The Bulwark Podcast - Live from Philly

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Will Saletan and (Hubert Humphrey alum) Bill Kristol join Tim Miller before a live audience in Philadelphia to discuss the uncanny parallels to 1968, the big 420 news, and the South now living back in pre-Roe days. Will there be a monster backlash? show notes Tim's playlist

Landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash RentSafeTO. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm Tim Miller. Today's episode is going to feature my live conversation with Will Salatan and Bill Kristol on Wednesday night in Philadelphia. It is spicy. Will brings me some ponies. I reject one of them. But one of the topics we discuss is how President Biden should talk about the campus protests in response to the conflict in Gaza.

And in the intervening time, he took a little bit of our advice. And so I think it's important to hear what President Biden said about this. I'm going to play the full commentary. It's about two and a half minutes. If you already heard it, just hit that fast forward 30 seconds button. Let's listen to President Biden talking about the protests. Before I head to North Carolina, I wanted to speak for a few moments about what's going on on our college campuses here. We've all seen the images, and they put to the test two fundamental

American principles. The first is the right to free speech and for people to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld. We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. The American people are heard. In fact, peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues. But, but, neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society. An order must prevail.

Throughout our history, we've often faced moments like this because we are a big, diverse, free-thinking, and freedom-loving nation. In moments like this, there are always those who rush in to score political points. But this isn't a moment for politics. It's a moment for clarity. So let me be clear.

Peaceful protest in America. Violent protest is not protected. Peaceful protest is. It's against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It's against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations, none of this is a peaceful protest. Threatening people,

intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not a peaceful protest. It's against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education. Look, it's basically a matter of fairness. It's a matter of what's right.

There's the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked. Let's be clear about this as well. There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for anti-Semitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it's anti-Semitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it's anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.

It's simply wrong. There's no place for racism in America. It's all wrong. It's un-American. I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions. In America, we respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn't mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence, without destruction, without hate, and within the law. You know, make no mistake, as President, I will always defend free speech. and I will always be just as strong in standing up for the rule of law. That's my responsibility to you, the American people, and my obligation to the Constitution. Thank you very much.

Q Mr. President, has the protest forced you to reconsider any of the policies with regard to the region? No. Thank you. Mr. President, do you think the National Guard should intervene? No. Pretty good. Pretty, pretty good, as usual. But here's the problem with Biden on this. While everything that he said, going back to first principles, talking about the importance of free speech and safety, while all of that is sensible, I don't know that it's going to satisfy the people who are most upset about the conflict.

Want some proof? Let's listen to another piece of audio. Here is at the University of Alabama, two groups of protesters, students protesting the war in Gaza, and then the right-wing MAGA counter-protesters, they found agreement on something. Let's take a listen. Yeah, that's right. Both sides of the protest are shouting, joe biden in unison it's like and they're also standing in a horseshoe which which you know it makes it a little bit on the nose

but here's the problem this gets to the problem as i said the people who are most upset about this conflict left-wing protesters who want dramatic policy change we've heard from them i've seen them on social media complaining about Biden's comments already. And Jewish conservatives, moderates who feel like they're being targeted and are being targeted in certain cases and, you know, who want a more dramatic response, which leaves Biden appealing to mostly, well, me. And I like being appealed to. That's great. But here's the thing about my perspective on this and President Biden's. It's at a remove, right? Like, I don't have a team jersey. And when you're talking about an issue that people are deeply passionate about, where they see their perspective as the only

righteous one, it's very hard to appeal to them from a remove, right? I can tell about this from my own inbox experience. You know, our listeners who feel like Israel's campaign to eradicate Hamas, protect their right to exist, feel like I get a little too squishy sometimes. I hear that. Our listeners who think the campus protests are a righteous campaign against genocide, tell me I'm obsessed with the handful of examples of antisemitism on campus. I hear that. I don't know. I sometimes think that folks are under appreciating the degree of Jew hate that is out there right now at these protests. I've heard that firsthand. But here's the thing. My job and Joe Biden's are different. I love taking

negative feedback. I want to tackle hard issues on this podcast. I don't know about you guys, but spending 10 years being right about a blindingly obvious question about whether we should submit to a depraved monster with no redeemable qualities who wants to tear America apart. Like it makes me want to shake strangers on the street sometimes and be like, is this real life? Have I gone through a black hole? What is happening? How is this possible that so many people are going along with this fucking idiot? Like, it is not a complicated question. It's not a complicated moral choice.

They're not different perspectives at play. Like, it is abundantly clear what is right and what is wrong when it comes to Donald Trump. The question of how we should react to the situation in Gaza and on campus is not like that. It's much more complicated. So I want to be able to continue to try to hash that out here. We're going to continue to do that. If we can't hash out hard disagreements in this community, what the hell hope is there for the rest of us? But here's the thing.

Joe Biden's not a podcast host. All right. He's got a different job. He's got to lead the country. He's got to enact the right policies. The morally right policies that help alleviate the most suffering. And he's got to beat Donald Trump. All right.

So balancing the right and just policies with the political imperative, imperative of victory in November is a dicey animal. Like it's tough. Holding his coalition together is like trying to keep up a Jenga tower. You pull out a little piece, you lose a piece from the, you know, lefties in Ann Arbor and you got to put another one back in of, you know, center right folks in Macomb County, right? He's got to keep a very disparate group together. And so from my perspective, he's managed the policy side of this about as well as anyone could have hoped. Some of the stuff's out of his hands.

