Trump's War With Iran Is Unjustified and Unpopular

Once again, American forces are bombing Iran, so once again I have to ask What exactly do American voters have to do? to avoid war in the Middle East. Welcome to the Reason Roundtable. This is your weekly libertarian review of news and culture from the editors of Reason Magazine. I'm your host, Peter Suterman, and today I am joined by my colleagues, Catherine Mengu Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt. Happy Monday, everybody, or maybe not so happy if you're

not stoked about a new war of choice in the Middle East. Um so Matt, uh last time Uh we talked about this was in June of last year when Trump bombed Iran. We criticized that. We said uh that uh okay, maybe it's one and done, maybe this is a one-off, but it could lead to more uh right, it's sort of greater consequences.

And people were like, oh look, no, this is this is a Jacksonian thump. That's all it is. This isn't war. This is actually going to prevent war. He obliterated the nuclear facilities. That's what it says on the White House uh website, right? There's this great bit. Iran's nuclear facilities have been obliterated and suggestions otherwise are fake news. June 2025, uh he White House headline. So what happened? Why are we at war now?

Um, I think that the best explanation of the seventy five explanations that President Trump has come up with came in his pre-dawn White Hat speech. Where he said, after reciting a litany of abuses, very real abuses that the Iranian regime has engaged in over the years, including towards Americans, he just said, and we're just not gonna take it anymore. That's right.

Um, he used the phrase imminent threat. No one really believes that there was an imminent threat. He just sort of has to say that because of the war powers. Resolution, kind of sorta. But he doesn't really care about that too much. They've been trotting out a bunch of other things, but it's because.

Uh we're he has decided, and a president has in the United States has a ton of power and discretion to use the military. He has decided that we're not going to take the things that Iran has done for years. which is export its revolution, it's harass people kill Americans. Etc. Um, and he's did this precisely because of the aforementioned bombing raids of last uh June, which basically decimated the uh anti air there was any really anti air capabilities of Iran. And so Iran was weak.

And he d along with uh Benjamin Netanyahu, uh, decided to strike while the enemy was weak and get rid of as much as they think that they can. their nuclear capabilities, their navy, uh, and their ballistic missile systems. So it's a war, a preventive war, preemptory war of choice of opportunity, uh, against someone that has no imminent threat towards us at all. We just felt like we wanted to take care of this problem because the president decided.

I mean uh Trump has said that, you know, they were two weeks away from uh maybe having nuclear capability. This is again in less than a year after they posted, well, we obliterated their nuclear capability. And anybody who says otherwise, fake news, right? So there's all these e excuses and explanations here. But Catherine, um Isn't that in and of itself quite worrying? If you don't have a a reason for going in to a war, then you're not gonna know when it's over.

Like you you how do you have an end game? How do you have a plan for finishing this if you don't have a clear objective? Recent American wars don't seem to have been waged with that thing in mind, like at all. I mean, I I was kind of reflecting on the fact that I think for almost my entire conscious political life Iran has been two weeks away from having an easy.

Like that's how it feels at least to me. Is that like that That's what John Bolton's been saying. That sentence has been said you know, in a not literally in a, you know, very, very regular way for as long as I've been been paying attention to this question and maybe even longer. Um, which makes perfect sense if you think about it from the perspective of every American president has preferred to keep the option open of going to war with Iran at any time.

And uh Trump decided today was the day or this weekend was the weekend. And um I I truly think it's exactly like his tariff policy. Like why did he do this thing? Because he wanted to. Because this is a thing that sounded like the sort of thing that he would like to do. So he did it. My boxes, my tariffs. My war with Iran. Yeah, basically. And you know, I I don't want to minimize like

I'm sure we'll have a chunk in this podcast where we do the thing that every podcast in America is doing this week, which is to note that uh it was you know couldn't have happened to a nicer guy to be totally obliterated by American bombs. Uh we're not mad about his death, but like

If the US government killed the You're talking about the Ayatollah Company was the supreme leader of Iran who was killed in the opening salvo of the airstrikes over the weekend. And and his nearest and dearest. But like if the US government killed everyone that I thought sucked. Um, we would that would be bad foreign policy. Maybe also bad for this podcast. It might be an upgrade.

And uh and certainly bad foreign policy. Um, and anyway, that it was only one small part of the reason. I think the much bigger part of the reason was Trump wanted to do it. Okay, but Trump has been saying that for forever. Since he has been in public life, that he doesn't want to do this. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, literally sold a t-shirt.

That says, no war with Iran. J.D. Vance published a piece in the Wall Street Journal. I don't have the headline quite in front of me, but the headline is something like Trump's greatest foreign policy achievement, no new wars, and yet per axios. No president in the modern era has ordered more military strikes. Against as many different countries as Donald Trump. He's attacked seven different nations. It's not just Iran.

This is a consistent and clear pattern with Trump, who was supposed to be the peace candidate, who ran on, we are absolutely not going to do this. How did we end up in this situation once again, Nick? So uh we don't know, you know, and we talked about this I think last week. We We don't know because Trump did not explain why he didn't do that in the State of the Union. He didn't do that in any kind of address or communication with Congress.

Um, and it's uh deeply troubling. Uh the one thing that we do know or or that seems to be hinted at is that he and Netanyahu had talked about this. back in December. So the timing, you know, while maybe kind of arbitrary, it seems like this plan was in place for a while. We're obviously doing negotiations with Iran. about uh creating a new uh deal, uh new nuclear deal, which Trump uh reneged on uh, you know, when he became president the first time.

Uh to follow up on, you know, I think something that uh Catherine was saying or Peter that you were uh saying, you know, when you go into a country, when you enter a war without any kind of idea of what the mission is. it makes it really hard to figure out when to stop or when to quit or when to pull out. And um, you know, when this happened over the weekend, my first thoughts were to Afghanistan because

Um, you know, Obama famously said Afghanistan compared to Iraq was the good war. And Iraq, you know, we had this long process by which the Bush administration laid out the threat posed by Iraq and then, you know, how we were going to defeat them. That did not work out very well. In Afghanistan, people were like, okay, well, we have to go after bin Laden and Al Qaeda who were being uh, you know, given safe harbour.

in Afghanistan. But I interviewed uh last fall the director of a a great documentary called Bodyguard of Lies, which was about Afghanistan. And the whole point was we never had a clear thought through rationale for why we were in Afghanistan and it started out that we were going there to d to destroy Al Qaeda.

and kill Bin Laden, then it was to stop another nine eleven, then it was to stop Afghanistan from becoming a terrorist haven. Then it was nation building. And that was like around two thousand five. We'd already been there for four years. Then it was counterinsurgency and winning hearts and minds. Then it was preventing the collapse of the country that we had just put together. And then finally it was kind of like

counteracting terrorism while we pulled out. And you look at a war that de goes on for decades. Um, you know, the Afghanistan experience here is really important because it lays out exactly what happens when you have no idea why you entered a war, how things build on themselves, they create a momentum.

