And again, just very high level, what's going on in tariff world?

Yeah.

So the thing to note here is that President Trump started his second term by pushing a very aggressive tariff agenda under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEPA.

This was an inferred power that he claimed.

It had never been used under IEPA before, and the statute didn't even mention the word tariff, but he claimed it.

that it authorized the enacting of basically a sweeping revision to the entire tariff schedule of the United States by executive order.

And that's where that famous chart everyone was waving around on Liberation Day was.

Yeah.

Yep.

So you got that.

I view that as kind of like the first salvo that was fired from the new right, the post-liberal right.

And then a few weeks later, Yarvin posts on his own personal blog, basically a lockdown manifesto.

And this thing makes Fauci look like an outright moderate by comparison.

So you read this manifesto, and it basically says the United States, to defeat COVID, needs to adopt a Chinese-style Wuhan, weld people in their apartment buildings and lock the doors, authoritarian lockdown, and even go beyond that.

It basically calls for the permanent social ostracization of anyone that questions lockdowns.

I, you know, I do think this friend enemy distinction, it's as old as politics.

The topping-up process will begin very shortly, and as a gift from Venezuela to the people of the United States." How are you interpreting this?

Well, this is confirming what I think were our worst fears when, uh, Trump toppled the Maduro regime in Venezuela.

Uh, now the Maduro regime I have no love for.

Uh, it was a horrendous, undemocratic, totalitarian regime that had wrecked that country's economy.

But in the aftermath, rather than seeking a democratic transition, uh, to the opposition leader, to the people that actually won the last election and had that stolen from them through, uh, ballot fraud, uh, Trump has instead struck a deal with Delcy Rodriguez, who was Nicolás Maduro's number two.

Uh, and she turns out to be a very corrupt politician, and decided, you know, she's going to, uh, cut a deal with the United States to maintain her position in power.

And the one thing that she had in leverage that she offered was access to Venezuela's oil reserves.

What else can we expect?

But does it actually work? When the Trump administration has put all these tariffs on all these countries in this wide variety of ways they tried to do it, is it even working to increase GDP, to shoot up manufacturing, to increase welfare?

Well, there's the great complication that Vance and Trump and people that are protectionists have because, you know, they espouse tariffs.

The idea there is if we cut off trade, we cut off imports and therefore we eliminate our trade imbalance.

You know, they've been championing this line basically since Liberation Day last year.

But here's a problem.

It misses some basic insights that economists are very well aware of.

When you put a tax on imports, you have basically a factor that plays out that we refer to as the Lerner symmetry theorem or symmetry effects.

This is a feature of both fascist regimes and the USSR.

Yeah.

We don't, uh, by and large.

Uh, this would be wrecking the global economy.

But you see this ulterior agenda, this, this supposed economic multipolarity, it relates to that economic isolationism.

They don't like trade.

They don't like the flow of goods back and forth across borders.

Uh, they don't like the dollar's position in the world, uh, because they s- they think that consumption itself is sinful.

How do, how do, how does the GOP temper this?

So what part of that do you actually reject? The mechanism, the size of the effect, or Vance's conclusion about what government should do about it?

Well, in the Myron paper, and this is the famous Mar-a-Lago Accord paper it's sometimes referred to.

This was Trump's former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors put this out right before he took office for the second term.

And it was basically an argument that we need to rebalance the entire international trade system.

It was a sophisticated dress up of the case for trade protectionism and tariffs.

And the issue with Myron's paper is he mistakes some very basic fundamentals of how trade policy works.

One of the cores of that is that when we put tariffs on goods, goods coming in from abroad, the question is who pays for those tariffs.

What keeps Phil Magness up at night more? Vance questioning the trade-offs of reserve status or the debt, deficits, inflation, and bad governance that could make foreigners stop wanting our money without anybody in Washington attending it?

But what did he mean? Historian and senior fellow with the Independence Institute, Phil Magnus, explains it this way.

Well, it is a very clear expression of an ideal, but it's an ideal rooted in an individual right, that all human beings have a basic dignity and that dignity is not something that government can step in and just take away from them by arbitrary whim.

In fact, it's the other.

It's the reverse of that order.

It's that government itself derives from that order.

individual right of the human being.

The reason that we establish governments is not to extract power from other people, but to protect and preserve our rights.

Should courts simply reflect the beliefs of their own time, or should they sometimes resist them? When, if ever, is it okay to sacrifice equality for the greater good? And do our values become meaningless just because we temporarily wander away from them? To the last question, Phil says no.

Yeah.

But he is a true believer.

And part of this vanguard theory is one of the tasks that the vanguard representative agent has is to educate the masses, to break them out of their false consciousness – And to do that, you have to teach them Marx.

You have to instruct them in Marx.

This is a really interesting insight because it was happened upon by a Marxist historian that's done some of the best work documenting it, Eric Hobsbawm.

He's a British Marxist historian, true believer, truest of true believer.

And he studies.

familiar.

And yet they made a lot of fabricated claims to support that 1619 project, didn't they?

Right, right.

They actually announced this.

They said, we want to displace 1776 as the real founding is 1619.

And it was tied to this injustice of slavery, which is the core argument.

And they made this economic claim that, like, if you use Microsoft Excel in the present day, you are repeating the practices of the slave plantation.

Therefore, capitalism is tainted and therefore discredited.

You know, even having said that, the New York Times was just quietly deleting things that it had originally said without telling its audience we goofed on this?

What

happened? This is Leslie Harris, who's another well-known historian of the American Revolution at Northwestern University.

So top of her field.

She had been asked by The New York Times because when they run journalism, they do fact checkers.

So they got her as the outside expert, as the fact checker, to read Nicole Hannah-Jones' essay.

And she did, and apparently her feedback was, you cannot make this claim that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery.

This just isn't supported in the historical literature.

And the source you're pointing to says

Why do they argue against those? What is their argument against those constraints?

This is most pronounced in Adrian Vermeule's work.

And I guess to get to it, we have to go back about two decades.

He first emerged on the law professor legal academic scene in about the mid 2000s.

He was a former Scalia clerk that lands at Harvard Law School.

And he starts putting out a series of books on executive power in times of emergency.

And what was the emergency? It was 9-11.

Absolutely.

So can you just sort of walk me through that?

Yeah.

S- so Marx is a legend in his own mind and a legend in the mind of a- a very small number of people around him.

Main- mainly Frederick Engels.

Uh, but in his own lifetime, uh, he's basically, like, this obscure nobody.

Uh, he's a, he's a couch surfer.

He's a, uh, um, marginally employed, uh, self-styled intellectual who is writing these bromides against, uh, all of society and the rest of society's not even paying attention to him.

How would you describe, um, Marx's approach to history without being able to use the word Marxists- Marxist to describe it, right? I mean...