That they just sort of, even though they wanted this to happen, we're not going to talk about it. I want to avoid that.
I want to, Reason has been in favor of gay marriage since it existed in 1968.

Speaker 16 I think our first editorial was in 1971 on the issue. I find it more potent to be

Speaker 16 talking about those ideas and those policies without worrying, without calculating whose team I am on or I am not. And therefore, my voice is not going to be silenced for even a little bit.

Speaker 16 I'm not going to hesitate. I'm going to be happy to talk to people who support those things, happy to criticize people who don't.
And then on the next issue, we'll change teams again.

Speaker 16 It's not until you're going to be able to do that.

Speaker 22 We'll go from side to side based upon what you're doing.

Speaker 17 Issue to issue, yes.

Speaker 13 Okay. Thank you.

Speaker 13 We have another question. I would have traded Sarah for her.
And I know that was an option. Aya, hi.
I've got a question. She was good.
She nailed them to the wall.

Speaker 24 I've got a question for the you don't have to pick a politics side.

Speaker 24 I might be misunderstanding the proposition, but for those average Americans who are not civil rights leaders or musicians or editors of a publication or a think tank,

Speaker 24 by not joining a political party or registering as a Democrat or Republican in the primary process, are you not actively diminishing your ability to have a say in in politics in your local community?

Speaker 24 And if joining a Democrat, becoming a registered Democrat or Republican is somehow not peaking aside,

Speaker 24 how is it not picking aside? And are you not actively contributing to diminishing your own say in politics?

Speaker 12 That sounds like a rush lyric expanded into a

Speaker 12 bigger thing. No, I don't, you know, first off, we are talking about this explicitly only in terms of politics, which is a big problem.

Speaker 12 I know when I meet somebody, if they define themselves, if you say, who are you? What are you interested in?

Speaker 12 And they say, I am a Democrat or I am a Republican in the top three, you know you're in the wrong conversation.

Speaker 12 We need to get away from politics to the greatest degree possible, but you're saying like you need to pick a party and then work exclusively through that.

Speaker 12 That just is a bad way to organize your life, I would argue.

Speaker 12 And it might mean I don't have as much say in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, but I still write and I still vote and I still do things that will give me a voice and an ability to express myself and hopefully have some impact on what happens in my communities.

Speaker 12 If I may,

Speaker 12 just to interrupt Matt mostly, you know, when you look at issues that matter, things like gay marriage, things like marijuana, or ending the drug war and incarceration of people, school choice and things like that, these things operate at a pre-partisan level.

Speaker 12 And when they become successful and when they become effective, civil rights movement is certainly like this. They are either pre-partisan or trans-partisan or non-partisan.

Speaker 12 And those are the things that change things.

Speaker 13 Not the civil rights movement was non-partisan. Yeah.
I mean, not in these states, that would have been news to MLK and George Wallace that they weren't picking the side. They weren't sides on that.

Speaker 13 Like, sure, back then, the parties. Wait, wait, wait.
Back then, the parties were not sorted the way the parties are now.

Speaker 13 So there were people with, there were pro-civil rights people and anti-civil rights people on both parties, but that doesn't mean that there weren't obvious sides between

Speaker 13 Northern Republicans and Northern Democrats.

Speaker 13 Well, they weren't partisan because you're in different partisan times, but people chose a side. It wasn't like Martin Luther King was like, oh, I'm still neutral on neutral on this one.

Speaker 12 Tim, as I said in my opening remarks, it's you don't have to choose a particular party. You stand on policy and on principles.
But if

Speaker 13 there were pro-civil rights candidates and anti-civil rights running for office, they might have been in different parties in different states, but

Speaker 13 there were people who were for civil rights, and then they were running against people who were against civil rights. So Martin Luther King had a side in those races.
Yes, exactly.

Speaker 11 Okay, I think we've got a bunch of exactlies here and a long, long line of people who want to ask questions.

Speaker 25 Well, I feel bad because everyone's asking the reason side here, but I have another question for the reason side.

Speaker 11 But just addresses

Speaker 13 that, I wish I had a cigarette up here while I was listening to them.

Speaker 11 You want a Vienna sausage?

Speaker 13 I hear they're.

Speaker 25 So I understand the view that neither candidate can meet your moral minimum for voting for them.

Speaker 25 What I can't understand, I think, are some of the smartest, most well-informed political journalists in the country on stage right now being unable to say that one of them is probably going to make a better president than the other.

