Pod Save America - “The Taliban takes Afghanistan.”

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

The New York Times’s Jane Coaston joins Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor to talk about the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the Biden Administration’s scramble to contain the fallout, and how the latest culture war is the right-wing crusade against vaccine and mask requirements. Cook Political Report Editor-in-Chief Amy Walter also talks to Jon about what the new 2020 Census numbers mean for redistricting and the battle for the House in 2022.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Tommy Vitor. And joining us today, while Lovett is on vacation, New York Times journalist Jane Koston. Jane, so excited to have you on the pod. I'm thrilled. I mean, being on vacation also sounds cool, but I would rather be with you guys. Thank you. Well, and you've joined on a sunny day for news on today's show, the Taliban take Afghanistan as the Biden administration scrambles to contain the fallout. Cook Political Report's Amy Walter breaks down what the new 2020 census numbers mean for redistricting in the battle for the house and the latest culture war is the right-wing crusade against vaccine and

mask requirements but first two big announcements journalist josie duffy rice has joined what a day as co-host alongside gideon resnick and recently announced co-host Travelle Anderson and Priyanka Arabindi. Josie's first episode drops today. I'm just applauding that. It's good to applaud. Thank you. Also, second announcement. Crooked is back with a brand new season of This Land where award-winning journalist Rebecca Nagel takes you inside her year-long investigation

into how conservatives are using a series of custody battles over Native American children to dismantle American Indian tribes. This Land's trailer is out right now and the first two episodes premiere on August 23rd. Subscribe to What A Day and This Land wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's get to the news. The Taliban has taken over Afghanistan nearly two decades after the American military drove them from power. The U.S. government had anticipated the eventual collapse of the Afghan government after President Biden announced he would make good on President Trump's deal with the Taliban to remove all U.S. forces from Afghanistan this year. But the Biden administration was surprised by the speed and success of the Taliban's final military offensive, which ended with the capture of Kabul and chaotic scenes at the international

airport where Americans, Afghans and other allies have been desperately trying to leave. Over the weekend, the president announced that an additional 6,000 U.S. troops would be deployed to Afghanistan to help people evacuate safely. And there's reporting that the Pentagon could relocate up to 30,000 Afghans who've applied for special immigrant visas to military bases in the U.S. In his Saturday statement, Biden also said, quote, one more year or five more years of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless presence in the middle of another country's civil conflict was not acceptable to me. Tommy, can you talk about

the circumstances that led Trump and then Biden to decide on that full withdrawal as the only remaining option and how the situation devolved from those announcements to the scenes of chaos that we've been seeing at the airport? Sure. I'll try to do a quick version. I mean, I think they both had the same calculus, which was that the U.S. went to Afghanistan to get the people responsible for 9-11, like bin Laden, and then degrade al-Qaeda to the point where the al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan and Pakistan couldn't plan another 9-11 and strike the U.S. again. That part was pretty successful. But the exit strategy that the U.S. created to get out of Afghanistan was to build the capacity of the Afghan government and the Afghan military so that

we could hand over control of security to the government-led forces and then facilitate a peace deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Trump negotiated a deal with the Taliban that would have had US forces out of Afghanistan on May 1st, 2021 in exchange for some assurances that are probably not worth the paper they're written on. Biden extended that deadline to August 31st. So fast forward to today, how things just unraveled so quickly. When the US pulled out without US air support and logistical support, it sounds like the Afghan government just literally couldn't get food and supplies to their forces, especially the ones in more remote locations. And I think they made a mistake not pulling back from some of the more remote locations to protect just population centers. And then even further back, maybe sometime last year, local Afghan officials started cutting

basically mini peace deals with the Taliban, mini ceasefires. And when the deadline for the US to get out got closer, more and more of these deals started getting cut. And so what happened was districts, capitals just handed over control to the Taliban. It wasn't that the Afghan forces were defeated. It's that most of them just didn't fire a shot. That's not true for the special forces, the elite commando units. They were fighting really hard in places like Kandahar, but there just aren't enough of those forces as compared to the broader Afghan army and broader Afghan police. So that's how the Taliban just marched into Kabul. I mean, I think the regular forces decided we're not getting paid. In some cases, we don't believe in this

government. This is not worth dying for. And so they basically said, here's the U.S. supplied M4 rifle I was given. It's yours now. I'm going to I'm going to go home. Jane, why do you think that these two very different presidents, Trump and Biden, Jane, why do you think that these two very different presidents, Trump and Biden, ultimately overruled their military officials who recommended reportedly keeping 2,500 troops in Afghanistan while trying to reach a peace agreement with the Taliban? of talk online today about the blob and people are referencing the blob are talking about kind of the foreign policy apparatus that has largely been supportive of first this war and then continuing involvement in Afghanistan and I would also argue Iraq and so I think that one thing and it's been interesting to see that apparently Donald Trump has scrubbed all reference to his own deal or attempted deal with the Taliban from his website. But then he said it was like, oh, it's routine website maintenance. And I'm like, sure, honey, sure.

But that was something that I think that he picked up on is that the I'm going to use the term neoconservative, though, that I think that that's generally now used as a slur. But I mean, the the general agreement of foreign policy hawkishness that was very popular in the Republican Party when this all got started, when I was a freshman in high school. And even before then, I think that there was a sense that Trump wisely recognized that that was incredibly unpopular with Americans, even just hearing the early arguments. I think that you put it very well of like our initial arguments for being in Afghanistan that stopped being the argument for being in Afghanistan in 2002, 2003. Let's keep in mind that the Taliban, we could have had some sort of agreement made in December of 2001, in 2003, and in 2010, after the surge. And in the first instance, Donald Rumsfeld turned it down. And I think that both Trump and Biden recognized, I think wisely, that this is an incredibly unpopular conflict,

the arguments for which were never that great and have steadily disintegrated. And I think it's interesting how you're now seeing this being used as a partisan cudgel, because of course it is. But I think it's worth noting that both parties are responsible for a war that cost $ trillion dollars for the eighty eight billion dollars spent, quote unquote, training the Afghan army, the Afghan army that isn't getting paid. So where's that money? I said earlier that I could make a ludicrous reference here. And mine is basically like, you know, that song where he's just asking questions like, what you got in that bag? What you got in that bag? Who's your weed man? How you smoke so good?

Like, what you got in that bag? What you got in that bag? Who's your weed man? How you smoke so good? Where is the $88 billion that was spent training the Afghan that I went to high school and college with who fought in this war. And you there were people who were old enough to not only have fought in this war, but then to have children who were old enough to fight in this war. Post 9-11, foreign troops. Yeah. And I think that there are a lot of people who and I've said this before that like this is bad. This is very bad. But it was never going to be good. And I think you've seen some kind of neoconservative argument saying like, well, if we would have stayed for another year or another five years, and if we committed more

troops and more specifically, more American weaponry, and I'm like, but then what? Because essentially you've set up a client state. That's not. And then what are our goals? What are we supposed to be doing here? Even the debate about what the goals were and are and could be are just so amorphous that the whole thing just seems it's just it's very sad. I think that's like that's my main thing. I keep just thinking about is that this is very, very sad.