Um, and you know, we really need to figure out or Congress needs to demand some clear answers and they may need to pull the plug on this. And, you know, that would be almost uh unthinkable, but it's also something that would make a lot of damn sense. Matt, the best joke I saw on Twitter all weekend I think was It's uh great great thing uh that Congress isn't alive to see this. Yeah.

Which is really sadly exactly correct here. I mean it does seem like there's gonna be a vote on war powers maybe this week, right? Some of this is scheduled. Uh it's not quite that there's gonna be no congressional action. But For those of us who who sort of are opposed to this not just as uh a a war of choice that we didn't need, but also as a severe violation. of the constitutional order and the process that is supposed to happen before America enters war.

What are we supposed to do here? What is the path back to something s more sane? I mean, encouraging your Congress critters to vote. and vote very hard this week is a tentative step. You think about uh Neil Gorsuch's uh concurrence in the Supreme Court case um that uh overruled the emergency tariffing power. Um it's basically a uh a a very like civics lesson for eleven year old. about, you know, the Constitution says that that that legislation

really super duper important. Um, and it was sort of written for Congress, like, hey guys, slap me in the face, snap out of it. Um, and so it takes a bit of that to begin with. I want to uh issue special Condemnation. uh here or for cowardice, uh Chuck Schumer and other Democrats as Matthew Petty was reporting on our site. Um and uh Alyssa Slotkin kind of confirmed when uh we talked to her uh on uh the fifth column podcast Democrats could have voted on this

uh or like could have tried to vote on this last week and kinda decided not to. Let's just sort of kick this can down the road. Trump's gonna do his thing. Maybe we'll talk about it afterwards. It was Democrats who were trying to slow the roll on a vote because they are afraid of having their names associated with a vote, as happened in 2003 in Iraq. Um and they have lost that kind of

uh constitutional architectural will to do a damned thing. Uh Nick mentioned Afghanistan and it's important to point out the Taliban runs Afghanistan. But in addition to that comp, the one I've been looking at today is Libya. Uh Brock, that's a war of choice, a preemptive preventative war of choice. So uh or according to the war powers resolution, you can do something the president can do something when there's you actionable threat. There wasn't, uh, in this case. And so then after sixty days

uh the president can no longer do that without uh congressional or approval. So Congress back then, which was run by the kind of the Tea Party generation of Republicans in the House of Gener uh House of Representatives. Um said, Hey, no, no, you gotta bring him back. He's like, ah, no. And like w didn't respond. Like, you know, new phone who dis.

Um, it was a series of absolutely brazen uh you don't really have that power. We don't really have to talk about it. And even when uh in 2013, when uh we almost went to war with Syria. We've forgotten about it now. Um, uh even all the way up to that, uh Obama at the last minute said, Okay, I I want to get uh Congress's sense of this, so we're gonna have a vote, but I don't need it.

I just kinda want it. Uh because at that time he was waffling and scared and the British uh House of Commons had uh voted against it. But presidents have successively, including and especially uh Democratic presidents, who run as anti war candidates have degraded this constitutional architecture over and over and over again. And what happened in Libya? All of the arguments for Libya, most of them, you can make, uh you can just uh cut control V onto Iran.

They were exporting terror. They were uh developing a nuclear weapon, which they ended up giving out, but they they killed Americans. They did a lot of really horrible things. Their dictator was mowing down dissent and dissidents.

All of that is true. Go read the quotes that we had on our website from twenty eleven from all of this. And people were like, Yeah, we just go and knock them out. Newt Gingris, John McCain, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Hillary Clinton thought it's gonna be easy peasy. Here we go. What happened? We created a failed state through which there was a mass migration into Europe of a bunch of people from uh from uh Libya and from Syria. It helped the creation of ISIL.

and ISIS. Um it was a big problem that led to civil war and then lots of death and destruction. So like let's learn from recent history. Um we're not, but we should try. Reason Magazine, which, you know, foreign policy isn't even our main thing, right? Like we like to cover it well. Matthew Petty is doing a great job, thank God for him. And We did more. to prepare for this possible eventuality and then to greet it immediately with an appropriate response than the US Congress did.

The con there's like various congressmen who are out here tweeting like you better believe when we get back in town next week we are gonna have something to say about this. And it's like You know, we're not the New York Times. We're not, this is not even our main beat, but like we had a piece pre-written. We monitored the developments. We like posted something quickly and then we covered it further. We like.

It's not that hard to have known this was coming, to have prepared for it, to have done your job in the system of this thing. Our job is to tell people about it and to help people think through it, but Congress's job should have been to authorize it. This wasn't a surprise to them. And yet we better you're it's it's very like you're when your father gets home, you're gonna be in trouble. Like i we'll be g we'll we're gonna get to you

Shortly on whether this war is okay. Ridiculous. Something else that's gonna happen shortly is we're gonna come right back with more discussion of this. Well, it's tax season again, and charitable donors all over the country are digging through emails, receipts, and bank statements, and they're trying to reconstruct a year's worth of charitable giving. The good news is there is a better way. Donors Trust is the donor advised fund provider for liberty.

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Okay. So since Matt Welch brings up uh right, they're not they didn't even bother to have it a vote here, um taking it to a vote, right? Uh Obama kind of maybe wanted one, but it's now that's

like that's a decade in the past. We're we're way over that. I think one of the reasons why uh why Trump didn't want to take this to a vote, get a vote in advance, is because that would have required him to make a clear and affirmative case. State the objectives, state the reasoning, and then allow a debate on it. And they didn't want that to happen.

And you can see why they didn't want it to happen, uh, in the polls. The Ipsos poll over the weekend is the first poll that polled after the bombing started, found that only twenty seven percent of Americans support uh the the war in Iran, that is even fewer than the

uh minority that supported the bombing last year. And just they they just didn't want to make the case. They just sort of feel like they have the right to do everything, whatever they want. They don't have to provide a clear reason for it, which is why we get all of these different reasons. Uh just in the past couple of days, uh, we have seen uh the the the aim is freedom for the people of Iran. That's what Trump told the Washington Post.

Maybe we can end it in two or three days, or maybe it's gonna be three or four weeks. That's Axios in the New York Times. Um, Trump said he has three very good choices. for taking control in Iran. Oh wait, actually he told ABC, never mind, those choices are dead. I think it's cause either the United States or Israel killed them.

This does not seem like it is a good plan, Catherine, but it also seems like they didn't it's not just that they didn't make a case. Yeah, there wasn't like a big speech explaining this or announcing it. It's that they made an affirmative opposite case. All of the right, the the Tulsi Gabbard t-shirts, all of these statements that people are circulating on social media from JD Vance, in which Vance just says, we are absolutely not gonna go to war in Iran. Well, guess what? President Trump.