Speaker 26 Like, I can rank the people on stage by who I think is going to make a better president.

Speaker 12 Probably Peter, number one.

Speaker 13 Boo. Yeah.

Speaker 11 Thank you, but I do not accept.

Speaker 25 But so I don't understand being unable, like smartest, most informed, bravest journalist, being unable to say one of these people is going to be a better president than the other.

Speaker 16 I reject the premise of your question. I'm, first of all, not smart.
And second of all, I

Speaker 16 wanted Harris to win, even though I didn't vote for her.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Also, the smartest, most informed people on the stage picked a side hard.

Speaker 13 So just that way.

Speaker 13 Go all that. Next question.

Speaker 11 Do we have one for the bulwark here? I hope.

Speaker 13 I actually do. Okay.

Speaker 15 So, so hello. I'll start by saying, so

Speaker 15 yeah, there are clearly a couple different ways to read this question.

Speaker 15 One, and different questioners have gotten at this, like, there's, you know, you don't don't have to pick a particular partisan side.

Speaker 15 And as more of a bulwark person, I definitely don't agree with that. I think Trump is beyond the pale.

Speaker 15 But there's also, you know, the side that, you know, reason has gotten at that I definitely agree with that, you know, we're ultimately looking toward a brighter policy future and like we're standing on our principles.

Speaker 15 And, you know, certainly you've communicated this that not that

Speaker 15 certainly the Democratic side doesn't have everything exactly right.

Speaker 15 So if I care about something that isn't precisely within the Kamala Harris agenda, maybe I care a lot about draconian zoning policies that are forcing down the supply of housing.

Speaker 15 Certainly, Kamala wanted to build 3 million new houses, and that's great, but I didn't see a super clear plan for how to do that.

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 15 sure, I believe Trump is beyond the pale, but what's your recommendation for someone who is ultimately looking toward a brighter policy?

Speaker 13 Yeah, I've got bad news for you. Life sucks and is filled with bad choices.

Speaker 13 And like, here's the thing, as a former moderate Republican who's now like an independent quasi-Democrat, whatever you want to call me, like,

Speaker 13 I don't foresee any future where there's going to be a candidate that's like, man, I am down the line with Tim. I want permanent daylight savings time.
I'm a Yimby. I really like gay stuff.

Speaker 13 I want to cut red tape. Like, you know, they believe that America has a great role in the world.

Speaker 13 Like, that candidate's not walking through the door. All right.
Like, Jared Polis is pretty good out there, Governor of Colorado, but like, besides that, the candidate's not walking through the door.

Speaker 13 And so, you know, you can still assess

Speaker 13 what is, again, going back to my opening statement, like, which candidate is going to do the best to allow people to live a

Speaker 13 lives of purpose and meaning. Like, that's my North Star.

Speaker 13 And sometimes you can look at them and say, I don't think that there will be a big difference.

Speaker 13 But most of the time, you'll be able to, and you can choose that side. And then you can still advocate for YIMBY housing and whatever else that you do.
And you can agitate the person you voted for.

Speaker 13 They're probably more likely to listen to you if you called them up. You're like, hey, I'm a supporter.
You got to focus on that.

Speaker 12 You know, one of the things is don't think about politics.

Speaker 12 And I guess I could stop right there. But to take it a step further, don't think about politics as, oh, the president gets elected and then they're Caesar and everything, you know, whatever they want.

Speaker 12 When Bill Clinton was elected in 92, he had two years where he got to do whatever he wanted, and he ended up doing such a good job at that that he elected a Republican Congress for the first time in anybody's memory.

Speaker 12 And then what happened was an alchemical kind of reaction or transformation where things ended up working out pretty well. Something like that might happen as well here.

Speaker 12 And this is where, you know, we're talking about all of this in like a great, you know, and implicitly in a great man theory of how the world works. Politics is not that important.

Speaker 12 Donald Trump does not have to be that popular. It might well be that the Republicans actually man up or woman up or whatever and challenge him on certain things.
And if they don't,

Speaker 12 they're going to get kicked to the curb like they did in 2018. So relax a little bit.

Speaker 13 I'm so glad we got a zoning question because that's the thing that actually

Speaker 17 is for the win.

Speaker 11 Zoning. Everybody clap for zoning.
Huge applause. All right.

Speaker 13 Wrap it by a ring.

Speaker 11 We've got time for a couple more questions here.

Speaker 11 Let's move along.

Speaker 14 Hi, I'm Ryan, long-term fan, first-time caller.