So two things. Number one, I did tell you that you would be awarded extra points if you worked in a ludicrous reference in a discussion about Afghanistan. You did that. You do get those points. Number two, you know, you made a really good argument about sort of the neoconservative critique that centers on the wisdom of the withdrawal itself. A lot of the other criticism that Biden is getting is about, okay, maybe it was the right idea to withdraw, but the

execution of the withdrawal has been a bit of a disaster. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who's been supportive of Biden's policy, sort of hit back in that criticism. He tweeted, I'm open to the possibility there was a different way to withdraw that wouldn't have led to a quick Taliban victory. But if that's your take, then come to the possibility there was a different way to withdraw that wouldn't have led to a quick Taliban victory. But if that's your take, then come to the table with specifics on how your alternative would have created a different outcome. Tommy, do you see an alternative that would have worked better? I mean, I think there's two issues to separate out. There's the visa issues that you mentioned at the start, the S.A.V. visa and the P2 visas and the broader war effort.

Clearly, the Biden team didn't leave enough time to process these visas for interpreters or people who work for USAID or as we expand, like who might be eligible, people who work for news organizations. That process is slow and like just mind-bogglingly bureaucratic in a normal year. You add COVID on top of that and it just slows to a crawl. And so I think what, you know, that was a huge mistake and Biden needs to fix that. And when you say mistake, what they should have done is sort of just like streamlined all that paperwork. Either streamline the paperwork or push out the withdrawal date. And I think when you say push out the withdrawal date, some people are saying, well, he should have just, you know, pushed out the withdrawal date past the fighting season because in the summer, the Taliban fights really hard in the winter. It's almost impossible. So they don't, I think what we're really talking about is like 2023,

to allow time to sort out all of these issues, get everybody out. If you did that, can I just ask if you did that and extended the withdrawal date with a Taliban military offensive that ended in Kabul, would that still have happened? And then would you have us troops been in danger and fighting Taliban forces while we waited longer to get that visa process in place? Possibly. So basically, when we cut this deal with the Taliban, they stopped attacking US forces. They were decimating Afghan forces. So it's an open question of whether they would have said, OK, you know, Biden pushed the deadline from May to August and they didn't, you know, increase attacks on US forces because they knew

we'd get out of there eventually. It's an open question about whether they would have allowed for another extension. So I do think that's one thing you could have argued. But the other alternative is basically you have to say the U.S. should have a permanent troop presence where we're doing air support intelligence or logistics for the Afghans in perpetuity. And like Jane was saying, like this this fantasy that there is some magical number of troops for six months or more that could have fixed it. It's a fiction. I mean, the U.S., the coalition at 130,000 troops at the height of the surge in Afghanistan, we could not defeat the Afghans militarily. send 5,000 more guys, 10,000 more guys, and it would have been okay. The thing I do think you have to remember is I've heard a lot of commentators on TV saying, man, you could have had a few thousand guys there for a little longer and it would have been relatively safe or relatively low cost because there haven't been casualties lately. Again, there haven't been casualties

lately because we cut a deal with the Taliban and they weren't attacking us. If they saw us as breaking that deal, I think they would have started attacking us again. Yeah, exactly. Like that's that's the point here. And also, I don't that that argument of like, well, you know, there haven't been any casualties lately. It's kind of like if you're a construction site, if you heard that there weren't any workplace injuries lately, that does not generate confidence. But I think that the arguments that we have heard from the national security establishment and from U.S. security for the past 20 years have never been on the up and up about what's actually going on on the ground in Afghanistan, especially with regard to the attempts to train the Afghan army. It was a money sink for the past 15 years. And I think that, I just think that this idea of there being a better way, this is bad, but a better way that extends into 2023, well, then what about 2025? We just start thinking about, again, the permanency of this mission,

which is something that I don't think very many people would have signed on to. And I think that that's the thing that's interesting is that this is one of those moments, and I think about this a lot, that we sometimes see things as being like, ah, the American people have spoken or the American people think X. And generally you can ignore that. And people generally, but this is one of those moments in which the American people are like 70% of Americans want out of Afghanistan. And there are a host of people who are like, no, no, no. What they mean is they want roughly three thousand to six thousand soldiers there all the time. They don't. Well, that that brings up the point. And obviously it's like too early to predict the political fallout, both short term and long term.

Yeah, I have no idea. I have no idea. But like, what is your what is your sense of like how the American people might react to what is a very complicated situation, which involves troops coming home, a 20 year war ending the Taliban on video chanting death to America? And I'm sure that will get worse scenes of chaos and potentially violence in Afghanistan and refugees being settled in America. Like, how do you think that all plays out? I have no idea. Yeah, I mean, not at all, especially because historically and for better, for worse, probably worse, foreign policy matters

don't exactly figure into how Americans or how really most people in most countries vote with rare exceptions. And I think that the arguments here are that it's funny because you're seeing simultaneously that kind of the Trumpian argument is that, well, we would have done the same thing, but better. And so I think that it'll be really, I don't know how people are going to react to this. I also am curious as to how much of this, I think this might be a moment, I'm not sure

personally, how much of this is because of who I happen to be following, people who are very engaged in the foreign policy space. But a lot of people aren't. And I think that I had a conversation yesterday where they were like, you know, the New York Times, my employer, the top is all Afghanistan, all Afghanistan. And then if you go to like the most read articles, it's Maureen Dowd writing about Barack Obama's birthday party,

which is like a, you know, a great subject for an opinion piece. But I think that it goes to like how we think about them, how we think about events is largely how we think about these events impacting us personally. But I do want to say that there are a group of people for whom this would be deeply impactful. And that's the folks who are veterans of the wars in Afghanistan. And I'm sure that many of them are your listeners.

And I happen to know a host of folks who fought in both Afghanistan and in Iraq. And I happen to know a host of folks who have fought in both Afghanistan and in Iraq. And I think that when you're going to get a variety of opinions from veterans, and I think that it's very challenging when you have the kind of like the veteran opinion, because I'm like millions of people have served. And that is thousands of different opinions. do think that this must be an incredibly challenging time for people who have served, whether you were serving back in 2001, 2002, or if the people who are being sent back now as we speak. And I just keep thinking about those folks because this is something where our understanding of this conflict is so, it bleeds so much into our understandings of political conflicts and everything happening being entirely domestic. But if you were on the ground there, you know, I had, I knew a colleague who was stationed there, but he, you know, he worked for GAO, but he was stationed there and

went to the bar with soldiers. And you like his entire understanding of this was like, it's a very strange compound because there's a lot of fast food, but most people leave to go get food elsewhere. And it was just this very small experience of such a big subject. And I just keep thinking about how like this is a very complicated conversation. And I feel as if this is going to somehow uncomplicate itself into being one about like Democrats versus Republicans. And I'm concerned that the folks who have been there, who have been stationed there, who have fought there, who have died there will get forgotten. Yeah. Like speaking of very simplistic takes, you know, you're seeing this is Biden's Saigon sort of all over the coverage. Tommy, we were talking about this the other day and you brought up John Kerry's very famous line

when he was a soldier protesting the Vietnam War at home when he said, how can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? And I do wonder, I mean, it's aligned with such powerful and challenging implications. Just, you know, sort of how the country thinks about a war like this ending after 20 years in failure. Yeah. I mean, you know, Jane's opening point that I have no idea how this is going to cut politically either, I think is the right one. I do think there's a question sort of like, what do people know about what's happening? Do they know that the ins and outs of the decision to send more troops, the visa questions, whatever, or do they just know that we lost a war and they don't like losing things? don't like losing things. Because I do worry that, you know, when people are trying to figure out how this will go, you know, there's all this polling about how Americans want to bring the troops home and end our war there. But, you know, if you see real acts of barbarism from the Taliban or evidence that terrorist groups are reconstituting or just the fact that sort of the media has decided that this is a stain on Biden's legacy and a humiliating defeat, like those, that's the language you're hearing in almost every story but it's a humiliation for the united states

as if it's somehow noble to continue a project that was doomed to failure 10 years ago right right and i think that that explains the extremely bifurcated response you saw from the trump administration which argued simultaneously that they should start this exit and also attempted to drop some of the largest non-nuclear weapons we have in Afghanistan. And so I think that that's something that is not unique to Trump or to Republicans or to Americans. I think that having that confused response is not at all. I mean, what I've seen mostly is I want it out, but not like this. Yeah.

