Federal Reserve Controversy: The podcast discusses allegations of mortgage fraud against Fed Governor Lisa Cook, highlighting the ongoing political tensions between the Trump administration and the Federal Reserve, with accusations of corruption being used as a tactic to influence Fed appointments.
Political Influence on the Fed: The conversation emphasizes the increasing politicization of the Federal Reserve, with both Trump and Biden administrations seeking to appoint loyalists to influence monetary policy, reflecting a broader trend of political control over traditionally independent institutions.
Washington DC's Federal Control: The hosts argue that Washington DC is inherently a federal district, heavily reliant on federal funding and control, challenging the notion of its local governance and advocating for a reevaluation of its status and funding.
Smithsonian and Cultural Narratives: Trump's proposal to review museum exhibits at the Smithsonian is discussed as a move against perceived left-wing narratives, highlighting the political nature of cultural institutions and the backlash from those who view this as an attack on established historical perspectives.
Trump's Role as a Disruptor: The podcast portrays Trump as an agent of chaos, inadvertently challenging and exposing the flaws in various federal institutions, from the Fed to cultural establishments, aligning with some libertarian critiques of centralized power.
Decentralization Advocacy: The discussion touches on the benefits of decentralization, criticizing the concentration of power and resources in Washington DC, and suggesting that a reduction in federal influence could lead to more localized and accountable governance.
Transcript
[Music] Welcome back to the Power and Market podcast. I'm Ryan McMin, executive editor at the Mises Institute, and this is the current events podcast where we get together and we talk about whatever's going on this week around the country and around the world. And uh joining me as is is our usual co-hosts. We've got uh two of our contributing editors from here at the Mises Institute. We got Connor O'Keefee and we have th Bishop. Both of whom you should know pretty well by now if you're a regular power and market listener. So guys, let's just uh let's talk about some of the issues today. And and the Fed's in the news today, sort of. Uh one of the Fed's voting members. So we like this. We love it when the Fed gets dragged through the mud a little bit. Uh, and both sides, at least in my case, I hate both sides in this ongoing fight between the Trump administration and the Federal Reserve. And I love that they're basically trying to make each other look bad. Although mostly, it seems most of the invective goes from Trump's direction toward the Fed, and the Fed tries to act sort of like above it all. But this time the latest tactic is uh Fed and his uh associates, his supporters are accusing Fed Governor Lisa Cook of corruption. Basically what they're saying is Cook, who was a Biden appointee to the board of governors, that is these are the permanent uh voting members of the FOMC and policymaking bodies within the Fed. Uh she was appointed by by Biden and apparently in the years leading up to that she had committed mortgage fraud. According to Bill Py who we've who we've trashed here on Power Market uh at least once before I think twice actually on two different episodes we >> make it a recurring bit Ryan. >> Right. Well, as you said watch >> right. I mean I hate the guy. Uh so uh but I'll just note that he he might be right. He's accusing uh Cook of corruption by saying that she had falsely claimed that various properties she was buying were all owner occupied properties. And you know you right if you're out there and you've applied for uh mortgages, you know how it works, right? You get a lower interest rate, you get more favorable terms. Uh a lot of it's related to federal policy, but you get more favorable terms if it's if you're buying a owneroccupied unit. uh whereas you get less favorable terms if it's clear that you're buying the house as a investment property. You plan to not live there. You plan to rent it out. So the idea here is that Lisa Cook went in and she bought uh she had one property but she bought at least two other properties uh while claiming that these were all her primary residents. And so if you're doing that that is actually mortgage fraud if that is the thing. The whole thing seems kind of like weird, right? It's It should be embarrassing if it's true, especially not just on the level of I'm corrupt, but on the level of I I couldn't even figure out a way to cover this up better. Like, I just went in and I just fraudulently filled out these forms hoping no one would ever notice. Also, she did it through uh credit unions. At least two of the the loans are through credit you one of a Michigan university credit union which seems just like kind of weird for a Fed board of governors member to do that. So I don't know what the angle was. Maybe she had a friend at the credit union or something uh like that. So that's so this seems to be though right as just the latest salvo in this war between the White House and the Fed, right? because we've kind of gotten used to thetick. So, of course, Pam Bondi and PY are trying to portray this as they're just trying to uncover corruption. They're just principled public servants uh trying to root out uh corruption in the Fed, but we all know what's really going on, right? They're they're trying to just come up with new ways to make the Fed look stupid, make its members look stupid. Maybe they could even make Cook resign and that would then open up a spot on the board of governors for Trump to appoint yet another person who could then come in and embrace more low interest rate policy. And of course that's the root of the whole thing, right? The end goal here isn't to root out corruption. The end goal here is to help Trump get more favorable and by favorable lower interest rates that Trump has been calling for for months now. uh because even though the Fed is totally uh inflationist in its policy, Powell is not a hard money guy, uh he's not enough of an inflationist for Trump. So everything that Trump does in terms of his rhetoric directed at the Fed needs to be, I think, seen in terms of uh he wants to pressure the Fed to embrace lower interest rates so that Trump can do more deficit spending more cheaply and Trump can also make the stock market go up and then claim credit for that. So, that seems to be the just the latest thing in the administration's war against the Fed, which which again I'm fine with. Uh it's it undermines the Fed and makes the Fed look more political. Uh which is all correct and that's okay. But though, you were telling me that you were looking a little into uh Lisa Cook's background. I don't I didn't actually look anything about her up. I just looked at what crimes she was committed up. But now that you mentioned it, I never even heard really of Cook before this controversy. And when I saw a picture of her, I didn't recognize her at all. So, what's what's the deal with this woman? Where's she even come from? >> Yeah. So, this is just a great example of just the gradual decay in quality um or at least the credentials, right? We don't want to, you know, of the sort of people in these policy positions. Um, and so this was a Biden appointee rewarded out of pure political favoritism. Now again, shocking that there's political favoritism in the Fed, right? There's long history of uh federal employees overwhelming overwhelmingly donating to Democrats. Do with that what you will. I'm not trying to pretend this is some great new scandal. This is always because it's just been a lot less explicit than it was in the case with Dr. Cook. Um so her background like you know she has no background in monetary policy generally. Again not to say that people that have background in monetary policy have good monetary policy views right most experts in that field are themselves probably disqualified from having that position from our point of view in the first place. But her entire kind of research background was focusing on you know the economics of racism. Right? So this was part of a uh this broader narrative of mission creep that the Fed very much has been engaged with you know particularly from Democrat administrations in trying to elevate additional aspects of the economy to increase the Fed's portfolio in these decisions. So you know there's been discussions about climate change and racism and this that and the other. And so this is the perfect example of just you the capture of of you know woke ideology infecting even in the Fed in such an explicit way. I remember when her nomination came up just because it was just so far you just so so absurd in its own right. I mean, she was grilled a little bit about like I mean, she didn't know what the Phillips curve was, you know, in any real view or or that it had been outdated at this point. Like she was not is not familiar with some of the conversations going on within the monetary policy realm. Her entire sort of credential this entire process was that she had was on the I believe the Federal Reserve Board of Chicago, which had happened just a couple months before getting this nomination. So, from the beginning, she was a political hack nomination. Um I I assume some people try to argue it's like oh it's because Trump tried to appoint like Stephen Miller and Herman Kaine and like Judy Shelton. It's like oh this is already kind of a watering down this entire process. I let people make that decision in their own right. But so Cook was a predictably bad candidate from the get-go and engaging as you mentioned this sort of low-level very petty mortgage fraud um doesn't look very good. And this is important because in terms of this larger crusade of reststacking, you know, remaking the Fed in Trump's image, um, you know, there's a nomination going on right now with, uh, uh, Steven Moran, I believe is his name. Um, so there's one seat open under the Federal Reserve Act. uh the president does have the authority to remove Fed governors but with cause and so they're hoping that this will create enough justification that would survive you know the inevitable scr scrutiny should they make a change here and so this is why this issue is important because again they're looking to pull more seats um you know more people out of those seats again stack it with the sort of Trump loyalist group >> I mean so would Trump replace her with someone of much higher quality like who are we who's who's on the docket for replacing Cook anyway, right? I mean, we know that it's just going to be someone that would, I guess, take orders from Trump in terms of policy. Uh, not that that's not the reality, right? I I think they basically lowered the policy rate in late 2024 because that's what Biden or at least Kamla wanted or his handlers wanted. I mean, that seemed to be a pretty uh close connection there. But I don't Yeah, I don't know what Trump has in mind for his new appointees or anything like that. Well, I I know there's there's a variety of names have been out there, usually floated within the chair race. Um, so I mean like the most interesting one is like Judy Shelton who has said compared the Fed in the past like the the Soviet Polar Bureau in terms of the way that it controls stuff. She's she's done a lot of interesting stuff on gold. She's got a lot of views that you know are she's by no means you know a Joe Solerno acolyte you know in terms of monetary policy even though she does does say some interesting stuff about the Fed there. U but really like the the whole quality of like the these names is is very interesting because like one of the most celebrated uh Trump nominations from the first time around you someone that got kudos from Heritage and KO and Mercadus and you know these sort of think tanks was like one of the worst Federal Reserve nominees of all time like I I want to just make this point uh it was a guy named Marvin Goodfriend who had like all these great academic credentials. He was someone who promoted he went regularly to Jackson Hole and like his idea was to he wanted he was a negative interest rate enthusiast. He wanted to abolish cash. Like he was a he was an evil scientist with the academic credentials to get the backing from like you know nominally serious you know free market sort of groups there like his actual mantra you know recommendations would have been like the most catastrophic thing you could possibly imagine. I mean this is he I think singer genuinely the worst the most dangerous Federal Reserve nominee of all time. Uh his appeal was he said some nice things about like rules-based monetary policy or whatever. That's all it takes to get the sign out from some of those groups. And so that was someone with with these very outstanding traditional credentials who was awful. Since then, you've had some people that um I know there was one of the fed governors that Trump appointed uh worked on the the Senate Banking Committee for a long time and kind of worked from that side set side of things. But again, when you even look at some of these names, uh Kevin Walsh is one who was on the Fed during the Bush administration, had some really bad stuff during um the '08 crisis. Uh was a big QE advocate, but has since then had some interesting stuff. He's he's had actually some conversation with Alex Pollock there. But these are some of the names out there, but it's this interesting group where again like we we're just seeing the the traditional credentials for Fed governors again as we know are should be disqualified in their own right. And so we're increasingly getting more sort of explicitly political folks filling these roles generally. Is that better or worse? Is an open conversation because again you could get someone who has really really radical ideas under the veneer of academic rigor. Um but it is an additional interesting component of just the staffing side of our, you know, beloved central bank institution. >> Yeah, it seems all about control right now with Trump. And it's like I'm a big critic of the Fed. We all are. So I'm not like against that uh per se, but it