Pete Hegsif. They're using the word war. This is gonna be this is a multi week uh bombing campaign in a foreign country. This is a war. We're at war in Iran and it already looks like it's escalating. What are what are people supposed to do about this? I like How do we how do we respond when our political leaders are just not in any way paying any attention to the polls, to their own campaign promises? Uh, I...

have been wondering many of these questions myself and in fact commissioned a cover story for the next issue of Reason magazine, which you might have heard of. Uh it's a good magazine. Called Who Can Stop the President. It's gonna be Gene Healy writing about the tools that exist and the extent to which they remain to put the brakes on this kind of thing. Because I do think that is

The big question right now. Like is there is there anything to be done? Are there any levers left to pull? I think there are still a few and um and I think This thing obviously can't like it has now happened. We have we have engaged in this kinetic action or war or whatever we are calling it. But um Pete Haggseth and Donald Trump are calling it a war. But it is um As they have also signaled, like it could be over tomorrow or next.

And so I think that is that is the thing on which there is still some potential input from the democratic process, from the courts. um from the polls, from the markets, and uh we will see if any of those tools do any good. Uh, you know, I I um I you know, Matt always does the call your congress critter thing. And I always have mixed feelings about it because on the one hand, um, sometimes that does work, right? Like

It is still true that if your phone your phone line in your congressional office rings a whole bunch of times and it's a a bunch of people saying the same thing, that sometimes the Congress people will bestir themselves to try to respond to that. And on the other hand, They've shown themselves so unwilling to move on this issue for so long that it is hard for me to really imagine a change of heart from Matt Welsh and ten little old ladies on the other end of the Well, you know the other

the other lever which and it's not immediate, but it's, you know, it's elections. And there's a reason why no party has been able to maintain a stable majority or a coalition over time. And it was a big reason you know, uh uh George Bush left office the least popular president in you know recent American history. Um, a big part of that was the uh uh financial crisis, which, you know, he certainly did his part to help along, but a big part of it was the way that he prosecuted

wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and push the Patriot Act through and did not, you know, actually put the funding up to a public vote for a long period of time. People like Dick Cheney and a pension for secrecy certainly helped that along.

The Republicans were already looking pretty weak in the midterm elections. I think you're going to see a real reckoning with this, even even if it turns out that toppling the head of the uh Islamic Republic yields, you know, a flowering of democracy and representative government and limited

you know, uh limited government and free markets and stuff like that, because the process here is really bad. And every once in a while you can luck into a good outcome. I think that's unlikely and it's it's disturbing. Um, but even if it is, people are not gonna forget like this is not a way to run a country. Donald Trump has already, you know, set a record for executive orders in this term. He's acting more and more dictatorially.

Uh, the people in the MAGA coalition, uh, right before this podcast, I was looking at a CNN interview with Mark Twain Mullen, the senator from Oklahoma.

where it's just like, can you explain what we're doing here? And like he could not seeing a guy and clearly, you know, he's a senator, so he already is starting, you know, with a double digit IQ at best. He could not say two sentences in a row that did not completely contradict one another because he knows this is bullshit, both the way it was done and how it fits with his uh, you know, campaign promises and especially Donald Trump's America First.

uh kind of ideology. So Nick is there for a blowout. Nick, is there an argument for this war or this kinetic action or whatever we're gonna call it? That isn't bullshit. And in particular, I'm I sort of Catherine referenced this earlier, but uh but this idea that Khomeini was a bad He just in the past couple of months is reported, these are rumors, it's hard to know the count, but like reportedly has killed 30 something thousand protesters.

In his regime, even before that was happening. This is somebody who has just brutally ruled over an oppressive totalitarian regime for uh, you know, 40 plus years. He's bad. There are people celebrating in the streets in uh Washington, DC, but also, at least according to some videos, which I don't think are fake, uh, in Iran itself. They're saying this is great. We're glad America is here.

Is that a reason to say to maybe think, well, this might work out. Maybe this is even a good idea? Um, those are two very questions. Is it a good idea? Might it work out? It's always good to see a despot. um, you know, uh kicked out of office either, you know, through being killed or being exiled or deposed in some other form. Um, I think the best case that you can make

for this action. And again, the secrecy undermines this. But if in fact This is part of a multi state action against a regional actor that has been one of the major, if not the major exporter of state back terrorism and domestic interference in countries that it didn't belong in. Um, you know, and if this is uh Israel working in concert with Egypt and Jordan and UAE and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. that we're saying enough to Iran's regional in interference.

Um and that this is a way where you're going to see that region take care of itself and create a better uh you know, a better, more peaceful, more representative uh set of governments for itself, that's the best case scenario. And one can hope that has something to do with this, but who knows?

And then you get back to this larger point of, you know, d you know, dropping a bunch of bombs on a country and then thinking that it's fertilizer in there, you know, it's democracy fertilizer and everything's gonna be okay after that. That does not work. Um and it hasn't worked in the past and it's not gonna work now. There's this this

horrific irony though, right? Like we are going to bomb the shit out of a foreign country in order to teach them to not interfere in other countries' business is like a real tough row to hoe. I mean, it's very much like the parents smacking the kid in the back of the head and being like, Don't hit your brother like I don't know why there's so much domestic violence in my commentary today. But the

you know, the idea that this can be a lesson like you cannot teach this lesson in this way. You cannot teach the lesson of mind your own business.

by bomb by bombing a country that has not otherwise could be a bit of a but you can by creating a regional alliance and you know I think Matt and I our differences on NATO may have narrowed somewhat over the years but you know, NATO is something like that where it's like, okay, there's a big bully in your backyard and we're going to create a you know a strategic alliance.

uh where we're in this together to h help prevent stuff. I don't know that any of that pertains to the Middle East, but You know, the Abraham Accords were uh Donald Trump's probab certainly his greatest foreign policy achievement as a president. Um, and to the extent that there is some furtherance of that, that also is predicated upon the US leaving the Middle East, which obviously it is backed in a with a vengeance now. Um, you know, I could see a positive case being made for that.

If I can make a brief uh point about public opinion,'cause I think it's sort of important. The fact we're starting this war with negative uh uh ratings on Um and the start of the war is when it's gonna look the best. Um unless there are unforeseen magic rainbows, uh at the end. And there could be, and I'm rooting for those rainbows. It'd be great. And I'm really happy for me my comrades and and tarongelus who are celebrating on the streets. It's a wonderful release uh of a lot of things.

But um Public opinion in America, um one of the reasons why you get populism to begin with is that there's a wide swath of public opinion that is consistently not even consulted in the prosecution of very important policies. That was true, especially with Afghanistan, also Iraq, uh, and some other issues as well. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in different ways both were able to capitalize in, take advantage of.

the fact that there was popular or populist discontents with people consistently doing un uh popular things as uh as presidents. I'm seeing so many people rehearse these arguments that the weekly standard used to make a lot of and somehow the bulwark It's certainly not the personnel. Um, but uh people are rehearsing these arguments like putting no longer works. Trump today said, uh like I don't look at polls, which is

Abjectly not true. Um, but a lot of people's uh agreeing with that. Like, oh, he shouldn't look at polls, he's doing what's best for the country. Uh we don't have to, you know, check in with Americans. We just need to do what's right. That's what John McCain used to argue all the time.

in two thousand seven, eight, and nine in regards to Iran, among other things. Like why, you know, let's sh why can't we stay? Why can't we have our troops in Iraq uh for another fifty or a hundred years? Uh it kind of doesn't matter. You can't do that. You cannot have American foreign policy

consistently untethered to popular opinion. You have to check in with a country. He didn't do it during his State of the Union address. He didn't do it meaningfully with the Congress, and he hasn't done it since uh launching these attacks. That is a strategic error if your desire is to continue to engage in your foreign policy and you will be punished. And that is, per next point, that's the mechanism, uh, Peter, by which some of this begins to claw back. There will be reproch.