And I think that the thing that I'm thinking about a lot now also is that the, I mean, you're starting to see a certain people person whose name rhymes with Beavan Biller talking about how, this is just an effort to turn America into Anglo Merkel's Germany, which I'm like, Berlin's pretty cool. But like talking about refugee, you know, the process of permitting more, and I would say

many, many, many more Afghan refugees come to the United States. And I think that that's a process by which you are starting to hear folks who are plugged into these conversations with refugee resettlement being increasingly concerned about, and especially because that's one thing the Biden administration showed seemingly no real urgency to start getting folks out of the country and especially making refugee resettlement more possible in the country. And I'm aware that in part, that's because we have just come out of a presidency that was so marked by a market hatred for refugees and for the conceit of refugee resettlement. And this idea that we have to placate those type of attitudes as if they are normal or something that is like something that should be placated. I understand that. But I think that this is a moment where that needs to be taking that needs to be a major priority. I mean, I found it very notable that the sort of neoconservative hawkish critique here is, yes, we should have stayed there and look at the chaos and look at the destruction. And that's what their angle is going to be. But where Miller and Trump

and some of the Trumpier parts of the Republican Party are going to go, is the refugee resettlement. And if they can gin up a refugee crisis on top of a border crisis, then they got themselves an argument. And it's notable to me that they find that more effective than shouldn't we have stayed in Afghanistan a little bit more. So I don't know what the politics are going to be, but clearly they think that it's more politically advantageous to demagogue about refugees than anything else. Yeah. And I look, I think that's going to be sort of an unfortunate outcome of how chaotic these last few days are, which is it's going to create more focus on efforts to get refugees

out of Afghanistan to speed up the SIV visa process, which, by the way, Congress has had years. I mean, the program was created in 2008, the Special immigrant visa program. We've had years to get people out of Afghanistan. Congress has shown no urgency to speed up the process. So have subsequent administrations that could have reduced bureaucracy, made it faster, et cetera. But like, that's where our focus should be. The Canadians already announced that they're going to take in 20,000 individuals from Afghanistan. We should be doing 10 times that. Like full disclosure, I thought Biden getting all troops out of Afghanistan was a good idea. I supported that decision.

In hindsight, I think Barack Obama sending 53,000 more troops to Afghanistan in 2009 was a mistake because we surged all these troops and we got back to nearly the same status quo. And he did it at the time because it looked like major population centers and cities were going to be overrun. And so we wanted to fight back against the Taliban. But the problem was the U.S. military can clear territory, they can kill people, they can hold territory, but there was no way to transfer it to an Afghan government or Afghan military or Afghan police to hold it, to provide security, to provide services, to all the things you would expect out of a basic government. Our ambitions were just far too great for this massive nation building project. And we completely lost sight of the original reason we went there,

which was Al Qaeda. Yeah. Last question on this, Jane. I mean, I don't know if we will learn these lessons, but what lessons should we learn from this about sort of the limits of U.S. foreign policy? Well, we never learn anything. I needed that caveat there. We never learn it. I mean, I just keep thinking about how like Rocky III is dedicated to the brave fighters of the Mujahideen. I think that one of I mean, it is that specificity that was lacking and it was a specificity that I think it's interesting because, um, I, I've started to see a lot

of conservatives who are suddenly very concerned about the status of women and girls under the Taliban as everyone should be. But I, I would, I would make two notes here. I was a freshman in high school in 2001, and I was opposed to entering Afghanistan because I was a liberal in a conservative city. And the response I got from everyone was the Laura Bush's. Don't you care about women and girls? Don't you know what the Taliban does to women and girls? And I'm like, yes, I'm aware of what happens here. But that was not the reason we were in Afghanistan. The reason we were in Afghanistan was to prevent al-Qaeda from having a base of operations and to hunt down people who were connected with September 11th. Now, notably, most of the people involved with September 11th

were from Saudi Arabia, where women and girls also do not have a great time, but we send them weapons and we have fun times with them, even when they murder journalists. And so I think that the moment we lack that specific argument, the moment it became about, oh, you know, nation building, we're going to build an economy and a political system. And we're going to basically turn this into what we said was going to be its own independent government, but what turned out to be apparently a client state. And I think that that lacking of specificity is something that I will remember in the future. And it is just it's very weird to see the same arguments that we heard in 2001, 2002 being used again, where it is about don't you know what the

Taliban does to women and girls when we know that wasn't why we were there in the first place. It just became like a nice amuse bouche to be like, yes, why don't we throw that in, too, when it's very clear that with the number of governments that we have close and happy relationships with that also are terrible to women and girls and sexual minorities, that wasn't our priority. And I really wish that we wouldn't have lied and said it was. I saw a reporter that I really like and trust tweet, you know, does the Biden administration's departure from Afghanistan, is that at odds with his pro-democracy promotion platform? And that made me despondent because I think the lesson of the last 20 years is we cannot

force democracy on a country at gunpoint. We cannot solve a country's political problems with our military. And so we have this, look, we're 20 years after 9-11, right? And like this era has been defined by a wild overreaction to a massive psychological wound that I'm not in any way sort of trying to act like it wasn't it was horrible for all of us. But it led us to invade countries, trample civil liberties, dump money on security operations that is not clear that made us safer. And like we just haven't I don't know that we fixed some of the policies we haven't right-sided the mentality right and i think that that's something like i know we're going to be having a lot of 9-11 related takes and thoughts and i will always think about

how fucking sad it was and horrible it was and how horrible it continues to be. You know, I, I remember that day. I remember where I was. I remember every aspect about it. I remember there was a girl I told it happened and then she laughed because she didn't believe me. And I've never forgotten who that was and how mad I still am about that, even though she's like 34 now and I should probably move on. But like, but it was one of those moments in which this horrible thing happened and the means by which we had to deal with it was this. And I think about that moment of like, the most important thing you can do is go to the mall.

