This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch discuss the riots engulfing France and whether the country's increasingly unsustainable welfare state has made it ungovernable. They examine competing claims that immigration and austerity are fueling the unrest, the political gains being made by the French right, and why even modest pension reforms provoke fierce resistance.

The conversation turns to the United States, where President Donald Trump's tariffs are losing support among blue-collar voters and Republicans are struggling in traditionally conservative areas like Ohio. The panelists then discuss the abrupt departure of White House press secretary Katie Zacharia after just five days on the job. Later, they examine Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D–Mass.) opposition to a proposed $45 billion merger involving McCormick and Unilever. Finally, a listener asks why libertarians don't follow the Democratic Socialists of America's example by trying to reshape the Republican Party from within.

0:00—France's riots and the imploding welfare state
21:29—Trump's tariffs lose support among blue-collar voters.
29:41—Zacharia's tenure as White House press secretary
35:45—Listener question on libertarian influence strategy
45:52—Warren's corporate merger opposition
57:07—Weekly cultural recommendations

Upcoming Reason Events

Reason Versus - Authoritarianism Is a Right-Wing Problem, November 10

Mentioned in the Podcast:

"France Burns," by Liz Wolfe
"Protesters in France and Spain Are Angry at Government Failure—and Demanding More Government," by Reem Ibrahim
"French Tantrum," by Liz Wolfe
"Yes, Heavy Regulation Hurts the Economy. Just Look at France." by Veronique de Rugy
"Even Blue-Collar Workers Have Turned Against Trump's Unpopular Tariffs," by Eric Boehm
"Ohio's Democrat Momentum," by Liz Wolfe
"Trump Fired Kimberly Guilfoyle for Influence Peddling That Pales Next to His Presidential Profiteering," by Jacob Sullum
"Why populism leads to decline," by Nick Gillespie
"How Third Parties Die," by Jesse Walker
"How GOP Fiscal Sanity Died, in 7 Easy Steps," by Matt Welch
"Be Prepared for Elizabeth Warren's Reign of Economic Error," by Nick Gillespie
"Elizabeth Warren Wants the Government To Investigate America's 'Sandwich Shop Monopoly,'" by Christian Britschgi
"The Elizabeth Holmes Documentary You Can See Everything Is an Act of Radical Empathy," by Peter Suderman
"Thank Dutch Merchants, Not a Strong State, for Capitalism," by Edward Stringham

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The post France's Welfare State Is Finally Imploding appeared first on Reason Magazine.

We all know Elizabeth Holmes is a villain. 

She promised a radical new technology—bloodwork performed in a countertop-sized machine from a single droplet taken from your finger. She was young, photogenic, and self-possessed; she dressed like Steve Jobs. Her invention would disrupt the $60 billion bloodwork industry, bringing cheap, frictionless health monitoring to the masses. Or it would have, if it worked. Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors of nearly $500 million; she's currently serving an 11-year prison sentence. Holmes has been written about extensively, and her story was turned into an Emmy-winning Hulu series starring Amanda Seyfried. She is an avatar of Big Tech mendacity, a cautionary tale as much as a person.

Everyone knows the story. You would think there is nothing left to say. But you'd be wrong. 

Just before she entered prison, Holmes invited documentarians Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim to live with her, her boyfriend Billy Evans, and their two young children in their beachfront San Diego rental unit, promising them full access, complete transparency. The result is this year's most entrancing documentary, You Can See Everything. When the camera captures Billy in the shower, the movie delivers on its titular promise; you, uh, really can see everything. 

Yet what you cannot see is who Holmes really is. The mystery of the era's most famous fraudster is the movie's central riddle: Is she cynical, calculating, a stone-cold liar and psychopath? Or is she something stranger—a damaged and delicate person who genuinely believes her lies, or at the very least, genuinely believes the stories she tells herself to justify those lies after the fact?

Fielder and Holmes seem uncertain themselves; the movie is, in part, their own attempt to wrestle with their own ambivalence, their own inability to come to a conclusion. It's a hall of mirrors about the infinite unknowability of a person, even given unfettered access. 

The documentarians do not absolve her of her villainy; the movie is not an attempt to excuse her fraud or build a case for her innocence. But they offer something exceptionally rare in this era of simplistic hero and villain narratives: genuine and deeply felt empathy for someone on whom the culture (not to mention the legal system) has cast final judgment. In the process, they have given us one of the strangest, most unsettling, and most poignant films of the year. You Can See Everything is a small miracle of a movie. 

It's sometimes said that the most compelling villains don't believe themselves to be villains. They have an internally coherent story to tell that excuses their actions, makes them the heroes in their own minds. Fielder and Oppenheim have given Holmes, and viewers, the gift of allowing Holmes a measure of psychological complexity. You don't see into her mind, because that's impossible. But you see that the story she tells herself is different from the story the world tells us about her. It's surprisingly kind and generous; it's also tricky as hell—to the point where you, the viewer, might wonder if you're the one being tricked. 

Halfway through, the movie takes a meta-turn that I won't spoil, entering into high-concept territory in an attempt to more deeply explore what art and images can reveal about a human psyche. It's formally audacious, often funny, and actually justifies the three-hour running time. I've never seen anything quite like it.  

The exercise left me just as unsettled as the documentarians seem to be themselves; uncertain about Holmes and her motives, and nearly as uncertain about Fielder and Oppenheim, two talented filmmakers who appear to be questioning not only the nature of their chosen form, but of reality, especially psychological reality, themselves. There are times when You Can See Everything borders on magical realism, except the magic comes from the complexity of human nature and storytelling, as if Gabriel García Márquez had written a story about a man with a camera that could see into souls. It's dizzying, dazzling, a sort of postmodern Rashomon of perspective shifting.

As I left the theater, in something of a daze, I found myself thinking of a line from the great Saul Bellow novel The Adventures of Augie March, "Nobody should be a mystery intentionally. Unintentionally is mysterious enough." In the case of Holmes, it's impossible to tell which it is. All we can say is this supposedly one-note Big Tech villain, like perhaps everyone, is better understood as some kind of mystery, even to herself. 

The post The Elizabeth Holmes Documentary <i>You Can See Everything</i> Is an Act of Radical Empathy appeared first on Reason Magazine.