I just totally reject the smooth brain like, well, it's Biden's fault that there was another flare up in a centuries old war in the Middle East. He just had to respond to events. And I think he's responded to events quite well. But that leaves the politics. And we've got six months to ensure that the people in these disparate groups that should be part of the Biden coalition stick with him instead of throw our democracy away for Donald Trump. And so we got to make sure that folks understand the stakes, understand the choice. I spoke to a woman in Philly at the end of this event you're about to listen to. She has younger siblings in PA.

Says they're on the fence about voting. They're apathetic about Biden. Go get them. Finding those people in your lives and explaining the nuance of this situation and the threat is up to us. In the meantime, around here, we keep talking, you know, try to not go crazy and see if we can, I don't know, maybe we can iron out peace in the Middle East on this podcast. We'll see. It's Friday.

So Spotify playlist is in the show notes. I've been in my bag lately on this playlist. So go enjoy the tunes. We've got another live event. The Philly event was so great. It was so wonderful to see everybody. Michael Liddig was there. Got a huge standing ovation. You know, everybody's coming up to me. It's like, I'm a Bernie Sanders leftist that loves you guys. Like I was a Republican. I'm still a Republican. We had a Republican elected official there. So a huge just ideological diversity there. And it was awesome to hear from everybody. And we've got some more events coming up in DC, May 15th tickets already on sale, the bulwark.com slash events. And then we're gonna be in Colorado on June 21st. Okay.

We don't know exactly where it's not going to be the Western slope, but you know, it's going to be somewhere Denver Boulder Boulder-ish. We'll be there June 21st, so put a hold on your calendar if you're in Colorado. If you want to come make a weekend out of it, my hometown is beautiful in June. It's a Friday, so come hang out with us in Denver. We'll have tickets on sale soon for that.

Up next, live from Philadelphia, Bill Kristol and Will Salatan. Check it out on the other side and we'll see you next week hello and welcome to the board podcast i'm your host tim miller i'm here with the normal Monday guest, William Crystal. And the great Will Salatan. House Lib.

Bill, we're here in Philadelphia, and so I thought that you'd talk about your glory days, back when you wore an onion on your belt, like was the style at the time. What kind of memories does it bring back? That was so shameless, that beginning. I'm surprised we don't have one of those applause signs up there. Then it goes off, and you have to stop right away

so you don't waste valuable seconds. No, it was great to be back here. We lived in Philly. My first job was teaching at Penn. My wife, Susan, was finishing up a dissertation that she taught at Penn. She taught classics. She was a real scholar and actually knew something. She taught classics. She was a real scholar

and actually knew something. That makes a lot of sense. So that's where all those references are coming from? Yeah, and I taught political science so I didn't really know much. It was great. We lived two or three blocks from here. 13th and Spruce. It was

kind of a rough neighborhood back then if we can be honest. I think we'd been here about two months, this is true, and I was coming back, so I took the subway from Penn down to Broad Street, right, and walked down to 13th, I guess, to our apartment building, our one-bedroom apartment there. And I'm walking along, and it was maybe November or something like that, and suddenly this guy runs past me, full speed

couldn't really tell why he was running so fast but and then 30 feet you know five seconds later another guy really burly guy runs past me full speed clearly chasing the first guy and pulling his gun as he runs and I thought yeeks you know everyone else feeling of course routine there's like no one even they didn, no one even looked right. He shot above the guy's head to stop it. He was a plainclothes cop. That was Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia. It was a sleep.

So that was my, but it was a great time in Philly. I was here for the glory days. What did we have? We had the Phillies win the World Series in 1980. Tug McGraw, big parade, right? I remember that. Eagles, I believe, lost the Super Bowl that year,

but they got to the Super Bowl. That was good. Dr. J, the Flyers. Penn, this is amazing. Penn went to the NCAA Final Four. You remember that in 79? They beat, I think, Duke and North Carolina or something in the regionals.

Fantastic upsets. Went to the Final Four, played Michigan State. Tim's a huge basketball fan. You both are, right? Played Michigan State, Irvin Johnson, and I believe Penn set a record by losing one of the Final Four games by 48 points or something like that.

Anyway, we had a great time in Philly. It was great to be back. Enough of that. Yeah, well, we're going to go back. We're going to go deeper into your memory here in a little bit, back an additional decade earlier than that in a second, because I want to start with a very uplifting topic that I'm sure everyone here agrees about 100%, which is the conflict in Gaza and the protests that are happening around the country.

We're just going to get that out of the way first, all right? We're going to do a little bit of chat, and I'm hoping that Will is going to offer me a pony, because I wanted to share something that I was... I got here last night early because I talked to your governor today, actually. We'll talk about that a little bit later. And so I didn't want to miss it. So I came in a night early, had a couple of beers, and I popped off a thought about the protests on x.com, twitter.com,

which is exactly what you're supposed to do after a couple of beers. And my thought was essentially summed up to something like this, which was on Reddit, we have a great Bullock Reddit community. You guys should join if you're not. There's a thing called Am I the Asshole? And so a person tells a story,

and they're like, am I the asshole here? And you can reply either, yeah, you're the asshole, or no, you're not the asshole, or the third option, ESH, everyone sucks here. And that's kind of how I feel about our current debate. Like the protesters with the, you know, we need you to bring us food and we're going to whine about this. Our parents are playing for Colombia. We've got Hezbollah flags.

They kind of suck a little bit. They might be nice and earnest, but they kind of suck. Hamas obviously sucks. Bibi obviously sucks. Bill might disagree with this, but the cops with their riot gear, like they're storming Fallujah, going into the campus quad. I feel like they kind of suck. Seems like everybody sucks here.

