The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan: Dilbert, Free Speech, and Racism

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Scott Adams has the right to carry on about white victimhood, and newspapers have the free speech right to drop him. Plus, after the Ohio train wreck, is Biden — with his global leadership — showing shades of Bush 41? Will Saletan is back with Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy Monday and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is almost the end of February, February 27th, 2023. And of course, because it is Monday, I am joined by my colleague Will Salatan. Good morning. I hope you had a great weekend. Good morning, Charlie. I did. I did. And I guess we're getting towards spring. It'll be Groundhog Day. And every week, I'll come out of the ground and try to tell you that some wonderful thing has happened in the world. I really could use that. Okay, we have so much ground to cover. We have to talk about the lab leak story. We have to talk about what's going on in East Palestine. I want to talk about the anniversary of the beginning of the

Russian invasion of Ukraine, a fantastic piece you had about Fox and the GOP. We also have, you know, the Scott Adams rant, which I want to get into. We have so much, many other things here, but it turns out that Rhonda Sanders has a new book out. New York Times review is less than enthusiastic. Can I just read you a paragraph here? Go for it. It's called The Courage to be Free. For the most part, the reviewer says, for the most part, The Courage to be Free is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma or a discernible sense of humor, much like the author.

While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human being, this one reads like a politician's memoir churned out by chat GPT. And for people who haven't been paying attention on Friday, we got half a victory for common sense. Puffin, the publisher, has decided that they'll back off from simply having the sanitized, whitewashed version of Roald Dahl's books. So they will publish the original versions of Roald Dahl's books after this spat over the stupid censorship. So you get to choose. Readers get to choose. You want the whitewashed version or you get the classic version. So what is that? One and a half cheers for that? That's kind of wild. I mean, I love that. It's

kind of like PC liberalism where you can have the woke version or you can have the unwoke version. It's freedom. I like it. Now, who are they coming for next? Did you tell me right before we started? Ian Fleming. Apparently they're coming for James Bond, you know, because misogyny, sexism and all this stuff is so baked in that everything that's been written has some of this, right? So I'm assuming that it's about the misogyny this time and not about some other kind of prejudice. They're coming for Ian Fleming next. No, this is a parody, right? You're just kidding.

I mean, everybody who's ever watched a James Bond movie, like it's a given, right? That Bond, the women are going to be derivative characters. And like it's all of that is gross and you just bake it in, right? I don't even know how you do that. Can I tell you my favorite story of, I don't know what category we put this in. I'm going to put it in the category of academic bureaucracy and AI just together. Did you hear the story about Vanderbilt University? I did not.

So Vanderbilt University, like every other college in America, has an office of equity, diversity, and inclusion. And so after the tragic shooting at Michigan State University, the Department of Inclusivity, whatever, you know, issues that touching statement of consolation to the students. Nice, right? I mean, very heartwarming. I mean, they wrote, another important aspect of creating an inclusive environment is to promote a culture of respect and understanding. And then the letter goes on. Let us come together as a community to reaffirm our commitment to caring for one another and promoting a culture of inclusivity on our campus. And finally, we must recognize that

creating a safe and inclusive environment is an ongoing process that requires ongoing effort and commitment, right? So it sort of goes on like that. And I'm, you know, 90% of our listeners going, what's wrong with that? What's wrong with that? Absolutely nothing. I mean, the sentiment is repeated over and over again. They use the word inclusive seven times, the word community five times, the word safe three times. And as Nellie Bowles notes in her newsletter, it kind of worked, except there was one problem at the bottom of the statement was this reveal. Paraphrase from OpenAI's chat GPT, AI language model, personal communication, February 15th. It was written by AI. So these humane bureaucrats cared so deeply about the tragedy, but not deeply enough to

actually have a human being write it. That's kind of perfect. I'm sorry. It's kind of perfect. You know, Charlie, I always thought that the humans were going to manage machine intelligence. That was going to be our job. We were going to be the higher level, but in fact, it's the other way around. So the humans write going to manage machine intelligence. That was going to be our job. We were going to be the higher level. But in fact, it's the other way around. So the humans write the boilerplate diversity statements that are actually written by us. And then the AI comes along and just synthesizes the statements because that's what it does, is boilerplate.

And yeah, we shouldn't be surprised that we just bypassed the humans this time and let the machines do it. But if the machines do it in a way that sounds exactly like the people, maybe we've kind of stumbled on something. Maybe we could replace all of these bureaucrats with AI. Oh my God.

If we could just start replacing university administrators. Exactly. We have all the professors in our audience are standing and applauding right now. And Nellie Bowles writes this great thing. She said, maybe this is like the discoverer of penicillin. You know, sometimes accidents make genius. You've discovered, wait, you know, if you just like throw these words, these word salads in and people go, well, that's great. That's fine. You know, do you actually need all the high paid bureaucrats?

