Reason Video

On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it's worth asking: What was the American Revolution actually about? We all remember the broad strokes we learned in school: Independence from the British crown. Taxes on tea. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But on a deeper level, the American Revolution was—and is—a revolution in political theory, reimagining what a legitimate government is and what its relationship to its citizens should be. Washington's troops won the ground war 245 years ago at Yorktown, but the ideological battle continues against forces on both the left and the right who are pursuing a ruthless assault on America's core values. The American Revolution isn't over. Inscribed inside the dome of the Jefferson Memorial are the words: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Thomas Jefferson wrote that in an 1800 letter, but that feeling of hostility toward the tyranny of a distant monarch is what drove him and his fellow revolutionaries in 1776. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch summarized the Declaration's core ideas in an interview with Reason: "The Declaration of Independence had three great ideas in it. That all of us are equal. That each of us has inalienable rights given to us by God, not government. And that we have the right to rule ourselves." That's why Jefferson declared that a legitimate government requires the "consent of the governed." Thomas Paine put it more scathingly in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, writing that "government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens." Monarchy was the Devil's most effective and enduring form of "idolatry." We don't fret over tyrannical kings in today's America. Only ceremonial vestiges of hereditary monarchy remain in the modern world. The Revolution achieved a complete victory in that sense. Yet a counterrevolution is underway, one that views the American Revolution and the republic it birthed as a failed liberal regime that has outlived its usefulness. And these counterrevolutionaries sit remarkably close to the levers of power. Self-Rule Under Threat Three years before he became vice president, J.D. Vance told podcaster Jack Murphy that America had reached a point of no return. "We are in the late republican period," he said. "If we're going to push back against it we have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with. Indeed, among some of my circle the phrase 'extra-constitutional' has come up quite a bit." Vance regularly cites and associates with a group of so-called "postliberals." He appeared on a panel with one of this movement's leading intellectuals, Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame political science professor and the author of Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, in 2023. Deneen believes there is an unbridgeable divide between the "elite" and "ordinary" people. "What is needed," he writes in the book, "in short, is regime change—the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class," which will be replaced by a more virtuous one. He envisions the kind of aristocratic government favored by the ancients like Plato and Aristotle, endorsing "aristopopulism," where an elite class works to further the interests of the masses. "The replacement of the current elites in our society ought to be more closely aligned to the interests of ordinary people," Deneen said at the panel. He invokes a "premodern conception of liberty—expressed in the pages of Plato, Aristotle, the Bible," where institutions like the family, the church, and the state worked together to impose "guardrails" protecting individuals from becoming "slaves" to their own desires. My colleague Stephanie Slade writes about the postliberal right for Reason magazine. "He says people like [himself] should just be in charge of our government. That's what he means by regime change," Slade says. "[That] we should replace the current elites." She notes that postliberals are willing to frame the entire American Founding as a mistake: "They might say, yeah, America did have a liberal founding and that's why it was a mistake. Actually, this whole experiment was a mistake, and it maybe took a couple hundred years for that mistake to play out….We now can see that it doesn't lead to good conservative outcomes." In his book Common Good Constitutionalism, Adrian Vermeule, a postliberal Harvard Law professor and appointee to President Donald Trump's Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, wrote that "the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to 'protect liberty' as an end in itself." That's a rejection of the spirit of 1776. Paine saw the existence of government as a necessary evil because of "the inability of moral virtue to govern the world." A minimal state, in his view, should be restricted to supplying "freedom and security." As Gorsuch put it in the same Reason interview: "If you think of the Declaration as kind of our mission statement, our ideals, and the Constitution is the how-to manual—well, the Constitution is all about dividing power. Madison realized men are not angels and that their aspirations for power need to be checked and checked and checked again." The "regime change" Deneen and Vermeule call for isn't explicitly violent. Deneen describes "Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends." The strategy manifests as a steady expansion of presidential authority, as we've seen under Donald Trump's second term: the 143 executive orders he signed in just his first 100 days, more than any other president in history; his decision to send troops to American cities without permission from local authorities; his declaring of 21 national emergencies while in