And the ways that this war became about 9-11, but not about 9-11. And it does seem to be that the war on terror in general was attempting to be about something, but wound up being largely, in my view, for nothing. And it's interesting because there's been a lot of response from people who were supportive of the war on terror, like saying, when was the last major terrorist attack you remember? And I'm like, you mean like domestic or international or like what? How are we thinking about this? Because this did not, in my view, make us safer. It made us in many ways appear far weaker because and then in a lot of ways, I think it generated an anti-American attitude that I think we've seen time and time again,

when you interview folks who have been involved in attempted or completed terror plots, they are thinking of their actions as reprisals for what our government has done in these countries. And so I think that the thing I keep thinking about is that this all started for horrifying, sad, bad ways, and it continues to be horrifying and sad and bad. Yeah. I keep thinking about what Obama used to say and then clearly learned the hard way, which is, you know, wars are much easier to start than they are to end. And that's something that we're seeing play out right now. OK, when we come back, I will talk to Cook Political Reports editor in chief Amy, about the new census

data and how it affects redistricting. The 2020 census results have finally been released, which means that states now have all the data they need to draw new congressional districts that will last for the next 10 years until the 2030 census. Here to help us break down what this means for the redistricting battles that will play out over the next several months, as well as the 2022 midterms, Cook Political Report Editor-in-Chief Amy Walter. Amy, welcome back to the pod. Thank you for having me, John. I'm excited. Of course. So the Cook Political Report's analysis of the census data written by Dave Wasserman has a headline that will undoubtedly pique the interest of most Pod Save America listeners.

New census data set is mostly good news for Democrats. We don't get a lot of good news these days. Why is that? Mostly not bad. Right. We're speaking in the... Low bars, low bars. Very low bar. There were two big questions that folks like David had before the census data came out. One, were we going to see a real undercount of Latinos, especially in and around major metro areas and in the Sun Belt.

Because when we got the reapportionment information earlier this year, there were a lot of stunned folks, stunned because the expectation was that Texas was going to get another district, not just two, but would have three seats, that Florida would pick up another district. And so the thinking was, well, maybe because of COVID plus, you know, all the politicization of the census around citizenship during the Trump era, that that had really dissuaded many Latinos from filling out the census. But what came to be is that, as you know, the census information came in, not just showing that indeed America is, those parts of the country are growing quickly, but they're growing because their non-white population, their voters of people of color have exploded. And so what that suggests is,

yes, people work actually counted. So that was good news, number one. But good news, number two, I think if you are Democrats, especially in those states, is that the urban areas, which are the most democratic in the inner suburbs, will retain a piece of those and spread them out as easily as you could if they were losing population. So in that sense, it's some good news for Democrats. The bad news, which of course we have to bring up, because I know you would. Of course. I was going to go there next. I was going to go there next. You're going to go there next to like, well, waiting for the shoe to drop is that Democrats don't control the redistricting process in Texas or Georgia or Florida.

And you could still be very creative as a line drawer, especially if you want to maximize your position, even with this new data. I do think it makes it harder. And this is what we're going to be looking for, not just this year, but quite frankly, for the next couple of years, is the kinds of court challenges that we are likely to see that will be based on the fact that this growth of non-white voters, voters of color, people, I'm sorry, they're not just voters, this is everybody, of the total population, suggests that if Republicans do a significant gerrymander, that Democrats can come back and say, hey, all the growth in the state has been driven by the fallen groups of people. And yet, how is it possible that we only have two or three or whatever many districts that have significant population voters of color? Why are white voters overrepresented in this state, given what we know about the population and the population trends? So you started this

interview with a very interesting point about, you know, and it's factually true, you draw these maps for the 10 years before we have our next census. But look what happened between 2010 and 2020, right? Many of these maps were redrawn because of court challenges. And Democrats actually succeeded in winning back the House because of some of those court-ordered redraws in places like North Carolina and Pennsylvania and Virginia. So to me, the bigger question is that it's sort of the short term, right? What can these legislatures do today that will impact the 2022 elections? What will be argued in front of court? What will be successful? And if those maps are redrawn,

what do those look like? And that could actually set us in motion for the next few years. So that is a fantastic top line summary of the data. I do want to dig in just on sort of the diversification of the electorate point on two specific questions. I saw that the census changed the way they ask about race. How much do you think that may have affected the results? Yeah, it's a it's a great question. And, you know, the New York Times actually wrote something up about this. I think it was over the weekend.

There are a number of factors that have gone into why we saw such a significant rise in the number of people who consider themselves to be of two or more races. One could be, you're right, the wording. So the questionnaire, if you look at the 2010 questionnaire and the 2020 to the naked eye, it doesn't look that different. But they did actually make changes that allow for people to write things in that you couldn't before. Right. So you could say for the first time, well, really I'm Jamaican and Puerto Rican, right. You didn't have to choose one or the other. And so that could be one. The second is people, as we know, race is a social construct. So our definitions of race change constantly. And so for different generations, how they identify themselves changes. And then the third is we do truly have more, especially recent immigrants who are marrying people who are not of their same race.

You have a lot more mixed race households. And then those children are going on and defining themselves as mixed race, whereas their parents might not have done that, right? Or might not have called their own child a person of mixed race. So it's all really, it's a fascinating conversation to have with demographers and sociologists, as we, and political scientists, as we sort of work through this, but you know better than anyone, right, this idea of, you know, how people view themselves, the lens with which they view themselves and the world is not fixed. And we put a lot of emphasis on this and and we shorthand things, especially in politics. And it fails to capture the nuance that is.

And has always been the American experience. I do want to talk about how it may affect the legal challenges. this point and then the in the piece that dave wrote it said that you know the declines in the non-hispanic white share of the population might strengthen democrats hand when they challenge republican gerrymanders in court i think a lot of listeners might not know why that is why it might strengthen democrats hand to say that okay as the point you made earlier that in in certain districts and certain states there's a diversifying population. So it should theoretically tie Republicans' hands a bit more than it would have otherwise. Right. But you can say, well, hold on.

If our state has grown X amount and almost all of it came from non-Hispanic, white, Asian, non-Hispanic white, Asian, other races, how can there be the same number of districts that are majority white and no other districts that have significant populations of people of color? And so it would argue against, there's this saying in redistricting, there's cracking and then there's packing, right? You can pack as many of your, if you're doing the gerrymandering, you'd put what you would think of as the other teams,

voters, residents into one district, pack as many as you can. And that gives you an opportunity to draw better or more competitive districts for yourself. In this case, because we know, especially when it comes to African-American voters, but just in general, the more diverse a district, the more likely it is to be Democratic, the more diverse demographically. And so if Republicans then say, take a district that is now, I don't know, 52% voters of color and make it 87%, right? And say, well, look, there we go. There we just put them all in this district. And Democrats say, well, hold on one minute.

Everybody got packed in this one district when they aren't even close to each other, right? Did you draw it in a way that you were bringing in disparate communities from across the state? Or they were not really communities of interest in that same way. I don't, I'm not an election lawyer. So I don't, I don't even want to pretend to be one on a podcast. But, you know, it seems, it seems to me that, you know, the real question going forward is, going forward is how, um, how open are the courts going to be 50.1%? Is it that it's just an attempt to get to that number? Like, what's the number?