Okay, let's take a deep breath because we do have some serious stuff to talk about, including the one year anniversary of Ukraine, particularly as some of the Fox hosts double down on their either pro-Putin or anti-anti-Putin rhetoric. And by the way, last Thursday night, we'll do this tomorrow more, but I sat down with Paul Ryan, and we had a, I would say, a friendly but challenging discussion about politics. And one of the questions I asked him was, what is his responsibility as a member of the Fox board when you're dealing with people like Tucker Carlson? And it's an interesting exchange. So stay tuned, because we will turn that into a podcast, I promise, that will be coming. This is the paradox of Paul Ryan, Will. I'm bracing myself.

I still like Paul Ryan. I mean, we've taken a break from one another, you know, seeing other people, but he's earnest, he's sincere. And yet the contradictions are still there. I mean, the contradictions that have existed since 2016, where he says, yeah, this guy is a textbook racist, but yeah, he should be in the White House. Or we need to move past Trump. What happened on January 6th was terrible. You know, I did everything I could to support Liz Cheney. But, you know, you ask him about Kevin McCarthy.

And yeah, I was on the phone with Kevin six hours ago. And, you know, and I'm not going to second guess Kevin McCarthy. The guy that orchestrated the excommunication of Liz Cheney. I mean, it's my head exploding. Ryan and McCarthy will be interesting to talk about as things go on because McCarthy is the guy who stays in the system, right? And therefore it does all the dirty work of trying to work out a compromise between the coup guy, Trump, and the party and the moderates. And Ryan is now outside the system. And so he gets to say things that McCarthy can't say, but you can see that they're thinking alike.

Well, yes and no. And that's the thing. It's the actually having the courage of your convictions to do what you believe, you know. So, for example, you know, he's talking about how he supported all the people like, you know, Peter Meyer and Liz Cheney and et cetera, you know, who voted to impeach Donald Trump. And yet he's unwilling to criticize Kevin McCarthy. So we had an interesting exchange about Marjorie Taylor Greene, which I will let that speak for itself. I think there was a division of opinion with people in the audience. This was sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Distinguished Lecture Series. So it wasn't intended to be a debate or anything. And it was sponsored by the Tommy Thompson Center, which is sort of Republican-oriented. So I think that there were people in the audience that

thought that I was really mean. And there were also people who thought I was too soft on him because I didn't call him an asshat to his face or something. I don't know. So people can make up their own minds on this. Right. I'm guessing that most of our audience will think I was too soft. But then there are a lot of people who are writing me like, I can't believe you were so tough on him. It was his event. And you said all these terrible things. First of all, I think you said what you believe.

And secondly, I think that it's important for people to exist in the part of the political spectrum in between Paul Ryan is the devil and must burn in hell eternally. And, you know, Donald Trump is the king. Paul Ryan is not the worst person in the world. He has spoken out pretty clearly, at least in the last couple of years about, you know, Donald Trump more so than a lot of other Republicans. You know, he's been honest about a lot of things about fiscal things as well as political things. So I'm glad that you're not just, you know, beg to differ about all of this. For people who are just catching up, Scott Adams is the cartoonist behind Dilbert, which at one time was pretty good satire, kind of smart and edgy. And Scott Adams, though, has been decompensating in public over the last few years.

He's gotten super Trump, gotten involved in every single culture war. He has this YouTube video where he went off on a rant. I'm going to play a little bit of all of this, which resulted in hundreds of newspapers. I don't know, was it hundreds? It's like lots of newspapers dropping his cartoon, Dilbert. And for most of them, this wasn't a hard decision to do because I think they were probably kind of sick of him anyway. And I was slightly surprised that newspapers even run cartoons anymore, but whatever. And of course, Elon Musk has now come out in defense of Scott Adams, not just for his free speech rights, but kind of because he, I'm sorry, you can disagree with me on this one a little bit,

kind of because he sort of agrees with Scott Adams. So we're now going to have this debate about Scott Adams, and there's going to be confusion between whether or not it's about free speech or, you know, maybe he's right. He's taking these ideas into the mainstream. Anyway, here is Scott Adams, the author, creator of Dilbert sharing his deep thoughts about race. Rasmussen asked, you know, white and black voters and, and probably others.

Do you disagree or agree with the statement? It's okay to be white. 26% of blacks said, no, it's not okay to be white. 21% weren't sure. Add them together. said, no, it's not okay to be white. Meet me. 21% weren't sure. Add them together, that is 47% of black respondents

were not willing to say it's okay to be white. Rasmussen. So I realized, as you know, I've been identifying as black for a while, years now, because I like to be on the winning team. And I like to help. And I always thought, well, if you help the black community, that's sort of the biggest lever. You can find the biggest benefit. So I thought, well, that's the hardest thing and the biggest benefit. So I like to focus a lot of my life resources in helping black Americans.

So much so that I started identifying as black. But as of today, I'm going to re-identify as white because I don't want to be a member of a hate group. I've accidentally joined a hate group. So if nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people, according to this poll, not according to me, that's a hate group. That's a hate group. And I don't want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away.