On uh that point, real quick, Matt, just on uh Twitter I I had written something about how, you know, this is a war of choice among other things, and I got like fifteen people being like, when did this war of choice rhetoric start. You know, where were you during Obama and Bush, et cetera? And it's like, yeah, like why don't you go back about twenty five years ago when the US entered two wars of choice

And people started talking about wars of choice as opposed to wars of necessity. Um, the amount of historical amnesia is like just next after. if that is a really bad mis mixed metaphor, I suppose. But it's um you know it is just amazing that we have barely come out of, you know, twenty plus years of terrible, stupid unresponsive foreign policy and now we are right back. It's you know, it's like we're right back to where we were.

Matt, to your point, the populists are revolting, at least a few of them, including your namesake Matt Walt.

Not Matt Matt Welch, who is out there on Twitter saying the reasoning here makes no sense and in fact that this is not obviously good for America. You have Eric Prince, right, the Blackwater guy. Saying maybe this will cause regional destabilization that would be bad and also not in America's interests here. Recall that Blackwater is now officially known as strawberry shortcake.

I think that's gonna be uh that's gonna be the name of the next mission, right? It's gonna be Operation Strawberry Shortcake. But like what do you make, Matt, of Uh your namesake. kind of unusual str unusually strong opposition to Trump here of the kind of the the fact that some MAGA influencers, uh genuinely thought, I think even for understandable reasons, that the one thing that Trump wasn't going to betray them on was war. Because this has been something Trump has been super consistent on.

They thought they had their man in the White House, the J D Vann. who wa you know, has it's not hard to find him on the record saying, Well, we're not gonna do X, Y, and Z

in Iran ever um and doesn't turn out to be true. I think part of that is that you have you've you've always had over the last uh ten years, but kind of accelerating the last five, this attempt by people in the influencer world or just commentary it or whatever to uh create this kind of architecture to backfill the ideological architecture of what MAGA means.

uh as if um that there is a coherent through line to everything and that it it isn't just more sort of following the whimsical notions of where Donald Trump has an enthusiasm, right? Um, it's pretty interesting. It's part of the succession battle of what happens when he starts to amble off the stage. And this will get intensify after twenty twenty six midterms.

will probably be a wipeout for him and he's no longer gonna be around. So people are gonna be jockeying for position and part of that architecture among some people has been a skepticism about US adventurism abroad and also a skepticism that sometimes particular. So you see a lot of this from Tu uh Tucker Carlson, for example, a couple of days just before

um this strike, um he posited that Trump doesn't want to do this. He knows because he's talked to him. Trump doesn't want to do this. So if he ends up doing it, that's because they have gotten to him. So I think there's gonna be a lot of that type of thing going on. Um, I am in my own way. Um, that's you know, you

um uh definitions of that word. Um I'm not normally in league with those people. Uh I am happy to see, because it's just rare in uh Trump-era conservatism, people breaking with him for any reason, even if I don't agree with Just because the the mind lock has been so strong for so long. I think there is a a a sizable block uh among MAGA conservatives who don't like foreign adventurism and think that they're seeing

Um, I don't think that we're gonna be doing a whole lot of nation building, but also uh we don't know. Um and uh is that going to be enough to mollify them? I kind of don't think so, uh precisely because we are edging closer to a midterm some when there's gonna be a

Catherine, I want to ask you a a generational question. You and I are about the same age. And also, uh, I think it was Matt or Nick who said something about, you know, 25 years ago, uh the arguments that were being made at the weekly standard. When you were at the weekly standard, when we were at war with Iraq, and I think that was your magazine to be quite honest.

at that time, right? Uh certainly a lot of people said, well, this is the weekly standards war of choice in Iraq and um you can understand why or some one could understand why here. But there's this other argument that I've seen going around. which is that actually the way that the war in Iraq rolled out created a kind of generational political trauma for elder millennials in particular.

where they're just so scarred by that thing that they don't understand that in fact, you know, we've just been doing like kind of sweep bombing every now and then, like air campaigns where in and they work pretty well. Like we we all just got PTSD, we got one-shotted and gigafried.

By the Iraq war. And like now we don't understand that in fact sometimes, sometimes intervention works. Things have changed, the rules of warfare, the the international geopolitics of all of this. Like, what do you make of that?

You know, I thought you were gonna go the other direction with the like intergenerational trauma narrative and say the war in Iraq was actually just you know, our generation ish-ish, uh, working out the trauma of the first Gulf War and how that went down and that in fact. We uh left our generation. That was just the Bush family. Okay. That was just the Bush family's trauma, but now it's I now it's everyone's trauma.

And uh that in fact uh people who are traumatized seek out uh repetitions and replays of those traumas and in a sort of misguided and pathological attempt to work them out. And so in fact, we are doing the same thing that traumatized us over and over without sufficient self-awareness to realize that we are doing the same thing over and over and it is always going to end the same way until we break the pattern.

That's the version of the trauma story that I would tell. Um and Men would rather go to war in the Middle East than go to therapy. Yes. Like literally, yes. Um, I do think it's interesting that we've gotten this um this like space has opened up between regime change wars and nation building. Like those those phrases used to be kind of used interchangeably.

or in a tightly connected way. And I think that for sure the thing we learned in Iraq was uh we are garbage at nation building and we should not try to do that. But um, you know, we have Hegseth saying, um, this is not a so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change, right? Like that's his quote. But but of course it isn't they kill they literally killed the regime. Like it's definitely a regime change war. They killed the whole regime just you know.

on the face of it, that's literally true. Um, the idea that we're gonna solve the problem of we can't do nation building by just actually murdering everyone in charge and then leaving is not, I don't think, like The solution that Pete Hagzett thinks. All right. When we come back, we are going to solve the problem of answering a listener question. It is, in fact, about regime change wars. We'll be back in just a minute.

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All right, a reminder. We love to answer your questions. If you have a question for us that is short, succinct, pithy, and otherwise not very long, you can email us.

at podcasts at reason.com. That's podcasts at reason.com. Please put the words listener question in your subject line so that I know it's in fact a listener question. This week's listener question comes from Daniel, who writes It seems to me that the purpose of all war is to force a surrender or regime change.

