David Harsanyi & The Dangers Of Following In Europe's Footsteps
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All right, boys and girls, we're back with another edition of the Ben Dominich podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can check out all the Fox News podcasts at foxnewspodcast.com. I hope you will subscribe to this one and rate and review it if you like it. Today, I am talking to David Harsanyi. He's one of my favorite columnists, someone who I've had the pleasure of working with at The Federalist. He's currently at National Review. He is the author of the new book, Eurotrash, Why America Must Reject

The Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. In our interview, we talked about a number of different factors coming from Europe that have been important across the pond and that Harsanyi raises real concerns about. We talked about this and a number of other issues in our interview today. The book is Eurotrash. The author is David Harsanyi. That interview coming up next. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Your latest book is Euro Trash, Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.

I am only disappointed by it, given that I thought you might be giving me a tour of the various types of Euro trash who populate said continent. But because I think that your acid tongue would have done phenomenal work on them. But I do think that this is a book that is very timely and certainly offers people

a warning about making the mistake of just saying, well, why aren't we more like Europe? Which is something that I certainly hear from a lot of people here in America. David, why aren't we more like Europe? And why is that a bad thing? Well, we exist not to be like Europe in many ways. I mean, take the long view of history. Though our...

you know, our pundits, many of our politicians, the sophisticated people in our society, the elites think we should be more like Europe, and they always have. But I think the idea spread to become a normalized position on the left and to some extent on the far right. We shouldn't want to be like Europe because what they're doing, the trajectory they're on in almost every way as I go through, you know, in my book,

is leading towards disaster. And none of the ideas they have, not on health care, not in the moral realm, not in the cultural realm, not in technology, economics, immigration, you know, there's nothing almost that they do better than us. So I try to quantify those things as best I can. But there's also sort of a dynamism and spirit of being an American. So if we became like Europe, we'd probably still be free, but we would be missing a

the entrepreneurial spirit that we have. Europe is risk averse, we're not, things like that. So I think it's important both in ways we can quantify in policy, but also in spirit. One of the sections of your book particularly focuses on the complacency of European workers versus American workers. And I found that to be somewhat amusing,

it's definitely in keeping with my experience in terms of traveling in Europe to say that their workers are somewhat less responsive, let's say, to the various demands of a job than what we experience here in America. To what do you ascribe that difference? That's a good question. I think that the European, when you look at polls,

embraces and cares far more about safety and comfort than the American worker who believes more in meritocracy and achievement. I just don't mean your salary. I just mean doing the things that you love to do, living in the places you want to live, and things of that nature.

So I just think it's a mentality. You know, I say this a lot and it sounds sort of romanticized or idealized, but Americans are self-selected risk takers. The very idea that you come here was risky. Usually you're trying to get out from the thub of something, either political or economic, destitution or whatever. And you come here and you come to a meritocracy. When you look at polls and you ask an American, can a poor person

escape their fate with hard work. Like 70 or 80% say yes. In Europe, it's only like 20%. And I think that reflects well on the society that they're in. So

That's just how it is. Americans, I mean, Europeans are more pliant. They're more subservient. The, you know, Scandinavians, for instance, always like their government, basically. It is just a different spirit and mentality and how you view the world. You touch on one aspect of Europe that I think is particularly concerning in its export to America, and that is declining birth rates.

there obviously was a lot of attention there.

paid to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle when they announced that they wouldn't be having more children. I believe they won an award or two for that, as one does. In your chapter on Europe as a retirement home, you talk about the development of this argument, furthered here by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that

Things are going to be terrible for kids, so we shouldn't have more of them. Something that I've heard and seen repeated in a lot of places and by prominent writers who I feel like ought to know better is

Why has Europe and so much of the elite that represent it embraced this Malthusian concept that basically the future is going to be terrible for kids and so we ought not to have them? Well, it's a great mystery to me. You know, I've been arguing this for a long time, long before I wrote this book.

that by almost any quantifiable measure, the world is better for people today than it was 20, 30, certainly 100 or 200 years ago. And yet we act as if things are getting worse and worse. Now I'm not saying obviously we don't live in a utopia, not everything is perfect, not everything is on the best trajectory, but just in general, we're safer, wealthier, and you can go down the line.