And so I'm hoping, I wanted to start, Will, by you offering me a pony. Is there anybody that does not suck in this debate? Can I find any like? everybody sucks here. And so I'm hoping, I wanted to start, Will, by you offering me a pony. Is there anybody that does not suck in this debate? Can I find any lies? Okay, so first of all, I have to say, I also have Philadelphia roots here. I went to college at Swarthmore, so. Is that Philadelphia, really? It's not. We should not let him get away with that. He came to Philadelphia. He passed through Philadelphia. It counts.

It counts. I'm taking that. I'll take that. It's the Philly burbs, okay? Nobody was chasing me. I did not witness crimes. I did, though. I did, apropos of this topic, I did witness, of course, the student protests.

I'm very familiar with that. And, in fact, we used to have, you know, Swarthmore, for those of you who don't know, was known, is perhaps still known as the Kremlin on the crumb. Now that the Kremlin is part of the Republican Party, maybe it doesn't work so much. So we would have, I guess you'd call them now outside agitators like the folks who come into some of the columbian other places we'd have the trotskyites we'd have the the stalinists we are leninists whatever we'd have we'd have them show up on on the uh the dining hall sharples dining hall and so they would they would distribute their whatever their socialist communist newspaper was

so we did a radio my friends and I did a comedy radio show. And we went out in front of the dining hall. And we distributed a mock socialist newspaper. And the headline on our mock socialist newspaper was a picture of us. And it said, students distribute socialist newspaper in front of Sharples. So we were early on the sort of performative protest thing. This is a real protest, what's going on right now. And I think Tim would agree with me on some of this.

I do sympathize with the cause the protesters are talking about. We have more than 30,000 people dead in Gaza. That is real. Somebody has to speak up for that. I do not begrudge anyone speaking up for that and feeling that that is not spoken up enough for. The way in which you do that is another question. And I think that the ways in which a lot of the students are doing it is not helpful to the cause and is in fact alienating. But I do think Tim asked me for a pony and I have to deliver a pony. So I did bring a pony with me.

Jim Swift, one of our folks, gave me this pony. Thank you, Jim. Is that like the Swarthmore mascot or something? The Swarthmore ponies. Bill, I'm going to have to familiarize you with the Swarthmore ponies. Bill, I'm going to have to familiarize you with the Swarthmore basketball team, which has been kicking butt. So I struggle to find a pony here

because I'm sympathetic to the idea that everybody is hateful in this situation. But there is one thing that I think good that can come out of this, which is we've had these debates on campus for a long time where the left is speaking for a minority group and saying that they feel threatened, they feel uncomfortable, they feel endangered. We need to protect them. We need safety for this group. And the right has said, oh, come off it. You know, you're playing the race card. Get over it. Free

speech. And what we have here is an inversion because the group that's being targeted, that's felt targeted on the campus is Jews. And that's not traditionally one of the groups that the left has spoken for as a threatened group. And suddenly you see the right looking at an endangered group and saying they mustn't feel uncomfortable. It's not right to make these students feel uncomfortable.

They feel unsafe. And the left now is saying, you know, sort of not exactly get over it, They mustn't feel uncomfortable. It's not right to make these students feel uncomfortable. They feel unsafe. And the left now is saying, you know, sort of not exactly get over it, but, you know, it's the protesters here have a right to speak up. And that speech needs to be heard. So I think it's an occasion for us all to be in the shoes of what the other side usually says and to recognize what's worth taking from that perspective. Sorry, put the pony back in the shit pile. Sorry, Will. It was a good try. It was a good try. But the people on the right pretending to care

about the Jewish kids on campus are full of it. They don't actually care about them. They don't actually care about them, do they? I mean, do they really? I don't know. I think that if Jewish kids were on campus getting menaced by little proud boys, do you think that any of these guys would be speaking up? Do you think Lee Stefanik would be waving her finger at the presidents on campus? I would say no. I don't know.

Bill, do you have a pony for me? That was an impressive pony-esque performance by Will. It was a good try. I appreciate the effort. I'm not really into finding the ponies. I'm sort of on the other side of saying there are no ponies. The one thing I would disagree with you on

is the cops in this respect. I went back and looked at the 68 Columbia protests, which I remember living in New York, a couple of miles south of Columbia. I mean, I wasn't involved. I was in high school. But, you know, it was a big deal, obviously. It was not that far away on the Upper West Side.

And I went back and looked at the headlines like a hundred students the cops were not as militarized then they went in with billy clubs and that's what they had a hundred students they had to lug the students out of there and a hundred students were injured I don't know 35 were hospitalized it was pretty bad that was a bigger protest they occupied more than one building but actually I thought the cops in Columbia so far as I could tell did a good job they removed all these. I don't think anyone's hurt even. I mean, is there even a case, one person who got, you know, had to have stitches or something? They carried them out. They put them in buses. They booked them, presumably. And they're gone. So I'm willing to be critical of

the police. God knows. I think we've all, I've learned over the last several years, there's more police misconduct than I, as a former conservative had realized and and and you know, no seriously It's one of the things that people ask. What have you changed your mind on? I was much more sort of instinctively I would say pro police law and order kind of but I still think in this case There hasn't been much police misconduct. I think they actually sure that's been pretty well trained for this kind of stuff It looks to me and now and other places too I mean in Florida and other places where they've gone in. You don't really have the stories. You did have those stories at Harvard,

which I went to a year after the Cambridge cops came in in 69. Famously, this was their one moment to really, you know, beat up some Harvard kids who they hated. And not without some justice, if we can be honest. You know, there's Harvard kids lording it around over the townies. And they just took it out on these kids. And I don't have the sense that's happening this time.