Because there's no fixing this. This can't be fixed. This can't be fixed. You just have to escape. So that's what I did. I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low black population. Now, of course, Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams in a series of tweets blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip. Replying to tweets about the controversy,

Musk said it is actually the media that is racist against whites and Asians. He offered no criticism of Adams' comments, in which the cartoonist called black people a hate group and said, I don't want to have anything to do with them. And in the clip, you know, Scott Adams goes on, basically says you should get as far away from them as possible. You should not do anything to help them. He is completely done with black. I mean, it is just on and on and on. Will, what do you make of this, this latest burp of the culture wars? So I actually think that this is a very useful teaching moment about a kind of, what you're watching in this video, in Scott Adams' video, is a kind of meltdown. And this is how prejudice gets accelerated. Yes. Let me back up for a minute. So Scott Adams is working from a poll, a Rasmussen poll. And just so people understand what the numbers are, he talked about a couple of them. The question was, do you agree or disagree with the statement, it's okay to be white? Now, that's a really weird question to ask. What exactly does that mean, right? But here are the actual numbers that came back. 18% of the black respondents said that they strongly disagreed. There was another 8% that sort of somewhat disagreed. There was 21% that wasn't sure. And then 53%. So a majority of the

black respondents disagreed. 21% are like, I don't know what this means. I'm not going to answer this question. So what Scott Adams does in this video is he goes from 18% of blacks to 26% of blacks. He throws in the 21% who were like, I don't know what this question means to get to 47. He's still at a minority, right? He's still got 53% of blacks on the other side. He just ignores that, Charlie. He just goes straight to get the hell away from all black people. Don't live in black people. Don't live in their neighborhoods. Don't do anything to help them whites should basically segregate themselves from white people i mean it's a bullshit poll with a bullshit question but so the heart of this is scott adams basically saying i'm done with black people whites should all be done with black people there's nothing we should

do we shouldn't be around them it's just okay so this is going to be cast in some circles as a free speech issue that which is of course course, Elon Musk's claim. There's two sides to this, right? Number one, the Scott Adams have the right to say this. Yes, we reiterate that simply because you have the right to say something doesn't mean it's right. So there's his free speech. But also the newspapers, which have decided, screw this, we're not carrying his comic strip. There is no obligation, implicit or explicit, for a newspaper to carry a cartoon strip.

None. One of the fundamental things of the First Amendment is that they get to decide what they publish and also what they don't publish. So that's free speech too. But to your point, I think you put your finger on it. What you're going to see over the next several days is, you know, the usual suspect saying, well, you know, poor Scott Adams, Scott Adams is a victim. And lots of people sort of, you know, furrowing their brow and saying, and was he right? Did he have a point there? So again, we're normalizing the kind of racist speech that used to be on the far fringes that used to be isolated. And I think that one of the things we've seen with the Tucker Carlson's of the world, you know, with a great replacement theory and et cetera,

is that they're essentially creating that permission structure to people to indulge ideas and impulses that I think we had thought, you know, had been, you know, that we'd moved past, but we haven't. And so I actually think this matters. I think it matters for the millions of people who will listen to this and go, yeah, you're right. We should be done with those people. We should move away from those people. We should not support any programs. And the racism in society is not directed against black people. It's white people. We are the victims. They are the oppressors. We are the oppressed. And we know where that came from and we know where it's going, or we can fear where it's going. So that victim mentality,

you can see it and hear it in his video. Scott Adams is talking about how I get called a racist every time I try to help. So now I'm not going to try to help. In fact, I'm going to resegregate society to the extent I can. I'm going to move away. So that victim mentality, that resentment just feeds. I mean, our discussions about race in this country have sort of advanced from originally from just cold-blooded prejudice to systemic racism. And we get to critical race theory and there's all this subtlety. What Scott Adams is rationalizing in this video is not any of that subtle stuff. It's the old-fashioned racism. It's just explicit bigotry. So he's saying that on the basis of some poll where some relatively small percentage of black people said something, white people

should get the hell away. And not only is he just rationalizing prejudice, I mean, he's telling you upfront, judge people on the basis of their color. But beyond that, his idea of a solution, which is segregation, it's part of a self-fulfilling cycle. You white people should get the hell away from black people, have no black people in your life, which only accelerates this idea that because you don't know from black people, have no black people in your life, which only accelerates this idea that because you don't know any black people, you start spinning wild theories about black people in general based on, you know, he talks about his social media feed. He's like, in my social media feed, I'm always seeing black people beating up white people. Well, maybe you should pause and think about where your social media feed is coming from and how the the time, then you're hanging out with people

who are trying to feed on and promote this, you know, bizarre idea that America is full of black on white violence. Yeah, I mean, I've said this before. And this, I think, is the real tragedy. And I know that some people are saying, well, you know, this is the way people have always been. This is what they've always believed. It's way more complex than that. I don't believe that people are all good or all bad or all black or all white in terms of their thinking about all of this, which is why thought leadership is so important. It is the better angels of your nature. There are people whispering in your ear saying, okay, we need to move past this. We shouldn't be dividing one another in this

particular way versus the people who are saying, you know, that resentment, that doubt you have, you ought to feed it. We ought to pour kerosene on it. They are coming for your job. They're coming for your women. They are the enemy. You should fear them. You should resist any impulse to see them as fellow citizens or to be compassionate. So people respond to that. And there was a period of time where I think there were people on the right who said, okay, we need to change the narrative. We need to appeal to the better angels. And then there were the voice who said, no, I can stoke this fear. I can stoke this resentment.

