G'day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. And it's certainly the scariest

idea that I've ever had about the United States, which is that that country, the country which is

more ostentatious than any other about its embrace of freedom, the country for which

freedom is baked into its DNA, has entered a period in which the sort of fundamental freedoms

that have been around since the Magna Carta, certainly since habeas corpus, the idea that

a person who is snatched off the street by his or her government

will have the ability to challenge that snatching in court, will have the ability to prove themselves,

or not even the ability to prove themselves, that the onus will be on the government, on the prosecutors,

to prove that that person has done

something so vile, beyond reasonable doubt, that their liberty deserves to be taken away,

that that principle would no longer prevail in the United States is somewhat terrifying. And look, I don't want to use this show as a way to

be reactive to the news. You will have noticed, given the topics that we've covered in the

period since Donald Trump's ascendancy to the throne of King Emperor, Grand Puba of the

universe, that I'm not spending my time talking to people about that.

You have plenty of that in your feed anyway, but there comes a time where one has to address it.

And the best person to do so is Mr. Matt Welch, who is a libertarian journalist.

He is the co-host of the wildly popular podcast, the fifth column.

And Matt was on real- time with Bill Maher,

the great HBO panel talk show last weekend. He did a great job there. And I got him on to Zep's

live, which is my weekly streaming television video chit chatchat thing and be squidget where you can ask questions

live and we respond to them or we banter about what's going on in the news. And this is that

recording. We don't just talk about the crisis, the possible crisis of American authoritarianism.

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