Speaker 14 This question will resonate a little bit better with the boomers on the stage, but to quote the rush song Free Will, I'm stroking out, so thank you.

Speaker 14 If you choose not to decide, you've still made a choice. And the arguments that I've heard on this stage tonight essentially boil down to a choice between partisanship and non-partisanship.

Speaker 14 Partisanship is a clearly defined side, but non-partisanship is a bit more blurry.

Speaker 14 So, this question goes out to the bulwark crowd: if a mass defection occurs from both major parties and then proceeds to vote for no one, what side have they chosen?

Speaker 13 I'm not high right now. So could you repeat that?

Speaker 13 Those cookies are still a lot.

Speaker 11 Lots of people decided not to vote.

Speaker 11 Is that in some, is that choosing a side?

Speaker 11 I mean, is that maybe choosing to not choose a side? And

Speaker 11 what are the implications of that?

Speaker 16 How about if in Nevada, none of the above had won, right? Because that's on the bat.

Speaker 13 I mean, I would argue that they've, again, that they've made a choice.

Speaker 13 In this theory, they're choosing to engage, but they're choosing to say, I reject both. Yeah, I mean, I guess I would say that technically that's a choice within the rubric of this conversation.

Speaker 17 But look, every election gives you data that politicians then use to make future choices.

Speaker 17 And so, if suddenly, you know, the vast majority of people were opting out of it, like people would be like, great, well, now there's this huge pool of voters that we need to go get.

Speaker 17 And in fact, right now, right, that's people are looking at this election and thinking, man, there's a lot more non-college working-class voters than there are college-educated suburban voters.

Speaker 17 We better figure out how to fight for them because the other side just beat us. There's you know, Republicans just beat us on that.
So, like, uh, if that happened, you know, we also did count this.

Speaker 13 Actually, I'm sorry, we saw this with undeclared. It took me a second to get the question in my mind.
We just saw this, they chose a side.

Speaker 13 We like there were a bunch of people in the Democratic Party that went out and said, No, I'm not choosing Joe Biden, and that was a choice.

Speaker 11 Uh, next question:

Speaker 11 You might take a button as well.

Speaker 13 Um,

Speaker 27 uh, hey, folks, So, not that anyone gives a shit, but I think one of the interesting background I

Speaker 13 care a lot.

Speaker 18 We care a lot.

Speaker 27 Well, okay. Well, I don't, you know, you can pretend that.
But anyway, no, but

Speaker 27 seriously, just to give the context,

Speaker 27 I'm 41, but back when I was 16, and I saw, I don't know if anyone on stage remembers Harry Brown. I saw him speaking,

Speaker 27 libertarian, former presidential candidate. And I was like, oh my my God.
And so I've been like small L Libertarian for a long time. But so my questions are really basic.

Speaker 27 But and I voted for Republicans and Democrats, but I just haven't heard.

Speaker 27 I'm sorry to the bulwark. I have like an addiction problem.

Speaker 27 But but with you all, I really do respect reason, particularly with

Speaker 27 the criminal justice stuff. I'll put that aside.
Anyway, my question is, so basic, just like,

Speaker 27 how are you guys cool with, like, the,

Speaker 27 I'm old enough to remember when like Republicans gave a shit about free trade and also,

Speaker 27 you know, like immigration, just free people who, again, not felons or murderers, like, like going, just how are you guys okay? And, and, and that's how me personally, as a small libertarian,

Speaker 27 I'm just like, I can't, I can't hang.

Speaker 13 How are you guys okay? Yeah, I'm, I'm not okay.

Speaker 12 I mean, this is

Speaker 12 like Matt, I was expecting and kind of hoping for Kamala Harris to win with the Republican Congress to buy us some time to get to a better place.

Speaker 12 Donald Trump's trade policy is idiotic, and the immigration,

Speaker 12 his

Speaker 12 promises to do mass deportations is disgusting and vile. And it's something that you will read a lot about in

Speaker 12 the pages of Reason Magazine, as we did when Obama deported people and when George Bush deported people and things like that. It's just, it's flat out wrong.

Speaker 13 You were hoping Kamala Harris was going to win? Yeah.

Speaker 13 No, no, it's

Speaker 13 not a structure all the time. No, my opinion is RD, but my preference.
Do you think you're followers? Do you think, like, you have a lot of social media followers?

Speaker 12 Absolutely. I said it multiple times in various broadcasts and whatnot that my preferred outcome was that Kamala Harris wins with Republican Congress.