just happens to be that MAGA has terrible monetary policy goals right now. So like you said uh at the beginning there, Ryan, I'm not I'm kind of rooting against both sides of this war. But I do like that you brought in kind of the the political optics of it. That is I think the biggest potential for silver linings here and I think like we talked a few probably months ago at this point about how the federal judiciary is viewed by the public and how that's really become a lot more politicized especially with the Supreme Court. like the the federal judiciary as a whole, people still think of federal judges as kind of these like above politics, but the Supreme Court like the average person, they think of them as this, you know, people that were appointed by different presidents and then to kind of do what they were brought in by that president to do. And I think that um if Trump is successful here, there's a lot of potential that people will start thinking of the Fed that way. And yeah, uh to to your point earlier, like that is kind of already how it works. It just happens to be that this is like a very closed establishment um system where there's not a lot of different sort of monetary thought happening there. But um I think it would be potentially very productive if we start thinking about Fed governors based on you know who appointed them. You know these were appointed by Trump, these were appointed by Biden whatever that that the the more we can kind of tear down the false vision of the central bank of the Federal Reserve uh the better. And yeah, I'm not all that excited about Trump getting more control over the Fed board. I think there's a lot of potential damage that that could bring just based on what he says he wants to bring around, but I mean it's not all a downside. I guess there's potential for some silver linings there on the optics front. >> And this definitely creates across the board like the FCC has now become like a hyper like partisan sort of position as well. So again like all these things that have you just traditionally been seen as just sort of these boring, >> you know, technocratic transitions. I mean everything Yeah. It's it is it is a continuing trend. >> Well, I'm not an accelerationist in general, right? Like I'm I don't want to leave the planet in complete chaos and disarray. I mean, I have children and all of that and hopefully grandchildren at some point. And while I have raised them to see that the world is really screwed up and they got their work cut out for them, I don't I don't try I don't insult their intelligence by telling them how great everything is and you can you can do anything you want in life. If you can be anything you want to be, that's not true. I mean, the world is run by horrible people who at every uh every turn try to destroy decent people and lift up the corrupt and evil. However, uh I I don't want to destroy every institution. At the same time though, I am an accelerationist for certain institutions. I'm perfectly fine with being an accelerationist for like the Fed or for certain federal agencies and stuff and and by hiring more incompetent morons to those boards, illustrating just how politicized, how truly poorly run these organizations are and really always were heavily politicized and poorly run. It's just now become more obvious. That's fine with me. So, I definitely see an upside to the fact that we're just so blatantly encouraging uh horrible people to join these boards. I it it's kind of uh I I want to destroy the nostalgia that certain people have for like the the way that that things were done in the past. And you still see this where people will look at a picture of George W. Bush and Obama and Clinton all hanging out together and laughing and everything and they'll be like, "Oh, I miss I miss the days when we were all civil, when American politics was civil. These people are too dumb to understand the reason they're all like friends and chums with each other is because they all have similar interests and they're all part of the same ruling class that has destroyed life for ordinary people. Uh but they were fooled into thinking that there was some sort of like high-mindedness in politics back then. There was never any high-mindedness. Those people could just agree more on how to destroy you and how to destroy regular life for ordinary people. So there wasn't that much that there wasn't the uh the bad blood that I think you have now that things have become more contentious. Uh, and so I I don't want people to be nostalgic for a time where they thought, "Ah, remember when the Fed was run by highly competent geniuses." And I mean, who who can imagine Lisa Cook sitting up there pouring over spreadsheets trying to trying to figure out like the details of this financial data? I mean, we all know she's not doing that. And we know that virtually no one else on the FOMC is doing that either. Uh, but some of them are very bright people. they're just very bright at uh destroying life for ordinary people and enriching themselves and that's the reality I think. >> Well, and it's also worth noting that again like the idea that the Fed is some sort of great you know body of independent intellectuals questioning policy and the like. Uh there there's a great book u the lords of easy money that uh focuses on kind of the playbyplay of the uh Bernanki Fed um among other things. There's a lot of history within it but um uh it went into the extent like where Bernanki would would was was effectively isolating any Fed governor that would question like the policy. Um, and so I think Thomas Hodnik was was one of the biggest people at the time that was questioning some of that policy um, off the top of my head and like you know he was just kind of increasingly excited. So again like the way that this this is not some sort of uh, you know, this has never been some sort of these then of great intellectuals you know carefully pontificating on you know the pros and cons of these policies. I mean these have been um, you know, explicit top-down you know policy decision you know making apparatus for quite some time. The difference now is the president's trying to interject himself. And of course, if we're talking about accelerationism and monetary policy, for anyone interested in that topic, uh I always get a kick out of reading Joe Serno's modest proposal for monetary policy, which fully advocated for congressional control over monetary policy with a full expectations on what that would lead. Um but if if you want some good Austrian literature on monetary accelerationism, you can there's there's usually a serna for everything. And that is an article worthwhile checking out if you're interested in that topic. >> Yeah, it would force the realities of monetary policy right out into the open in front of the public and the public would be forced to have opinions about it. I think to some extent that was like uh Rothbart's lament, right? He's like, "How was it that in the 19th century we had Americans regularly talking about uh the gold silver exchange rate and what federal policy should be related uh to um gold, to money in general, to banking regulation and so on. And now that's considered just completely out of reach of any normal person that they could possibly have an opinion about that." But you look at the old publications from the time and man I it was like these these allegedly lowbrow sort of party p publications that regular people were reading after working on the farm or whatever and they would come home and then they would read a thousand words about monetary policy. I mean really quite quite shocking uh when you consider where we're at right now. But but that was all pre-entral bank. That was when it was governed by elected officials. And so it was a different situation then uh for sure. Now this issue of politicization. Uh let's let's look at the next topic though. Now Connor, you had an article this week on mises.org talking about this whole Trump crime thing in DC. And uh I I want to kind of go into that topic because it opens up a larger issue I think about uh DC's political independence. So, can you get us give us like why are we even talking about this? Just kind of the general rundown about what Trump says he's trying to do in Washington with this whole like police federalizing the police and all that in Washington. >> Yeah. So, we touched on this a bit last week and I kind of wrote this article expanding on a point that I made in uh last week's episode when we were talking with Bill, but um Ryan uh not not Ryan, Trump um the president uh he I I think there was some reporting indicating that it was a a Fox News segment specifically as well as um some of his experience driving um in his motorcade around DC prompted him to uh start this takeover of um essentially federal izing the city's police system, uh the police department, bringing in um National Guard troops on top of that and mobilizing, uh federal agents of various law enforcement agencies to basically try to clean up the city. And um so like it was a little bit unclear at first what that meant. Um they started marching through and clearing out some homeless encamp encampments, which I think is what Trump was seeing from uh his car window. Um, and then on top of that, like as it's aged, it seems like a lot of the arrests, like I think more than half of the arrests were actually um, immigration related. So, it's almost like a giant citywide ICE raid that that's been happening. Um, but this, of course, has prompted a lot of discourse online. A lot of Trump's opponents are freaking out and acting like he's, you know, starting a federal police state for the first time ever in in this country's history. And um I just I sort of wanted to expand on a point I made last time, which I think is just a general point that libertarian types um need to make more, which is that like we often think of government doing things like government action as action, but the government can also do a lot and cause a lot of damage with what you could almost call purposeful inaction. And so like as a different example, I wrote an article um ear I think at the beginning of the I don't remember when those LA fires were but like in that case you essentially have all this governmentr run land where they just conserve all this wilderness and then don't do any kind of fire management there. And by doing that like it's making that an incredibly risky area. I think if it was privately owned there would be controlled burns there would be things happening. So through inaction government's actually doing something and causing damage. a similar thing. I mean, we were just talking about the Fed. That's another example where like in in uh mystery, the mystery of banking, I think it was Rothbart's book. Um he has that chapter where he talks about how the market process itself is a limit on banks ability to do credit expansion to to do credit inflation. Um and it's only through the central bank that the government comes in and removes those limits. And so also kind of it's like in the absence of um you know this market process then this sort of new system is able to flower up. And I think there's a similar thing happening in a lot of these blue cities with crime that the I mean the the police are we're told supposed to protect us and help us protect our property to protect and serve as like a common slogan for the cops and yet like these cities are just just there's just they're crimeridden and so yeah it's almost like we don't even really think of them as a protecting force anymore. Um, I know Tom Dorenzo, he calls cops crime historians because they'll show up after the crime happened and take a bunch of notes about it, but like the the whole idea that they're going to like actively be protecting your property um is kind of foreign to us now even though they the government has monopolized that service and on top of that with um DC especially, but a lot of other blue cities, especially in recent years after the whole defund the police movement and the George Floyd protest, there have been like I guess they they go by uh people call them progressive prosecutors, but it's basically this progressive ideology that um and they do look at to to be fair um they often point to what I think is the very real uh over incarceration of the American population, which I think is a real problem. I think it's more about a bunch of things that are not actually crimes being, you know, uh deemed crimes by the government. But anyway, they point to that and then it sort of led to this philosophy that um to make the justice system more just, it should do less. And that what that led to was fewer prosecutions, especially for um what we would still consider violent crime, but like lower level property theft. So like the like car smash and grabs and shoplifting and things like that. And in DC especially, it came to a head where um I think it was 2022, it was like twothirds of people arrested were not prosecuted. And so that just sort of adds to this like the absence of active strenuous property protection that you're getting from these uh police um and the the the police departments. And so I was sort of making the point that like and I guess I was kind of hearkening back to that whole um Sam Francis uh he called it anarcho tyranny which is a term I don't really like that much but this whole idea that like the government will not provide the service that's monopolying well but it will protect it will work very hard to protect its sole right to be like the the group in society that is there to protect your property. So, like there's so many examples of um people like gas station clerks that um try to defend, you know, their the the convenience store they're in against somebody that's, you know, trying to steal stuff. Maybe they hurt them, harm them, or kill them. And that like those people like the the cops and the prosecutors go hard against anybody doing that. Um, and like you had that uh case, there was some clerk that stabbed a guy and like a number of these cases, especially the ones that are just like so clearly um self-defense or defense of property. They may eventually get acquitted, but like that's after spending like that