But I think, you know, when I wrote this book, I lay out all the problems, you know, with Europe. It's an old place. Germany, I think, is maybe the second oldest country after Japan of, you know, advanced nations. That causes many problems. But since then, I think we've seen some numbers that we're on the same same route as they are. I mean, we're just not having many kids anymore.

And that means that we're going to want more immigrants. Nothing wrong with immigration. I think that's a big part of this discussion as well. But Europe tries to make up for their lack of, you know, childbirth by importing people, but they don't assimilate them like we do. And immigrants have many more children than they do. And it causes all kinds of problems, not just because new people aren't assimilating, but also because you're

you're sort of sparking this ethno-nationalistic backlash against those people. So it becomes a very, you know, society becomes, it becomes more brittle and it becomes a problem.

I don't know why they don't have more kids. I get the richer you get. And I think this Malthusian idea that you shouldn't have kids is part of it, definitely part of it in Europe and definitely part of it here among progressives and people who like Europe. But I'm not sure that's the only thing because we see this happening across the board. There's so much that's bad about the comparison here when it comes to trends.

What are some of the things that you actually do believe we ought to emulate here in America about Europe? Not much. I would say there are things they do better than us. Someone was asking me today about wokeism. You know, they don't really have that there like we do here. I think that that's sort of a trend that's problematic and they push back against better than we do. But obviously there are other things. I mean, we have high levels gun homicides and it's part of

Yeah, I'm a big proponent of the Second Amendment, but it is what it is. You have a lot of guns, you're gonna have more murders with guns, that's a problem here. It's like when they talk about healthcare and life expectancy in Europe and how much better it is. Well, it's only better because we drive more, we have more vehicular deaths, we have more homicides here, things of that nature. It's not because they have a better healthcare system. We've already taken all the good ideas from Europe, classical liberalism, all the ideas that made this country are from Europe.

the ideas of Christianity, frankly, the idea that we have choice, we have free will. These are ideas that come from Christian culture and European culture, and we have already taken those ideas. I'm not sure what's left over there. Talk to me about the

The backlash in recent years against this globalist approach to managing Europe that has taken the form of rising levels of.

nationalism or hyper nationalism, however you want to define it. Tell me about the dynamics that are going on there and what has fueled that in recent years. You mean like Hungary? Yes. I actually, you know, my parents are from Hungary. They left there and I sort of speak Hungarian and I like to pay attention to Hungary because it's obviously become a place that many

I don't know what to call them exactly. You know, conservative social conservatives believe, you know, Orban's doing a great job there and such. I'm not a big I'm not a huge fan of Orban. I think there's a lot of a liberalism there that that rubs me the wrong way as a as a more, I want to say libertarian person, but, you know, a person who believes in in in less government.

But I kind of understand why he exists. I mean, you know, Hungary was the entryway for a mass immigration that was uncontrolled. And once you're in the European Union, you can go anywhere you want, basically. And the Hungarians shut that down. And that's why people first began hating Orban in the way they do, especially the American left. But also because he wants to defend Christian values and he calls it a Christian nation and he is protective of, you know,

of Hungarian culture. He admits that there's a distinct thing called Hungarian culture, just like there is a distinct thing called, you know, German culture. And the European Union tries to, you know, as a blob, and it's just an economic arrangement. No one's ever picked up a musket to defend the European Union. They want to sap nations of their individuality in that sense. So I

I understand what's going on in Hungary and I understand what's going on in Poland. And I, and I feel for them. I wish they were more liberal in their approach to the press and things of that nature, but I feel for them. And I, I would, I don't feel for them. I understand that. Obviously there are more radical anti-Semitic strands of that as well, go on in Hungary and elsewhere that I, you know, I obviously don't understand, but yeah,

yeah, when you have huge influx of immigrants, you have a massive Euro super state that tries to tell you what you can do and can't do every day. You're going to have a, you're going to have blowback. Is, is the central problem that's afflicted Europe and that continues to be, you know, a problem for the EU, just the trouble of managing a situation that,

where Germany wants to dominate everyone, but we really don't want them to actually fight wars in order to achieve that end. Yeah. Well, you know, it's, it's, they take Hungary. I mean, all they do is complain about the EU, but they don't actually want to leave the EU because of their market and their, their net beneficiaries of money. You know, Brexit was a different story. I think maybe unexpected to a lot of people, but you know, as an, as