Speaker 27 What about the free trade?

Speaker 13 We have free trade.

Speaker 13 It's bad. Can we talk about free trade? Yes, we can talk about free trade.

Speaker 11 We're going to do that on our podcast and in Reason Magazine. We have time for one more very quick question.
Unfortunately, just one more. We are on a clock.

Speaker 20 Okay, my question is, having grown up around a lot of libertarians in college, they seem to be all the wealthy kids. So how do poor people be libertarians?

Speaker 20 They can't isolate themselves with wealth, and they have to pick a side.

Speaker 20 You know, a lot of the voters in this election voted for Trump because they couldn't afford eggs and they couldn't afford to put food on the table.

Speaker 20 While I am totally against Trump because I worked for Congress on January 6th, I understand the idea that you can't afford food. So how do poor people be libertarian?

Speaker 16 Same way rich people are libertarian. They just decide to become libertarian.
I mean, it's a set of ideas and beliefs about policy. It's also, you know, marginal on some level.

Speaker 16 Libertarians are never a huge part of the electorate. But one of the things, stories that libertarians like to tell, and Republicans back when they used to talk about this stuff,

Speaker 16 back when these guys were Republicans,

Speaker 16 is that free trade, to go back to the last question, has lifted more people out of extreme poverty over the last 35 years than anyone has ever seen in the history of the world.

Speaker 16 And that is an unbarnished, great thing that we don't talk about nearly enough.

Speaker 16 And so

Speaker 16 liberal ideas, meaning the classical liberal ideas, have been the best poverty eradication program ever. So I don't see any

Speaker 12 conflict in that. And just as a quick follow-up, I'm a libertarian because

Speaker 13 I grew up lower middle class, not in spite of that.

Speaker 12 I think capitalism and free markets and limited government gives you the most opportunity to actually advance in the world.

Speaker 12 It also creates a market full of innovation so that suddenly food is unbelievably cheap, even relatively speaking during terms of high inflation. But

Speaker 12 I think that the argument that libertarianism is simply

Speaker 12 the province of upper middle class people who have never really had to think about stuff is just empirically wrong. And it's certainly wrong in my case.

Speaker 11 Okay, so thank you all for those excellent questions.

Speaker 11 I apologize to the people who did not get get to ask questions, but all of our debaters will be at the bar afterwards. There is an after party.

Speaker 11 So now we are going to move into our final segment before we get to that party, before the drinking really starts. And this is just going to be closing statements.

Speaker 11 Each side, each person, excuse me, will have two minutes to make a final case. And

Speaker 11 we are going to start with reason. Is that Matt Welch?

Speaker 11 Yeah, Matt Welch is going to start.

Speaker 16 So I'm going to leave you with one or two stories, bedtime stories. One is about a

Speaker 16 very successful billionaire, one of the most successful billionaires in the country, who fashioned himself as a philanthropist, which he was and is,

Speaker 16 and also somewhat of a philosopher, thinking a lot about

Speaker 16 Austrian economics and kind of big ideas. He even published kind of a book of his own, Sense of Philosophy.
And he had been a big,

Speaker 16 you know, multi-multi tens of millions philanthropist in

Speaker 16 policy causes, but had long said that I don't want to get into the politics of it.

Speaker 16 I don't want to choose a side in politics because it reduces my effectiveness and I worry that it's going to make me dumber.

Speaker 16 Well, president is elected and the president that he sees as, oh, this could be an extinction level event for American democracy.

Speaker 16 We're going to see the bubble of American supremacy popped and this is a bad thing.

Speaker 16 So he decided suddenly to throw a ton of money into politics to oppose this president, to create mirror institutions on his side that he saw the other side doing so well.

Speaker 16 And the funny thing is, I could be talking about both Charles Koch and George Soros. But for the sake of this, I'm talking about George Soros.
And what did he create? What are these things?

Speaker 16 This very storied intellectual, he really is. theory of reflexivity and all that.
What did he create?

Speaker 16 He created Media Matters of America and he donated tons and tons of money to Democrats for a long time.

Speaker 16 Did he make the world a better place even for his issues that he'd been caring about for a long time? I'm not so persuaded that it made him smarter.

Speaker 16 I think it actually made him dumber and it made his activities less interesting. Last story, very short, is there once was a badly governed city called New York.
People were mad.

Speaker 16 They thought, we need to get Republican, we need to get Democrats out here. I'm just going to back whatever Republican is going to have an R on his or her jersey.
Let's go. Let's do this.