Is a regime change war distinct and or more immoral than other forms or purposes of war? Killing and self-defense, whether done by a person or a government, is within the bounds of my libertarian ideals. If that is generally the case for non-anarchist libertarians, is that limited to responsive action? Can you preemptively strike? If you are certain you will be attacked tomorrow, in a week.

or in a year, and please, please do not fight the hypothetical built into the question that defeats the purpose of the intellectual moral exercise. Uh I don't know if we're gonna be able to do that, Daniel, but we are gonna start with a non anarchist libertarian. Nick, what do you think? Uh, you know, to be honest, I've already forgotten the uh the thing I'm not allowed to dismiss as part of the question, but uh it is very hard to know. when you are going to be attacked in advance.

That's the thing. That's the thing you have to think about. Um I'm, you know. These questions are just kind of dis divorced from reality. Um I think I asked my Sunday school teacher that once. Yeah. That's why I got called. When you go to Catholic school, these are the kinds of questions you ponder on an almost hourly basis. Uh but um you know, the the idea we we have fought in defense of wars before.

Um, and we've we did pretty well in them. You know, World War Two was ultimately a defense of war. Uh we were the ones who were attacked, Germany After Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, we uh Germany declared war on us. And it still took a couple of weeks for the Congress to actually authorize war. That's a pretty good model. It worked then and something like that would work better now. To talk about the difference between regime change versus

whatever. Um, you know, there's you you there are times when it is okay for the US to bomb foreign countries. Um and this is not one of them. And I think it's important to keep that in mind. Um, because when we start talking about hypotheticals as opposed to the case in front of us. we start to lose the you know, the trail of what just happened. And this is a war all of the uh you know, all of the presumptions in for in favor of it that

Iran was going to get a nuclear weapon. Iran was going to uh do some kind of damage to us. Iran was going to do this, Iran was going to do that. None of that has been proven and most of that the administration has already admitted like yeah, that w actually wasn't the case. The way that you just like Fully did the opposite of what this question answer wanted you to do is actually kind of impressive. I will do my best to actually answer it despite not having been named in the question.

And by the way, uh today is Murray Rothbard's 100th birthday, just apropos of nothing, just throwing that out there. Um, but uh I think that the reason that we often say that the only justified war is a war of self defense is because The moment that you get hit by a bomb is the moment that you know with 100% certainty that the enemy was going to attack.

And so in this stipulation, we have that knowledge in advance of being hit by the bomb. And I think that is a war of self-defense. So like i if the question is just to take this hypothetical very seriously, we are a hundred percent sure that we are in danger of being attacked. Can we do something about it? Yes. Of course we can. That is self defense. When the when you see the fist coming at you, you are allowed

I don't know. Right? You have real intelligence. People use that term. It's such a cra they people I mean, this is what Nick is objecting to, is people use that term so loosey-goosey, so garbage that you really do have to be careful. However, I think the regime change. piece of it still you still don't get there, even with this hypothetical, because there is almost always going to be a way to um

protect against or prevent or or otherwise kind of short circuit an attack that doesn't involve messing around in the governance structure of another nation. And so I I still th I still think we don't get to regime change. uh even if we know with total certainty that the threat is um the threat is real. But you but you do get to, you know, you get to you get to start sending bombs. You do get that. Matt, is regime change war worse and uh is preemptive attack sometimes just?

It's uh I I I will associate myself with Catherine's answer to the uh unreal hypothetical. Um uh I d I agree with that too in the in the intellectual and moral thing. The question is whether uh regime change war is distinct uh uh and and more uh immoral. I think it is distinct in that uh than other forms of war um and in the way that we're uh contemplating doing a regime training now or that we did We've done in uh in other places as well. Those wars tend to not be

Um, I think uh, you know, some of your defensive wars are going to be Regit Javis wars as World War Two absolutely was. Uh, and that's fine. The the main dividing line that we're talking about is is this a war of choice?

um to uh where someone who wasn't in in any imminent way about ready to attack to is that going to be justified. That's how that's how this question plays out in the real world. I'm reminded with this um, you know, rule to not question the hypothetical of uh entire debate that happened twenty five years ago that Nick remembers fondly, of uh talking about whether you would allow torture if there was a Oh my god, months of discourse. Thank God we didn't have Twitter back.

A hit television show premised several seasons premised entirely on this question. Well, in in fact it's kind of that the argument was premised on the hit television show. Okay. But anyways, uh people talked about all that time and like, no, no, no, no, don't tell me about hypotheticals and then what happens in the real world? We did the torture.

Um, in regardless of how the hypotheticals and the arguments came. Some of the intellectual arguments I would argue helped soften the way for the administration to adopt torture tactics. Certainly on the right there was

The libertarian right. There was a not small amount of people like, you know what? Yeah, maybe ticking time bombs. So um and then uh good luck looking for instances when we had a ticking time bomb scenario and that the torture produced valuable information as opposed to motivating.

Um very, very difficult. And I think this this runs up against that. Yes, if I know that uh Manhattan is going to be bombed through this window um in a day or a week, a year is a little bit too long for being honest about like that. You don't really know. advance um uh then yeah let's go out and do it if you know but you don't You don't.

Um, so the difference between uh regime change war the w the way that they happen now is that they're from countries that actually are not engaged in active warfare against us. It's a war of choice on our part. to change a regime because we or de decapitate a regime as we did in Venezuela and we might yet just be doing in Iran. Um w uh, you know, the the underlying structures might still have power by the time we're done with Um

I'll associate myself with Catherine's answer too, like the point that the fist is backed up and about to move towards your face. Yes, you can in that case preemptively strike if that is an an option for you. At the same time, the thing that I worry about. Because it's very difficult with even the very best intelligence to know whether someone is about to attack you.

Uh when you say, well, in that case it's okay, what you're doing is you're creating a justification, a kind of legal, political, moral justification that is going to be expanded. that is going to be abused by people uh in power, by people who want an excuse, a reason, uh like s a cover for doing the thing that they wanted to do anyway. And that is what we are seeing with this war in Iran right now is there is no reason for it.

Or there are a bunch of stated reasons for it, some of which are contradictory, because the thing is, Donald Trump wanted to go to war. He didn't have a good reason for doing so, so he's offered up a whole bunch of reasons for going to war. Um, and the more reasons you give people that where you say, this is the okay reason, you can do it this one time this way because of this.

That's gonna mean that you there are that people in power then have more justifications at their disposal for going to war, for torturing people, and for doing awful stuff. And so you really gotta cut. is my feeling on this. Um, and in fact, that is a good setup for our next topic about the other military conflicts that uh was in the news last week.

This is between the Department of Defense or the Department of War, whatever we're supposed to call it now, and the AI company. It's uh I think it's the Department of Peace now. Mm-hmm. They do have that building, right? So the AI company, Anthropic, uh, they make Claude, the Claude chat bot and uh s associated tools. And the Department of Fence of Defense has been uh contracting with them.

um s at least since the Biden administration, to use Claude in classified work. And Claude until very recently was the only one of these AI tools that was um available that was sort of legally allowed for classified work. Uh, the contract that was agreed to by both the Biden and the Trump administrations contained two carve outs. One was no mass surveillance of Americans, and the other was no autonomous weapons. where the decision to kill left humans entirely out of the loop.

