Wow. Okay. Here we go. Welcome to the reason round table. The weekly podcast champion,

not only of small L libertarianism, but small R Republicanism as well. I am Matt Wells

joined as is customary with our unwritten traditions by Nick Gillespie, Peter Suterman,

Katherine Mangu, ward greetings subjects. Hello. Howdy. Happy Monday. Hi, everyone. Okay. As

perhaps only Amazonian aboriginals are unaware of by now, Queen Elizabeth II died last Thursday

at the ripe old age of 96 after 70 years on the throne, the longest reign in British history,

one of the longest in world history, it's a matter of fact, as bizarre as it sounds to say out loud,

King Charles is now in charge of the constitutional monarchy being an American-based political and

cultural publication with a healthy skepticism towards centralized power. Reason has not exactly

stuffed its digital pages with Queen is dead content, but I thought we might zip around the table

real quick and each share a thought or two about the old gal or the monarchy and or the discourse

around it. Katherine, your people by which I mean Romanians, not the robots, absolutely adored

the Queen. I think it's because she at some point hid in the bushes to avoid meeting Nikolai Chachescu,

which is super awesome. What is one Mangu take away from the events over the last four or five days?

My take away actually is less in the Romanian heritage category or in the robots category and more

in the high fantasy tropes category, so I obviously have been watching house of the dragon and really

feeling the gap between the modern royalty and the fantasy hijinks of the Targaryens and feeling

worried about an impending convergence between those two things. So we published a piece by Robert

Jackman, who is one of our freelance brits that we keep around, doing a little a little bit of

analysis of the Queen. And basically the headline was something like, if monarchy is a must, keep it

neutral. Basically stay out of politics. This is good advice. This is not advice that people are good

at following in general. And I would suspect that royals might struggle with it more than most.

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