guy in in New York spent a long time at Riker's Island. Like basically these overcrowded um blue city jails full of violent criminals, the people that aren't let off by these progressive prosecutors. So, it's just like it's night and day when it comes to what they're really clamping down on and what they're sort of uh letting happen. That's the point I was trying to kind of make in this article. But, um that that is also why this this whole story has been in the news. People have been debating about it. And yeah, um, to your point, by taking over the the police department, which that some federal judges kind of walked back parts of that after Trump did that, it has also brought in this topic of like, you know, who actually gets to control DC cuz going back before I think 73, it was the federal government for basically the entire country's history. And then they passed home rule saying that there there would be a city government in DC uh, managing things. And now, you know, Trump coming in and saying, "Hey, they're doing a terrible job keeping the city safe, keeping it clean. I'm going to do something about that." That's brought that whole issue on top of all this uh to the forefront. >> Yeah. I think Trump is very good at the theatrical side of things, right? People, at least in their minds, imagine DC is this hell hole, which in many ways it is because all those things you're just listing about how right it's a catch and releaseleas system for criminals basically. And to the extent that that's true is difficult to say. um unless you're living there. But clearly this is not a serene city. Uh and I think it's funny how they they try to portray it as oh crime is down. Crime is at a it's down compared to where it was 30 years ago. Yeah. Okay. That's not something to brag about. The the uh the the first half of the 90s was terrible for crime and that was 30 years ago. So to now say that, oh yeah, things are at a 30-year low, um, well, great. I mean, yeah, most cities have lower crime now than they did in the the first half of the '9s, in the late '7s, throughout much of the 80s. Horrible gang problems during those time periods. And so, uh, that's just a pretty low bar to really say that, oh, crime's been going down. Well, yeah, it's been going down and it's still awful. Uh, and so we're supposed to get worked up about this whole issue though. But I'm having a hard time caring about uh self-ruule, quote unquote, for Washington DC. And so I think you did a good job kind of covering the origins of why we're even talking about it now. Uh but I mean I have literally written a book on the importance of radical decentralization and generally I am I am in favor of anything being decentralized and uh operating uh separate and free from the central federal government. However, Washington DC is a manifestation of federal power. It's it's not a state. It's never it's not a real city. it was something that was created um to actually enhance federal power and and a lot of the rhetoric around now this whole police thing is totally idiotic. Uh here's here's a line from uh the Associated Press uh an article on right uh Trump quote unquote federalizing the police. It says that the White House efforts are quote the most sweeping use of federal authority over a local government in modern times. Uh that doesn't make any sense at all because Washington DC isn't a federal isn't a local government. I'll tell you why. Here's what the constitution says about it. It uh if you look if you go and you look at article one of the US Constitution, it says and this is this pertains to Congress which is actually relevant to the discussion uh that we'll get back to. It says in article one that Congress has the power quote to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over district that is district what became the district of Colombia not exceeding 10 square mile 10 mile square as may by session of particular states in the acceptance of Congress become the seat of government of the United States and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state. Basically what it's saying there is okay if you can find a place where the states will seed this territory to you this 10 miles uh 10 by 10 miles basically uh then you you congress you rule that directly this is a federal district they called it the federal city back then and this is going to be a place directly under Congress's control and Congress created it and everything that goes on in that district is federal. It's federalized always has been. So the very use of the term federalization of uh police or whatever in Washington DC, it doesn't make any sense because the whole district has always been federalized. DC police, they get their money either directly or indirectly from the federal government. They're they're not like there's not some private sector economy that's fueling tax revenue in Washington DC. Just imagine where Washington DC would be if it wasn't absolutely filled with federal employees, federal contractors, and overwhelmingly dependent on federal spending. And as you noted, it was only in 1973 that they got quote unquote home rule, which all that did was create a city council and mayor system where they had some some local uh elections. This was an offshoot of the civil rights thing and where they're like, well, there should be democracy in Washington DC, so we'll give them some local elections, but in the end, Congress has to sign off on everything. And of course, it's it's funded by Congress, either directly or indirectly. And there there there's no such thing as any sort of uh local government there. However, what they try to do constantly is cast it as such. And so I was I noticed that one of the city council members there referred to how uh here's what she says. Uh what she this this politician from BA from Washington DC named Bowser was advocating for basically a federal bailout of Washington DC's budget. They were looking for another billion dollars uh for the city. And that's that's just standard operating procedure for Washington DC. Go to Congress, get more money. They have no life of their own as a city. and she says, "We are not a federal agency. We are a city, county, state all at once." They're not a state. Uh, and they're not a real city. It is a federal district that was created and by the way plowed under all the independent uh, stuff that was nearby. Like Georgetown used to be a real city that had real independence and Washington DC absorbed it and forced it into the new city of Washington as it was called back then. And we should note by the way that the whole creation of Washington DC was was designed to separate Washington DC from the Hoy Paloy. So the origins of Washington DC are in when Congress was meeting in Philadelphia. And this was in the early 80s, the 1780s. The war was like barely over. Congress was meeting, a bunch of militia men from the war who had been promised payment for the war basically started hanging out threateningly in Philadelphia and sending messages to Congress saying, "Hey, you better pay that money to us that you owe." And so Congress, especially Alexander Hamilton, as you can guess, who absolutely hated regular people. Uh he's like, "Well, let's just kind of convince them to to, you know, give us a little time and we'll get around to it later." And uh it was all just a very um unpleasant situation for Congress because they were actually being forced to deal with the regular people they had made promises to. And they thought, hey, uh why doesn't the governor of of Pennsylvania call out the militia and protect us? Well, he didn't do that because theoretically, well, it's it's theorized that he uh was sympathetic to the militia members who wanted to get paid. So, Pennsylvania didn't offer any protection for Congress. So Congress like in the middle of the night like they they they went across over to Trenton, New Jersey and met there for a few years. They had to get out of Philadelphia because the common people were angry at Congress. So then they thought, you know what we need to do? We need to like create this federal district which will we need to create this big square around Congress so that we can staff that with loyal federal troops and keep regular people away and so that they can't threaten us and make us do things. So the whole idea of Washington DC is like a screw you to ordinary people. We don't trust ordinary people. We can't rub elbows with you ordinary people. We need our own federal district so that there's a buffer zone between us and regular people. And that's why it was created. And so they drew this big box um that was supposed to be both in Virginia and Maryland. And they created the county of Washington. They created the city of Washington. They absorbed uh Georgetown eventually has all became consolidated into one big city called Washington DC. But it has always just been this federal thing. It's basically a big federal fort. And just like in olden times they let people live inside the forts. They let people live inside Washington DC. But the purpose of it is to create this haven for the federal government. And it's totally federal funded. The federal government has total control over everything here. So they cannot be influenced by any state or local government. So when you look at uh extending the power of Washington DC, it's an extension of federal power directly. So to do this song and dance about should Washington DC be independent, should it have electoral college votes, which it absolutely should not. Should it have statehood, which it absolutely should not, should it have some sort of city power, so can out there be lobbying with the League of Cities and having a life of its own? Should not be doing that. It shouldn't DC should not be considered in any way like a legitimate real city. It should be just considered basically an extension of federal agencies. And so this woman's quite wrong when she says Washington DC is not a federal agency. It is a deacto federal agency. It's it's uh it's a bunch of federal employees either directly or indirectly paid by federal dollars laring as like ordinary regular city people. And so I mean I would be absolutely thrilled if the if the city if the federal government absolutely slashed spending on the city that the city emptied out that people had to leave the city and live in real places rather than this fake city that is Washington DC and if the whole city just went to hell and looked like garbage and nobody ever wanted to go there. I think that would be a wonderful thing for America. Uh and of course America would be much better off if DC ceased to exist altogether. Uh but you know pending that um it should just be the dump that it deserves to be. It was always just basically a glorified fort for the federal government. And I have no interest whatsoever in like creating independence, making them a state um doing some sort of democracy experiment uh played out through Washington DC politics just don't care. So when I see all this all these worries about uh what might happen, I mean there was another article about how his takeover of the police is is impacting Washington's uh economy. No, it's not. Washington has no real economy. Washington's economy depends on federal spending. It only exists because of that. And so all these concerns over Washington, I think it's all just a complete waste of time. Um but let's go to you though. What do you think? What do you think uh about what should we do with Washington? >> Yeah. Well, I I we covered a lot of it last week and I I agree with your sentiments, skin. My my thought is DC is a fake city. It should be treated as such. So, I'm uh I've got very little sympathy particularly for the DC city council or or most of the people within that uh that body right now. >> Well, and you've lived there. I mean, I haven't I've been there for like one week. >> It's a fun place to be if you know 20some year old. >> Well, that's great Sunday brunches. >> That's my impression of it too, right? Is that you meet like only two or three types of people in Washington. you meet do you do meet the people who like are regular people who work there but again they're all heavily dependent on federal spending the truth >> even if you don't work for DC you're working for a a lobbying agency that lobbies DC I mean everything is somehow connected to government every single question when you meet someone is you know what do you do and if you don't have the right answer to that question they they immediately move on when you get a family you move to Virginia or Maryland right like it's anyone who's been in DC for too long a period of time is just like you can just see the soul just kind of going away from their body from year after year. So again, it's it's it's an interesting spot. >> But all that money coming in, there's there's good restaurants for sure. >> Yeah. >> As well. That's I guess the benefit of it of being like one of the wealthiest parts of the country, >> right? And the restaurants aren't even real, right? If the federal jobs went away, if the federal spending went away, those restaurants would cease to exist 100%. And you and the numbers are totally fake. I was looking up before this. How many people in Washington DC work for the federal government? And the number is ridiculously low. It's like 12.5%. They're like, "Only 12.5% work for the federal government." Well, obviously that number is BS in the sense of yes, only 12.5% of the workers, assuming that number is even true, get a paycheck signed by some that it's a US check, right? Well, okay. But as we covered in all this discussion about budget cuts and government employee cuts as Trump came in, the the the main problem isn't government employees. That number's hardly changed in decades. It's the number of federal employees that exist because it's all outsourced now. It's all uh contractors. It's people who were one degree separated from the federal government. So, as th says, right, everyone you encounter there, they're a contractor. They're a direct employee. If they work for the local government in Washington DC, they're essentially an employee of the federal government as well. So there, yeah, there aren't any real private