And over the past month or so, what we've seen is that the Department of Defense, the Department of War, Pete Hegsith, our secretary of whatever Secretary of Beer, has decided that uh actually we don't want that in there. We want a we want a different contract that says any lawful use. And because Anthropic said no to that, they have now designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk. Which means Uh that if this goes through that no other defense contractor

can do business with anthropic at least on the defense contract. And Pete Hegseth says they might want to expand that to just commercial business entirely. This is the first time that designation has ever been applied publicly to an American company. It seems like It seems like Catherine, this is kind of the Department of Defense is saying if you don't do what we want, we are going to destroy your company.

Yeah. I mean, it's it is wildly disproportionate. Um, this is a relatively minor contract negotiation. It has big stakes, right? Like I actually think this question, um, in particular the first part, uh like Can we use can we use these tools for mass surveillance and who can use them and in what way is probably the question, the public policy question that I'm the most concerned about personally right now. Um and like really of all of them?

Yeah, I think so. Like I think in terms of a thing we can genuinely we could genuinely decide in two radically different ways that will shape the future. Like, you know, I would like to fix entitlements, but like Whatever. That's a morass and we're screwed. And like that I think that is very important issue. That's not happening. I think that's an important issue, but I don't think it's an issue where like actually any real change of path is available to us right now. Whereas the decision what

parts of the federal government can use AI for what thing and especially for surveilling Americans is a genuinely open question and one that matters. So I will say I think this is an important issue, but I think Whether or not it is part of this contract with the DOD is super resolvable. Like we have the DC's entire population is defense subcontractors, basically. Like everyone I know is a defense subcontractor.

So I'm right here. They they all have contracts. They have contracts. There there are thousands and thousands and thousands of contracts with the Department of Defense that exist. They get renegotiated all the time. Renegotiating a contract should not be an apocalyptic event for a company. and being designated as a supply chain risk is an apocalyptic event for a company. The U the US government broadly, but certainly not peak Hegseth.

for crying out loud, um, should not hold the ability to just murder a company in this way. This is very similar to like the SC the FCC pulling a broadcast license. Like it's it is an existential threat that I don't think the state should hold in the first place.

Um, you know, this is this is the libertarian case for limited government because you do not have if you give these kinds of powers, if the if the Department of Defense has its little camo fingers in every single part of the economy, then you cannot have a free market that operates in any kind of meaningful way, you will always have a bottleneck, you will always have a kind of a a killer hiding in there like something like this.

What do you think about that, Nick? I mean there are people who are sort of who are saying that there is a way in which this One dust up between the Department of War and Anthropic represents the total breakdown of American constitutional democracy. As we know it, because functionally it is the government asserting the power to take control of one of, if not the most important.

and powerful technologies and and a giant company worth something like three hundred and fifty, four hundred billion dollars. Um and basically saying, if you don't do what we say in exactly the manner we say, uh constitution be damned, we are going to murder your company. Effectively shut it down. And that's that's not the American system. That's not a free market system. That's not a that's not a free system.

Can I challenge the premise of your question? Uh uh I'm joking. Uh it is a massively disturbing, serious threat for all of the reasons that Catherine laid out. Um the the biggest thing is like if you don't want to work with Anthropic, then cancel the contract. And do it, you know, under the terms of the contract and and pay the fine if you're the if you end up losing the case that you broke the contract for no good reason or for bad faith.

weatherwise or otherwise. Um, but you know, the idea of deeming somebody a supply risk, a supply chain risk, or uh bringing in the Defence Production Act. and trying to take over a company or force them to do your bidding, compelling speech and action and code is kind of speech. Um, we you know, this is of a piece with Donald Trump socialization, like right wing socialization of the economy.

It's a bad idea. It's a bad idea when it is uh, you know, when it relates to Nvidia or Intel and chipmakers. It's a bad idea when it has to do with software. uh companies and AI companies, or with widget companies and everything else. And this is of a piece And this with Trump's whole kind of unbounded role of government in everything, you know, that the government can tell uh Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert, don't make those jokes.

because we will punish the network, you know, that holds your license or we'll block the mergers of the companies that want to get together. This is what is coming into focus as to what the midterm elections are about in the twenty twenty twenty twenty eight presidential election. And if your model Is a Trumpian model that the government gets to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, because the chief executive has an itch.

That he has to scratch, or he has an Epstein Files type scenario that he's got to push off the front page for a while. You are going to lose. You're going to lose big. You're not popular now. And just let's see how low you can go because this. is not something that I think most Americans, even those who hate the left and vote for Trump because he's not the left, et cetera, most people are finding something in the center and it's not a mushy moderate.

Position. It is a classically liberal idea that the government exists to help with a couple of things to keep the country safe. And then get out of the way so that we can live our lives. Matt, is there something ironic about the fact that this this administration has constantly talked up? the threat of authoritarian China and its state capitalism model and yet has also been arguably the most invested in state in a kind of American uh state capitalism. It's e even if it's not a formal system.

Of any president, certainly in my lifetime. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I mean, he I don't think that Trump or the administration or Margaret Large spends a lot of time talking about the communist. aspects of China. logical differentiate differentiation. It's just that they're bad and they cheat and they take advantage of us and they do this X, Y, and Z, some of which or much of which is true. But it's not like, how dare they intervene in the economy?

I don't recall hearing you know Howard Lutnick getting all exercised about that, although maybe I haven't following his Are you not listening to enough Howard Lutnick well? Uh that's the thing. I think they'll say that China is running an un-American system and that they I they are ideologically our enemy and then I'm I really honestly don't see maybe you you know uh drink from a different well, but I don't see a lot of ideological arguments.

Just that they're corrupt, they're big, they're bad, they're nasty. They're successful. They're eating our lunch. There's yeah. They're trying to, you know, buy uh properties along the Panama Canal. We don't like that. Um, so I think it's a little bit different. Uh I just think that w uh all the entire content of this particular episode of the Reason Roundtable and a lot with the Trump administration is just a a reminder that too many people seem to forgot, which is that Power corrupts.

And uh more power corrupts more lead. Um Lord actin in the house. And Because I don't wanna go there has to be something between power and then absolute power, right? I'm talking about the intermediate stage. That once you can like start doing stuff and getting away with it, what do you think as a government, as like You know, you're the most powerful, rich country in the world, uh, arguably definitely the biggest military. You know, you got these buttons you can push.

And you get away with it and then like cool stuff that you wanted to happen happen. What do you think's gonna happen next? You're gonna get like Pete Hegseth doing push ups and shooting four locos and telling you he's gonna use the fucking National Defense Procurement Act on whatever the hell. Um, it's crazy. Uh and we should take a step back, um and remember another uh aphorism, aphorism.

uh, which is when you lie down with dogs, Nicolespie, you get up with fleets. Uh which is a way to say I don't own dogs, Matt Welch. Um I don't either, although I appreciate The dogs own themselves. Uh but uh you My dogs do not own themselves. They own you, yeah. Too much of American life and thankfully not Reason Magazine Foundation or anything to do with Reason ever over the years to is wrapped up with stuff having to do with the federal government. Knock it off.