Did you just call yourself a former conservative? You found your pony by accident. I go back and forth. I'm a Josh. I'm a Shapiro Democrat. Is that okay? Okay. Hey. Boy, I hope Josh doesn't hear that. Yeah, I know.

That was bad. Strike that from the record. Don't take that out of the podcast there on Friday. I want to go back to 68 for a second, though. I do want to reiterate. There's an everybody sucks element to it, and I do feel like there's a very serious crisis happening in Gaza. I'm very empathetic towards

it. I think I'm totally pro-protest, drawing attention to it. I think that, by the way, you could argue that some of the protests have already had an impact in that the way that they're letting additional trucks in with humanitarian aid, who knows if that would have happened if there wasn't quite as much blowback. So I'm for it. But we can use a little more strategy. You know, we can be a little bit smarter about it. And I'm a little bit concerned that we're staring down the barrel of Richard Nixon, part two. Bill, you wrote about this earlier this week.

Are these kids going to fuck us? I guess that's my question, Bill. Are these kids going to fuck us? We're doing a lot of work here to try to prevent Donald Trump 2.0. But are they going to ruin it? It was a pretty big, I think the campus protests have been a pretty big, unintentionally, and maybe it's not their fault, but still in reality, in practice, a pretty big in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign. And I, now maybe I don't read it right because the

people I know are particularly interested in this. A lot of, you know, East Coast Jews who are very pro-Israel, but also very anti-Trump and the degree to which the anti-trump stuff we are in a swing state east coast jews conservatives are particularly anti-trump we got a lot of them around here i don't know if there's anybody out there the degree to which these people have become the face of the american left and of course it's ridiculous they they don't like biden they're protesting against biden's policies right nonetheless i mean i can't tell you how many people i've had casual conversations with or read you know emails from that were passed on to me about you know this is what this is the party you've signed up with bill this is the liberal this is the left and and i do think

good liberals should do more to distance themselves from the protests and from some of what they've done and some have and some have been putting our senator yes he's been our senator here in Pennsylvania. He's been fantastic, you know. Fetterman, yeah. Yeah, Fetterman. I can't decide. Are we for... You like Don Fetterman? Are we for... I can't. I'm torn now.

Are we for Fetterman in 2028 or Shapiro in 2028? Why not both? Yeah, the electoral college problem. Yeah, for the ticket there. Well, I can make a move. This is kind of... I got to say... Sorry, this is kind of fascinating to me.

So I've never been a Republican. Um, and what, but the pandering to the crowd that goes on with these things, it's just terrible, you know? Thank you. This is Philly after all. So I've always been sort of a moderate Democrat. So I'm like being hated by the left or having differences with the left, but it's totally fascinating to me to come to the bulwark. I mean, I was at Slate, and I was among my people, liberals, progressives,

and now I'm with sort of these former Republicans, and I'm so used to people on the right wanting to elevate voices on the hard left because they know that that's going to, like Fox News. We're going to show you the craziest people on the left because that's going to drive our audience to the right. And it's really interesting to me to be at a place where you guys who are, you know, do,

have done political strategy, especially you, Tim, like, you know that the hard left is alienating the middle. And so you guys come over and instead of trying to elevate the left, you're talking to the moderates on the left about the far left and saying, get those people out of the way because you're now playing for our team. You're playing for the left half of the spectrum. That's right.

Well, you know. But Mike, look, I mean, Mike. So I speak. No, please. I mean, Mike Johnson wasn't an idiot when he went to Columbia and made it. I mean, it's really terrible to do that because it just makes the situation worse and it's vulgar pandering to his own base and so forth. But, you know, enough Republicans go visit New York and go to Columbia and speak out

against the protests and introduce stupid resolutions to the House and so forth. And some voters think, I guess they're the ones who are against this, who are for Israel and against, more important than being for Israel, actually, in this case, I think, who are for the majority of the college students who just want to go to school, take the tests, not be harassed all the time, not have loudspeakers at midnight if they're trying to sleep

or do other things in dorms. And I do think it hurts the effort among swing voters for the Democrats to say, no, no, we're a sane party. We're not the caricature that Fox has created of the Democrats and of the left. So I worry about the political implications of it in this year. And I do think the Trump people think it's a...

And Trump started talking about it, I noticed, the last couple of days. He went on Hannity. Well, it's a freebie for Trump. Totally. It's a freebie for Trump. Trump's coalition is people that hate these protesters. They're all united in that right now.

Some of them are anti-Semites and some of them are pro-Israel. But they're all united in that. Right now, some of them are anti-Semites and some of them are pro-Israel. Some are both. But they're all united in hating these protesters, right? Whereas the Biden coalition is very fractured over all this. It's very fractured over all this.

The pod bros brought me on today because they're like, we need somebody else to, we need one of you people to come over here and like point and represent the argument that like, like there are legitimate concerns here about anti-Semitism on campus. I'm like, you can be concerned about anti-Semitism

and concerned about this protest and also concerned about the humanitarian issue. But like, that's tough. And Joe, and I think that Biden has struggled a little bit. It's just not his strength. You know, I said to those guys today, I was like, now lightning's tough. And I think that Biden has struggled a little bit. It's just not his strength. I said to those guys today, I was like, now lightning's really going to strike me, but we could really use Obama right now. Because he would have been good at this. He would have been good at this. He would have been good at this doing the well on the one hand, on the

other hand. And he was like, that was his strength. It's not really Biden's. He hasn't been out there at all. It feels like he's been really limited to written statements. I don't know. What do you think Joe Biden should be doing? Just one thing on that, though. It is striking how the Deputy Press Secretary... Great statements, by the way. All the deputy press are here saying that's awesome.