And those voices are getting louder and louder and louder. And there will be consequence. So there are people who might have gone in a very different direction who are going to listen to this and go, yeah, damn right. And that doesn't mean they were always like that. It means that we are always capable of these things. And the question is whether we're incentivized, encouraged, and stoked to be this. Are you following me on this one? Because I find it exhausting. No, no, people have always been racist. They've always been bigots. Okay. I concede that there's always been that element. And I've said that I think it was a recessive gene. It's hard to say it's a recessive gene anymore. In fact, it's impossible. Look, our country has advanced in lots of ways, you know, ever since the voting rights, civil rights act, we have pushed back

a lot of the explicit racism and that's great, But there is now a backlash that is based on a kind of resentment. And it comes back to, I mean, in that video, Scott Adams says, you know, I wanted to be on the winning team. And that's the way a lot of these sort of white people who sort of feel victimized are like, just for some perspective, average black household wealth in this country is like one 10th of average white household wealth. So this idea that you're on the losing team is just completely factually false, right? But you get into this idea that we're the victims and you circulate stuff on social media that's all about like the latest crime we can find with a black person against a white person or some black person getting a job

that I wish I'd gotten or something. And so you work yourself into this mentality where you're the victim. And that's a whole new stage. That's a whole new stage where now you rationalize, because we're the victim, we have the right to push back and we can talk about white nationalism and it's not mean anymore because we're the oppressed. Let's change gears here because last week was a rather extraordinary milestone, the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You did a really interesting piece, I thought. I mean, you threw yourself on the media hand grenade of watching a lot of Fox News,

which means you're a better person than I am, which we kind of knew this will. You went through various Republican politicians, the ones who pander to the anti-Ukraine Fox line versus those who are willing to push back against it. So talk to me about that, because this is interesting because this this is one of those rare moments where you have, of course, as you'd expect, some Republicans take the bait and go along with it. But some Republicans pushed back on it. So what did you hear? What did you see? What's happening?

I got into this because I, like a lot of other people, saw Ron DeSantis going on Fox and Friends and saying some stuff that sounded pretty isolationist, anti-Ukraine war, let's pull back. We don't want to get involved in this. And I was like, what the heck? And since then, of course, there's been a lot of reporting about Ron DeSantis' history as a congressman and how he actually was a hawk. And now he's sort of, you know, trying to reposition himself. So I looked at these interviews of Republican politicians, 2024 I actually found, Charlie, was that a lot of the Republican politicians who have had a history, at least in office from the last few couple of

decades, are still hawks. They're still hawks, but they're grappling with pressure within the Republican Party. It's coming up from the base. It's being stoked by people like Donald Trump, by Marjorie Taylor Greene, towards isolationism and towards, well, if Biden is for defending the Ukrainians, then we should be against it, right? Right. And so what I saw in the interviews was, it's the Fox News hosts who are channeling that resentment and encouraging that resentment, encouraging the anti-Ukraine, pro-isolationist sentiment. And they're pushing the politicians, they're pressing them and trying to send a

message, you are in a politically dangerous position in a Republican primary, maybe you need to back off on supporting the war. And some of the politicians like DeSantis were kind of folding in that pressure. But some others like Mike Pence, like Nikki Haley, were pushing back. And so I think it's important when we see Republicans standing up for principles that the party should stand for to commend them for it. So I do. Okay. So let's talk about this because this is important. This is in some ways, this is the pre-primary entertainment wing primary, right? Who are the biggest, you know, panderers? You have Rhonda Santantis, right? I see Tom Cotton is pandering. But you had Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Senator Roger Wicker. How did he do? Terrific. Roger Wicker was-

All too rare in politics. I did not see that coming. That was not on my bingo card. on Fox and they're sort of, you know, giving him the, what the polls are and all that. And Roger Wicker says, you know what, part of what we need to do is push harder to help the Ukrainians faster, let them advance on the battlefield, push the Russians back. He said, we can change the polls, basically. We can move American public opinion by showing that the Ukrainians are prevailing. And that's this old fashioned idea. I don't know what else to call it, Charlie, leadership, where you actually do what you believe to be the right thing and then you hope that the public will follow you. Well, and the pressure is going to continue to be intense on Fox. I don't know.