office; and his decision to send illegal immigrants to overseas prisons in defiance of the judicial branch. Incidentally, one of the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence was King George III's penchant for shipping the accused "beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses." Before he became vice president, Vance encouraged Trump to emulate Andrew Jackson and dare the Supreme Court to try enforcing its rulings against him. "If I was giving him one piece of advice," Vance said, "fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people, and when the courts—because you will get taken to court—and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, 'The chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.'" "That's a really dangerous idea to be even casually trotting out there, let alone for somebody who is now the sitting vice president to be on the record," Slade says. "He said it a number of years ago when he was just a candidate for office, but I've never seen anything from him since he's been in office that makes me think that he doesn't ultimately believe in that sort of approach to politics." Some postliberals call for measures far more dramatic than the steady erosion of constitutional restraints currently underway. Michael Anton, who worked in Trump's State Department over two terms, wrote in his book The Stakes about the prospect of a "Red Caesar"—a right-wing dictator who would rise from the ashes of the fallen republic. "Caesar's word replaces constitutionalism and even, in the final analysis, law," he wrote. In a podcast conversation with pro-monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin, Anton discussed what that might look like. "Caesarism is a form of monarchy, but that follows a nonfunctioning republic, a republic that doesn't work anymore," Anton said. Yarvin proposed that the path to power would begin with declaring a state of emergency in an inaugural address, "taking direct control over all law enforcement authorities….Basically like Caesar, you're using all of the force available to you."  "There is just clearly much more of a sense that government power is meant to be used to advance our side in the face of our enemies," Slade says. "And the enemies are the left, the political left, and anyone on the right who isn't going to line up with [them]. [They believe] political power should be used to reward our friends and punish our enemies, and that to me is a clear violation of one of the core principles of rule of law, which is equal treatment for everyone under law." In the COVID era, President Joe Biden imposed national mandates by executive fiat, and his administration tried to suppress dissent by pressuring tech companies to censor critics. The Democratic Party has also flirted with the idea of packing the Supreme Court to get its way, which is not a new impulse for the party. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to pack the Court in 1937, it cost him the support of progressives who had previously backed the New Deal. FDR is revered by progressives and cited by Yarvin as a prototype for an American Caesar. "Was FDR a dictator? What does it mean to be a dictator? What does this pejorative word mean?" Yarvin asks. "A dictator is somebody who rules alone. And that, I think, is a beautiful thing." The Revolution was, first and foremost, about self-rule: We would no longer abide by a diktat from an overseas king. From the very beginning of the republic, power-seeking men have tried to undermine that vision. In its earliest days, there was a plot to install a Prussian prince as king of a new American monarchy. Jefferson accused John Adams and Alexander Hamilton of being monarchists, recounting in horror a dinner conversation in which Hamilton told him "the greatest man…that ever lived was Julius Caesar." But monarchy is seductive because strongmen promise order in chaotic times. In the wake of Shays' Rebellion, a post-Revolution farmer's uprising, Jefferson worried the Constitutio

Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder, has a provocative theory about how the Antichrist could take over the Earth and enslave humanity. "My speculative thesis is that if the Antichrist were to come to power it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time," Thiel told Hoover Institution interviewer Peter Robinson earlier this year. The greatest danger we face, according to Thiel, might not be from global warming, terrorism, nuclear winter, or artificial intelligence going rogue. The real danger is that we're so afraid of these threats that we're willing to give up our freedom in the interest of "peace and safety," which is the phrase Thiel ascribed to the Antichrist, citing Thessalonians 5:3. "It's the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world," Thiel told the New York Times' Ross Douthat on a podcast. "In our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg." "I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building," replied Douthat.  Douthat was referring to Palantir, the government contractor that Thiel co-founded in 2003 during the height of the war on terror. Today, Palantir is "in the white-hot center of the latest trend reshaping the global order," according to The Wall Street Journal, receiving more than $322 million from government contracts in the first half of 2025. It's equipping the government with tools to sift through massive data troves to identify patterns and hunt down illegal immigrants. It's helping the Feds deploy facial recognition technology, and has created AI tools to "predict" where crimes might happen in advance. "Like, wouldn't the Antichrist be like: Great, we're not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far," Douthat asked Thiel. "Isn't that a concern? Wouldn't that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?" When Thiel replied that hastening the Antichrist's arrival is "obviously" not what he thinks he's doing, Douthat agreed that it was unlikely but pressed, "I'm just interested in how you get to a world willing to submit to permanent authoritarian rule." It's a great question. While Peter Thiel is warning that the Antichrist could bring totalitarianism by exploiting our desire for "peace and safety," a company that he co-founded is building the tools with great potential for abuse by a totalitarian surveillance state, all based on our desire for "peace and safety."  