Don't take the contract. Tell them to get bent. Walk away from it. Um bad things happen because they start dictating terms and Hegzeth starts doing push ups and it's all really p terrible and stupid. Um I understand they have a lot of money and it's they're doing stuff that's be pretty good for your company. Uh but we need the divorce uh between the federal government and academia, between the legal uh establishment between a lot of a lot of sectors of of society and recognize it for a

actual threat. They're going to get bigger and they're going to get more predatory regardless of who wins any federal election. Um and so you need to build protections for it because this is going to You think it's because they're drinking whole milk? It is all the people in the federal government are drinking whole milk and now uh we're at war with Iran.

They're drinking whole milk and then they're going right into the sauna. Like I think there's like a curdling that's happening as much as I think. In the in the jeans. In in full jeans and combat boots or uh you know, construction boots. Very disturbing. Whole milk And not for loco, Matt, because for loco is illegal. Is now illegal thanks to Chuck Schumer.

You gotta drink vodka and Red Bull. Yeah. You gotta drink vodka and Red Bull if you want that fix. Or, you know, an Irish coffee, espresso martini. A Scots Irish coffee among heritage Americans. They really don't want to give anything to the Catholics. All right, this is uh driving me to drink, so let's move on to our final segment.

Cultural recommendations, what we have been watching, reading, otherwise consuming in the cultural sphere. Catherine, do you have one and only one recommendation for us this week? Or do you have three? I object to tyranny everywhere that it is found, around the world. This is not a good idea. Including on this.

Uh private contractual arrangement. I was gonna talk about Spider-Man, but instead I will talk about the fact that I read Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I don't know. I'm a middle-aged white woman and this is what happens, so let's talk about it. Um I

I don't know. It just showed up on my Libby, like my little recommendations or whatever. And I was like, Yeah, I remember this book. And I had just read The New Yorker Profile of Elizabeth Gilbert, who um has fully lost her mind is the implication of the New Yorker profile. She seems to have um, really like the the seeming balance zen self knowledge, self awareness that she comes to at the end of Eat Pray Love.

utterly obliterated by a series of truly chaotic, romantic, and chemical choices uh in subsequent years. But um Wait, what drugs was she doing? All of them. Like truly, truly. I it does seem like that's possible. So is it it's actually love was the drug for her though, right? Right. So it's quite a sad story. She falls in love, she falls in love again, she realizes maybe the falling in love is the real addiction.

Um, but that does not stop her from also getting really addicted to real drugs also. So, um, the but E Pray Love is interesting. It's it's um The New Yorker piece that I just referenced actually makes this point and I think that it's um that it's a really good one.

Every person in America of a certain demographic read this book and thought, like, Oh my God, it's so me. I totally could do uh, you know, a year where I live in Italy and then in Bali or It Italy and then go to the ashram and then and then live in Bali and find myself. But in fact, this is a story of a truly remarkable woman, like a a total outlier human.

who is living at the absolute extremes of kind of um spiritual and emotional existence in a whole bunch and logistical existence in a whole bunch of different ways. Um, and it's it's actually kind of a testament to her power as a writer that she managed to write this book in a way that felt relatable when she is in fact perhaps the least relatable human to have ever written a book. And I say that advisely. Um you've never written a book?

That's right. And you can draw whatever conclusions you want from that. And I never will. Mm. I probably never I almost definitely never will. Life is long. Anyway, um The uh the thing that I offer to you are mostly male listeners is uh if you have a middle-aged lady wife and you haven't read this book, you should maybe do that. Because whatever it is in this book that made every middle aged lady in America go like, Oh my God, it's so me, Eat Pre Love.

Um, that is still alive in them. It is everywhere. And I read this book and I was kind of like, Oh, it's so me and then I was like, No, she's a crazy person. But uh, you know, that's the duality of woman. If you have a middle aged lady in your life, read this. what you think. Report back to me. Can you in thirty seconds or less explain that?

In Spider-Man terms? Yeah. So uh I also re-watched Into the Spider-Verse with my son this weekend. And both Into the Spider-Verse and Eat Pray Love are stories about how you have to accept the things that are interesting and exceptional about yourself.

in order to fully realize your power and also both have a scene where a bolt of blue electricity goes through the main character. So they are basically the same story, but I don't think watching Into the Spider-Verse will help you understand your middle-aged wife. Thank you.

You're welcome. Matt Welch, what do you have for us? Uh speaking of things that are everywhere, I saw a movie about Elvis uh called Epic uh Elvis Presley in concert by uh Baz Lorman, who did the Elvis movie from a couple of years ago, the fictional one. um and that I liked a l uh a lot, uh despite Tom Hanks. Um this is he is a part of that process, he had gotten his hands on a bunch of concert footage um and old like tapes and salt

like storage mines in Nebraska or whatever the hell. And um and so There had been a couple of uh Elvis documentary movies that were kind of won and done in the late 60s and early 70s after his big comeback and the beginning of his Vegas. uh kind of uh eventual degradation. Um and they've been sort of forgotten. And so he found those documentaries, he found all this new footage, and then went to Peter Jackson um uh to do his sound magic as he had done for the Get Back documentary for the Beatles.

and uh found some other stuff of like uh Elvis just sort of like talking to and uh talking about his career. Um and uh puts it in a movie where you basically um see uh semi-documentary style, the the first thirty or so minutes is him rehearsing bits of his career, but most of it is just him performing in like nineteen sixty nine, nineteen seventy and seven.

This is early fat Elvis. He's sweating so much. And uh I saw it in IMAX, which is where it was uh originally released. So you got like 900 foot Elvis who's sweating so much and his eyes are sometimes there and sometimes not. He's got a first a small band who's amazing, just like Elvis's uh uh late career band is fantastic, Ronnie Tut on drums. Um and then the band gets bigger to become a whole Vegas thing, and it's remarkable.

Like this is why IMAX is created, this is why Peter Jackson was created. Um uh it's kind of uh you should it it can be seen in the same kind of thing as the get back thing and also the Summer of uh Soul documentary, which also reclaimed a bunch of old tapes and prettid it up and and made you excited about drums. Uh again, it's in that vein. Uh and it's just like you get uh more more than kind of you

You know, you see pictures or you see footage of Elvis from the fifties, and he's like what he's incredible. Like what what's going on there? Humans can't do that. That's too much energy. Right. Um, see him in 69 and 70, and it's the beginning of the end, uh, but also the the amount of just crazy uh musicianship and singing ability, um band leading, even as he's obviously very wrecked.

We're about about to get wrecked. Um and but just this charisma and what it does to every lady. The best part about the movie is he's just constantly kissing lady fans on the mouth. Just like they come up they're like they're with their husbands or whatever. They're middle aged women who would eat who would dri read re eat pray love in other circumstances and they just they can't. You just the he's got like a head uh

a beam coming out of his forehead and it strikes everyone dumb and they have to kiss him right now. And he's like, Yeah, you do and it's it's great. It is great. I enjoyed it as much as any movie. And this is why you should go to movies. Big Sound, Elvis, kissing ladies, and music. Fantastic. Yeah, that's gonna that's gonna bring the cinema back. It really is. Uh was there a song uh that you had not heard before or a performance that uh rocked your world? Um the

What what the hell is the song called? Uh uh Uh yes, there was there a a couple um uh and it's It it's like a vamp a vamping song where it's just about a woman like picking a a a plant in the Like poke alley it made us poke any salad. Annie salad, poke salad annie. Poke salad annie. He loves that song so much.