Obama could have spoken up, actually. He did graduate from Columbia, and he could say, I'm sympathetic, I process it myself, blah, blah, blah, but, but, but, don't take over buildings, don't break the glass, don't dump things on police. Don't tell Jews, don't tell Europe. And I think that would have been helpful.

I guess he's too busy doing other things. But you know, you mentioned 68, so just one reason I was so, I was in 68, in the summer of 68, in between, I guess, my finishing high school, I guess my sophomore year, and working somewhere for the summer job, I volunteered in the Hubert 68 in between, I guess, my finishing high school, I guess my sophomore year, and working somewhere for the summer job. I volunteered in the Hubert Humphrey campaign for three weeks.

All my peers were for Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy, obviously. Well, half my peers were for them. Half my peers were to the left and for the socialists who were at Swarthmore and stuff like that. And I was for... And this was at our little private high school in New York. And I was for Humphrey because I was like the centrist, you know, anti-communist Democrat.

And Humphrey, and so it was the first campaign, I mean, I was just a ridiculously, you know, just low-level volunteer, I don't know, looking, putting stamps in envelopes and stuff, whatever you did in those days. But I followed the campaign after that very closely, you know, as you do when you get interested in politics in high school. And I was really heartbroken when he lost to Nixon. And he lost by, so I looked up some stuff the other night when I was writing the newsletter.

The Democratic Convention in Chicago, as this year's is, was a total disaster with riots and demonstrations, obviously, which this year's could be. Humphrey came out of that 20 points behind. That won't be the case now, at least we're so polarized, but still it could do some damage. Had a fantastic comeback the last few weeks and lost by 0.7% of the popular vote to Nixon.

If you look at the polls right now, Trump is ahead of Biden by 0.7%. By 0.7%. It's like a little uncanny. The parallels are pretty crazy. The date on which the cops went into... I can make it worse. And then we'll have to talk.

The date on which the cops went into Harriman Hall at Columbia is the same date, 56 years ago, as April 30th, as yesterday. I mean, it's really, it is sort of weird. And Humphrey had the same problem as Biden, which is he gets attacked, of course, for being part of the Johnson administration, which is fighting the Vietnam War. So the left hated him and they, not all of them

ended up coming home to him on the one hand. Then he distanced himself from Johnson correctly in October and said, I'd be more interested in the peace negotiations of Vietnam. And then some of the old, you know, the Johnson loyalists and others were, you know, you're betraying Johnson and so forth. And so like Biden, in a way, Humphrey, really a wonderful man, and Biden, a very decent man too. So similarity of being caught in this trap, and it's the trap of incumbency.

And this is what worries me. One of the things that worries me about the race, obviously, is that if you're an incumbent, you get blamed for a lot of things, a lot of them unfairly. And being a challenger is better. And being a challenger who's also a former president, so you get the benefits that people

think incorrectly. Well, he knows what he's doing. He can do the job. And he's the challenger. He's going to shake everything up. Anyway, that's why I'm worried about the race and why I got depressed thinking about the Humphrey analogy. That's enough. So, Will, give us some more ponies here. Will, final point. What if Joe Biden calls you?

What is he supposed to do about this? I don't know if Joe Biden can do it. The problem is, let me come back to Obama, actually. So Humphrey, obviously, before my time, but Obama was really good at this stuff. This is what I put up with all the time. That's okay.

But Obama was really, you know, when I came to the bulwark, I was like, what were two of the most difficult things I was going to have to deal with? One was that I loved Barack Obama, and the other was that I think abortion should be legal. We'll get to that. But Obama, like this whole caricature on the right of like Obama was like some kind of hard lefty. Obama was great at this. Obama was great at expressing exactly what you're talking about, Tim. It's on the one hand, this, and it's all, you know, he would encompass it. Obama would classically say, that's not just my opinion. That's the

opinion of these three ultra conservative people. Mark Zandi. All right. So, but that's kind of what we need. And I think one of the problems we have is in Joe Biden, we have a very nice man, a very decent man, but not a very compelling, charismatic speaker, and he's not out there delivering a message that brings people together, even if he's trying, we're going to have to get through this election with this guy, and it's going to be a challenge because he's not Obama. Is that the end of the answer? I'm sorry.

That's all I have to say. Where is that pony? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Well, so do we think he has to talk about this more like do you want to see biden out there talking about this or is this right he's just going to let this go let the deputy press secretary talk about it and hopefully hopefully anthony blinken cuts the deal this is not about america this is about keeping israel from invading rafa ending this conflict as soon as possible, and hopefully with maximum destruction

to Hamas and minimum destruction to innocent Palestinians, and putting this behind us. Because I think as long as it's festering, it's just going to hurt. It's bad for the world, but it's also bad for Joe Biden. Fair enough. Okay, we're doing what we can, but all you jerks out there that are cheering for Will because he was never a Republican, it's your job to go talk to your children and tell them to maybe protest Donald Trump instead of Joe Biden and focus on that. Let's talk about abortion. You want to talk about abortion? Some good news, bad news this week for abortion rights advocates, or today rather. In Florida, the six-week abortion ban goes into effect today.

Or was it yesterday? Whatever, this week. Time is a flat circle. And today in Arizona, two Republicans, there were two good Republicans in the Arizona State Senate. How about that? Hot damn. And they crossed over and created a 16-14 vote to overrule the 1864 law written by the bigamist pedophile.