workers in Washington DC because that's just that's not where the money comes from. And so yeah, if they say, "Oh, you know, I'm a private sector," they're just lying. Uh or they're dumb. I mean, if they really believe they're truly private sector, >> or it's like really like the the like the kitchen worker at the restaurant that all the federal employees are buying lunch. Yeah. But that's basically it. It does. It's like it's not anything higher level than that. Of course, one of the nice things about being in DC is uh they do have some very nice museums, which I know is also a topic in the news cycle. Oh, yes. Popping up this week. >> Yes. Let's uh let's look at that a little bit. Yes. Speaking of all just the the copious amounts of spending that occurs in DC. Yeah. There's the Smithsonian and uh Trump was um criticized this week or last week for suggesting that he's going to put in place a review process for analyzing the way that all these exhibits go into museums. No, I mean at this point, right, you got to be naive to not know that when you visit a museum, there's a there's a political agenda behind what is shown and what the message overall of the the language and the plaques are. And a famous case, for example, is that I guess they just recently in recent months removed uh plaques in Glacier National Park that had predicted that the glaciers would be completely gone by like the year 2013. And the glaciers are still there uh more than a decade after they had predicted the glaciers would be gone. And I guess they just now the edict went out, oh, you should take those plaques down uh because it turns out they're extremely wrong. So that's that's the sort of thing you have to be aware of anytime you go to any sort of cultural quote unquote installment, right? Is what are the plaques saying? What is the message that is being sent to me? Right? I think of this of course in terms of presidential libraries, right? Obama's presidential library has got an increasing amount of news. It's it's I don't know if you guys have seen pictures of it. This hideous hideous building in Illinois where they're all just temples and monuments to make presidents look good. They're propaganda factories to make their respected presidents look amazing. And that doesn't mean they can't be entertaining. Doesn't mean they can't be nice. Uh I've been to the Truman Presidential Library, for example. There's a nice fountain there. It's not a bad place. Uh, it's relatively cheap if I remember correctly. So, yeah, go ahead and visit. But no, that's just going to be a bunch of BS about how great Truman was. So, that's just the way museums work. So, though, can you tell us a little bit more about Right. In the case of Smithsonian, what's going on with these museums here? Right now, I'm sure they've all been put together in a totally neutral, nonpartisan fashion, but but Trump apparently wants to inject politics into the process. Shocking. shocking because sort of uh of of demonstrations of of big projects they've had on display uh you know done by such even-handed very rational uh intellectual leaders if you will the brightest of the bright like like uh Ibram KI uh who was the guy that wrote the whole like anti uh white fragility sort of stuff. So yeah, this has been, you know, part of the the tip of the spear. You know, museums often play this role, but you there's they went into overdrive. Um, you know, surprise surprise, you following the summer of love within DC. And so now people are acting shocked. You they're shocked that at the consideration of re-evaluating um some of these, you know, taxf funder subsidized displays. Um, and again, I've spent, you back in my time in DC, I've spent a lot of time there. Once upon a time, a lot of the stuff was more you you'd have like private sponsors. I know that the Koch brothers, for example, they had a lot of different kind of displays that they funded and the like. I'm sure none of those have changed with political correctness over time either. That's a whole another conversation there. Um but uh but again it's just this massive shock that uh you know how dare Trump politicize the Smithsonian you know that's been you know waving you not just uh you rainbow flags but the full-on like triangle multicolored you know rainbow flag pluses uh all these things about uh the definition of whiteness and how whiteness itself was a demonstration of the systemic racism of America yada yada yada. Um, and so, you know, you know, again, to me, you not having this stuff in the first place, I think is a a net positive, uh, for the American spirit, but we should not be surprised at all that there's a political side of things to all this sort of stuff. And this this goes back, of course, you to the most basic things, right? the entire narrative that you're going to get, you know, ranging from high school textbooks or elementary school textbooks even to anything that's going to be a a government demonstration of uh a cultural narrative of a historical narrative is going to be, you know, guided by the underlying politics of the people behind it. And for the longest time, a lot of these sort of cultural institutions, whether it's your local library to again the Smithsonian, always just had, you know, activist leftists typically overwhelmingly represented. Um, now this is one of the interesting trends that you've seen in modern politics is a recognition of that battlefield as well. And so once again, just like the Fed, just like the FCC, just like some of the agencies that we were talking about earlier, this is once again now you're right for um, you know, kind of partisan takeover. And I think that's a lot better than just having, you know, cultural homogeneity, you know, based off of the, you know, the the the trends of leftwing academia in today's day and age. Yeah, I think a lot of this uh comes back to something that other people have noticed before, which is like yes, we do have like Americans live in bubbles for sure and generally there is kind of a a red bubble and a blue bubble, but the difference is that if you live in that red bubble, you will still encounter the narratives of the blue bubble. If you turn on the TV ever, if you watch any TV shows, movies, or even like professional sports, like you're going to be inundated with this stuff, which is why I think like there's been research to show that like uh conservatives tend to have a better understanding of what liberals believe than vice versa. But you can live in the blue bubble and really not encounter the red, you know, counternarrative of American history at all. And so I think like when you're uh something like the Smithsonian like the narratives that are uh being portrayed in these museums are like the narratives of blue America that these people that is all they've heard. It's their entire understanding of our country's history. And so that really the only difference here is that um Trump for I guess the first time has decided that he's going to fight back and you know he's not just going to sort of roll over and let them continue sort of spouting all this stuff which you know blue America might think is like settled fact but like actually these are like political opinions and like highly debated um topics and so for for the first time he's actually going to the right is actually doing something about it and um they're they're losing their minds and similar things can be seen I mean, um, in in other areas like this sort of, uh, it reminds me of a lot of things that some people on the right are doing with civil rights law right now where like the the left dominated civil rights law. Um, and the right just sort of shrugged it off as something that, you know, they if you um, sometimes they would maybe admit that they didn't think uh, it should exist at all, which is definitely our position. Um but now like you have some thinkers that are like well if it civil rights law exists like we may as well jump into the battlefield and like be advocating uh you know for the people we represent in in those sorts of you know legal battles. Um, and it's it's a also like the civility thing you brought up before, like looking back at how it was before, like you'll always hear leftists bringing up that uh it was the debate with John McCain and Obama where that lady like stood up and she started saying something nasty about Obama and McCain like runs to his defense and is like, I disagree with him about a lot of these issues, but he's a good man or whatever. And you'll see leftists like looking back at that like why can't we just go back to that America when like politics was all civil. But then you see what they were saying about McCain or like the more absurd one to me is Romney. I mean the way they tried to like portray Romney as this ultra radical fascist right-winger um is crazy. And I think it was Romney where Biden was literally up there saying he's going to put you back in change to a black audience. And so all they wanted is they wanted to be the univil ones against the right while the right was nice and civil and kind of taking it against uh you know in response with the Trump years in in large part has been the right refusing to just take it and starting to fight back and treat the left like the left left's been uh treating the right this whole time and the left is just losing their minds in response. And I think this uh Smithsonian thing if it really takes off this is just the latest example in that broader story. >> Yeah, I think you're right. And I mean so I mean you think right they they really believe this right like I don't think it's the cynical sort of oh of course we are pushing our own point of view through all these institutions museums universities media etc. uh it seems that they truly believe that they're just saying the truth whereas when Trump says something different that's some sort of like cynical political ploy, right? Like they're well I'm sure there are some cynics among it but but they do seem to be real believers, right? Who who think that they're just doing the right thing and the other side is motivated to through hate or I don't even know what their motivations are. I mean, that does seem I I I'm not wrong in that, right? Am I imagining that? Or do they really truly believe that disagreeing with them is just disagreeing with sanity? >> Well, one of the critics of this whole proposal, um, who's a biographer of John Lewis, who's done some stuff in DC, uh, direct quote, like it's totalitarian. It does remind you of a fascist state and makes up a laughingtock around the Western world. I have to confess in my worst nightmares I didn't think it'd be it would proceed this far in terms of willful meglamania and again this is responding to something literally again this is the exact wordage of the sort of projects in question is uh white dominant culture or whiteness refers to the ways white people and their traditions attitudes and ways of life have been normalized over time and are not considered practices in America and since white people still hold most of the institutional power in America we've alter internalized aspects of white culture including people of color and about like the assumptions and like the the weaponization of white culture in the United States by Emma Kimby and I guess like how dare how dare we have a reconsideration of the value of these sort of projects going on taxpayer funed money in these these museums. This is what fascism looks like Ryan. >> Well and of course you'll meet conservatives who are fine with all of these institutions so long as they reflected a more what they regarded as a conservative point of view. Right. But I don't think they even appreciate the extent to where there's been ideological drift away from that old sort of cold war centerright consensus. I mean, that stuff's just long gone, right? >> Well, well, it's okay, Ryan. The the response I I know this been talked about is uh like one of the PBS supplements that they're they're looking at is bring in PragerU, that that bastion of uh of hardcore revisionist thought that that's going to be the right-wing response to some of this content. >> Yeah. all all day long stuff about how nuclear weapons are good to use against Japanese women and children. Remember that's a big Prageru thing. They get really mad if you suggest that nuking civilians is bad. And then of course all it's going to be like pro-state of Israel stuff all day long. We can count on that for Prageru as well too, right? That's the best the conservatives have to offer. I guess it's pretty pretty sad and pathetic. I I am hoping that the uh the specially commissioned stopmotion drawing animation of Anthony Fouchy that the National Portrait Gallery commissioned goes up for sale cuz like that'd be that'd be some fun target practice right there. So, I mean that's just the state of American institutions and uh and the fact that Trump wanted to defund some of that stuff is just shocking that we're supposed to believe that. But that brings us back again right to that whole issue and of course we need to get into more of this on some future topic, right? is that why aren't there institutions like this at the state and local level, right, which are building up local elites? It's just there's been so much money funneled into Washington that they've got all these cultural institutions that we're all forced to uh to fund. And guess who dominates all of them? Uh guys like KI, right? That's who's running all this stuff. And and they just can't believe that anybody's challenging that uh at all. So, I mean, kind of the takeaway from the week is what? Trump as an agent of chaos. I mean, he sometimes comes down in favor of us, right? He's making the the Fed look bad. He's uh exposing how um just he's bringing up, I suppose, the issue of DC independence and uh and normally it's just been assumed that it's on its way to statehood. The one of the great things about I think is Trump's whole thing is that people are starting to raise the issue of just revoking the old self-ruule legislation and returning DC to direct rule from Congress, which I think would would be great. I don't think that would be getting as much traction without uh his stuff on there. And then he's he's making people the Smithsonian freaked out. So don't send don't at me, bro, and tell me that I have Trump derangement syndrome. the the guy by accident has always done a lot of pretty decent stuff, I think. And yet again, by accident, he's attacking a lot of the institutions that I also hate. So, it's been a good week for Trump, uh, I think, in terms of stuff we like. Uh, we haven't talked, of course, about his federal spending or anything that week, so we'll just leave that for some other time. But this week, Trump, that number is not going up, Ryan. That's okay. >> All right. Well, we're at about 50 minutes, so we'll go ahead and call it a day for this episode of the Power and Market podcast. Uh, thank you, Connor. Thank you, though. We will be back next week with more. So, we'll see you next time. [Music]