What's the acceptable number? Obviously, we know that the Supreme Court didn't want to weigh in on this. This is going to be something for the states to have to tackle, which ultimately means that it's the district courts and the state courts that have to tackle this. But it's not entirely clear that we know what that means, especially when you no longer have the Justice Department weighing in on these maps. So yeah, and we and it matters legally, we should say, because the Supreme Court has basically said that partisan gerrymandering is okay. But there have been more successful challenges to race based gerrymandering because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is why we're talking about this at all. Beyond the legal challenges, after what we saw with the Hispanic vote in 2020, and to a lesser extent, the black vote, do you think it's still possible to

know whether a diversifying nation helps Democrats or Republicans? Right. I mean, isn't that, that's exactly the question, John, because look, we have, exactly the question, John, because look, we had record turnout in 2020 in this country that the census captured. And it showed that, yes, a diversifying country and given the margins by which Democrats continue to win voters of color. Diversifying country means that they're probably going to win the popular vote. If all goes the same way, if Republicans follow the same playbook, Democrats follow the same playbook, Democrats continue to win the popular vote election after election. But that the electoral college vote is basically between 40 and 80,000 votes between going to a Democrat or Republican. And so that is not changing, at least in the immediate future. I think the other thing that we've learned over these last few years is it's not the assumptions that have been made about

Latino voters. We've been forced to re-look at those, right? So these assumptions, and especially I think that even many Democrats made, oh, this is a 70% Latino district. We win Latinos 70-30. Great. Let's turn out every single voter we can, right? It's all GOTV, all GOTV, no persuasion, no understanding of necessarily what the issues are. It's just plug and go. And that obviously is not a strategy for the future. That missed a lot of, as we talked about, the nuance. But we also know that when it comes to geography, that density is really so much more of a powerful predictor of electoral performance, right? So the denser a suburb, the denser an outer exurb, whatever we are calling those now, the more likely that it could be competitive.

Fewer, less density, more Republican. And that the race piece of it is part of the story, but not the entire story. Yeah, because you have rural Hispanics and rural blacks acting more like rural whites than blacks and Hispanics in cities acting like college educated whites. And so geography becomes more of an important factor, even than race, or at least increasingly more important factor. That's right. And education and education. And education, right. And there were some studies after the election that, again, not surprising, we've talked so much about white non-college, white college and the shift. And those are still the two biggest population sets out there. But when you look at Latino college, non-college, you saw some of those same breakouts, right? Non-college, much more conservative leaning college, leaning toward Democrats. So that shouldn't be surprising. But we somehow, I don't know that we were shocked by it, but it was one of those things that I think, look, it's expensive for pollsters to go in and do some of these deep dives and to oversample populations that have traditionally been sort of ignored.

It's clear that if in these races that are won on the margins, which right now we're in an era where, as I said, 40,000 votes determined who the next president of the United States is, 30,000 votes doing and thinking versus just assuming based on past performance. And by the way, we measured past performance so inaccurately, right? So it's not all that helpful to go back and go, well, in the 90s, well, how were we defining Latino in the 90s? How were we defining Asian? We weren't even talking about that. Asian Americans are now the fastest growing group and have been the fastest growing group of Americans. And Asian's a pretty big category, right? I just think you have to really appreciate and understand the nuances between those different groups, which, you know, coming back all the way back, John, this is why I love house races so much, because those communities of interest can play very different roles, right?

So we saw you have a very strong Cuban influence, we all know, in South Florida. You also have, at where you are, in two districts in Orange County that Republicans flipped. They were Republican. Democrats won them in 2018. Then Republicans flipped them back in 2020. You have really significant Korean communities. You have significant Vietnamese communities, as well as significant Latino communities. Those members of Congress have to understand, and they do. If you're successful there, you understand who those communities are,

what is important to them in a way that at a presidential level gets sort of glossed over right uh you mentioned that republicans obviously still have a significant advantage over the redistricting process because they control it in a lot of key states um do you think that republicans will be able to simply draw their way to a House majority with with the data that's all out there and the map and everything we know now? I have to ask if you're if you're looking at the number five, right, that's really the number we're looking at right now, which would which would flip control from Democrat to Republican. That seems very doable.

From Democrat to Republican. That seems very doable. To me, there are two layers. One is what can Republicans do? Right. How creative, how willing are they to kind of be aggressive, knowing that it could come back to bite them later on or they could get that map overturned in court. But do they want the short-term gain of let's just get it right now, get what we can, worry about all the fallout later? And then the second piece of it is how aggressive are Democrats going to be? Because, you know, Illinois, they don't have many states where they control the whole process illinois is one of them um will they aggressively uh go draw that map and you know again you have a governor in the state who has said publicly right no gerrymandering we hate gerrymandering we want to have independent redistricting um

okay so we'll see where that goes. And then in New York, where Democrats really could make significant problems for Democrats can make significant problems for Republicans, basically, axing all but a couple districts upstate for the Republican Party. So that you combine those two things. Oh, and then your state. You know, California's independent redistricting, but that independent redistricting was actually pretty good for Democrats in the 2010 um redraw and you know in a state that is as overwhelmingly democratic as california you may get better maps than you know people have been thinking about yeah so you know you put those you put those places together that could help to offset. So there's what are Republicans can do? And then what's the offset? So Illinois, New York, California, are there any other states you're looking to for potential surprises? What are the biggest redistricting mysteries to you

right now? I know. So Maryland is another one Democrat. Again, these are just on the margin, but are Democrats going to redraw to get literally an 8-0 map? They did it in the last round of redistricting. They created some really perverse districts. So that suggests to me they would be willing to do it again. But there are a couple of states that are really big question marks. New York, again, because they've never had an independent commission. So the New York legislature would have to vote to overturn the independent legislature. If they didn't like it and then go out and just create their own maps, that would be clearly pretty gerrymandered. Ohio, similar question mark.

What can Republicans do there, given that they don't draw the initial map, an independent commission does, but will they say, let's just play politics. Let's not even pretend, right? Because that's what both bodies would have to do is basically say, we're just not even going to pretend that this is an independent process. We're going to overturn it and draw our own maps. And then Michigan is a big question mark, too. You know, the good news for Democrats is they have a Democratic governor this time around.

They didn't in 2010. And it's an independent commission. Wasn't that way in 2010. And it's an independent commission. Wasn't that way in 2010. But Detroit is, as you know, that was one of the cities that did not look as robust as places like Chicago or New York. And so, and they have to lose a seat. There are a lot of Democrats, I think the statistic, if I remember, don't hold me to this, but it's something like, you know, the five Democrats who represent Detroit and the immediate areas outside of Detroit all live within like 10 miles of each other. So there's, it's musical chairs there. You know, it's really dangerous if you are any one of those Democrats. And that was a, you know, there was good news out of Michigan in 2018 with Democrats picking up two seats there, but it's, that's going to be a really tough go of it. And it's unclear exactly what that's going to look like. But it could the outcome, but perhaps more cautiously optimistic than I was before. local process, right? This is parochial politics too. We talk about this as if every single person who is in the state legislature, who is on an independent commission in these states

is thinking about sort of the national implication, right? So many of these folks are drawing these districts, right? It's like my buddy who sits next to me, I'm worried about his right. Like you're thinking about what you want to do for your own parochial interest in that state as well. And so, you know, that is something that you can't, and I think national folks appreciate this, but it's also frustrating. They't control that you can't tell a state legislature what to do and um for years california the line drawing was done by a cantankerous legislator um named john burton who you know just famously would like draw the maps himself and who he liked and who he didn't like and nice process that didn't like. And that's what it was. That's what it was.

That's good to know that it's, it's, it's a lot less linear than people think. Well, we will be following all the coverage of the redistricting process, especially on the Cook political report. Everyone should go check it out and subscribe. It is a valuable resource for this.