And so now the good people of Arizona do have abortion rights up to 15 weeks. The Florida thing is interesting. We're going to spend a lot of time in the Time magazine interview in segment two. But Trump refused to say how he'd vote on that. That doesn't feel sustainable for him, seeing as he is a Florida man. But Will, what do you think? The extent of the opportunity here for Democrats and the extent of the badness, I guess, for women in these states? Well, I mean, the Florida thing is enormous

because if you now... Florida was the state in the southeastern quadrant of the United States where it was still legal. It was 15 weeks after the last ban. Now it goes to six. I cannot stress to you enough, for those of you who don't know this, how big a difference that is.

You may not like a ban at 15 weeks, but at 15 weeks, 90% of abortions, more than 90%, something like 93, are before that period. At six weeks, something like two-thirds, at least 60% of abortions are after that. This is an absolute abortion ban, and the entire southeastern quadrant of this country is now back to pre-Roe v. Wade abortion illegal days. I have been waiting for

a political explosion in this country, and I know people say it was the 2022 elections. I didn't see what I thought I was going to see. Maybe we're going to see it now, because when abortion becomes illegal in that much of the country, I'm just waiting for women to rise up, and like men who understand that this is not a decision best made by the government. And politically, I think the Republican Party got away with going to 15 weeks in some states,

and then Ron DeSantis just decided, hell, I'll sign a ban at six. I think that that's going to trigger... And again, it didn't go into effect, so it wasn't real. It's real now. So I am waiting for, in 2024, the monstrous backlash that I didn't see in 2022. Where do you want it to come from that it hasn't come from yet? Are we talking about maybe Trump women? Like Trump women, non-college, working class women, that are like, I've had enough of this, this is crazy. It is crazy, and if you're in Florida,

Carrie Lake did the stupid thing where she was like, well, it's not that big a deal in Arizona, you can just drive to California or New Mexico. Great talking point, Carrie. You can't really do that if you live in Daytona Beach. You're a long way from Norfolk, or whatever the closest place is you can get an abortion if you're a working class woman in Daytona Beach. You know, is that like kind of

the demo? Because we spent a lot of time talking about, you know, the college educated Republican went, the Nikki Haley voter class. We spent a lot of time talking about them. But is there a non-college group that the Democrats can cut in with on this issue, do you think? To me, one of the interesting things about this issue is that it crosses party lines. I mean, I did a whole book about this. This was the Webster versus Reproductive. I'm going to take people back to 1990. But the point is that there was a group at what was then NARAL, National Abortion Reproductive Rights Action League, that did all the political strategy. They did the polling, and they saw that they could draw a broader coalition, not just liberals, but people,

conservatives who don't like the government on their back. They don't like tax. And they went for those people. So what I'm interested to see is whether we get some of these libertarians on the right as part of that coalition. Florida is now an increasingly Republican state. A bunch of people moved to Florida because they liked Ron DeSantis' COVID libertarianism. How are the COVID libertarians going to vote when the medical authoritarianism is not vaccines, it's not masks, it's abortion? It's the right telling you you can't get an abortion.

So I think there's a lot of potential to draw some of those libertarians into a pro-choice coalition. I mean, it's on the ballot. I think just to be clear what Tim was talking about, it's on the ballot this November in Florida. So the bill went in, the legislation that went through the legislature went into effect this week. And now it's on the ballot. A proposed, I think, constitutional amendment to overturn that legislation is on the ballot. So it will be a big story. Everyone in Florida will vote on that at the same time they vote for president.

And I do think it could have a big effect. I don't know. I had lunch at Penn with John DiIulio, an old friend of mine who teaches political science there, a really wonderful guy and a very good political scientist, a serious one, unlike what I was. He just wrote a paper, very interesting, on the white working class,

which everyone talks about so much. There's wildly different votes. About half the white working class, oversupplying here, is, call themselves evangelicals, and about half aren't religious, don't go to church basically, just secular. The voting difference between them is as great as the difference between the white working class,

non-college, and college educated. The white evangelicals, the white working class evangelicals are, I mean, 85, 15, or something like that for Trump, really lopsided. Maybe some of them will also think this is cruel and move away, but that's are, I mean, 85, 15, or something like that for Trump, really lopsided. Maybe some of them will also think this is cruel and move away, but that's probably, you know, they're mostly pro-life.

That's not got our chickens. Yeah, but the white working class non-college was sort of like, I don't know, 65, 35, much more like that, and that's where you presumably could get some movement, right? I mean, you're a, you know, you didn't finish college and you're working, anyway, whatever the type of person it is.

So I do think this could have a political effect. It's one of the biggest issues the Democrats have gone through, don't you think? I mean, for me, the three issues are democracy, which unfortunately the country

doesn't seem to care that much about, so that's kind of bad. Ukraine, basically, and Putin and NATO and the whole state of the world order, which the country also, the country, I think, cares more about that than people realize. But here, I do think the administration has done a bad job of making clear how unbelievably dangerous and disastrous it would

be to have Trump. But those two maybe are too, I don't know what, macro or high-toned or something for politics. But the third is Dobbs, right? I think those, for me, are the big three. And it may turn out, for me, Dobbs is important, but the other two are more fundamental. But it may turn out politics is funny, right? It doesn't work that way. And maybe Dobbs ends up being the biggest issue. And I do think having it on the ballot in Florida, the state Trump lives in, where he'll have to vote,