As an Anglophile, I was happy to see that. And I just think the British have always been a little bit different. They, you know, from the very beginning, the French were never really hot on them joining this situation, you know, the union even before it formed. And because they're, you know, they're more free market organizations.

oriented they're more they're less inclined they never took on the currency they're simply less inclined to um to participate in that sort of thing but um germany dominates the eu as you said we don't want them fighting wars for sure um and there's a bunch of weak other weak nations like you know obviously greece or or even italy and these other places that uh that they like to dominate and that's their marketplace

So I think it's a big problem. And the EU was actually built initially when the idea first, you know, was born in the 50s. And so on the modern European Union state was was modeled on the American federalist idea. But but they got it all wrong because you have Germany being so dominant. You know, now we're emulating them by making Washington more and more dominant and centralizing government. So it's kind of ironic, but they got it wrong. And now we're following them down the wrong path.

There's an obvious tension that exists between the United States and Europe when it comes to paying for their national defense. We have the vestiges of Cold War dedication to protecting Europe and the connections of NATO and the like.

But at the same time, American political critics, you know, not just Donald Trump, but Rand Paul and others as well, have basically said, you know, Europe needs to do more.

in order to pay their part when it comes to defending themselves and that they essentially enjoy a luxury under American taxpayers' auspices when it comes to the amount of money that they have to spend in their own defense. What's your attitude towards that and toward the need to have a strong defense

Europe militarily in balance against, obviously, a Russia that has seen fit to encroach in recent years. Hmm.

Well, it should be said that, you know, everyone went bananas when Trump was bringing up how Germany doesn't pay a fair share of NATO defense, which is a fact. And not just, you know, Donald Trump had said that, but Barack Obama had constantly been saying that as well. And it's just simply true. They are they live off the U.S. taxpayer tax.

And if the European Union was built, and it was, to maintain peace, but also to compete with the United States, it is very weird that we should be paying for their defense as they try to compete against us. We're talking about a lot of money and effort here. So my position is that we should be...

extricating ourselves from that arrangement because it doesn't make sense in the 21st century. I don't exactly know how that looks. I am not obviously a fan of Russia, but if Germany is going to make deals with Russia to get their energy from there, you know, that's fine by me, but I'm not exactly sure who we're defending them from then, you know? So last I saw NATO was involved in Libya and not in Russia. And I don't really understand that arrangement. I haven't for many years. So, yeah,

I mean, listen, Europe has only been a peaceful place largely since the US taxpayer has been watching over them. Before that, they were not. I think that we're in a new world. I don't see Austria and France going to war. So I don't really understand NATO anymore.

You write about the prevalence of eugenics in Europe, particularly targeted at the eradication of Down syndrome, which is something that I've talked about before as well. What is the state of play there in terms of the assumptions that Europeans seem to have about just getting rid of potentially expensive people who have

significant health or mental problems. It is clear. And I think from what I've read research, just looking at numbers and in every way that we value life more than Europeans do. We value end of life more than Europeans do. We value premature babies more than Europeans do. And

We value sick people more than Europeans do, eugenics. And that's the right word to use when you're supposedly eradicating a disease that is not genetically passed on from generation to generation. You're just eliminating people who are inconvenient to you. And the way it's done, where there's almost no debate in Europe over this, right? I mean, here it happens as well. It's just done more quietly. But there's a debate over it because they

There's Christianity here. There are religious people here. There's social conservatives here. That doesn't really exist very much in Western Europe anymore. And there's really no one to push back. In old Europe, you might have had kings, but you also had clerics. You also had all kinds of forces, intentions and debates. But in New Europe, you just have bureaucrats. Bureaucrats decide who is cost, you know, what's cost effective, who is worth more.

saving and who isn't worth saving and things of that. I know it sounds nefarious what I'm saying, and it's not that, you know, it's not everyone, but there is definitely less respect for human life in Europe than there is in the United States. I'll have more of my interview with David Harsanyi right after this.