Do you get the sense that Tucker Carlson is dialing up the dopamine hits or whatever it is that he's becoming more extreme, more shrill? Let me play a little clip from Tucker Carlson over the last few days. It is galling to be lectured about democracy by a man who took power in an election so sketchy that many Americans don't believe it was even real. Joe Biden has never had the majority of American support for a single day of the Ukraine war. In fact, Joe Biden is far less popular in

the United States than Vladimir Putin is in Russia. That is not an endorsement of Putin. It's just true. And it says everything about Joe Biden's tenuous legitimacy. Democracy, please. We're adults. Stop lying to us. Wow. There's so much. He's bundling election denialism in with sort of wink, wink. I'm not pro-Putin, but here's some pro-Putin talking point. This guy's so full of shit. Right. Although the election denialism seems to be confined to the United States and Ukraine, not to Russia. Joe Biden is sketchy, but Vladimir Putin is way more, you know, has a much bigger mandate.

Really, Tucker? What do you got in that bow tie, man? I mean, seriously. So let me come back to the idea of what's teachable here. Like Tucker Carlson, okay, he's vile, but he's also a useful teaching tool, right? Because this is where Tucker Carlsonism leads you, right? You start off with the idea of America first. We're going to pull back from the world because we believe in America. But where you end up is

you're actually America last. You're anti-American because what Tucker Carlson is basically saying is that I trust elections in Russia and polls in Russia, right? An authoritarian country where people literally get thrown in jail for dissent. I trust that more than I trust American public opinion, right? That Biden has less support than Putin. He actually believes, does he, Charlie, that Putin has that support in Russia? Does he? No, no, seriously, that's an interesting question. I occasionally ask the question, well, do these guys really believe it? I don't have any idea anymore. I mean, based on that Dominion lawsuit dump, you know, they say and put on the air lots of stuff I don't have any idea anymore. I mean, based on that Dominion lawsuit dump, you know, they say and put on the air lots of stuff they don't actually believe.

Right. I mean, at a certain point, that's almost beside the point. Okay. To be cynical here, let's say he just believes that propaganda works, right? Tucker Carlson, that's his job, right? He's a propagandist. He's a propagandist for Putin. He's a propagandist against Ukraine. And maybe he believes that, you know, that the same propaganda that Putin's putting out in Russia has worked. And there is some evidence for that, right? A lot of Russians believe falsehoods about the Ukraine war. Ukrainians are Nazis. They started the war, et cetera. But that's not a vindication of Vladimir Putin. That's not a,

you know, the people support Putin and therefore we should trust him more than we should trust Biden. That's a vindication of propaganda. So help me with this, seriously. Because a year into this war, it is hard to look at Vladimir Putin and this war as anything other than an act of genocide, of one war crime after another, just horrific atrocities. And yet Tucker Carlson, we know is a propagandist, but he's also afraid of his audience. So he's giving his audience what they want. How does this happen? How does the audience want to hear that Vladimir Putin in some way is more legitimate than Joe Biden? I mean, what is happening to people's brains, Will? Charlie, I just think it's negative polarization.

I just think it is that human beings are very tribal. We ought to see ourselves as beings in need of civilization. And we try to teach our children to be good, right? But there's a dark side of human nature. It's very deep. This tribalism, this we're against the other guys. And what has happened in the modern Republican Party is, and this has happened to some extent in the Democratic Party too, but it's really prominent in the Republican Party, is that the bad guys, the enemy, is not the rapists and murderers in Ukraine. It's not the

Russians. It's not the Chinese. It's not the CCP. It's Joe Biden, right? And it's the Libs and the Democrats. And once you make that commitment, then you find yourself aligning yourself with everyone who is on the other side of Joe Biden, including Vladimir Putin. You are completely right. That was excellent. So this does matter. There are consequences to this. They're paying attention to this in Russia. If you watch Russian state TV, you're going to see a lot of Tucker Carlson. Yesterday, CIA Director William Burns was on Face of the Nation with Margaret Brennan, and he talks about a recent meeting with Russia's head of intelligence and about Vladimir Putin's

belief that he can wear us down, that political fatigue is going to set in, that Americans just don't have a long attention span. So this is the head of the CIA talking about his conversation with the Russians, what the Russians are thinking right now, what Vladimir Putin is thinking right now. Let's play a little clip of that. It was a very defiant attitude on the part of Mr. Naryshkin as well, a sense of cockiness and hubris, you know, a sense, I think, reflecting Putin's own view, his own belief today that he can make time work for him, that he believes he can grind down the

Ukrainians, that he can wear down our European allies, that political fatigue will eventually set in. And in my experience, Putin's view of Americans, of us, has been that we have attention deficit disorder and we'll move on to some other issue eventually. So basically, the Russian position is that time is on their side and time is not on our side. So what do you think about this, Will? It's really important to take this seriously. This is Putin's long-term strategy. He can lose in 2022.