You've got Amy and Dave and their brilliant team who know more about this than most. So, Amy Redistricting Committee and All on the Line have a state-by-state plan to achieve fair maps and fight partisan gerrymandering. So this week, if you head over to votesaveamerica.com slash nooffyears, you can sign up to learn more from the experts themselves. All on the Line is hosting redistricting you summer sessions to ensure grassroots activists and volunteers like you have the tools you need to make your voices heard through this final stretch of the 2021 redistricting cycle. Again, that's go to votesaveamerica.com slash nooffyears to learn more and get a bunch of volunteer opportunities where you can actually make a difference in the outcome of these redistricting battles.

The United States is now leading the world once again when it comes to the spread of COVID-19. Not only cases, but hospitalizations and deaths are spiking all over a country where 90% of all counties are now experiencing substantial or high transmission. Because about 30% of all eligible Americans have not yet chosen to get their first shot, Because about 30% of all eligible Americans have not yet chosen to get their first shot, a growing number of governments, businesses, and schools are trying to contain the pandemic by requiring vaccinations and or masks in indoor public settings. One big obstacle, Republican politicians, pundits, and activists. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott banned mask mandates and vaccine mandates. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis banned mask mandates and threatened to withhold the salaries of school officials who defy him. Those two states alone, Florida and Texas, account for nearly 40 percent of the country's new hospitalizations. But Republicans are intent on waging a full-on culture war against public health measures

just the same. Here's what some of them have been saying recently. Everyone needs to get back down, back down to common sense and remember that, you know, we're human. We can't live forever. We are going to catch all kinds of diseases and illnesses and other viruses and we get hurt sometimes. It's almost as if the vaccine invited this explosion of cases. I mean, you know, you've had you've had all the experts say, well, look out for the Delta variant or the Lambda variant. Next is going to be like the Chi Omega variant or the Pi Kappa Psi variant. I got the Florida variant. I got the freedom variant. It affects the brain. It gets you to think for yourself. It makes you think once you think about it, that maybe none of this is really about COVID.

Maybe it's about social control. So that last clip was from a school board meeting in Tennessee where some activists were threatening doctors. So that's cool. You also heard Marjorie Taylor Greene in there saying, hey, we can't live forever. Matt Gaetz talking about how the Florida variant has affected his brain. No argument there. Jane, do you think that Republican opposition to mask and vaccine requirements is rooted in a genuine belief about the need for limited government? Or is there something else going on? That's a very leading question, because, of course, there's something else going on here, especially when you see in Texas they have Austin bars were like, could we have a mask mandate?

Could we require vaccines? And they're like, no, we'll shut you down if you do that, because that's how limited government works. No, but I think this is also an example of a moment in which you are seeing that. And I would argue this is also true in some cases for Democrats of people being absolutely terrified of the base they need to vote for them, ronda santos arguing that they shouldn't even require vaccine proof of vaccination from people coming to the united states and that's uh weird for ronda santos um and he said you know he won't even endorse vaccine passports for i mean the of like, how desperate do you need to be to pander where you're saying like, no one should need proof of vaccinations. But I also think it's worth noting here, this is another one of those moments in which like, we are hearing a

lot about something, but I remain questioning as to whether or not it is reflective of like, mass opinion. And I think that we see that with regard to masks. When you ask people about mask mandates in schools and elsewhere, they're generally supportive. But of course there are people who are not supportive of that. And they're very, very, very loud. And I think that, and then you're seeing that also in smaller towns and elsewhere,

they're attempting to defy these executive orders in Texas and Florida. But I also think like one of the challenges, because we're thinking about, we're doing an episode on this very subject. One of the things that's particularly challenging about COVID, if this were a disease that only appeared to impact a particular subgroup, none of this would be a problem because no one has any problem ensuring that other people can't do something. And we see the very same people who argued, I went back a while back and was thinking, looking at how people treated folks with HIV in the late 1980s and early 1990s, because some moron on the internet tweeted something like, we wouldn't even do this to people with AIDS.

And I'm like, oh, yes, we did. And we have because you see mass polling arguing that people, not people with full blown AIDS, but people with HIV should be legally prevented from marrying or having children and that sterilization should be an issue. So let's keep in mind that when it comes to public health, how people think about this is often tied with how vulnerable they view themselves as being to either the disease itself or to the requirements of government. And so I think that this is one of those moments, especially when you're hearing people who are making the argument of like, oh, well, we all have to die from something. About what other disease would you make that argument like at a certain point like should we just stop funding cancer research like because when you gotta go

you gotta go but yeah it's it's a challenging issue also because something that i i do want to bring up is that a lot of the people who are the loudest people who are saying that they absolutely would never get vaccinated under any condition tend to be working class white voters. That's pretty clear based on the research. But the number of people in a lot of urban areas who are unvaccinated or resistant to the vaccine, shall we say, are black and brown Americans who are resistant for any number of reasons. And also folks within specific religious communities that are hesitant regarding the vaccine. So we have a lot of different forms of vaccine hesitancy.

And my concern here is I want people to get vaccinated. I think that would be awesome. I would really prefer that everybody get vaccinated. Please get vaccinated. But I think that there are lots of different forms of vaccine hesitancy. And I think that occasionally we get very focused on like very loud Georgia CrossFit enthusiast vaccine and like anti-vaccine enthusiasm. And we're not focused enough on the people who think, for instance, that you have to pay for the vaccine or something that I've been thinking about is

when we got vaccinated in beginning of the year, a lot of people tweeted about like, oh, you know, I got really sick for about two days. If you're an essential worker or working in a job where you don't have vacation time, how appealing is it? Like, yeah, you're going to get this vaccine and then you're going to not be able to work for two days and you might lose your job. So have fun. It's still important for you to do it. Like, I think that we need to do more thinking about how that vaccine hesitancy, not vaccine refusal, because I think those are two separate issues. But we need to deal with each of those in a different way. And a lot of it is like, yes, there are going to be the Republicans or

who are terrified of their base and terrified of saying anything that is supportive of the vaccine in any way because apparently the worst thing in the world would be to not be in office this remains like a funny thing about politics is that like the worst thing in the world is not not being a senator anymore like your life will go on if you are not in the United States Senate. Not for these people. Not for these people. It'll be great.

Yeah. Like, I live in Washington. You're allowed to still be here if you're not a United States senator. Like, you know, you can go to the bar. It'll be great.

But I do think that we need to think, if we're thinking about increasing vaccination numbers and not just being incredibly angry, which you can also do, you can do both at the same time. But I think it's worth thinking about vaccine hesitancy and the reasons behind it and how some of our own actions may contribute unintentionally to vaccine hesitancy and how to think about that. Yeah, it's such a good point about vaccine hesitancy. I mean, you know, I was like, as soon as a vaccine was offered to me and I could get it, I was like first in line. I was

really excited about it. So I'm someone who really, really loves vaccines. I, of course, got J&J. And so I've been thinking at some point about, oh, do I need a booster? But it's even like the thought process of that. You're thinking, OK, when would I get another shot and how many days could I take off if I have side effects and not look at my busy schedule? And, you know, I have the luxury of taking days off. But you're right. There's a ton of people who just for the sake of the fact that they can't take work off or they don't have easy access to the vaccine or someone hasn't knocked on their door and told them about it, that they may not take it. So it's not all these, as you said, the Georgia CrossFit crew. But I do think the reason we talk about that so much more, Tommy, is because Republican politicians have now made this an identity issue, which is what they've made so many other issues now,