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You quote a Finnish local joke, which I was unfamiliar with because I'm not an expert on Finnish humor, that an introverted Finn looks at his shoes when talking to you, an extroverted Finn looks at your shoes. The experience of talking to American progressives

about Scandinavia in recent years has been a depiction of a utopian human experience where there are really no problems whatsoever, that we ought to emulate them in every respect. What do you actually see when you look at Scandinavia and how accurate is it to, or how responsible is it to pretend that that could be a model for how we live here in America?

Right. I think you hit it on the head there. You know, scaling that kind of system to 350 plus million people is it would be impossible, especially impossible in a place where you can't even raise taxes on the middle class over there. Middle class person making $60,000 a year is paying maybe 65 percent of his salary in taxes.

I mean, just that's the, the, that's just not in our DNA. It's not going to happen, nor should we want it to. It's a massive welfare system. What they get wrong, of course, is that it's a socialist system, which it's not. It's in many, you know, every, all those countries are a little different, but what you have is a capitalistic system holding up a giant welfare state. But put it this way, there's a cultural thing as well, as you mentioned with the Finns and they're an Nordic nation, but they,

Someone once said to Milton Friedman, you know, there are no poor people in Scandinavia. And he said, well, that's great because there are no poor Scandinavians in America either. The Scandinavian people themselves are different than Italian people or Greeks. Not trying to put Italians down, just saying, you know, there's a work ethic and a different sort of culture among Scandinavians.

that they are successful wherever they go. And I think we need to remember these cultures when we talk about Europe, they're not all the same. Scandinavians are not like the French when it comes to work ethic and they do well. They're industrious people and they have a good sense of community, but they're also pliant.

I think I might have the number slightly off, but I think like 91 percent of Finnish people are happy with their government and they're always happy with their government, no matter who's in government. So that tells you that's impossible here. Right. We're just a diverse, messy place where there's going to be a lot of infighting, political fights, and we're not going to agree on things. So we can't have that kind of culture here.

The battle over borders and understanding of nations in Europe is obviously something that has been, you know, front of mind in the context of the Brexit discussion and various other efforts to have some kind of breakaway experience by various nations. Here in America, obviously, there are regularly protests

and people who push for the idea of either secession or some kind of gathering of certain states together to form various compacts and the like.

to govern themselves, uh, and as opposed to having to respond to what they see as encroachment from, from Washington, whether that be from the right or the left under, under Donald Trump, for instance, in the, in the last couple of years of his term, uh, the Western, uh, states, uh,

gathered together and tried to do something like this. We saw, you know, similar things happen under Barack Obama and during the Tea Party era of the Republican Party. Talk to me about your impression of these various movements that try to seize back power or to, you know, engage in some type of dramatic effort of achieving self-government.

And what those types of movements are likely to result in, if anything, do you think that they're just all kind of pie in the sky thoughts or do you think that they might actually come to fruition in some sense?

I think it's mostly pie in the sky stuff right now, because I think geographically it's a difficult thing to ask, because this is not about states as much as it, I think, is about urban and some suburban and rural areas fighting amongst each other. It's not, you know, so I just don't I don't know how that would happen locally.

But I have to say, I am happy whenever people talk about stuff like this, because I want states to be more independent of federal government, even if it's about Donald Trump or Biden, I don't care. But there is an answer to all this. And the answer is to demand that Washington follow its enumerated rights and that, you know, we have federalism for states. That's the point of the entire system, why it exists. And the

The problem, I think, is, frankly, that I don't think that someone in rural Texas really cares what someone in Brooklyn or Park Slope is doing. But I do think that the person in Park Slope wants to compel a person in rural Texas to live a certain way and say certain things. I don't think it's an equal, you know, I don't think it's equal. And now that they have the majority, I think that they've embraced majoritarianism and they've embraced centralizing government in ways that are un-American. And, you know, so I don't blame both sides equally for it. I

I think one side is trying to undermine the system in ways the other isn't. You have always been a critic of direct democracy and particularly the way that it has been modeled in America, in California. The push for more responsiveness from government is