He can have failed in 2022. He can fail in 2023, as long as he can into the idea that eventually we have to put Ukraine on a clock. Because the way to actually break Putin's will, to break the will of the Russians, is to convince them that we're not going to let up. The mantra from Biden and the Democrats and the government has been, we're going to stay, quote, as long as it takes. And what you're seeing now politically is a lot of Republicans saying, wait, we can't just stay as long as it takes. We have to win now or the Ukrainians will start to lose. And as soon as Putin believes that we believe we have a limited time to do this, that just gives him more heart, more spirit to continue the fight. So as hard as it is to hear, I think we have to be willing to make good on that commitment as long as it takes.

Big story over the weekend, generating a lot of buzz. Story in the Wall Street Journal saying that there is new evidence or that there is evidence. There's strong evidence. The reason I'm pausing here is because there's a caveat to it. But the Department of Energy now believes that there is a possibility or probability, you correct me on all of this, that the COVID pandemic came from a lab leak from China as opposed to something that was created in an open air market. And of course, you know, this is generating a huge amount of, I told you so from people who say, see, it was a Chinese lab leak and the media covered it up. What do you make of this story? How big a deal is it?

How seriously should we take it? I wouldn't make too much of it. And I wouldn't have made too much of the previous, you know, so-called consensus that COVID arose naturally. We have very limited information to make any of these judgments. And that to me is the takeaway. So this assessment comes from one agency. It's coming from the Department of Energy. Most of the departments in the government have come to the other conclusion. We're talking of small numbers. There's like four agencies that think it's, that it arose naturally. There's a couple that think it arose from the lab. All of these judgments are pretty much low confidence. That's literally their term. I mean, the energy department assesses with low confidence that this might have originated from the Chinese lab leak. And yet the intelligence community is still in disagreement about the origin. So again, low confidence seems to be, I mean, like a red flag, right? I mean,

we don't know what we don't know. Right. So what you have is a lot of Republicans, people on the right saying, we told you so, we told you it was a lab leak. That's the wrong conclusion. The right conclusion is the negative one, which is you said that you knew for a fact that this arose naturally, but that may not be true. And they're right about that. We have very limited. So to me, the bottom line here is we could get higher confidence, Charlie, in understanding which way COVID arose. If the Chinese government would give us access to data from their labs, they haven't done that and they've resisted that. So the bottom line here is that the Chinese government is making it impossible for us to get a better read on how the virus arose.

That is a major problem regardless because we need to understand how this pandemic happened, right? And it may have come from the lab, may come from a wet market, but if we have authoritarian governments controlling much of the world and hiding the information that allows us to do retrospective analysis, that's very dangerous going forward. And, you know, we actually have a very unusual moment in American politics. As you were talking about negative polarization and, you know, the hyper tribalism of our politics. And yet the bipartisan sweet spot seems to be being tough on China, right? I mean, there does seem to be at the moment a bipartisan consensus

that we should take a hard line with China. And this week we're going to be seeing the first public hearings of that House Select Committee on China. And I'm going to be very interested to watch that, you know, only in part because, you know, Wisconsin Congressman Mike Gallagher is the chairman. So where does this go? Because China is making it clear that it is aligned with Russia on Ukraine. So, you know, that pact seems to be tightening at a time when the U.S.-China relationship seems to be, well, deteriorating. What do you think? Where are we going? One of the interesting divisions that I think is emerging now inside the Republican Party,

for sure, is, I don't know whether to call it lumpers versus splitters. So they're talking here about Russia and China, right? So there are a lot of Republicans who look at the situation in Ukraine, and they're looking for a wedge they can use against Biden. And their wedge they've chosen is China is the real enemy. China is the real threat. We shouldn't be wasting our time in Ukraine fighting the Russians, right? The Russians, this is sort of the DeSantis line. DeSantis basically said, Russia is a third rate power. They can't even take over Ukraine. We should worry about China. So that's the idea of splitting them and focus on China. But there's another camp that says that we should view Russia and China as a common problem. So in particular, we need to stand up to Putin in Ukraine, because the number one thing that Xi Jinping is looking at right now

in terms of aggression is, does Putin succeed in Ukraine? If Putin takes a terrible beating in Ukraine and fails, right, that is chastening Xi in terms of his ambitions for taking over Taiwan. So that if you want to stand up to China, one of the first things you need to do is to defeat Russia in Ukraine. It's all part of the same package. I think that's a persuasive argument. I think it's a very persuasive argument. Okay, let's switch back to domestic politics. Last week, Donald Trump went to East Palestine in Ohio after the train derailment, a story that has taken on a life of its own and become part of the culture war. Pete Buttigieg has been really kind of the main target for Republicans and the right for his

alleged failures and all that. He also visited East Palestine. Joe Biden did not, of course, because he was in Ukraine. So what do you make of this and why a train derailment has become such a partisan flashpoint? Well, it's captured. We were talking earlier about Scott Adams and the idea of victimization, particular white victimization. So this idea has sort of arisen on the right that the people of East Palestine, I mean, voted overwhelmingly for Trump, right? And that this is sort of rural Ohio and it's white America. And therefore, you know, the Democrats and Biden are neglecting it because they hate white people, etc. That's the Tucker Carlson line.