so that it's not based in sort of self-interest or what's good for you or what's going to make you feel better, what's going to save your life even. It's all about your identity as a partisan. And that sort of drowns out all the other sensible conversations. I don't know what you think. Yeah, no, I know people in my life and friends of friends who, you know, were nowhere close to being Republicans, but they were scared by Internet research or, you know, maybe they came across Robert F. Kennedy on Facebook and they think like, oh, he's a Kennedy. This is a legitimate voice on policy. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're almost out of Kennedy's. You should listen to you on Facebook. There's like we're we're we're low on Kennedy. Like, yeah, there's a Kennedy involved. Like you got it. And then you're like, oh, okay. Oh,

no, not that one. Yeah. But like you could see how your average person would see him and think, oh, this is like a real serious thought leader. But you're right. I mean, on the Republican side, you know, I just come to believe that culture fights are everything for Republican leaders, especially ones who want to win a Republican primary. Right. I mean, you saw Josh Hawley with his budget resolutions, which are like been critical race theory type on masks given to vaccinated, you know, abortion, like whatever, like whatever crazy thing you have. Larry Elder, who is trying to run to recall Gavin Newsom in California, who did an interview one day where he said Gavin Newsom was elected fairly. A couple days later, he said he wanted a mulligan on that answer and had to clean it up and say that Biden

was not actually elected fairly. So like, you know, all of these people are terrified of the people they purportedly want to vote for them. They're owned by their base. And right. And I think that that's something it's interesting because I think with regard, you see occasionally conservatives arguing that Democrats are also controlled by their base. But that would mean that like the Democratic base is so myriad that you have like progressive base that actually hates Democrats and then like centrist base that hates progressives. And it's just like it's like a very large, confusing high school that I am afraid of. But yeah, I think that they're also the thing about it is that it is an identity marker and it's an identity marker that seems so constituent on this one thing. When you know that what gets me is that when you know all of the people making these talking points are vaccinated, like all of them are.

The sin of hypocrisy is no longer a problem for anyone that has just gone out the window you know right they're all vaccinated and especially because then you start getting into like when you're public health concerns the relationship between public health and individual actions is always curious and questionable and if i uh i i've been do i've been in like a history wormhole as I tend to be in. But if you go back to like the actual story of Typhoid Mary, one of the things that was about that was that like she was condemned by the city, but no one explained to her why she was in so much trouble. And she was just like, I just want to work. Why won't people let me do my job?

And well, it turns out her job involved introducing people to typhoid fever, which is very unpleasant. But I think that that intersection has always been really complicated for people. But it is interesting that this has been another moment in which the Kennedy I don't like and the people who were anti-vaxxers before this, the people who are like, no, no, you shouldn't get any vaccines for anything like we are seeing a re-up of measles which can kill you we are seeing rips of numerous diseases that we were very proud of having eliminated and it's interesting how that that history has been helpfully forgotten by certain republicans i saw someone tweeted something like you know maybe covid will just be with us like smallpox and i'm like who do you know who's gotten smallpox we did that like we eliminated it there are certain like there are vials of smallpox in very secure facilities and like three places on earth what are you even talking about like there there's a history here and it's a complicated one but i think that people are

willing far too willing to ignore the complicated and embrace the easy. Well, that is very true. And I mean, I do think what's depressing about it is like if if seeing other people getting sick and dying around you and in some cases getting sick and almost dying yourself, if that's not going to convince you to either get a life saving shot or wear a mask inside for a little while longer like aren't you just beyond convincing at this point like aren't you sort of beyond don't we have a group of people now and some of these republican partisans who are just like beyond the goal of politics itself which is to like persuade people to see something differently like if we can't do it on this issue

i don't know i don't know what's going to happen with anything else when the aliens come we are fucked is my big takeaway and i guess climate change will be second to that i mean i do think like i do think fighting about this in a political context is probably just not the path forward i do think like the fact that it's become a culture war issue bleeds into making it harder to convince these sort of fringe cases like for example joe rogan right joe rogan is like i'm just an idiot comedian with like a massive audience. Why would anyone listen to be on vaccines or anything else? But he brings it up a lot. And then, you know, fairly recently, a year or two ago, he had Alex Jones on who was spreading anti-vaccine information about the polio vaccine, which I could have,

I could have given you one Google search, one link to explain sort of the challenges with polio vaccinations, which is basically there's an oral version where you poop it out and you can infect people. But there's a version that gets injected into you that is completely safe and is basically eradicated disease. That's the gist. But he has Alex Jones on and they're like spreading sort of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. And now he's sort of, you know, in the place where Rogan just doesn't want to be told what

to do by the libs or anybody else. So he's going to keep asking questions. Right. And like, that's how I think this whole debate has gotten distorted and stupid and it's so fucking dangerous because it's not just the hardcore magas. Also because Alex Jones, as he has admitted in court, this is a performance art that is mostly meant to sell supplements.

But I would also say that like that entire conceit, there's this internet terminology of just asking questions where you're just jacking off where it is like, all you're doing is asking questions, but like, what is for questions for the pursuit of what you are, you have a thesis and you're just going to find support for your thesis. It's not a hypothesis.

It's not the if then statement, and then you might be wrong and you're like, well, it turns out I was wrong. No, they're like, you have a thesis, and you're just going to find the pieces of information that support it. And I think that that is one of those things where one of the, I mean, the conceit of the internet was like, you could have all of the information in the world, but you wouldn't stop being a person. Like there were people, there's a one of the person who basically invented the idea of like washing your hands for surgery wound up in a mental hospital because he was basically telling surgeons at the time, your hands are dirty. And they were like, but I'm a gentleman. I'm always clean. And they're like, no, you aren't. And

they're like, no, you're're wrong and it basically drove him insane and then he ironically died of an infection due to a wound he received from a prison guard in a mental assignment so like history is the worst yeah man people are like stop learning from the problem here is people the people the problem here is that like the intricacies of people in groups it's always going to be really hard to do deal with especially when you need them to do something and i always like i i understand wanting to have this be an apolitical space this this conversation around covid but i'm really trying to think of an illness that we've faced that hasn't been political throughout history and i just cannot think of one like do you remember when we were like the idea, especially because at first COVID wasn't going to be a thing and then COVID was a thing, but it wasn't that bad.

But it's interesting because the same people arguing that it's not that bad are suddenly very allegedly worried about undocumented migrants bringing in COVID, which I'm like, but why would you be worried? Because remember, it's not that bad. Like there's no none of this makes sense. None it makes sense but none of it ever would well that's because it's it's it's never going to be a political once the government is involved and the government is involved because this is a public health issue right and i do think you know back to my original question to you which is like is there some sincere belief in in limited government driving this it's not a sincere belief in limited government but this. It's not a sincere belief in limited government, but it is a skepticism and cynicism about government and institutions. And to your point, Jane, the whole just asking questions is designed to make people distrust people in

positions of authority, whether it's the government, whether it's their own doctor, whether it's their own community public health official. And I do think that's been driving so many of these Republican culture wars anyway, is that like people in positions of authority, people in positions of power, you can't trust and they're trying to screw you. And that is sort of what drives this whole message for them. I would also say for better or for worse, we also give the government no flexibility to be wrong, right? The novel coronavirus, it was a brand new thing. For a while, we thought it was on surfaces. We thought masks might be a bad idea. They corrected that when they could, but that creates a big trust gap with the US government that I don't

know has been filled. Now, do I think people should be able to intellectually get over that? Sure, but I also can understand how if you're a parent, you're trying to figure out, is this new mRNA vaccine safe? Should I give it to my kid eventually? Like it's scary, big decision. I do think we have to approach that with some empathy and some understanding and try to get them the information they need. And it's probably going to be outside of the political context, which, you know, is why I sort of have long thought it's best when you have other people communicating about these things. But look, today we're just asking questions, which is, you know, is Lovett out today because he was arrested, charged. Just asking questions.