There's nothing in the world that he loves. And we see and they have like three or four different performances that they're constantly splicing back from. And he is so much more invested in that song. It's like Brian Wilson and Oh yeah. Shortened bread. Shortened bread. Like that's he, you know, yeah screw Heartbreak Hotel and anything else like that. I am gonna do poke salad Annie and I'm gonna sell it

With every fiber of my being, no matter where I am. If there's nobody here, you know, dance like like Poke Saladowney is. It's fantastic. Uh I'm sorry to derail this, but Matt, there is a uh an Instagram reel of Iggy Pop talking about being trapped with Brian Wilson playing shortly, but Ed Ed Iggy Pop who w w spent much of his adult life clinically insane. It's like I had to get out of that room.

Elvis who also maybe did too many drugs even for a reason. If he had taken a laxative, he'd still be with us. I mean they talk about that quite openly at Graceland. That's part of the big finish of the tour to be quite honest. Where Matt and Nick just like achieved a single mindhood for a minute there. Like that That's what it's like. I I just like people who are listening to this podcast need to understand you hang out with these dudes and that shit just happens and it's quite trouble.

Yeah. Uh Catherine, I said before, I'll I'll go on to my uh recommendation in a second, but what how do you define middle age? And is it different for men and women? Oh, that's a good question. You are middle aged and I am middle aged, Nick, so it must be quite Us may have yeah. So it's like independence in American politics, we're a plurality. A large and growing plurality. Yeah. You know it when you see it. Okay. So uh Peter, I uh I watched uh Corey Feldman versus the World. Uh

Which is a documentary by Marcy Hume that I highly recommend for a wide variety of reasons. And the first is if you have ever wondered how cinema verite gets done, watch this. Um, it is footage from a decade-old tour that Corey and his band The Angels, who were a group of musically challenged, scantily clad women who most of whom ended up

leaving and speaking very poorly of him, uh, go to uh small venues. The biggest one and this Matt, this is another mind melt, uh the biggest one was the coach house at uh San Juan Capistrano. places like Maloney's Bar in Eau Claire, Wisconsin or something like that. Um Corey Feldman is somebody who when I was back in the teen mag game and I hope to get back there someday.

Um, you know, I had interviewed him when he was a teen star, when he was at the height of his fame. Um And it is an amazing portrait of what happens to somebody who achieves a type of celebrity that really isn't available anymore, but you can live on in a broken down version of that because of social media and because of various

advances in technology and distribution channels. Um, and what happens when you take too many drugs, when you marry too many women, when you sleep over at Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch too many nights. Um it's a fantastic portrait of everything that is wrong with celebrity culture in America. And Marcy Hume is just an unbelievably brilliant filmmaker where the the story

starts out um in a kind of kind and generic way. And then you realize as it goes on, she is telling a very specific narrative about what happens when people uh become mega lamia megalomaniacal. Um, and in that sense, I hope that Donald Trump watches this, or at least the people around Donald Trump should watch Corey Feldman versus the world, because, you know, bet on the world and uh bet against Donald Trump. Uh we are three for three for no, but really you can take too many drugs.

Bring us home, Zuderman. Uh well I saw Scream Seven and I wish I'd taken too many drugs before watching it. Uh Scream Seven, uh otherwise known as Scream yet another one. A big takeaway is there's another one. They just keep showing up. It's like uh wars in the Middle East every few years. Another

And uh this is my least favorite of the bunch. Um, and it's um it's a throwback. They sort of rebuilt this movie uh about a year ago because the star of Five and Six um had said some things that uh about Palestinians, uh Jews, uh Just like stuff that maybe uh the studio didn't want to be associated with. Um and it the the original plan for this movie collapsed. So they brought back the writer of the original scream from nineteen ninety six.

Kevin Williamson, who uh co-wrote and directed this one. Um, and it's very, very self-referential in a way that is trying to be clever, but really fails. And mostly it just made me remember what a great movie the original screen. That is just an absolutely killer kind of um no. Uh yep, absolutely killer. Uh

uh deconstruction of the horror genre up until that point. And what I loved about that movie was this movie, it the original scream showed up at a point in the world of horror filmmaking at which horror movies, horror franchises had kind of become choked. They'd kind of become lazy. Audiences went to them and those movies made money, but the audiences went to them because they kind of knew what was gonna happen.

They were always ahead of the film. They knew the formula. They understood exactly how it worked. And it was a sort of a it was a gag, right? Like it was, oh great, this person's gonna get killed now because these two teens. Snuck off to have sex, right? So now now they've got a that's it. That's a death sentence amongst the rules. And so this movie was a movie that also had seen every horror film. And it kind of announced its it's uh it's sort of like a little bit of a little bit of a

It's meta horrendous, like from the very beginning. I mean, it starts with a discussion about favorite scary movies with Drew Barrymore before she gets killed, you know, kind of famously, uh, and then proceeds from there to the point where there is literally a famous monologue announcing the rules. of horror films and then the film proceeds to uh follow every single one of those rules.

But it's just snappy and tense. And Wes Craven is the director of the original Scream, right? He's this is a guy who's been uh a big part of the horror renaissance revival in the 1980s, directed the original Nightmare on Elm Street. And part of what he does is he knows how these things are made.

And so what this movie does, what the original Scream does, is this is a film for for audiences who are always ahead of the film. And it says, hey audiences, we know you're always ahead. We're this time, we're gonna be one step ahead of you. Part of what makes it great is that it's not just a horror film, it is a mystery. It is a kind of locked house murder mystery thriller, uh like in the Agatha Christie mold, with a very small number of characters, uh one of whom or

Well, if you know the ending, maybe more than one of whom uh has to turn out to be the killer. There's a novel solution to it. It's so great, so clever, so crisp. And this one this one doesn't have anything to say about the state of modern horror at all. Instead, what it does is it just comments on itself and on the franchise and is sort of pats itself on the back for being clever.

It's sort of smug and also kind of tedious and it just really doesn't work, but it has also folded in on itself. This franchise no longer has any other external reference points. It's just scream all the way down. And it's really disappointing for a film that like for a film franchise that started out making fun of basically lazy, uh sort of prolonged, too long in the e in the world. Um

Yeah, horror franchises because this is exactly the kind of movie that the original Scream was making fun of. Sadly, I cannot recommend Scream enough. Uh folks. Was Drew Barrymore the one who said anti Semitic and anti-Palestinian things? Tell me it's not Nev Campbell. No, not that who was the actor who uh the name of the actress who who Don't have that in front of me. He really anchored that franchise for a couple of years.

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