Speaker 16 And that is why we got, for at at least a short little while, a congressman named George Santos. So, that type of thinking is how you get some really, really bad people.
Thank you.

Speaker 11 Tim, closing remarks.

Speaker 13 Thank you guys so much for having me.

Speaker 11 Are you going to show us what's in the bag?

Speaker 13 No, it's just cookies. I've been a little bit of a smartass tonight because I do think some of this is a little silly.
So, I'm going to be earnest for a second

Speaker 13 first.

Speaker 13 And the thing is, like,

Speaker 13 I do like politics.

Speaker 13 Nick is pretty.

Speaker 13 I wish I was as cool as Nick, and I kind of affect not caring about politics sometimes in order to offer that cool, but I'm a model UN dork at heart. Like, I care about politics.

Speaker 13 I care about government. That's why I do this.
That's why I wake up every morning and talk about it every day. That's why I worked on campaigns and volunteered on campaigns.

Speaker 13 So I text my friends about it even when I'm not working. And

Speaker 13 I just think that it's important that we all do the best we can to try to make things better.

Speaker 13 And we're not all going to agree on what that looks like.

Speaker 13 I certainly don't agree, I think, with a lot of even my own podcast listeners about what the best way for government to look would be. But I think that it's really important

Speaker 13 that we try to engage in civic discourse. We try to make our society a little bit better.
We try to protect people's freedoms.

Speaker 13 We try to have a positive influence on the world.

Speaker 13 And I think by having an affected distance from that, you remove the ability to make a difference. You're not going to make a difference every time.

Speaker 13 Sometimes people are going to vote for people you didn't like. And you could argue or act or work or try and people could reject you.

Speaker 13 But luckily, at least for now in this country, you get another opportunity to do it again and again. And I think that right now we're facing a very, very serious time.

Speaker 13 And I hope that the threats are not as serious as I assess them to be, but I worry they are. And I think that this is not a moment to not pick a side.
It is a moment to pick a side.

Speaker 13 And frankly, I think it's absolutely critical that people pick a side and get involved. And I thank you all for having me today.

Speaker 11 Nick Gillespie.

Speaker 12 Thank you all for coming out. And thank you guys for arguing.
We'll continue it later. Thank you, Peter, for organizing this and Matt.

Speaker 13 Whatever.

Speaker 12 So,

Speaker 12 no, but to follow up a bit on what Tim is talking about, it's exactly because I want to make a better world and a world in which we're all more free to live the way we want, talk the way we want, dress the way we want, and get on with our lives outside of politics.

Speaker 12 So, politics is never going to be the be-all and end-all. And societies that suck are the ones that are, where politics is everything.
We want to get rid of that.

Speaker 12 And one of the best ways to do that, you know, in every part of our lives, we're debundling things. How many of you cut your cable cords?

Speaker 12 Because, you know, you don't have to buy $200 worth of channels in order to watch the one or two or three things that you want to watch.

Speaker 12 We're debundling all the time, and it's time we do that with our politics.

Speaker 12 I don't want to join the Republican Party because I want slightly lower taxes, and then that means I also have to vote for a flag-burning amendment.

Speaker 12 I don't want to be part of the Democratic Party because I believe in abortion and reproductive choice, but then that means I have to be against school choice. It's like, no,

Speaker 12 if we continue to play the game where we say, in order to make a difference, in order to matter, in order to be serious about our lives, we have to go whole hog and pick a team in politics.

Speaker 12 We are just going to get bigger, and I'm trying to remember this right now. It's like we're only going to get more giant turds and bigger and bigger douches, or however it works.

Speaker 12 That way, madness lies. And, you know, think about the 21st century, which is kind of mind-numbing that this, you know, is what some of us, or at least people as old as me, dreamed about.

Speaker 12 I was going to be cool in the 21st century. And instead, society gets more and more politicized, and we get worse and worse candidates.
That's not an accident.

Speaker 12 And the way that you can fix that is by not taking partisanship as the be-all and end-all and the summit of how we engage to make a better world. Thanks very much.

Speaker 13 Sarah Longwell.

Speaker 11 Take us home.

Speaker 17 So there's a couple of us up here on stage that were Republicans, and now we talk about why you shouldn't vote for most Republicans.

Speaker 17 And I think that's a pretty nonpartisan thing to do

Speaker 17 because

Speaker 17 you shouldn't pick a team. I agree, where you feel like you have to then be on their side for everything.
That's stupid. That's brain dead.