Is it too late to stop this nightmare? It's fitting that Palantir is named after the mythical stones in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which allow users to see into distant lands, eavesdrop on conversations, peer into the past, and—some claim—conjure visions of the future. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, explored the dangers of unbridled power in a way that resonates with Thiel's ideas about the Antichrist. While the Antichrist invokes peace and safety, the corrupted wizard Saruman in Lord of the Rings implores his fellow wizard Gandalf to join forces with the dark entity Sauron, he invokes the values of "Knowledge, Rule, Order." Trump promised peace and safety when he took the stage to accept the Republican nomination in 2016 by cracking down on crime and riots in America's big cities. "I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored." Thiel, who was the first tech billionaire to back Trump, spoke at that convention. Eight years later, Trump was back at the RNC once again warning of a crisis and promising to restore peace and safety. "There's never been an invasion like this anywhere," said Trump, referring to a spike in illegal immigration.  Exploiting a national emergency, real or manufactured, is how governments typically grow their power and limit our freedoms. As the libertarian economic historian Robert Higgs chronicled in his 1987 classic, Crisis and Leviathan, the government ratcheted up its power in the 20th century by capitalizing on the Great Depression and two world wars. More recently, the 9/11 terrorist attacks justified the war in Afghanistan, provided cover for the invasion of Iraq, and led to the expansion of the surveillance state under a new paradigm known as Total Information Awareness. "[Total Information Awareness was] what Palantir is now. What they were literally trying to do is come up with the ability to ingest data from pretty much any source and then run that against their de facto target list," says Patrick Eddington, a former CIA analyst who studies the surveillance state at the libertarian Cato Institute. His latest book is The Triumph of Fear, a history of federal law enforcement and surveillance. "All this stuff at the end of the day is fear-based. That's how we get a lot this surveillance mentality," says Eddington.  Total Information Awareness was an initiative started at DARPA, the research arm of the Defense Department. The stated goal was to construct a "virtual, centralized, grand database" for tracking terrorists, the same kind of database Trump wants to build to track illegal immigrants. The government hit years of roadblocks before finally achieving this vision. Public backlash to the unnerving name led to a rebranding before Congress defunded the program in 2003. "But a lot of these really bad surveillance-related ideas, even if they get knocked down, they're kind of like a vampire, right? You knock them down. You think you've knocked them down for good, and then one way or the other, they just seem to kind of come back," says Eddington. Total Information Awareness lived on under the innocuous code name "basketball" and was absorbed by the NSA, which Edward Snowden would later reveal was collecting the phone records of millions of Americans and intercepting web traffic without the knowledge of the companies involved. The same year that Congress defunded Total Information Awareness, Peter Thiel and his co-founders created Palantir. They even met with John Poindexter, the recently fired director of Total Information Awareness, who told them they had "an interesting idea." Initially, the company struggled to attract mainstream investment, but when the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, put in $2 million, it signaled interest from Washington, and the company took off. Today, Palantir is worth more than $400 billion with over half of its revenue coming from government contracts. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, the dream—or nightmare—of "total information awareness" seems closer than ever before. ICE is now using mobile facial recognition technology to track immigrants and tie their identities to "derogatory information" compiled in one of their database. The agency also uses Clearview AI, facial recognition tech that scrapes social media, and much of the data is managed by Palantir. Even if you support Trump's objective to deport more immigrants, you should still be concerned about this technology. Like with many surveillance tools of the past, immigrants and foreigners are fertile testing ground before it's rolled out to the wider domestic population. People on the Republican side should really not be cheering a lot of this stuff that's going on right now, because if Democrats manage to retake the White House and both chambers of Congress, which is a very real possibility, then they could turn around and use those tools," says Eddington. "And by the way, that's exactly what my own work in this book basically shows." The MAGA movement should understand what it's like to walk under the gaze of the