I think, especially during this pandemic, has led to a lot of people trying to entertain or consider more extreme ideas about ways to demand that the government respond to their desires. Are you concerned that there's going to be a rising plea for more direct democracy in

in the wake of a pandemic that saw so much devolution of the institutions that we really want to be able to trust, whether, you know, health institutions, you know, major government agencies, bureaucracies and the like, who misused or mismanaged this process. Yeah. I, you know, this pandemic has sort of changed my mind a little bit about the American people. I mean, I,

in government slightly in the sense that, you know, governors just shut down churches and shut down businesses. And most people just pretty much went along with it, at least in the beginning. I don't know what they were supposed to do, grab guns, obviously not, but it's just, there wasn't the uproar I thought there would be.

You know, that Ruth Marcus story where she's in the elevator and she tells the guy, you know, you should have worn a mask. That's what I think. And the guy says, I don't care what you think. Like, I don't care what you think is like the American motto or get off my lawn is the American motto. And to hear people embrace that.

And I live in a county like Fouchistan over here where, you know, everyone just like little soldiers puts their put their masks on outside, jogging, et cetera. So I find all that really off-putting and unfortunate. And, you know, I hope the rest of America isn't acting the same. But I think it's just strengthened my belief, though, in local democracy. You know, these these things that happened, these mandated government induced shutdowns,

we're done by fiat unilaterally by, by without any debate, without any vote, without anything. So I don't think it undermines my view of democracy in general, but it does make me think that perhaps the P you know, that there were too many people who don't embrace what it means to be. And I don't want to like call everyone on American, but you know what it means to be an American. And that's like, you know, I don't care what you think, you know, I'm going to do it.

The thing that really disappointed me was I just wish that Americans had been a lot less docile during this whole period. And I...

I hoped that they would have more resistance to it and yet found very little. One thing that I do wonder is, you're someone who is very aware of how much kind of overpowered bureaucrats, overpowered elites can make mistakes and send us in the wrong direction.

in ways that teach people that those folks should not be trusted or those institutions should not be trusted. And yet the irony of history seems to be that the response to those institutions or individuals displaying that fact

tends to lead to people demanding that they be, that they or the people who inherit their positions be given more power, not less. That they actually be given more authority under the assumption, false in my view, that that was the problem all along. That, you know, because they didn't have enough power, it's why we ended up in this circumstance. Are you at all worried about that? Because that certainly seems to be the way that things...

play out, not just in Europe, but in Mexico and in other nations around the world, where people are just given more and more authority, even in the wake of them showing either personally or as parts of institution that they can't be trusted with it.

Yeah, very. I mean, you see this on the right quite a bit lately where, and listen, I agree with the critics of tech companies, and I think what tech companies do is a serious problem for a healthy Republican democracy and free speech.

Certainly do. But the idea that if we give government more power, they're going to make things fairer in some way is just mind boggling to me. Where does that ever happen? I mean, the government grows in power. It's going to inhibit speech it doesn't like no matter who's in power. And the left has been far better at using that power than the right.

For me, it's deregulating and uncoupling the big company from government that's important. Cronyism happens because of rent seeking. It happens because, you know, corporations are scared to offend anyone in the bureaucracy. And we are run by the bureaucracy. When Donald Trump became president,

the state department, the FBI, other institutions who run this country decided that he wasn't going to be president and they just undermined him every step of the way. Whether you like him or not, that's a fact and it's incredibly dangerous. It's more dangerous than January 6th. It is a true coup in a way of the government. It's not supposed to be run that way and now the left wants to expand the bureaucracy constantly, it always has, in ways that would give them even more power.

um these are the i think the bureaucracy is the most dangerous thing in this country and um in europe it's huge there are layer after layer you're you know there's european union bureaucracy and then there's the bureaucracies in your country i mean it's nothing new europe has always the austrian hungarian empire had a huge bureaucracy and things like that but they're more as you say docile and pliant and uh

keen to listen to what their betters tell them rather than telling them to get lost. And I was worried too that this pandemic showed government that they could actually tell us what to do quite easily. Do you have a favored solution when it comes to the big tech problem? No, not really. I hate it because everyone asks me, well, what's your solution? And I don't really...

have one. If I say, you know, the right should build their own stuff, all I do is get mocked by everyone. But I really think that that is not as outlandish as you think. People can build things. You built something. Others have built things, meaning, you know, media sites and, you know, and platforms and things of that nature. And I just think that I don't really see another way out of it right now.