Speaker 17 But you do have to decide that there are a bunch of ideas that you stand for, that there are values that you stand for, that there are things that really matter, and then you should defend those things.

Speaker 17 And I remember being like in high school

Speaker 17 or college, you know, and teachers would sort of pose the question to you: well, what would you have done during the Holocaust, or what would you have done during the civil rights movement?

Speaker 17 And I've always liked to think that in a time of moral crisis,

Speaker 17 I would understand how to choose between right and wrong, that I would be able to see it clearly.

Speaker 17 And I feel like there has been a lot of people on the right through Donald Trump's tenure that have done whatever they can to obfuscate, to brush away, to downplay the noxious, toxic, soul-destroying force that Donald Trump poses.

Speaker 22 And I want to fight that.

Speaker 17 Yes, what I'm going to do, I'm going to continue to fight that all through. I'm going to continue to fight what Trump's doing.
I'm not going to fight what he says.

Speaker 17 I'm going to fight what he does, but I am going to continue to fight it. And so

Speaker 13 I

Speaker 17 became a conservative and liked libertarians and read Reason magazine and have lots of friends that have gone through Reason all these years because I was on America's side.

Speaker 17 Like I wasn't really on a partisan side. I thought Republicans were better at liking America and defending because everybody kept mailing me those pocket constitutions.

Speaker 17 I thought, surely, these are the guys who want to defend the Constitution.

Speaker 17 But then I watched an entire political movement that said it was committed to ideas lie down for this guy and forfeit their intellectual credibility and not stand up at the moment that it mattered.

Speaker 17 And I will never stop condemning people for that. And so I choose America's side.
That's the side I'm on. And I think you should be too.

Speaker 13 All right.

Speaker 11 So this is now the moment in this this debate when you, the audience, have to pick a side again.

Speaker 11 So you're going to vote a second time.

Speaker 11 And remember, the winner of the debate will not be the team that has the most support or the least support, but instead it will be the team that moved the most people towards their position.

Speaker 11 And so please get out your channel.

Speaker 13 Hold on. Just by choosing to vote, haven't we already won?

Speaker 13 Think about it that way. I don't know.
Bring the guy up with the

Speaker 13 closing arguments are done.

Speaker 11 With the blunt. We can take this up at the bar.
It's time for you all to vote. So get out your phones and vote.
The instructions I hope are on the screen behind me. I think it's just a text message.

Speaker 11 While you're voting, I just want to say thank you so much for coming to this very first edition of Reason Versus. You guys were great.

Speaker 11 Also, thank you so much to the Bulwark and to Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell, to also to Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, my friends and colleagues who came down from New York for this.

Speaker 11 To the Arthur N. Roop Foundation, which provided support for reason for this series.
Okay, let's find out what the results for the initial vote were, right? So we had 30%

Speaker 11 for the resolution you don't have to pick a side in politics, 45% for you do, and 25% undecided.

Speaker 13 Look at all the double haters.

Speaker 11 And now, now we're going to find out what happened after the debate with a second vote.

Speaker 13 I'm going to storm the Capitol

Speaker 13 if you guys pick Nick. I'm going to let you know that.

Speaker 13 I am going to be.

Speaker 11 When we find out, we're going to give a prize here.

Speaker 11 And that prize is going to be delivered by the one and only Andrew Heaton. So we're going to bring him out.

Speaker 13 Going to be at four seasons total landscaping, demanding a a recount.

Speaker 12 The chicken sausage is looking better.

Speaker 11 The whole point was to increase the drama here.

Speaker 13 All right, so there's a

Speaker 13 bulwark is the winner, moving 21% of the audience towards their side.

Speaker 11 You guys win. What do you win?

Speaker 13 Andrew Heat.

Speaker 12 You win, Andrew Heaton.

Speaker 13 You've got a trophy with some balloons, and we win. Getting rid of the skills does he have?

Speaker 17 Why does he get the medal?

Speaker 13 Yeah, take a king off him.

Speaker 11 You guys can divide the prizes however you want.

Speaker 11 One thing the balloons are for is that at the after party, which we're all going to go to very soon, you're going to be able to find out where the bulwark people are because there's going to be big balloons hanging above them.

Speaker 13 All right.

Speaker 13 Do people at Reason have lice? I don't know. I haven't hung out with the libertarians in a while.
Am I concerned about the hair?

Speaker 17 I would like to thank the audience for making good choices.

Speaker 13 Thank you.

Speaker 21 Thank you all so, so much.

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