Eye of Sauron. After the January 6 riot, "right-wing extremism" became a priority for America's intelligence agencies. Online censorship reached its zenith under the Biden administration, which leaned on social media companies to suppress speech that criticized COVID policies, vaccines, or questioned election integrity. The "triumph of fear," as Eddington calls it, is what has allowed governments—particularly federal law enforcement—to expand and consolidate power throughout history, consistent with Higgs' theory of crisis and Leviathan. Eddington has documented how, since its inception, federal law enforcement has been weaponized to go after not just criminals but political dissidents, which the FBI did with a program called COINTELPRO in the '50s and '60s. "It started out as something designed to target the Communist Party of the United States," says Eddington, "But then of course it branched out. You know, they went after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They went after the organization that he founded. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of human beings who were targeted in the course of this." It's easy to imagine how the technology that Palantir is building to help the government keep tabs on terrorists and illegal immigrants in the interest of peace and safety could be applied more broadly. Snowden has predicted that governments will soon use AI-enhanced surveillance not merely to fight terrorism or deport immigrants but to shape behavior. "We are all entering a new phase of history where what we considered the more enlightened collection of States globally, ones that had embraced the classically liberal ideal, are now some of those working hardest to roll it back, to bureaucratize, to influence, to nudge, to shape, to ultimately control each and every individual within their territory and beyond," said Snowden at a conference in Singapore late last year.  Thiel is also worried about AI. "If you were to say that crypto is libertarian, then why can't we say that AI is is communist," said Thiel at the University of Oxford in 2023. "It's not completely inherent in it

In President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, he also cautioned Americans about the growing power of a "scientific, technological elite." "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment project allocations and the power of money is ever present," warned Eisenhower. The federal government had become a major financier of scientific research after World War II, and Eisenhower was worried that the spirit of open inquiry and progress would be corrupted by the priorities of the federal bureaucracy. And he was right. Today, many of the people protesting the Trump administration's cuts to federal funding for scientific research are part of that scientific, technological elite. But there's a good chance that slashing federal spending will liberate science from the corrupting forces that Eisenhower warned us about. "If you look at, particularly, 19th century Britain when science was absolutely in the private sector, we have some of the best science," says Terence Kealey, a professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Buckingham and a critic of government science funding. "It comes from the wealth of the rich. Charles Darwin was a rich person. Even [scientists] who had no money had access to rich men's money one way or another. The rich paid for science." Kealey points out that Britain's gross domestic product (GDP) per capita outpaced that of 19th-century France and Germany—both of which generously subsidized scientific research—indicating that the return on state subsidies in the form of economic growth was low. As America emerged as a superpower, its GDP per capita surpassed Britain's. "So the Industrial Revolution was British, and the second Industrial Revolution, was American, and both were in the absence of the government funding of science," says Kealey. Thomas Edison's industrial lab produced huge breakthroughs in telecommunications and electrification. Alexander Graham Bell's lab produced modern telephony and sound recording, all without government money. The Wright Brothers—who ran a bicycle shop before revolutionizing aviation—launched the first successfully manned airplane flight in December 1903, beating out more experienced competitors like Samuel Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who had received a grant from the War Department for his research. The notion that the government needs to accelerate scientific progress was based on America's experience during World War II, when federally funded research led to breakthroughs in rocketry, medicine, and radar. The Manhattan Project, which cost $27 billion in today's dollars, employed more than half a million people and culminated in the creation of the atomic bomb and the discovery of nuclear fission. "Lobbyists took the Manhattan Project and said, 'Look what government funding of science can do,' and they then twisted it," says Kealey. He acknowledges that the government can accomplish discrete, "mission-based" scientific projects—like racing toward a bomb—but he argues that this is very different from the generalized state funding of "basic research" that followed.  In November 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a letter to Vannevar Bush, director of the U.S. Office of Science and Development during the war. Roosevelt instructed Bush to come up with a plan to make federal funding of scientific research permanent.  "It has been basic United States policy that government should foster the opening of new frontiers," wrote Bush in calling for the nationalization of basic science research. "It opened the seas to clipper ships and furnished land for pioneers." Bush's treatise eventually led to the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950. But it was a stunning accomplishment from America's greatest rival that would supercharge the nationalization of science. Sputnik, the world's first manmade satellite, seemed to confirm fears that the Soviets, with their centrally planned economy, might eclipse the U.S. in scientific innovation and weapons technology. That turned out to be completely wrong. But in 1957, Americans were terrified. After Sputnik, the Eisenhower administration tripled the budget of the National Science Foundation, which would provide federal grants to universities and labs. If federal funding of science is counterproductive, as Kealey argues, what explains the success of Sputnik and the Manhattan Project? Of course, government funding has led to major breakthroughs both during and after World War II, such as the synthesis and mass production of penicillin during World War II (though it was accidentally discovered in a contaminated hospital lab in 1928), cancer immunotherapy, artificial heart valves, and the gene-editing technology CRISPR. But this has to be compared to what might have otherwise happened. Good economics takes into account not only the seen, but the unseen. What are the unseen innovations the world misses out on when governments set the research agenda? "If the government funds science, it actually takes the best scientists out of industry puts them in the universities, and then industry in fact suffers," says Kealey. After Sputnik, government money pushed basic science out of the private sector. By 1964, two-thirds of all research and development was paid for by the federal government. "If you were a tool maker in Ohio in 1964, and you wanted to invest in R&D to make better tools because you wanted the beat your competitors in Utah, you wrote a grant to the Department of Commerce," says Kealey. "That's how nationalized American science was … Eisenhower's warning is absolutely correct." In academic science, process often takes precedence over outcomes. Researchers are incentivized to publish peer-reviewed papers that garner citations, which helps them secure prestigious academic posts and more federal grants. "What happens under peer review under the government is that there's homogenization, and only one set of ideas is allowed to emerge," says Kealey. The pressure to publish has created a positivity bias, where an increasing number of papers supporting a hypothesis are published, while negative findings are often buried. One biotech company could confirm the scientific findings of only six out of 53 "landmark" cancer studies. Swedish researchers found that up to 70 percent of positive findings in certain brain imaging studies could be false. A team of researchers re-examined 100 psychology studies and successfully replicated only 39. "There is still more work to do to verify whether we know what we think we know," they concluded. In an influential 2005 paper, Stanford University professor John Ioannidis flatly concluded that "most published research findings are false." He argued that the current peer review model encourages groupthink, writing that "prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma." "You end up with a monolithic view, and so you crush what's so important in science, which is different ideas competing in a marketplace of ideas," says Kealey. For decades, the federal government advised Americans to avoid saturated fat and prioritize carbohydrates based on the work of a researcher named Ancel Keys, who received substantial funding from the U.S. Public Health Service and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Today, the debate that Keys suppressed rages on. "Ancel Keys said, 'I have the solution, it's all to do with fats,'" says Kealey. "And very quickly, you couldn't get grants to the American Heart Association unless you subscribe to Ancel Key's theory of fat. Having captured this small little redoubt, he then moved to the [National Science Foundation], and then suddenly the whole world believed only one thing." More recently, Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya was attacked by the public health establishment for questioning the COVID-19 lockdowns. He told Reason there's an inherent conflict between the NIH director setting public health policy and doling out grant money. "If you have an NIH director that [sets policy and distributes money], they control the minds of so many scientists. It's an inherent conflict, and nobody's going to really speak. Nobody's going to disagree with them because that's the cash cow," says Bhattacharya, who President Donald Trump appointed head of the NIH. His agency now faces a proposed 40 percent spending cut. But if Kealey is right, slashing science funding could, counterintuitively, accelerate medical innovation in the long run. "If these changes can be managed in such a way that these scientists can move from the NIH into the private sector without massive disruptions to all the work and research they're doing, that will be to the benefit of America," says Kealey. It would be similar to what happened in the early 1970s, when Congress slashed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's budget in half, laying the groundwork for the rise of the computer age. "What happens to all those scientists? Well, they all go out to Silicon Valley, because they've all been made redundant … And they invent the modern world," says Kealey.  "New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life," wrote Roosevelt in his letter to Bush. But maybe Roosevelt drew the wrong conclusions from the war. "Vision, boldness, and drive" can be found amongst the dreamers and tinkerers working in private laboratories, who are often too iconoclastic to be good candidates for government research grants but whose ideas, simply, work. "It's technology that keeps science honest," says Kealey. "If you're a scientist and you m