Fraud at the Fed, Smithsonian, and DC Council
Summary
Transcript
[Music] Welcome back to the Power and Market podcast. I'm Ryan McMin, executive editor at the Mises Institute, and this is the current events podcast where we get together and we talk about whatever's going on this week around the country and around the world. And uh joining me as is is our usual co-hosts. We've got uh two of our contributing editors from here at the Mises Institute. We got Connor O'Keefee and we have th Bishop. Both of whom you should know pretty well by now if you're a regular power and market listener. So guys, let's just uh let's talk about some of the issues today. And and the Fed's in the news today, sort of. Uh one of the Fed's voting members. So we like this. We love it when the Fed gets dragged through the mud a little bit. Uh, and both sides, at least in my case, I hate both sides in this ongoing fight between the Trump administration and the Federal Reserve. And I love that they're basically trying to make each other look bad. Although mostly, it seems most of the invective goes from Trump's direction toward the Fed, and the Fed tries to act sort of like above it all. But this time the latest tactic is uh Fed and his uh associates, his supporters are accusing Fed Governor Lisa Cook of corruption. Basically what they're saying is Cook, who was a Biden appointee to the board of governors, that is these are the permanent uh voting members of the FOMC and policymaking bodies within the Fed. Uh she was appointed by by Biden and apparently in the years leading up to that she had committed mortgage fraud. According to Bill Py who we've who we've trashed here on Power Market uh at least once before I think twice actually on two different episodes we >> make it a recurring bit Ryan. >> Right. Well, as you said watch >> right. I mean I hate the guy. Uh so uh but I'll just note that he he might be right. He's accusing uh Cook of corruption by saying that she had falsely claimed that various properties she was buying were all owner occupied properties. And you know you right if you're out there and you've applied for uh mortgages, you know how it works, right? You get a lower interest rate, you get more favorable terms. Uh a lot of it's related to federal policy, but you get more favorable terms if it's if you're buying a owneroccupied unit. uh whereas you get less favorable terms if it's clear that you're buying the house as a investment property. You plan to not live there. You plan to rent it out. So the idea here is that Lisa Cook went in and she bought uh she had one property but she bought at least two other properties uh while claiming that these were all her primary residents. And so if you're doing that that is actually mortgage fraud if that is the thing. The whole thing seems kind of like weird, right? It's It should be embarrassing if it's true, especially not just on the level of I'm corrupt, but on the level of I I couldn't even figure out a way to cover this up better. Like, I just went in and I just fraudulently filled out these forms hoping no one would ever notice. Also, she did it through uh credit unions. At least two of the the loans are through credit you one of a Michigan university credit union which seems just like kind of weird for a Fed board of governors member to do that. So I don't know what the angle was. Maybe she had a friend at the credit union or something uh like that. So that's so this seems to be though right as just the latest salvo in this war between the White House and the Fed, right? because we've kind of gotten used to thetick. So, of course, Pam Bondi and PY are trying to portray this as they're just trying to uncover corruption. They're just principled public servants uh trying to root out uh corruption in the Fed, but we all know what's really going on, right? They're they're trying to just come up with new ways to make the Fed look stupid, make its members look stupid. Maybe they could even make Cook resign and that would then open up a spot on the board of governors for Trump to appoint yet another person who could then come in and embrace more low interest rate policy. And of course that's the root of the whole thing, right? The end goal here isn't to root out corruption. The end goal here is to help Trump get more favorable and by favorable lower interest rates that Trump has been calling for for months now. uh because even though the Fed is totally uh inflationist in its policy, Powell is not a hard money guy, uh he's not enough of an inflationist for Trump. So everything that Trump does in terms of his rhetoric directed at the Fed needs to be, I think, seen in terms of uh he wants to pressure the Fed to embrace lower interest rates so that Trump can do more deficit spending more cheaply and Trump can also make the stock market go up and then claim credit for that. So, that seems to be the just the latest thing in the administration's war against the Fed, which which again I'm fine with. Uh it's it undermines the Fed and makes the Fed look more political. Uh which is all correct and that's okay. But though, you were telling me that you were looking a little into uh Lisa Cook's background. I don't I didn't actually look anything about her up. I just looked at what crimes she was committed up. But now that you mentioned it, I never even heard really of Cook before this controversy. And when I saw a picture of her, I didn't recognize her at all. So, what's what's the deal with this woman? Where's she even come from? >> Yeah. So, this is just a great example of just the gradual decay in quality um or at least the credentials, right? We don't want to, you know, of the sort of people in these policy positions. Um, and so this was a Biden appointee rewarded out of pure political favoritism. Now again, shocking that there's political favoritism in the Fed, right? There's long history of uh federal employees overwhelming overwhelmingly donating to Democrats. Do with that what you will. I'm not trying to pretend this is some great new scandal. This is always because it's just been a lot less explicit than it was in the case with Dr. Cook. Um so her background like you know she has no background in monetary policy generally. Again not to say that people that have background in monetary policy have good monetary policy views right most experts in that field are themselves probably disqualified from having that position from our point of view in the first place. But her entire kind of research background was focusing on you know the economics of racism. Right? So this was part of a uh this broader narrative of mission creep that the Fed very much has been engaged with you know particularly from Democrat administrations in trying to elevate additional aspects of the economy to increase the Fed's portfolio in these decisions. So you know there's been discussions about climate change and racism and this that and the other. And so this is the perfect example of just you the capture of of you know woke ideology infecting even in the Fed in such an explicit way. I remember when her nomination came up just because it was just so far you just so so absurd in its own right. I mean, she was grilled a little bit about like I mean, she didn't know what the Phillips curve was, you know, in any real view or or that it had been outdated at this point. Like she was not is not familiar with some of the conversations going on within the monetary policy realm. Her entire sort of credential this entire process was that she had was on the I believe the Federal Reserve Board of Chicago, which had happened just a couple months before getting this nomination. So, from the beginning, she was a political hack nomination. Um I I assume some people try to argue it's like oh it's because Trump tried to appoint like Stephen Miller and Herman Kaine and like Judy Shelton. It's like oh this is already kind of a watering down this entire process. I let people make that decision in their own right. But so Cook was a predictably bad candidate from the get-go and engaging as you mentioned this sort of low-level very petty mortgage fraud um doesn't look very good. And this is important because in terms of this larger crusade of reststacking, you know, remaking the Fed in Trump's image, um, you know, there's a nomination going on right now with, uh, uh, Steven Moran, I believe is his name. Um, so there's one seat open under the Federal Reserve Act. uh the president does have the authority to remove Fed governors but with cause and so they're hoping that this will create enough justification that would survive you know the inevitable scr scrutiny should they make a change here and so this is why this issue is important because again they're looking to pull more seats um you know more people out of those seats again stack it with the sort of Trump loyalist group >> I mean so would Trump replace her with someone of much higher quality like who are we who's who's on the docket for replacing Cook anyway, right? I mean, we know that it's just going to be someone that would, I guess, take orders from Trump in terms of policy. Uh, not that that's not the reality, right? I I think they basically lowered the policy rate in late 2024 because that's what Biden or at least Kamla wanted or his handlers wanted. I mean, that seemed to be a pretty uh close connection there. But I don't Yeah, I don't know what Trump has in mind for his new appointees or anything like that. Well, I I know there's there's a variety of names have been out there, usually floated within the chair race. Um, so I mean like the most interesting one is like Judy Shelton who has said compared the Fed in the past like the the Soviet Polar Bureau in terms of the way that it controls stuff. She's she's done a lot of interesting stuff on gold. She's got a lot of views that you know are she's by no means you know a Joe Solerno acolyte you know in terms of monetary policy even though she does does say some interesting stuff about the Fed there. U but really like the the whole quality of like the these names is is very interesting because like one of the most celebrated uh Trump nominations from the first time around you someone that got kudos from Heritage and KO and Mercadus and you know these sort of think tanks was like one of the worst Federal Reserve nominees of all time like I I want to just make this point uh it was a guy named Marvin Goodfriend who had like all these great academic credentials. He was someone who promoted he went regularly to Jackson Hole and like his idea was to he wanted he was a negative interest rate enthusiast. He wanted to abolish cash. Like he was a he was an evil scientist with the academic credentials to get the backing from like you know nominally serious you know free market sort of groups there like his actual mantra you know recommendations would have been like the most catastrophic thing you could possibly imagine. I mean this is he I think singer genuinely the worst the most dangerous Federal Reserve nominee of all time. Uh his appeal was he said some nice things about like rules-based monetary policy or whatever. That's all it takes to get the sign out from some of those groups. And so that was someone with with these very outstanding traditional credentials who was awful. Since then, you've had some people that um I know there was one of the fed governors that Trump appointed uh worked on the the Senate Banking Committee for a long time and kind of worked from that side set side of things. But again, when you even look at some of these names, uh Kevin Walsh is one who was on the Fed during the Bush administration, had some really bad stuff during um the '08 crisis. Uh was a big QE advocate, but has since then had some interesting stuff. He's he's had actually some conversation with Alex Pollock there. But these are some of the names out there, but it's this interesting group where again like we we're just seeing the the traditional credentials for Fed governors again as we know are should be disqualified in their own right. And so we're increasingly getting more sort of explicitly political folks filling these roles generally. Is that better or worse? Is an open conversation because again you could get someone who has really really radical ideas under the veneer of academic rigor. Um but it is an additional interesting component of just the staffing side of our, you know, beloved central bank institution. >> Yeah, it seems all about control right now with Trump. And it's like I'm a big critic of the Fed. We all are. So I'm not like against that uh per se, but it just happens to be that MAGA has terrible monetary policy goals right now. So like you said uh at the beginning there, Ryan, I'm not I'm kind of rooting against both sides of this war. But I do like that you brought in kind of the the political optics of it. That is I think the biggest potential for silver linings here and I think like we talked a few probably months ago at this point about how the federal judiciary is viewed by the public and how that's really become a lot more politicized especially with the Supreme Court. like the the federal judiciary as a whole, people still think of federal judges as kind of these like above politics, but the Supreme Court like the average person, they think of them as this, you know, people that were appointed by different presidents and then to kind of do what they were brought