I don't really have a favorite solution either. And this is one of the things that I struggle with, because I think you and I are very ideologically similar when it comes to this circumstance. I think we recognize that big tech in particular in recent years has done a lot of harm to American public discourse and to freedom of thought.

But I also don't necessarily see that there's a solution to it in the sense that I think that what you can do is take away some things that amount to corporate welfare or protections against various treatment that might have been a good idea when the Internet was starting out and was a wild west of a place, but that we may not want to continue in in the current era.

But I don't think that that actually solves the problem. I don't think that it will result in better behavior on the parts of these institutions. And that, to me, seems to be the thing that we ought to want.

You know, better behavior, meaning, you know, not having YouTube suspend this, that and the other for saying things that that they don't like, you know, not having. I mean, I think of Twitter, by the way, as being completely irrelevant to this because it's so tiny, but not having, you know, the the institutions that say, you know, allow your sites to remain up. You know, Amazon Web Services obviously being the biggest example of this.

not having them judge people based on their political positions, that better behavior is what we ought to want. And getting to that point, I'm not sure that there's a piece of legislation or a regulatory approach that would necessarily lead us to that end. I just haven't been convinced of anything like that.

Yeah. I agree. Is there anything, if there's anything that can be done, though, and I do believe something needs to be done because we need to send the message that, you know, clearly this has become something that is not just a political concern among elected officials, but it is a concern among, you know, small business owners and Americans who are just, you know, menacing

regardless of how online they are, they're concerned about their kids and the cancel culture that is related to this. And of course, there's also the elite mindset of we're going to label everything that we dislike as dangerous misinformation or disinformation, which is itself a very dangerous thing, I think, in terms of the discourse. Clearly, something needs to change.

But is there anything that you've heard or that you've thought of that that could actually lead to that kind of change, whether it's government or non-governmental?

Well, let me just say a couple of things to piggyback on something you said. So I think the press and tech companies are essentially illiberal institutions. It doesn't mean that they're state-run institutions, obviously, but they're illiberal. They stop speech. There's groupthink, all that stuff. I do think Twitter matters more than – I'm not saying – I'm not trying to –

It still matters more than I think that you claim only because I think that's where the group think of media like germinates. This is correct. That is correct. I'll concede that. So then select the questions they ask and the focus of their coverage is constantly, you know, made on Twitter.

But I think it's important to put it all into some context. You know, when I was a kid and Ronald Reagan was elected, there were three people giving me the news and, you know, they were biased, three biased, three people, three networks. And that was that. So I think things are actually better now for now, even with everything that's going on than they were when I was young. Yeah.

The problem is that we can't trust major institutions of media anymore. So what happens is you have other voices which are fine, but you also have a lot of crazy voices filling that vacuum. And then, you know, people believe all kinds of nutty things. How do we fix that? I don't I don't I don't really know. I don't have any good ideas other than to try to push back with bigger institutions and better, you know, arguments and things of that nature. But, you know, I get laughed at for that. But really, what else can you do if you get power?

to government to have some sort of fairness doctrine or something. I mean, it's the arguments we made against the fairness doctrine back then still hold today. There's no, there's not two views on every issue. There's 15 views on every issue. And it's, it's very dangerous to try to have government control that. So I honestly don't have any way to fix that other than to try to push back in my little world that I live in. I mean, it's, it's frustrating because I think a lot of the times I'm very sympathetic to

to the arguments that are advanced by people who are tech critics. And I certainly publish and I would say employ people whose views I share in terms of the criticism. I just don't, you've yet to offer me a recipe that I strongly believe would lead to some kind of success in getting better behavior from these institutions that we would like to function as

American companies that have American values, that value free speech, you know, that are not going to be beholden to China or to the crushing nature of of of despots around the world. And it's just it's discouraging to me to see that conversation not go in more productive ways. Circling back to to this political moment.