"Wise words," wrote Elon Musk about this 1999 viral clip described as "Milton Friedman casually giving the blueprint for DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency]" as he ticks off a list of federal government agencies he'd be comfortable eliminating.  Musk is right. Friedman, a Nobel Prize–winning libertarian economist, did offer a solid blueprint for creating a smaller, less intrusive government. At the peak of his fame, he seemed poised to influence an American president to finally slash the federal bureaucracy. But those efforts ended in disappointment because they were blocked by what Friedman called the Iron Triangle of Politics. Slashing government waste and making the federal bureaucracy more accountable are incredibly important. But President Donald Trump and Musk are hitting the same wall President Ronald Reagan did more than four decades ago.  Now more than ever, it's time to pay attention to Milton Friedman's advice for how to defeat the tyranny of the status quo. In the 1980s, Friedman's influence reached deep into the halls of power. "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem," said President Reagan during his first inaugural address in January 1981.  Like Trump, Reagan was preceded in the White House by a big government liberal, who expanded the size of government and whose presidency was plagued by inflation. Reagan, who awarded Friedman the Presidential Medal of Freedom, promised to enact many of the libertarian policy ideas laid out in the 1980 bestseller co-authored with his wife Rose. "I don't think it's an exaggeration to call Milton Friedman's Free to Choose a survival kit for you, for our nation, and for freedom," Reagan said in an introduction to the television adaptation of Friedman's book. But for the most part, the Reagan Revolution failed to deliver on its libertarian promises. "Reagan's free market principles…clashed with…political reality…everywhere," wrote his former budget director David Stockman in his 1986 book The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. "For the Reagan Revolution to add up," he wrote, all the people "lured" by politicians into milking social services "had to be cut off." Reagan tried to keep his promises but, like most presidents, he was only partly successful. Reagan lifted price controls on oil, cut taxes, and pushed for deregulation. But his commitment to these initiatives quickly fizzled. Federal spending exploded, and he even left trade quotas in place for the automotive industry. The failure of the Reagan revolution inspired the Friedmans to write The Tyranny of the Status Quo, which examines the political obstacles that obstruct government cost cutting. Their insights are as relevant today as they were 41 years ago.  The book, which came out in 1984, pinpoints the Iron Triangle of Politics as the main obstacle to cutting government. The triangle's three points reinforce each other to uphold the status quo: the Beneficiaries, the Politicians, and the Bureaucrats. The "beneficiaries" are interest groups and connected industries that profit off of government programs at the expense of taxpayers. Today's beneficiaries include farmers who receive federal dollars. The new budget bill backed by the Republican Party would extend the Farm Bill, which subsidizes crop purchases. As Friedman said, the people paying the bill are "dispersed." You might not have noticed your share of the $2.1 billion going to prop up corn, soybeans, wheat, and other prices when you paid your 2023 taxes, but the farmers who get that money certainly did. The "politicians" depicted on the triangle are supposed to be responsive to their constituents but end up serving interest groups instead. But it's the bureaucrats who actually distribute the money. They grow their power when politicians grow the size of their departments, which generates more spoils to distribute to the beneficiaries. It's a symbiotic relationship all at taxpayer expense. Bureaucracy tends to "proceed by laws of its own," wrote Friedman, noting that in the half-century between Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and the Reagan Revolution, the U.S. population "didn't quite double but federal government employees multiplied almost fivefold." Musk has also observed that a metastasizing bureaucracy "proceeds by laws of its own," stating in a press conference from the Oval Office that "if the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives…then we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy." And, like Friedman, he senses danger if the ballooning of the bureaucratic state isn't reversed. At another press conference, he told attendees that "the overall goal here with the DOGE team is to help address the enormous deficit….If this continues, the country will become de facto bankrupt." DOGE's strategy is to try breaking through the Iron Triangle by the force of a thousand cuts, looking for little inefficiencies with the mindset of a software engineer. Musk has described his role as "tech support," which is fairly accurate given that the Executive Order that created DOGE actually just rebranded an Obama-era agency called the U.S. Digital Service. It's a good start. The federal work force should be streamlined, and much of it even automated. But Musk might be repeating some mistakes of the Reagan years. As Stockman observed, the Reagan Revolution floundered because his team only focused on "easy solutions" like ferreting out "obscure tidbits of spending that could be excised without arousing massive political resistance," which" yielded savings that amounted to rounding errors in a trillion-dollar budget." To make real progress on cutting spending, the cost reduction must go deeper than tech support could manage on its own. Friedman knew that the path to shrinking the federal government began with abolishing federal agencies. In his viral clip, he lists the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Commerce, and Education as ones to put on the chopping block.  