in by that president to do. And I think that um if Trump is successful here, there's a lot of potential that people will start thinking of the Fed that way. And yeah, uh to to your point earlier, like that is kind of already how it works. It just happens to be that this is like a very closed establishment um system where there's not a lot of different sort of monetary thought happening there. But um I think it would be potentially very productive if we start thinking about Fed governors based on you know who appointed them. You know these were appointed by Trump, these were appointed by Biden whatever that that the the more we can kind of tear down the false vision of the central bank of the Federal Reserve uh the better. And yeah, I'm not all that excited about Trump getting more control over the Fed board. I think there's a lot of potential damage that that could bring just based on what he says he wants to bring around, but I mean it's not all a downside. I guess there's potential for some silver linings there on the optics front. >> And this definitely creates across the board like the FCC has now become like a hyper like partisan sort of position as well. So again like all these things that have you just traditionally been seen as just sort of these boring, >> you know, technocratic transitions. I mean everything Yeah. It's it is it is a continuing trend. >> Well, I'm not an accelerationist in general, right? Like I'm I don't want to leave the planet in complete chaos and disarray. I mean, I have children and all of that and hopefully grandchildren at some point. And while I have raised them to see that the world is really screwed up and they got their work cut out for them, I don't I don't try I don't insult their intelligence by telling them how great everything is and you can you can do anything you want in life. If you can be anything you want to be, that's not true. I mean, the world is run by horrible people who at every uh every turn try to destroy decent people and lift up the corrupt and evil. However, uh I I don't want to destroy every institution. At the same time though, I am an accelerationist for certain institutions. I'm perfectly fine with being an accelerationist for like the Fed or for certain federal agencies and stuff and and by hiring more incompetent morons to those boards, illustrating just how politicized, how truly poorly run these organizations are and really always were heavily politicized and poorly run. It's just now become more obvious. That's fine with me. So, I definitely see an upside to the fact that we're just so blatantly encouraging uh horrible people to join these boards. I it it's kind of uh I I want to destroy the nostalgia that certain people have for like the the way that that things were done in the past. And you still see this where people will look at a picture of George W. Bush and Obama and Clinton all hanging out together and laughing and everything and they'll be like, "Oh, I miss I miss the days when we were all civil, when American politics was civil. These people are too dumb to understand the reason they're all like friends and chums with each other is because they all have similar interests and they're all part of the same ruling class that has destroyed life for ordinary people. Uh but they were fooled into thinking that there was some sort of like high-mindedness in politics back then. There was never any high-mindedness. Those people could just agree more on how to destroy you and how to destroy regular life for ordinary people. So there wasn't that much that there wasn't the uh the bad blood that I think you have now that things have become more contentious. Uh, and so I I don't want people to be nostalgic for a time where they thought, "Ah, remember when the Fed was run by highly competent geniuses." And I mean, who who can imagine Lisa Cook sitting up there pouring over spreadsheets trying to trying to figure out like the details of this financial data? I mean, we all know she's not doing that. And we know that virtually no one else on the FOMC is doing that either. Uh, but some of them are very bright people. they're just very bright at uh destroying life for ordinary people and enriching themselves and that's the reality I think. >> Well, and it's also worth noting that again like the idea that the Fed is some sort of great you know body of independent intellectuals questioning policy and the like. Uh there there's a great book u the lords of easy money that uh focuses on kind of the playbyplay of the uh Bernanki Fed um among other things. There's a lot of history within it but um uh it went into the extent like where Bernanki would would was was effectively isolating any Fed governor that would question like the policy. Um, and so I think Thomas Hodnik was was one of the biggest people at the time that was questioning some of that policy um, off the top of my head and like you know he was just kind of increasingly excited. So again like the way that this this is not some sort of uh, you know, this has never been some sort of these then of great intellectuals you know carefully pontificating on you know the pros and cons of these policies. I mean these have been um, you know, explicit top-down you know policy decision you know making apparatus for quite some time. The difference now is the president's trying to interject himself. And of course, if we're talking about accelerationism and monetary policy, for anyone interested in that topic, uh I always get a kick out of reading Joe Serno's modest proposal for monetary policy, which fully advocated for congressional control over monetary policy with a full expectations on what that would lead. Um but if if you want some good Austrian literature on monetary accelerationism, you can there's there's usually a serna for everything. And that is an article worthwhile checking out if you're interested in that topic. >> Yeah, it would force the realities of monetary policy right out into the open in front of the public and the public would be forced to have opinions about it. I think to some extent that was like uh Rothbart's lament, right? He's like, "How was it that in the 19th century we had Americans regularly talking about uh the gold silver exchange rate and what federal policy should be related uh to um gold, to money in general, to banking regulation and so on. And now that's considered just completely out of reach of any normal person that they could possibly have an opinion about that." But you look at the old publications from the time and man I it was like these these allegedly lowbrow sort of party p publications that regular people were reading after working on the farm or whatever and they would come home and then they would read a thousand words about monetary policy. I mean really quite quite shocking uh when you consider where we're at right now. But but that was all pre-entral bank. That was when it was governed by elected officials. And so it was a different situation then uh for sure. Now this issue of politicization. Uh let's let's look at the next topic though. Now Connor, you had an article this week on mises.org talking about this whole Trump crime thing in DC. And uh I I want to kind of go into that topic because it opens up a larger issue I think about uh DC's political independence. So, can you get us give us like why are we even talking about this? Just kind of the general rundown about what Trump says he's trying to do in Washington with this whole like police federalizing the police and all that in Washington. >> Yeah. So, we touched on this a bit last week and I kind of wrote this article expanding on a point that I made in uh last week's episode when we were talking with Bill, but um Ryan uh not not Ryan, Trump um the president uh he I I think there was some reporting indicating that it was a a Fox News segment specifically as well as um some of his experience driving um in his motorcade around DC prompted him to uh start this takeover of um essentially federal izing the city's police system, uh the police department, bringing in um National Guard troops on top of that and mobilizing, uh federal agents of various law enforcement agencies to basically try to clean up the city. And um so like it was a little bit unclear at first what that meant. Um they started marching through and clearing out some homeless encamp encampments, which I think is what Trump was seeing from uh his car window. Um, and then on top of that, like as it's aged, it seems like a lot of the arrests, like I think more than half of the arrests were actually um, immigration related. So, it's almost like a giant citywide ICE raid that that's been happening. Um, but this, of course, has prompted a lot of discourse online. A lot of Trump's opponents are freaking out and acting like he's, you know, starting a federal police state for the first time ever in in this country's history. And um I just I sort of wanted to expand on a point I made last time, which I think is just a general point that libertarian types um need to make more, which is that like we often think of government doing things like government action as action, but the government can also do a lot and cause a lot of damage with what you could almost call purposeful inaction. And so like as a different example, I wrote an article um ear I think at the beginning of the I don't remember when those LA fires were but like in that case you essentially have all this governmentr run land where they just conserve all this wilderness and then don't do any kind of fire management there. And by doing that like it's making that an incredibly risky area. I think if it was privately owned there would be controlled burns there would be things happening. So through inaction government's actually doing something and causing damage. a similar thing. I mean, we were just talking about the Fed. That's another example where like in in uh mystery, the mystery of banking, I think it was Rothbart's book. Um he has that chapter where he talks about how the market process itself is a limit on banks ability to do credit expansion to to do credit inflation. Um and it's only through the central bank that the government comes in and removes those limits. And so also kind of it's like in the absence of um you know this market process then this sort of new system is able to flower up. And I think there's a similar thing happening in a lot of these blue cities with crime that the I mean the the police are we're told supposed to protect us and help us protect our property to protect and serve as like a common slogan for the cops and yet like these cities are just just there's just they're crimeridden and so yeah it's almost like we don't even really think of them as a protecting force anymore. Um, I know Tom Dorenzo, he calls cops crime historians because they'll show up after the crime happened and take a bunch of notes about it, but like the the whole idea that they're going to like actively be protecting your property um is kind of foreign to us now even though they the government has monopolized that service and on top of that with um DC especially, but a lot of other blue cities, especially in recent years after the whole defund the police movement and the George Floyd protest, there have been like I guess they they go by uh people call them progressive prosecutors, but it's basically this progressive ideology that um and they do look at to to be fair um they often point to what I think is the very real uh over incarceration of the American population, which I think is a real problem. I think it's more about a bunch of things that are not actually crimes being, you know, uh deemed crimes by the government. But anyway, they point to that and then it sort of led to this philosophy that um to make the justice system more just, it should do less. And that what that led to was fewer prosecutions, especially for um what we would still consider violent crime, but like lower level property theft. So like the like car smash and grabs and shoplifting and things like that. And in DC especially, it came to a head where um I think it was 2022, it was like twothirds of people arrested were not prosecuted. And so that just sort of adds to this like the absence of active strenuous property protection that you're getting from these uh police um and the the the police departments. And so I was sort of making the point that like and I guess I was kind of hearkening back to that whole um Sam Francis uh he called it anarcho tyranny which is a term I don't really like that much but this whole idea that like the government will not provide the service that's monopolying well but it will protect it will work very hard to protect its sole right to be like the the group in society that is there to protect your property. So, like there's so many examples of um people like gas station clerks that um try to defend, you know, their the the convenience store they're in against somebody that's, you know, trying to steal stuff. Maybe they hurt them, harm them, or kill them. And that like those people like the the cops and the prosecutors go hard against anybody doing that. Um, and like you had that uh case, there was some clerk that stabbed a guy and like a number of these cases, especially the ones that are just like so clearly um self-defense or defense of property. They may eventually get acquitted, but like that's after spending like that guy in in New York spent a long time at Riker's Island. Like basically these overcrowded um blue city jails full of violent criminals, the people that aren't let off by these progressive prosecutors. So, it's just like it's night and day when it comes to what they're really clamping down on and what they're sort of uh letting happen. That's the point I was trying to kind of make in this article. But, um that that is also why this this whole story has been in the news. People have been debating about it. And yeah, um, to your point, by taking over the the police department, which that some federal judges kind of walked back parts of that after Trump did that, it has also brought in this topic of like, you know, who actually gets to control DC cuz going back before I think 73, it was the federal government for basically