If you’ve been listening to WatchCats for a while, you’ve probably heard us refer in passing to “neoreaction” (sometimes pretentiously dubbed the “dark enlightenment”), a once-fringe political philosophy that holds liberal democracy is not merely dysfunctional but doomed. The only hope for “freedom,” its adherents paradoxically insist, is the installation of a monarchic executive with effectively despotic powers. If this sounds like something a cranky blogger would cook up, well… it is—but from those humble origins, this proudly authoritarian worldview has won itself a shocking degree of political influence, including over the likes of Vice President J.D. Vance, tech billionaire Peter Thiel, and the techies and ideologues running the show at DOGE.

So how did this unlikely stew of ideas come to hold such sway in both Silicon Valley and Washington, and how concerned ought we to be? To find out, we spoke with Mike Brock, who had a front-row seat to the spread of neoreactionary ideology as a senior executive at Block, the fintech firm behind payment platforms like Square and CashApp. These days, Brock is loudly sounding the alarm about the neoreactionary “Plot Against America” at his newsletter Notes from the Circus, which is well worth a look.

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If you’d expect anybody to be enthusiastic about the Department of Government Efficiency, it would be Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow and economic policy expert at the Manhattan Institute. A fiscal conservative of unimpeachable credentials, she’s worked as a policy scholar at the Heritage Foundation, as chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), and as staff director of the U.S. Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. She’s a regular on Washingtonian’s annual list of the 500 most influential policy professionals in D.C.

Despite her commitment to smaller government and fiscal discipline, however, she’s been conspicuously unimpressed by the results produced by DOGE to date, documenting its faults in a New York Post op-ed, a long essay in The Atlantic, and (most recently) a roundup of expert takes on DOGE in the libertarian magazine Reason.

We spoke to her about why DOGE’s efforts to reduce government spending are leaving many fiscal conservatives cold—and what a smarter and more serious effort might look like.

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If you’ve been trying to follow the nitty-gritty details of DOGE’s efforts to seize control of the Treasury Department’s payments system—and why it’s so important—then odds are you’ve already heard of Nathan Tankus. An independent journalist and researcher, his newsletter Notes on the Crises has become essential reading for anyone seeking to untangle the workings of an abstruse but vital piece of financial infrastructure that most of us had never given much thought—or even heard of—before January. (How essential? Tankus is the guy Paul Krugman calls up when he needs an explainer.)

In our latest episode of WatchCats, Tankus walks us through what the Treasury payments system is, why it’s so important—and why he thinks DOGE’s insistence on controlling its levers has set the stage for a constitutional crisis. We also explore how the Musk team’s meddling may imperil the Social Security system millions of older Americans rely on to make ends meet.

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