Trump has already shut down the Department of Education…kind of. His executive order directs the Education secretary to draw up plans to eliminate or shift some spending to other departments. It keeps major spending like federal student loans intact, and a total dismantling will require Congress to act. The Trump administration has made severe cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and it defunded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, which made access to credit and banking more difficult for low-income customers. DOGE also enticed 75,000 federal workers to resign. But many of these cost-cutting initiatives have been challenged in court. Truly eliminating federal agencies requires congressional action. Because Trump holds only slim congressional majorities and didn't win on a platform to slash government, he won't be able to eliminate entire federal departments like Commerce or Agriculture. But what would happen if the Trump administration had really followed the Friedman blueprint, learned from the shortcomings of the Reagan Revolution, and created a political movement capable of pressuring Congress to finally start permanently eliminating entire agencies? Friedman says it would actually make the federal government function better by narrowly focusing on providing what state governments and the private sector can't. "One function of government is to protect the country against foreign enemies—national defense," says Friedman. "A second function of government, and one which it performs very, very badly, is to protect the individual citizen against abuse and coercion by other citizens….I believe that the government performs that function very ineffectively because it's doing so many things that it has no business doing." Earlier this year, Musk wielded a chainsaw gifted to him by Argentina's libertarian president, Javier Milei, who more closely followed the Friedman blueprint by targeting the beneficiaries and the bureaucracy, which he calls "La Casta." In Argentina, it took massive poverty and triple-digit inflation to spark a real libertarian movement that now has a chance of overthrowing the tyranny of the status quo. We don't want to wait for things to get that bad.  Musk praised Milei's approach at an event in Buenos Aires co-hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute. "I think governments around the world should be actively deleting regulations, questioning whether departments should exist," said Musk. "Obviously President Milei seems to be doing a fantastic job on this front." Fantastic indeed. But how can the Iron Triangle be overcome in the American system? DOGE itself can't legally delete entire departments. DOGE's website claimed $140 billion in cuts out of its $2 trillion goal as of early April 2025. But it hasn't provided full documentation, and various media and open source analyses have ball-parked DOGE's total savings as more in the $2 billion to $7 billion range. Either way, DOGE isn't anywhere close to reaching its goal of cutting $2 trillion in government spending, or almost 30 percent of the $7 trillion annual budget. The Congressional Budget Office found the deficit grew 5 percent in February compared to the previous year despite DOGE's early cuts. Meanwhile, the Republican majority passed a budget projected that would add $3.4 trillion to our $28.8 trillion debt. And we haven't even talked about Social Security and Medicare, which are the major drivers of debt, and which Trump has promised not to touch. As Stockman came to realize, this is a bipartisan problem. "There isn't a difference [between the parties] when it comes to the debt," he said on an episode of Reason's Just Asking Questions. "How in the world can we keep adding $1 trillion to our public debt every three months? How are we going to get away with basically enslavi

"Deny," "defend," "depose"—these three words were allegedly written on bullets found at the murder scene of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The slogan began appearing in graffiti, highway banners, and T-shirts. When the identity of the likely killer was revealed to be a man named Luigi Mangione, he developed a passionate fanbase.  "So many men and women are going nuts over how good-looking this killer is," said Jimmy Kimmel in a breezy monologue joking about his writing staff's adulation of Mangione's physique. "Free Luigi!" exclaimed comedian Bill Burr on a later episode of Kimmel's show. How did a man who allegedly executed a married father of two at dawn on a New York City sidewalk become a hero? Those three bullets with words inscribed on them explain not just why the alleged killer did it, but why he received so much adulation. And it's not for the reasons most people think.  It seemed like the perfect American tragedy: A handsome valedictorian with a promising future suffers a back injury and a botched surgery, robbed of life's pleasures at his physical peak—no surfing, no travel, no sex. The personal became political, so the story goes, when the health insurance industry rejected Mangione's claim for treatment. "Deny, defend, depose" was likely a reference to a 15-year-old book by Jay Feinman exposing how health insurance companies don't pay routine claims.  "Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming," Mangione wrote in a manifesto.  