I could find the answer easily by Googling like Joe Rogan could. But instead, I'm just going to ask questions because that's more that's easier for me. That is an easier, easier thing to do. But no, I do. It's more fun i do think that's why i taught me like i try to approach with some you know there are these all these pieces lately and headlines and tweets that sort of like sneer or celebrate when an unvaccinated person is in the hospital and dying and even when i've like charlie warzel tweeted a good piece about it the other day and i retweeted that and i saw that he starts getting ratioed by a whole bunch of people who are like, I've lost my patience with unvaccinated people. Fuck them. They should. And it's like,

look, I'm enraged at unvaccinated, most unvaccinated people for not doing this. I'm more enraged at the people who are spreading the disinformation. And I'm trying to have some humility and understanding for especially a lot of the people that Jane was talking about, who aren't like these crazy Republican partisans who were just trying to do this to stir up trouble, but just people who are scared and confused and have been spread a lot of misinformation. Look, I have people I love deeply and who are not vaccinated,

who I worry about all the time. And, you know, there's, what can you do? They're not doing this to hurt somebody else. They've just have come to a different conclusion based on the fucking cesspool of garbage that's available on Facebook and the internet about wildly complicated issues. And they're probably sold a bill of good by charlatans who use it to make a profit, et cetera, et cetera. But here we are. Look, I'm no science expert. I'm just regurgitating what I read as well. But I have

faith in these institutions. That's something that I think that we don't talk enough about. Like, I also was like, there's a vaccine. I'll go get it. Fine. Right. And I think that there is there's an element to which we have this this conceit of expertise. And I was just talking about like we were talking about Afghanistan earlier. And you have the conceit of expertise of the people who were like, the Afghan army is going to be fine. And I'm like, i am not in kabul um and i was like i'm like you know i don't know enough about this but then people

who do know a lot about this seem to be thinking this one thing and so i could kind of understand how people would be like at a certain point whose expertise is there and whose expertise isn't there right at the same time you see the same people who the same time, you see the same people who, I mean, you see the same people who are very resistant to the medical establishment telling them what to do with regard to COVID, who then if they get COVID will be inherently reliant on that same medical institution. The people who are on oxygen, the folks who are dying in hospitals,

where it's so complex. I mean, human nature is incredibly complicated and complex and how we think about these things. But I do see that there is an element here where you're like, how do we trust these people, but not these people? What is research and what is quote unquote research like when am i just listening to people who sound like me so it sounds correct and when am i actually

getting real information when am i because i think that one thing is for instance people look at um the trying to find like well a lot all these people have been injured by the vaccine and they're using a like a Web site to which the CDC invites you to upload these instances of challenges with vaccines. The problem is that when you go back and look at them, some of the people haven't even received the vaccine at all. Right. And but then you're like, but it's you know, it's a Web site and it looks scientific. And I'm like, yeah. And I look at websites that look scientific, and I have sources that I believe in sources I don't believe. And I think that that's it's really hard in these moments, especially when the people who are supposed to be informing us about a lot of different subjects, we've seen them again and again be wrong. But I think that where I always

go is like, when you're wrong, admit it and explain how you were wrong and how you got to your wrong conclusion. And if you have a lot of different pieces of information and they all are, they come from differing places and people who might differ ideologically, but they center on the same basic finding. I'm like, OK, that seems believable. But I do understand how this is a time where it seems as if everything is believable, but nothing is. And that's really hard in the midst of a pandemic. No one can predict the future. I have empathy for people who are scared or confused. I have scorn and disgust and hatred for the people like Donald Trump Jr. who spread anti-vaccine information or just fear monger because they think it'll help them politically. Those are the people I think should be written off from society.

100%. And just to end on a somewhat positive note, whether it's been because so many cases have been going up in hospitalizations and deaths or people becoming more persuaded, we have seen sort of the vaccinations increase over the past month. I think we're now at like the highest level every day we've been at since since July 4th. So at least it is heading slowly in the right direction. Jane Koston, thank you so much for for joining Pods of America today. Amy Walter, we also thank you for joining. It's fantastic to have you, Jane. We should come back again soon. Let's do it again. Let's let's do it. And to have you jane we should come back again soon let's do it again uh let's let's do it and then you know maybe something will be happy happening i don't know maybe we'll we'll get

to talk about like yeah something i'm just not even like happy just like neutral well yeah well okay we'll shoot for having you back for a neutral conversation what's a good thing we could talk i don't know we'll have to i mean we'll see i haven't finished white lotus yet is that is that good it it is okay flavia and i were just talking about it before this before the uh the episode began it's the finale is quite good i have not seen it and i just keep inventing what it's about based purely on images that's a fun game memes like it's like how big little lies i assume, is about lesbians. I don't know what it's about, but I'm assuming it is. And I'm like, oh, busy lesbians, my favorite kind. Like, I just, especially, I'm in this weird moment in, like, in content where I can only watch things that will make me feel neutral, positive, or good. good so i'm like people keep recommending like i i don't understand why the trump administration

seemed to correspond with people telling me to watch like don't you want to watch the handmaid's tale no no i want to watch midsummer murders i want to watch like old episodes of pro i want to see if i can find old episodes of wishbone this is why i watched emily in paris and all these people came down on me like a ton of bricks you know what here we go it was mindless it was fun then i watched the 1999 woodstock doc and it's fucking depressing yeah yeah no no i'm just like i want to like listen to nonsense and then watch nonsense and then like hulu's like do you want to watch some more nonsense i'm like yeah of course i do i'm just gonna watch brooklyn 99 but not like the new season where they're actually dealing with the stuff that happened last summer i watch old episodes you know what never fails golden girls

but not the episodes where dorothy has to deal with having chronic fatigue syndrome because that's too hard i just want to hear saint olaf stories no this is the this is like the success of Ted Lasso, right? People are like, the fact that it's groundbreaking. It's groundbreaking that there's a show about a nice guy. Everyone's like, what is this all about? A nice guy who then inspires other people to be nice. I was like, I can't get into it. Everybody's into it.

And then we started watching it like last weekend and we just barreled through because I was like, I don't feel anything but good. Yeah, I thought that way with Hacks too, even though it's kind of sad oh yeah hacks is good about i like this pop culture clothes this is the most fun this is good and also and i want to thank jane because even though this is an episode about afghanistan and redistricting in covid we are going to name it busy lesbians now which is yeah right after big little lies perfect a show again people are gonna email me i never saw it either never saw big little lies perfect a show again people are gonna i never saw it either

never saw big little lies myself people are gonna email me a big big little lies is actually not about that and i'm like i'm just gonna ask questions and i'm just gonna do my own research by making it up perfect where was love it arrested it's another question we don't know um thank you we appreciate it and we'll talk to you later absolutely bye bye pod save america is a crooked media production the executive producer is michael martinez our senior producer is flavia casas our associate producers are jazzy marine and olivia martinez it's mixed and edited by andrew chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Katie Long,

Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Rustin, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, Yale Freed, and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.