the entire country's history. And then they passed home rule saying that there there would be a city government in DC uh, managing things. And now, you know, Trump coming in and saying, "Hey, they're doing a terrible job keeping the city safe, keeping it clean. I'm going to do something about that." That's brought that whole issue on top of all this uh to the forefront. >> Yeah. I think Trump is very good at the theatrical side of things, right? People, at least in their minds, imagine DC is this hell hole, which in many ways it is because all those things you're just listing about how right it's a catch and releaseleas system for criminals basically. And to the extent that that's true is difficult to say. um unless you're living there. But clearly this is not a serene city. Uh and I think it's funny how they they try to portray it as oh crime is down. Crime is at a it's down compared to where it was 30 years ago. Yeah. Okay. That's not something to brag about. The the uh the the first half of the 90s was terrible for crime and that was 30 years ago. So to now say that, oh yeah, things are at a 30-year low, um, well, great. I mean, yeah, most cities have lower crime now than they did in the the first half of the '9s, in the late '7s, throughout much of the 80s. Horrible gang problems during those time periods. And so, uh, that's just a pretty low bar to really say that, oh, crime's been going down. Well, yeah, it's been going down and it's still awful. Uh, and so we're supposed to get worked up about this whole issue though. But I'm having a hard time caring about uh self-ruule, quote unquote, for Washington DC. And so I think you did a good job kind of covering the origins of why we're even talking about it now. Uh but I mean I have literally written a book on the importance of radical decentralization and generally I am I am in favor of anything being decentralized and uh operating uh separate and free from the central federal government. However, Washington DC is a manifestation of federal power. It's it's not a state. It's never it's not a real city. it was something that was created um to actually enhance federal power and and a lot of the rhetoric around now this whole police thing is totally idiotic. Uh here's here's a line from uh the Associated Press uh an article on right uh Trump quote unquote federalizing the police. It says that the White House efforts are quote the most sweeping use of federal authority over a local government in modern times. Uh that doesn't make any sense at all because Washington DC isn't a federal isn't a local government. I'll tell you why. Here's what the constitution says about it. It uh if you look if you go and you look at article one of the US Constitution, it says and this is this pertains to Congress which is actually relevant to the discussion uh that we'll get back to. It says in article one that Congress has the power quote to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over district that is district what became the district of Colombia not exceeding 10 square mile 10 mile square as may by session of particular states in the acceptance of Congress become the seat of government of the United States and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state. Basically what it's saying there is okay if you can find a place where the states will seed this territory to you this 10 miles uh 10 by 10 miles basically uh then you you congress you rule that directly this is a federal district they called it the federal city back then and this is going to be a place directly under Congress's control and Congress created it and everything that goes on in that district is federal. It's federalized always has been. So the very use of the term federalization of uh police or whatever in Washington DC, it doesn't make any sense because the whole district has always been federalized. DC police, they get their money either directly or indirectly from the federal government. They're they're not like there's not some private sector economy that's fueling tax revenue in Washington DC. Just imagine where Washington DC would be if it wasn't absolutely filled with federal employees, federal contractors, and overwhelmingly dependent on federal spending. And as you noted, it was only in 1973 that they got quote unquote home rule, which all that did was create a city council and mayor system where they had some some local uh elections. This was an offshoot of the civil rights thing and where they're like, well, there should be democracy in Washington DC, so we'll give them some local elections, but in the end, Congress has to sign off on everything. And of course, it's it's funded by Congress, either directly or indirectly. And there there there's no such thing as any sort of uh local government there. However, what they try to do constantly is cast it as such. And so I was I noticed that one of the city council members there referred to how uh here's what she says. Uh what she this this politician from BA from Washington DC named Bowser was advocating for basically a federal bailout of Washington DC's budget. They were looking for another billion dollars uh for the city. And that's that's just standard operating procedure for Washington DC. Go to Congress, get more money. They have no life of their own as a city. and she says, "We are not a federal agency. We are a city, county, state all at once." They're not a state. Uh, and they're not a real city. It is a federal district that was created and by the way plowed under all the independent uh, stuff that was nearby. Like Georgetown used to be a real city that had real independence and Washington DC absorbed it and forced it into the new city of Washington as it was called back then. And we should note by the way that the whole creation of Washington DC was was designed to separate Washington DC from the Hoy Paloy. So the origins of Washington DC are in when Congress was meeting in Philadelphia. And this was in the early 80s, the 1780s. The war was like barely over. Congress was meeting, a bunch of militia men from the war who had been promised payment for the war basically started hanging out threateningly in Philadelphia and sending messages to Congress saying, "Hey, you better pay that money to us that you owe." And so Congress, especially Alexander Hamilton, as you can guess, who absolutely hated regular people. Uh he's like, "Well, let's just kind of convince them to to, you know, give us a little time and we'll get around to it later." And uh it was all just a very um unpleasant situation for Congress because they were actually being forced to deal with the regular people they had made promises to. And they thought, hey, uh why doesn't the governor of of Pennsylvania call out the militia and protect us? Well, he didn't do that because theoretically, well, it's it's theorized that he uh was sympathetic to the militia members who wanted to get paid. So, Pennsylvania didn't offer any protection for Congress. So Congress like in the middle of the night like they they they went across over to Trenton, New Jersey and met there for a few years. They had to get out of Philadelphia because the common people were angry at Congress. So then they thought, you know what we need to do? We need to like create this federal district which will we need to create this big square around Congress so that we can staff that with loyal federal troops and keep regular people away and so that they can't threaten us and make us do things. So the whole idea of Washington DC is like a screw you to ordinary people. We don't trust ordinary people. We can't rub elbows with you ordinary people. We need our own federal district so that there's a buffer zone between us and regular people. And that's why it was created. And so they drew this big box um that was supposed to be both in Virginia and Maryland. And they created the county of Washington. They created the city of Washington. They absorbed uh Georgetown eventually has all became consolidated into one big city called Washington DC. But it has always just been this federal thing. It's basically a big federal fort. And just like in olden times they let people live inside the forts. They let people live inside Washington DC. But the purpose of it is to create this haven for the federal government. And it's totally federal funded. The federal government has total control over everything here. So they cannot be influenced by any state or local government. So when you look at uh extending the power of Washington DC, it's an extension of federal power directly. So to do this song and dance about should Washington DC be independent, should it have electoral college votes, which it absolutely should not. Should it have statehood, which it absolutely should not, should it have some sort of city power, so can out there be lobbying with the League of Cities and having a life of its own? Should not be doing that. It shouldn't DC should not be considered in any way like a legitimate real city. It should be just considered basically an extension of federal agencies. And so this woman's quite wrong when she says Washington DC is not a federal agency. It is a deacto federal agency. It's it's uh it's a bunch of federal employees either directly or indirectly paid by federal dollars laring as like ordinary regular city people. And so I mean I would be absolutely thrilled if the if the city if the federal government absolutely slashed spending on the city that the city emptied out that people had to leave the city and live in real places rather than this fake city that is Washington DC and if the whole city just went to hell and looked like garbage and nobody ever wanted to go there. I think that would be a wonderful thing for America. Uh and of course America would be much better off if DC ceased to exist altogether. Uh but you know pending that um it should just be the dump that it deserves to be. It was always just basically a glorified fort for the federal government. And I have no interest whatsoever in like creating independence, making them a state um doing some sort of democracy experiment uh played out through Washington DC politics just don't care. So when I see all this all these worries about uh what might happen, I mean there was another article about how his takeover of the police is is impacting Washington's uh economy. No, it's not. Washington has no real economy. Washington's economy depends on federal spending. It only exists because of that. And so all these concerns over Washington, I think it's all just a complete waste of time. Um but let's go to you though. What do you think? What do you think uh about what should we do with Washington? >> Yeah. Well, I I we covered a lot of it last week and I I agree with your sentiments, skin. My my thought is DC is a fake city. It should be treated as such. So, I'm uh I've got very little sympathy particularly for the DC city council or or most of the people within that uh that body right now. >> Well, and you've lived there. I mean, I haven't I've been there for like one week. >> It's a fun place to be if you know 20some year old. >> Well, that's great Sunday brunches. >> That's my impression of it too, right? Is that you meet like only two or three types of people in Washington. you meet do you do meet the people who like are regular people who work there but again they're all heavily dependent on federal spending the truth >> even if you don't work for DC you're working for a a lobbying agency that lobbies DC I mean everything is somehow connected to government every single question when you meet someone is you know what do you do and if you don't have the right answer to that question they they immediately move on when you get a family you move to Virginia or Maryland right like it's anyone who's been in DC for too long a period of time is just like you can just see the soul just kind of going away from their body from year after year. So again, it's it's it's an interesting spot. >> But all that money coming in, there's there's good restaurants for sure. >> Yeah. >> As well. That's I guess the benefit of it of being like one of the wealthiest parts of the country, >> right? And the restaurants aren't even real, right? If the federal jobs went away, if the federal spending went away, those restaurants would cease to exist 100%. And you and the numbers are totally fake. I was looking up before this. How many people in Washington DC work for the federal government? And the number is ridiculously low. It's like 12.5%. They're like, "Only 12.5% work for the federal government." Well, obviously that number is BS in the sense of yes, only 12.5% of the workers, assuming that number is even true, get a paycheck signed by some that it's a US check, right? Well, okay. But as we covered in all this discussion about budget cuts and government employee cuts as Trump came in, the the the main problem isn't government employees. That number's hardly changed in decades. It's the number of federal employees that exist because it's all outsourced now. It's all uh contractors. It's people who were one degree separated from the federal government. So, as th says, right, everyone you encounter there, they're a contractor. They're a direct employee. If they work for the local government in Washington DC, they're essentially an employee of the federal government as well. So there, yeah, there aren't any real private workers in Washington DC because that's just that's not where the money comes from. And so yeah, if they say, "Oh, you know, I'm a private sector," they're just lying. Uh or they're dumb. I mean, if they really believe they're truly private sector, >> or it's like really like the the like the kitchen worker at the restaurant that all the federal employees are buying lunch. Yeah. But that's basically it. It does. It's like it's not anything higher level than that. Of course, one of the nice things about being in DC is uh they do have some very nice museums, which I know is also a topic in the news cycle. Oh, yes. Popping up this week. >> Yes. Let's uh let's look at that a little bit. Yes. Speaking of all just the the copious amounts of spending that occurs in DC. Yeah. There's the Smithsonian and uh Trump was um criticized