It seems to me that the sympathies of certain factions of the right, whether it comes to big tech or whether it comes to some of the nationalism, the populism that we were talking about earlier, I understand those sympathies. But I also have kind of a similar attitude of skepticism about whether that type of approach can function well in an American system. It seems to me that that is...

You know, it's too sweeping. It's too ambitious of a change in a way from where we currently are in America to the kind of governmental system that they would like to see. And I do think that, you know, that clearly there are a lot of people who are ambitious, who fall into that category.

But I think that they maybe think too much of what government power can achieve in an era in which we are very familiar with the regularity of gridlock and the inability of particularly representative government to do just about anything other than spend other people's money. What are your thoughts on that? Right. Oh, I agree. I'm not even sure. Well,

They remind folks who like talk about Hungary all the time, remind me of people who talk about Denmark all the time. You couldn't scale that sort of system here, nor is there the support for anything like that system. I don't understand and I don't want to name names, but, you know, there are people out there who think that we're going to be able to set up some kind of technocratic system.

you know, theocratic, uh, state government here through populism. It's just not going to happen. There's no support for it. The right is losing support. I'm gaining support. I think, um, certainly people are far less religious than they used to be. I just don't understand why they think a country of 10 million or whatever Hungary has of one nationality basically is the same as a country as diverse as ours. I just don't see how that system scales here or could be implemented here. Um,

And I am, you know, they don't like gridlock. Technocrats hate gridlock. But gridlock, as I've written in many columns, including at The Federalist, is the organic state of a country that is at odds with each other in different places. We're a huge country. I just don't understand why it offends people so much. And I don't understand why they feel the need to compel people to live like them. You're right, though.

What happens is they just end up spending money. I don't like that. I think that's a serious problem, but it's better than some kind of new great society, which is exactly what the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill is about. An irony in all of this, I don't know, maybe I'm using that in the Alanis Morissette misuse sense, in which there's so much faith in the power of government that

to achieve the kind of society that many people believe ought to exist, whether from the left or from the right. Even as what we've basically learned about our government in the last two decades is that it can't do jack. It can't launch a healthcare website. You know, it can't keep track of terrorists and their wives. You know, it can't deal with

the basic things that we ought to expect of government, regardless of ideology. In fact, I think the greatest

core conservative libertarian right of center critique is that government should do less because it's so bad at what it does. You know, even, even if they wanted to teach your children critical race theory and indoctrinate them in these things, they're going to be bad at indoctrination too. They're going to be bad. They're going to be bad at keeping track of all of this. It's just systems that are on top of systems that continue to fail. And so my, my response to that is to basically say, well,

maybe government shouldn't be doing this. Maybe we should have systems that are more, maybe they shouldn't be doing it at all. Maybe we should have systems and things that are more responsive to the people. Is there a single government institution, bureaucracy, anything that hasn't failed us in the last 20 years? I can't like even think of the FBI, the CIA, right? I mean-

State Department, you know, frankly, our armed forces, you know, I mean... Armed forces, yeah, they were the last holdout post-Vietnam. You know, you felt like the armed forces could actually do things and they learned the right lessons. Nobody feels that now. I mean, after seeing the debacles of the last...

several years. And so it really is, in this moment, it seems to me that that ought to lead to a doubling down on a narrative that basically says, look, regardless of what you call yourself ideologically,

You have to concede that our government is just not that good at doing these basic things that we expect it to do. So maybe it should do less. Maybe it should not even bite off as much as it's currently biting off in terms of trying to manage our lives. And maybe we should invest more in whether it's the private sector or in communities and states and localities themselves.

to direct their lives. Everyone needs a religion. It's weird coming from an atheist like myself. The problem here is that people are looking for a new faith and they find faith in government. Europeans have always found faith in government, whether, you know, the old monarchies, but also fascism or communism, et cetera. Whereas the here we have not, we have much more locally focused and community focused and church focused. I think we're losing a lot of that. So I, I, you know, I'm sympathetic to many of the arguments made by, you know,

advances of the world or whoever about populism and local churches and things like that. I just think they have the wrong idea about how to fix that. And again, I don't know how to fix it, but, you know, giving failed institutions more power, it doesn't seem like the right way to go for me. The book is Zero Trash, Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. David Harsanyi, thank you so much for taking the time to join me. Thank you for having me.