if he bothers to vote, I don't know, for or against this constitutional amendment, that could have spillover effects way outside of Florida. I want to go to D.C. Can we do a little swamp talk? My big Marjorie Taylor Greene had a big press conference today. Some compelling points. She, well, she did, she made an announcement. We were mentioning Will's,, Will is so moved by the

concerns about anti-Semitism on the right. We should mention that Marjorie Taylor Greene said that she could not vote for the resolution condemning anti-Semitism because she was worried that it could lump in people who wanted to point out that the Jews killed Jesus. So she did not want to run afoul of that law not look it was a long time ago so marjorie was a no on the anti-semitism resolution um anyway uh she's ready to get rid of mike johnson uh she's going after the uni party mike johnson is part of the union party our tent just keeps expanding baby it's like's like, you know, it's radical Christian conservatives all the way over to DSA liberals, right? Didn't you have some evidence just this

week, last week? Maybe I shouldn't even say this, that someone on Mike Johnson's staff is reading the bulwark carefully or something like that? You can say this. It's fine. Whatever. I don't think he listens to the Polar Podcast. Maybe he does. Well, apparently he does. That's right. I wrote an article where I complimented Mike Johnson. I did it. I did it. I complimented Mike Johnson. Okay.

He did what Mike Kevin couldn't do, which was he said, it's like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this even though Mr. Trump doesn't want it on Ukraine. And good on him for doing that. And so I pointed that out. And I savaged Mike Kevin mercilessly about how pathetic and sad his life is now and how he's just gotten absolutely owned by Mike Johnson. I received a text from an old friend who I haven't heard from in literally eight years

who's Mike Johnson's now comms director. It's like, nice article, period. I don't know. Maybe we're back in. I replied. I was like, thanks. That's it. That's the extent of the exchange. Anyway, what do we think? MTG's trying to get

rid of them. Uniparty, she's worried. Her and Tom Massey were out there. Do you think that she was talking with Gates today? Do you think that they're going to be able to scalp them? What do you think? No, they're not going to. I've been waiting for this whole thing. This is a real pony. Okay. This is a real pony. Hot damn. The Uniparty. The Uniparty. I can thing. This is a real pony. All right. This is a real pony. Hot damn. The Uniparty. The Uniparty. I can't. This press conference was Marjorie Taylor Greene

and Thomas Massey. And that's it. If they could have got anybody else, where was Gates? He was, he was unavailable. It was,

he was a slow driver. Injections in the forehead. Forehead keeps getting higher. Higher the forehead, the closer to God. You have to remember, for Gates... Matt does listen to this podcast, by the way. Hi, Matt. For Gates, God is in the mirror,

so he's got to move forward. So they would... Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massey, if they could have had anybody else, they would have the Freedom Caucus, not there. Nobody else there. These two, that's it. We're going to take that. So there's two members. Now, it's a narrow majority for the House, so they think they have power. And they're not going to get it, and they're not going to get it, because Hakeem Jeffries and the Democrats said, we're not going to let Mike Johnson fall over doing the right thing in Ukraine. The Uniparty, what these two members are attacking, is the blessing. This is

what we should want. It's not, the Uniparty is Republicans and Democrats who actually want to govern, who actually want to get something done to do their job. The passing the bills for Ukraine, for Israel, honestly trying to pass the Lankford border provisions, that was also trying to, that was a problem that conservatives identified. And what we have in Washington now is not so much a fight between the right and the left. We have that. We have a fight between the people who want to govern and the people who just want to pontificate and object and fight fight and and go do Fox News hit

rope yeah right I don't want to pontificate and so every opportunity we have for Democrats and Republicans to work together on issues where they can agree on a solution and the border is a classic case of that. Ukraine is another classic case. I'm for it, and I'm for Marjorie Taylor Greene and these people identifying the uniparty and distinguishing what it is. All right, Bill, that was nice, but let's ignore Will. I know he's right here.

It's nice. We're supposed to be earnest and care about governing, but is there a dark part of you that's kind of like, let him throw fucking Mike Johnson overboard. That little weirdo wants to get into our bedroom that's kind of like, let him throw fucking Mike Johnson overboard. That little weirdo wants to get into our bedroom and wanted to overthrow the election to make Donald Trump an autocrat. Like, should we really be working with him?

Like, doesn't it suck that the Democrats have to swallow hard and help Mike Johnson? You know, that is politics to some degree. No, I'd say for the next six months, no. The next six months, the task is to get some number of Republican-ish voters out there and say, hey, half the Republicans in Congress, just a little over half actually, including Mike Johnson, who's very conservative, probably more conservative than you are, Mr. Swing Republican voter,

or Mrs. Swing Republican voter, they voted for aid to Ukraine. They knew how important this was. And they were not happy when Trump blew up the border bill. We can stipulate that. And you therefore have a permission structure, as Sarah likes to say. You're not voting for Biden, right?

You're voting against Trump and you're voting for a guy whose position on Ukraine is identical to that of Mike Johnson. And to be fair to Johnson, he's been pretty, he's gone pretty far. Like he did somehow,

if I can use this phrase, get religion on this or something. I mean, he's now a Reagan Republican and and this is the he's a wartime speaker biden hasn't even said maybe he shouldn't say that he's a wartime president and johnson has sort of internalized that notion i think so i think the democrats should use johnson honestly as a way to get to voters they're not going to get to the diehard speak but it creates a broader permission structure for the biden set for voting against Trump or at least not voting for Trump. Maybe they can't quite bring themselves to vote for Biden.