So it has cultural utility, political utility to the right in that respect. I do think that Biden should have gone there by now. Buttigieg should have gone there sooner than he did. But Charlie, it's really weird how the Republican position on this is you need to show up physically to show that you care, but really not much else, right? It's not like the Republicans have some big solution to this. And one of the weird things to me about the whole East Palestine question is, OK, it's about rail safety and it's about environmental disasters and cleanup. Both of these issues kind of play to the Democrats. Democrats are the party of regulating the railroad.

Democrats are the party about environmental protection and environmental cleanup. So I don't understand how Republicans expect to profit from this issue in the long run. OK, but this is a really interesting point because this ought to be from this issue in the long run. Okay, but this is a really interesting point, because this ought to be the Democrats' issue. So why haven't they made the point that you just made more forcefully? They're starting to make it, but the problem is, you know, we're creatures of media, right? And just showing up and showing that you care is kind of the first stage, and Biden kind of flunked that. I mean, it would have been so easy. When we talk about Biden, Charlie, sometimes I want to put my head in my hands. Here's a guy who campaigned for president from his basement. He's done so much of his political career without showing up. I mean,

look, to his credit, he went to Ukraine and in the big picture, that's way more important. Yes. And I'm willing to give him, you know, yes, standing ovation here for that. But, Charlie, this is weirdly, and I'm dating myself, this is reminding me of 1991, long, long ago. And George H.W. Bush, the first Bush, you know, fighting in Desert Storm, the Iraq War that everybody could agree on. And it didn't matter because he had neglected America in the minds of so many people. And so even though he was doing the globally right thing, nobody gave him any credit for that politically. So I wonder if the Democrats are just a little tone deaf here. Okay. Now that is a really, really good analogy. Well, you are not just another pretty face. That is really good. People need to be reminded that George H.W. Bush had what a 91% approval rating a year before the 1992 election, and he loses the

election because you cannot be a hero internationally, globally, and then neglect domestic issues. The domestic issues will always trump the global issues. You know, I was thinking about, you know, Gerald Ford, here I'll date myself. Do you remember when they rescued the Mayaguez? I'm probably mispronouncing that. They actually, and people thought, well, that's it. That's, Gerald Ford has assured his reelection. Nobody remembered it in 1976. They don't remember those things if you screw up the domestic politics. Again, this train thing is so weird because this thing ought to be the gimme, right?

I mean, this is the case for better government infrastructure spending. Let me start right there. This is the argument for stronger safety regulations, environmental regulations. And yet, for some reason, they've kind of gone quiet on it. I mean, Nellie Bowles, I quoted her a little bit earlier. I love her newsletter, by the way. You should check it out. She said, is there something I'm missing here?

Why did the train derailment get coded as so conservative that no one could talk about it? Why do the cameras have to be off? Why isn't Michael Moore there? To me, this whole thing is a gimme for the Democrats, right? You know, it's kind of a political mystery, isn't it? They've seeded this thing. This ought to be their issue. Charlie, can you imagine if Bill Clinton were still president of the United States,

him not going to Ohio? I mean, Bill Clinton would have looked at this and said, because he was such a political creature, right, him not going to Ohio. I mean, Bill Clinton would have looked at this and said, because he was such a political creature, right? A campaign-oriented person. He would have looked at this and said, you know, we've been having a lot of trouble in Ohio lately. I'm going to take me and my whole freaking cabinet up there, and we're going to be the ones handing out water. It's not going to be Trump water. It's going to be Clinton water or whatever he would have done, right? And even if he didn't have a solution for them, he would have been there. And instead, what you have in Joe Biden is a guy who he just doesn't have that look to his credit.

Biden is trying to do the job. And the biggest job of the president of the United States right now is to hold together an international coalition against the violation of sovereignty and democracy. But it wouldn't have been that hard to show up. Okay, this is a really important point, Will. You cannot say that someone is a fantastically good president except that they are not communicating with the public or showing up, because that is a fundamental part of the modern presidency. Right.

I mean, you cannot separate that. We have a very interesting, provocative piece in the Bulwark today about Ukraine by Daniel Fata. I apologize if I'm mispronouncing that. And he praises the administration for what it's done with Ukraine, holding together this coalition. I mean, I think Biden deserves tremendously high points, but then he makes the point. While the Biden administration and Congress have continued to support Ukraine, the Biden administration has declined to engage the public, both experts and average voters, about what it will take for Ukraine to win the war and to maintain post-war peace. I mean, there's good reasons for sensitive conversations. You don't happen in private.