You may have noticed the news that was widely spread regarding the renaming of Facebook's parent company by Mark Zuckerberg. And while it may seem like just another big tech rebrand of the sort that comes along from time to time, it actually really says something important about what Zuckerberg wants to do and how he wants to spend

his enormous amount of money in pursuit of a real, very potentially life-changing element of society. And that's an investment in the creation of what's known as the metaverse.

You've probably heard something like this discussed in the realm of science fiction. If you've been a reader of those types of novels or short stories over the years, you're certainly probably familiar with it from the very popular book Ready Player One, which got its own Spielberg movie treatment and the like. But essentially what we're talking about is life within a virtual reality created realm.

And the problem is that when you dig into what Mark Zuckerberg and his associates want to accomplish with this world, it really has an enormous potential to be something truly dark and disturbing if you dig into what they really want to achieve. Emily Jashinsky has a piece at The Federalist on this topic. Meta could make Mark Zuckerberg the world's most powerful landlord that I'd encourage you to read.

She writes in part, while the bowtie class debates Section 230, one of the most powerful companies in human history is plotting to trap us in virtual reality. And I mean that literally. Mark Zuckerberg's robotic rollout of Meta, his new name for Facebook's parent company, is earning a round of well-deserved mockery enjoyed on his own products, of course. The tech seems bizarre and futuristic. His

His utopian promises fall on deaf ears. His sweet baby Rey's bookend boggles the mind.

Back in July, Zuckerberg expounded on his plans for the metaverse in a deeply disturbing interview with The Verge. That same month, Sheryl Sandberg explicitly revealed that Facebook's hope is that one day people will host religious services in virtual reality spaces as well, or use augmented reality as an educational tool to teach their children the story of their faith, unquote.

Faith organizations and social media are a natural fit because fundamentally both are about connection, said Sandberg.

Note that Meta is cloaking its new technology in the very same language Facebook was pitched to us in the mid-aughts. This fuzzy, abstruse technology will connect us, they say, and that connection will be wonderful. We now know this presumption was naive and destructive, so the oligarchical plan to transfer more of our lives onto their platforms should be regarded as nothing short of an emergency.

Worship is just one aspect of everyday life Meta wants us to substitute for virtual reality, monetizing nearly everything we do with deliberately addictive and divisive technology. Zuckerberg and Sandberg may be high on their own supply, but their motivations are hardly pure. The more time we spend using Meta, the more money and power they amass. They

They are cynically positioning themselves as the real estate kingpins of the future. They want to be the global landlord of every church and gym and office space. The more time people spend in the metaverse, the more value virtual property will have. It's not just about the money either. Their control over virtual spaces will give them more control over our human experience and our culture. Who is their major competitor right now? Physical reality?

We are still learning about social media's chemical addictiveness, so I won't argue the research is conclusive. I also won't argue that the research into social media's effects on our brains is conclusively negative. There is, however, compelling evidence that social media companies intentionally design their products in ways that hurt us.

This is very serious. Zuckerberg wants to normalize VR worship and VR everything because the more time we spend in his metaverse, the more money he makes and the more control he has. Zuckerberg has spent 15 years proving he's a terrible steward of money and power. We've run the experiment and Facebook failed. We cannot cede more of our lives to this company.

Tech boosters assure us this is all another moral panic, the likes of which we've seen at least since the printing press, since the wristwatch, since the novel, since the radio. It's old, they say. But all of those technologies, even the printing press, are relatively new. In the scope of human history, all of this is extremely new. The last several hundred years are a blip, let alone the last 15 years of the smartphone revolution. These technological advancements have been incredible for civilization.

That doesn't mean new technologies will always amount to advancement. It certainly doesn't mean we should give Meta and Zuckerberg and Sandberg more control over more moments of our daily lives.

I'm very concerned about this development, and I believe it has the potential to be world-altering on an incredible scale, something that really does upend a lot of the ways that we as humans have lived for most of our existence and without the kind of necessary preparation for living in such a changed and altered environment.

But that remains to be seen. I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.