The border thing, I do wonder, don't you think Biden should, I mean, he signed off on that deal. Trump torpedoed it. Biden said, we're going to hold their feet to the fire. Trump's going to pay a price to Republicans for torpedoing this bipartisan deal. But this is one problem with Biden as a politician. It's not just the eloquence. He doesn't really hammer home. He's got a winning issue there. Some of us probably aren't crazy about the border deal. It's a little, you know,

restrictive and all this, but whatever. They signed off on it. The Democrats in the Senate, 47 of them voted for it, you know. They did the right thing. They were a governing party. They swallowed hard

and accepted something they didn't like to get the aid package that was so important for the country and for the world. Having done that, they should get some more credit for it, and Biden should be just hammering the Republicans,

where is that border deal? Amen. I think we're going to get that. I think we'll get that. I think it's a big part of the campaign. I thought the first Biden ad on this topic was basically good, which is like, I got infrastructure, I tried to do this. This guy doesn't care about you.

I think that crazy, selfish versus trying to get things done is a contrast that they are going to push in the campaign year. Okay, we're going to do more campaign stuff with Sarah and JBL, but I've got one important topic that people might have wanted Sarah and JBL's opinion on this, but

really when I was listening to the crowd, they were like, I want to hear what Bill Kristol thinks about marijuana being rescheduled. So, are we excited, Bill Kristol? On the other podcast, Levitt said to me, he's like, you know, the 90s Republicans like Bob Novak, they were right. It was a slippery slope to legalization of marijuana. Suck it, Bob Novak.

How are you feeling about the schedule reassessment of marijuana? Well, Will is the bulwark expert on marijuana. I think really Will should be the one to speak to this. We can't answer it jointly? Oh.

That was good. That was not prearranged either. That was good. That was not prearranged either. That was good. It's good news. We're not talking about it. We'll get to the actual final question. That's good news.

That was ridiculous. We have people like, we've got white college bros, like, you know, fucking smoking, hitting the bong while we've got black people in jail for marijuana. It was an absurd, it was an absurd situation. And I'm glad that Joe Biden, a little belatedly, is finally resolving it. And Merrick Garland doing something right for once. That's nice. But given just kind of this big day, it's not 420, but we're coming off of 420 and we had this big announcement. I wanted to know, Bill Kristol, what is your dream blunt rotation? They always do this. For people who don't know,

a blunt rotation is four or five people standing around in a circle, puff, puff, pass. So you're looking for interesting people. You want nice people. You want good conversation. You're going to be there for a few minutes. And so I'm just wondering, all of world history, we're allowing you to exhume

people from the grave. I'd like to know who you would like to have in your dream blunt rotation, Bill Kristol. I would like Tim, Sarah, and JVL. I was hoping for like Ramsey. And, you know, I don't know. I was hoping for you to pull deep cuts from your time at, you know, as a Straussian.

There are no Straussians you'd like to join us in the one rotation? I get so much abuse for the mistake of having actually gone to grad school and taught for a couple of years. It's okay. I take it. Will takes abuse for going to Swarthmore. Do you have a dream one rotation? All right.

Confession. I am the only pot virgin I know still remaining in this world. So if I'm going to do this, I'm losing my pot virginity. It better be with some important people, right? So I'm going to do one person for one category, somebody who's just fun to get high with. I'm picking Charles Barkley. I just think that would be...

Sixers. Guaranteed. More pandering from Will. Yep. I want one person who you want to ask them, Sixers. Also Sixers. Guaranteed. More pandering from Will. Yep. I want one person who you want to ask them, what the hell were you thinking? I thought you were going to give us some Roman or Greek philosopher. I'm going to go with Hegel.

I went to Swarthmore, damn it. I read a lot of Hegel. I didn't understand any of it. And I literally wrote a song about Hegel and it had the line, it makes you wonder what he was smoking. So if I'm smoking, I want to smoke with Hegel and say, what the hell were you talking about? And then I want a Marshall McLuhan type figure.

You know the Woody Allen movie where he brings in Marshall McLuhan. Somebody from the past who can say, you know, that isn't what I thought at all. So, I mean, obviously you want to pick Jesus.

Like, you'd want to go up to Mike Johnson and say, you want to have Jesus with you so you could say, no, that isn't what I, you know. So you've got Barclay Hagel and Jesus?

Yeah, or you could, you know, you could pick de Tocqueville. Hell, you could pick Ronald Reagan. You bring back Ronald Reagan and just like. I don't want Ronnie. I don't want Ronnie watching me DeTokeville. Hell, you could pick Ronald Reagan. You bring back Ronald Reagan. I don't want Ronnie. I don't want Ronnie watching me hit the blunt. No, no.

That isn't what I meant at all. Wouldn't that be useful? Who would you do? Thank you. Will took the project seriously, which I appreciated, Bill. My dream blunt rotation is Mitt Romney, Larry David,

Angel Reese, and Little Wayne. It's a nice little group. They've got a lot to say to each other. Guys, what do you think? Will Salatin and Bill Kristol. Thank you. You wanted me to stay But I can't ignore the crazy visions of me in L.A. I heard that there's a special place Where boys and girls can all be queens every single day

I'm having wicked dreams of leaving Tennessee If Santa Monica, I swear it's calling me Won't make my mama proud, it's gonna cause a scene She sees her baby girl, I know she's gonna scream Girl, what have you done? You're a pink pony girl And you dance at the club Oh mama, I'm just having fun On the stage in my heels

To where I belong Down at the pink pony club I'm gonna keep on dancing At the pink pony club I'm gonna keep on dancing at the Pink Pony Club I'm gonna keep on dancing down in West Hollywood I'm gonna keep on dancing at the Pink Pony Club Pink Pony Club The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Breth.