His fans embraced him as "our shooter." The media made him a symbol of American rage towards a system that denies basic treatments with an eye toward the bottom line. Former Washington Post and New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz defended the celebrations of Thompson's murder, writing that in a nation with "a barbaric healthcare system," where "the people at the top…rake in millions while inflicting pain, suffering, and death on millions of innocent people," "it's natural to wish" that people like Brian Thompson "suffer the same fate."  "I felt alongside so many other Americans, joy, unfortunately," Lorenz told an incredulous Piers Morgan when asked to describe her reaction to Thompson's murder, later clarifying that she felt, "maybe not joy, but certainly not empathy."  Forty-one percent of poll respondents under age 30 say the killing of Brian Thompson was acceptable. More young people polled admitted to viewing the killer favorably than unfavorably. But these poll numbers don't actually tell us very much about popular dissatisfaction with health insurance.  Most people under 30 are healthy and don't interact much with the health care industry. In fact, despite its problems, two-thirds of Americans say they are personally "satisfied" with their own insurance coverage.  Yet, the "delay, deny, and defend" inscribed on bullets do explain Mangione's popularity: Equating words with weapons is a reflection of how our culture increasingly treats language and violence as morally indistinguishable. I first encountered claims that speech equaled violence a decade ago as I interviewed college students about microaggressions, trigger warnings, and deplatforming mobs. One student expressed the view that "political change is hard to conceive of without violence…even taking human life." Today, most students approve of shouting down viewpoints they disagree with; almost half are okay with blocking access to speeches; and a third say violence is a justified response to hateful ideas.  These notions trace back to the 1960s and a group of intellectuals who were part of the "Frankfurt School." In a 1965 essay, the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who was once branded the father of the New Left, called into question the value of free speech in a "manipulated" society, arguing that we need to "reexamine…the traditional distinction between violent and non-violent action" and recognize a difference between "revolutionary and reactionary violence, between violence practiced by the oppressed and the oppressors." "People experience denied claims as an act of violence against them," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) said in a social media post addressing Thompson's murder. If words are violence—and denying a service is violence—then actual violence is justified as retribution. To celebrate the murder of Brian Thompson, one must first dehumanize him by transforming him from a three-dimensional human into a low-resolution symbol. But he was a real person with a family: a father of two and the son of a grain elevator operator who worked his way up the corporate ladder.  Thompson reportedly rushed $135 billion to an emergency fund for health care providers, keeping "thousands of hospitals and other healthcare providers afloat during the pandemic." Meanwhile, the federal government struggled to find the money. He was soon after promoted to CEO.  He made a lot of money in that role but didn't start out with the same "privileges" as his accused murderer: an Ivy League son of wealthy parents who spent the months leading up to the murder bumming around with friends in Hawaii. There's also no evidence that Mangione was ever a United Healthcare client. He evidently received back surgery and recommended the procedure to others on Reddit, advising on strategies to get insurers to cover it.  The truth is, neither of these men should be viewed as heroes or villains, or simplistic symbols in a memetic war. They're flawed humans who made consequential choices with varying levels of knowledge and virtue. And now Mangione, if proven guilty, will rightly face the consequences of those choices.  Fortunately, political violence is still unpopular with the majority of Americans, but it only takes a small and determined minority to wreak havoc when left unchecked. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, a similar mentality that led to celebrating Thompson's murder generated support and excuses when neighborhoods were looted and bricks were tossed through store windows. Following its defeat, some members of the Democratic party, such as Rep. Seth Moulton (D–Mass.), are distancing themselves from the mob cancellation, anti-speech, deplatforming mindset because they realize that it's a losing strategy.  "We have a wing of our party that shames us, that tries to cancel people who even bring up these difficult topics and shames voters," Moulton said in an interview defending his comments about trans athletes that had provoked a backlash in his party.  Maybe it's possible to reverse the cultural drift that made the murder of Brian Thompson into something to celebrate. Combine moral zealotry with increasingly blurred lines between political speech and violence long enough, and the outcome is predictable: more violence. Photo credits: Antony Mayfield (CC BY 2.0), SEBASTIAN KAULITZKI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Newscom, Mykyta Starychenko, Anthony Behar/Sipa USA/Newscom, Curtis Means/UPI/Newscom, Stefan Krusche, Tomas Del Amo, Kelpfish, Cristina Matuozzi/Sipa USA/Newscom, Steve Sanchez/Sipa USA/Newscom; Credit: Marilyn Humphries/Newscom   The post Why the Internet Celebrated a Killer appeared first on Reason Magazine.