Welcome back to the Rational Policy Podcast! In this installment, our 52nd (!) to date, your stalwart hosts Mike Coté and Art Vandelay dive into a grab bag of the week in news and politics. We skip over some of the repeat topics that we usually address - Iran, Israel, Ukraine, China - and touch on some other subjects that caught our eye instead. First, we take a listener request from my friend Dr. Amber Brittain-Hale to discuss the potentially looming breakup of the United Kingdom. We talk about the history of British unionism (and secessionism), the challenges to the current version of the UK, and the very real problems its constituent parts - and the US - would face if our top Atlantic ally fell apart internally. Next, we touch on last week’s Republican midterm convention, noting it as a good idea in an age of nationalized politics, but one that was executed poorly. (Good ideas badly executed may be the overarching theme of the entire second Trump administration.) After that, we spend some time on a broader and more serious topic: whether artificial intelligence will kill us all. We talk about the big money and progressive politics behind the AI doomer clique, the role of China in pushing anti-AI fervor in the US, how we should regulate this industry (if at all), and why this technology is just a tool for humans, neither inherently good nor bad. Finally, we jump head-first into the online right-wing fever swamps, detailing the latest dust-up over who counts as an American. We go hard at the faulty idea of Heritage Americans, explore the dangerous and anti-American ideology of the New Right, describe the malign networks promoting racism and Christian nationalism, explain the funding mechanisms behind this attempt to alter the civic compact, and provide a better, actually conservative, way forward.
Check it out, follow us on Twitter/X (Mike / Art), and share the podcast with anyone you think might appreciate it. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week with another great episode. Until then, enjoy the early beginnings of the best season of the year: autumn. See you next time!