this week or last week for suggesting that he's going to put in place a review process for analyzing the way that all these exhibits go into museums. No, I mean at this point, right, you got to be naive to not know that when you visit a museum, there's a there's a political agenda behind what is shown and what the message overall of the the language and the plaques are. And a famous case, for example, is that I guess they just recently in recent months removed uh plaques in Glacier National Park that had predicted that the glaciers would be completely gone by like the year 2013. And the glaciers are still there uh more than a decade after they had predicted the glaciers would be gone. And I guess they just now the edict went out, oh, you should take those plaques down uh because it turns out they're extremely wrong. So that's that's the sort of thing you have to be aware of anytime you go to any sort of cultural quote unquote installment, right? Is what are the plaques saying? What is the message that is being sent to me? Right? I think of this of course in terms of presidential libraries, right? Obama's presidential library has got an increasing amount of news. It's it's I don't know if you guys have seen pictures of it. This hideous hideous building in Illinois where they're all just temples and monuments to make presidents look good. They're propaganda factories to make their respected presidents look amazing. And that doesn't mean they can't be entertaining. Doesn't mean they can't be nice. Uh I've been to the Truman Presidential Library, for example. There's a nice fountain there. It's not a bad place. Uh, it's relatively cheap if I remember correctly. So, yeah, go ahead and visit. But no, that's just going to be a bunch of BS about how great Truman was. So, that's just the way museums work. So, though, can you tell us a little bit more about Right. In the case of Smithsonian, what's going on with these museums here? Right now, I'm sure they've all been put together in a totally neutral, nonpartisan fashion, but but Trump apparently wants to inject politics into the process. Shocking. shocking because sort of uh of of demonstrations of of big projects they've had on display uh you know done by such even-handed very rational uh intellectual leaders if you will the brightest of the bright like like uh Ibram KI uh who was the guy that wrote the whole like anti uh white fragility sort of stuff. So yeah, this has been, you know, part of the the tip of the spear. You know, museums often play this role, but you there's they went into overdrive. Um, you know, surprise surprise, you following the summer of love within DC. And so now people are acting shocked. You they're shocked that at the consideration of re-evaluating um some of these, you know, taxf funder subsidized displays. Um, and again, I've spent, you back in my time in DC, I've spent a lot of time there. Once upon a time, a lot of the stuff was more you you'd have like private sponsors. I know that the Koch brothers, for example, they had a lot of different kind of displays that they funded and the like. I'm sure none of those have changed with political correctness over time either. That's a whole another conversation there. Um but uh but again it's just this massive shock that uh you know how dare Trump politicize the Smithsonian you know that's been you know waving you not just uh you rainbow flags but the full-on like triangle multicolored you know rainbow flag pluses uh all these things about uh the definition of whiteness and how whiteness itself was a demonstration of the systemic racism of America yada yada yada. Um, and so, you know, you know, again, to me, you not having this stuff in the first place, I think is a a net positive, uh, for the American spirit, but we should not be surprised at all that there's a political side of things to all this sort of stuff. And this this goes back, of course, you to the most basic things, right? the entire narrative that you're going to get, you know, ranging from high school textbooks or elementary school textbooks even to anything that's going to be a a government demonstration of uh a cultural narrative of a historical narrative is going to be, you know, guided by the underlying politics of the people behind it. And for the longest time, a lot of these sort of cultural institutions, whether it's your local library to again the Smithsonian, always just had, you know, activist leftists typically overwhelmingly represented. Um, now this is one of the interesting trends that you've seen in modern politics is a recognition of that battlefield as well. And so once again, just like the Fed, just like the FCC, just like some of the agencies that we were talking about earlier, this is once again now you're right for um, you know, kind of partisan takeover. And I think that's a lot better than just having, you know, cultural homogeneity, you know, based off of the, you know, the the the trends of leftwing academia in today's day and age. Yeah, I think a lot of this uh comes back to something that other people have noticed before, which is like yes, we do have like Americans live in bubbles for sure and generally there is kind of a a red bubble and a blue bubble, but the difference is that if you live in that red bubble, you will still encounter the narratives of the blue bubble. If you turn on the TV ever, if you watch any TV shows, movies, or even like professional sports, like you're going to be inundated with this stuff, which is why I think like there's been research to show that like uh conservatives tend to have a better understanding of what liberals believe than vice versa. But you can live in the blue bubble and really not encounter the red, you know, counternarrative of American history at all. And so I think like when you're uh something like the Smithsonian like the narratives that are uh being portrayed in these museums are like the narratives of blue America that these people that is all they've heard. It's their entire understanding of our country's history. And so that really the only difference here is that um Trump for I guess the first time has decided that he's going to fight back and you know he's not just going to sort of roll over and let them continue sort of spouting all this stuff which you know blue America might think is like settled fact but like actually these are like political opinions and like highly debated um topics and so for for the first time he's actually going to the right is actually doing something about it and um they're they're losing their minds and similar things can be seen I mean, um, in in other areas like this sort of, uh, it reminds me of a lot of things that some people on the right are doing with civil rights law right now where like the the left dominated civil rights law. Um, and the right just sort of shrugged it off as something that, you know, they if you um, sometimes they would maybe admit that they didn't think uh, it should exist at all, which is definitely our position. Um but now like you have some thinkers that are like well if it civil rights law exists like we may as well jump into the battlefield and like be advocating uh you know for the people we represent in in those sorts of you know legal battles. Um, and it's it's a also like the civility thing you brought up before, like looking back at how it was before, like you'll always hear leftists bringing up that uh it was the debate with John McCain and Obama where that lady like stood up and she started saying something nasty about Obama and McCain like runs to his defense and is like, I disagree with him about a lot of these issues, but he's a good man or whatever. And you'll see leftists like looking back at that like why can't we just go back to that America when like politics was all civil. But then you see what they were saying about McCain or like the more absurd one to me is Romney. I mean the way they tried to like portray Romney as this ultra radical fascist right-winger um is crazy. And I think it was Romney where Biden was literally up there saying he's going to put you back in change to a black audience. And so all they wanted is they wanted to be the univil ones against the right while the right was nice and civil and kind of taking it against uh you know in response with the Trump years in in large part has been the right refusing to just take it and starting to fight back and treat the left like the left left's been uh treating the right this whole time and the left is just losing their minds in response. And I think this uh Smithsonian thing if it really takes off this is just the latest example in that broader story. >> Yeah, I think you're right. And I mean so I mean you think right they they really believe this right like I don't think it's the cynical sort of oh of course we are pushing our own point of view through all these institutions museums universities media etc. uh it seems that they truly believe that they're just saying the truth whereas when Trump says something different that's some sort of like cynical political ploy, right? Like they're well I'm sure there are some cynics among it but but they do seem to be real believers, right? Who who think that they're just doing the right thing and the other side is motivated to through hate or I don't even know what their motivations are. I mean, that does seem I I I'm not wrong in that, right? Am I imagining that? Or do they really truly believe that disagreeing with them is just disagreeing with sanity? >> Well, one of the critics of this whole proposal, um, who's a biographer of John Lewis, who's done some stuff in DC, uh, direct quote, like it's totalitarian. It does remind you of a fascist state and makes up a laughingtock around the Western world. I have to confess in my worst nightmares I didn't think it'd be it would proceed this far in terms of willful meglamania and again this is responding to something literally again this is the exact wordage of the sort of projects in question is uh white dominant culture or whiteness refers to the ways white people and their traditions attitudes and ways of life have been normalized over time and are not considered practices in America and since white people still hold most of the institutional power in America we've alter internalized aspects of white culture including people of color and about like the assumptions and like the the weaponization of white culture in the United States by Emma Kimby and I guess like how dare how dare we have a reconsideration of the value of these sort of projects going on taxpayer funed money in these these museums. This is what fascism looks like Ryan. >> Well and of course you'll meet conservatives who are fine with all of these institutions so long as they reflected a more what they regarded as a conservative point of view. Right. But I don't think they even appreciate the extent to where there's been ideological drift away from that old sort of cold war centerright consensus. I mean, that stuff's just long gone, right? >> Well, well, it's okay, Ryan. The the response I I know this been talked about is uh like one of the PBS supplements that they're they're looking at is bring in PragerU, that that bastion of uh of hardcore revisionist thought that that's going to be the right-wing response to some of this content. >> Yeah. all all day long stuff about how nuclear weapons are good to use against Japanese women and children. Remember that's a big Prageru thing. They get really mad if you suggest that nuking civilians is bad. And then of course all it's going to be like pro-state of Israel stuff all day long. We can count on that for Prageru as well too, right? That's the best the conservatives have to offer. I guess it's pretty pretty sad and pathetic. I I am hoping that the uh the specially commissioned stopmotion drawing animation of Anthony Fouchy that the National Portrait Gallery commissioned goes up for sale cuz like that'd be that'd be some fun target practice right there. So, I mean that's just the state of American institutions and uh and the fact that Trump wanted to defund some of that stuff is just shocking that we're supposed to believe that. But that brings us back again right to that whole issue and of course we need to get into more of this on some future topic, right? is that why aren't there institutions like this at the state and local level, right, which are building up local elites? It's just there's been so much money funneled into Washington that they've got all these cultural institutions that we're all forced to uh to fund. And guess who dominates all of them? Uh guys like KI, right? That's who's running all this stuff. And and they just can't believe that anybody's challenging that uh at all. So, I mean, kind of the takeaway from the week is what? Trump as an agent of chaos. I mean, he sometimes comes down in favor of us, right? He's making the the Fed look bad. He's uh exposing how um just he's bringing up, I suppose, the issue of DC independence and uh and normally it's just been assumed that it's on its way to statehood. The one of the great things about I think is Trump's whole thing is that people are starting to raise the issue of just revoking the old self-ruule legislation and returning DC to direct rule from Congress, which I think would would be great. I don't think that would be getting as much traction without uh his stuff on there. And then he's he's making people the Smithsonian freaked out. So don't send don't at me, bro, and tell me that I have Trump derangement syndrome. the the guy by accident has always done a lot of pretty decent stuff, I think. And yet again, by accident, he's attacking a lot of the institutions that I also hate. So, it's been a good week for Trump, uh, I think, in terms of stuff we like. Uh, we haven't talked, of course, about his federal spending or anything that week, so we'll just leave that for some other time. But this week, Trump, that number is not going up, Ryan. That's okay. >> All right. Well, we're at about 50 minutes, so we'll go ahead and call it a day for this episode of the Power and Market podcast. Uh, thank you, Connor. Thank you, though. We will be back next week with more. So, we'll see you next time. [Music]