That's what made last week's visit so dramatic, because it was such such a public facing, you know, affirmation of his position. But there's been no address to the nation. Remember when presidents would have primetime Oval Office addresses and things like that? And he just hasn't used the bully pulpit. And again, there are people who say, well, you know, now you're just talking about PR versus the substance to all be about substance. In modern American politics, substance and the communication of the substance are inextricably linked. You cannot decouple. And I think this is the problem you are speaking to. And it's going to be a problem going 2024. You know, I mean, people need to be reminded

2020 was a very close election and doubts about Joe Biden's age will continue to grow. Right. And, you know, stuff can happen. I mean, it's just, it is, it is, it is, it is an issue. And this sort of, I'm not going to prioritize showing up at domestic tragedies is, I think might come back to haunt them. Just a thought. Yeah. So that we have a couple of things going on with Biden here. So one is we've talked about this before. Biden is just not a good talker. He's never been a particularly good talker. And as he gets older- He can be. He had a good State of the Union. I give him that. That's a prepared speech. That speech in Poland was pretty good. Right. But that goes to another point,

Charlie, which is what if Joe Biden is a lot like George H.W. Bush in this respect. George H.W. Bush believed that his job was to be leader of the free world. He thought that was the most important. He was right. He was right. And Biden thinks the same thing. And what if Biden just cares more about holding together the coalition in Ukraine than he does about, I mean, we talk about middle-class Joe, but what if Biden actually thinks that's the job? Even if we accept all of this about Biden, he does have an outstanding talker on his team, a guy who happens to be the secretary of the department of transportation, and that is Pete Buttigieg. And I have seen Pete Buttigieg on TV making some of the points that you and I are saying should be made by the Biden administration. Why the hell wasn't he in East Palestine two weeks earlier making those points?

Do you have any idea what the answer to that question is? I do not know. It is somewhat baffling to me. Because he's usually very good at this. I freaking love Pete Buttigieg. I think part of what I love about him is he's so good on the actual substance of the issues. Maybe in this case, he just failed to put the politics a little bit higher on his list of priorities. Okay. So, Will, you are so good today. I want to read a piece from Will Salatan. Is Joe Biden George H.W. Bush? This is good stuff. I mean, really, when you start thinking

about it in those terms, it gets a little bit difficult, doesn't it? The way they conceive the office, the contrast between success globally and more mixed record domestically, you make a really compelling point there. Well, you know, the big mistake that George H.W. Bush made, of course, is that he won his war. Too quickly. Yeah, he pushed the Iraqis back out of Kuwait in no time. And by then, people were like, they moved on to the next thing. Charlie,

that's like COVID. That's like Biden coming in with the vaccines. And then everybody gets their vaccines and COVID subsides. And we're like, okay, next thing, inflation. Who cares about COVID? Nobody gives the president credit for problems they solved. So if the Ukraine war is still going on, maybe that's a little bit different from the George H.W. Bush 1991 scenario. Okay. So in the few minutes that we have left, we haven't spent much time talking about the Republican race for president, mainly because it's February of a year before the election, which I mean, I just remind people like it's February the year before the election, but there's a lot of maneuvering already. They've set the first debate for this August here in Milwaukee, which is interesting enough.

And Ronna Romney McDaniel was asked about loyalty pledges. And you know, this whole issue of loyalty pledges, will you pledge to support the nominee no matter who it is? That was a big deal in 2016. It basically broke Reince Priebus' soul. And it's going to be an issue again this year. And Ronna Romney McDaniel was asked about this yesterday. Let's play that. At the same time, what you hear somebody like Asa Hutchinson, who is, he's no moderate. He is a tried and true conservative Republican, effectively saying is, you'd be asking him to put party over. Oh, I don't see it that way. That may be how he sees it. I don't see it that way. I think if the

voters choose Donald Trump to be the nominee, if they choose Mike Pence, if they choose Mike Pompeo or Asa Hutchinson, everybody should support the will of the voters. And we're not going to defeat Joe Biden if we get in this tit for tat of I'm not going to support this nominee or I'm not going to support this one. So that's why we want to put this to bed early. This is a pledge that's been in existence. It was there in 2016. Yeah. And how did that work out for the Republican Party? So, Will, your thoughts about this? It is interesting that Asa Hutchinson is one of those who are saying, yeah, I think the loyalty oath is not a good idea. It'll be interesting to see how many other potential candidates take that stand.

Intuitively, just if someone asks you to answer in five seconds, does this loyalty pledge make sense? The answer is yes. Like, well, of course, you're running in this political party. Whoever gets nominated, you should support them, be part of the team. But then ask yourself the next question, which is if David Duke or Nick Fuentes or somebody like that ran for president, which they can, I'm a Republican, I'm running for president, and they win, they win the Republican nomination.

Are you committed to supporting that person for president, right? If the answer is yes, then please get out of my line of sight. I don't want you anywhere near power. But if the answer is no, then you've already amended this rule, right? So I think Asa Hutchinson is just fine to say, yes, I am part of the team. I'm running for this job within this party. I will support anyone except someone who has attempted a coup against the United States of America, right? That should be fine. It should be fine to draw a line against David Duke, against Nick Fuentes, and against Donald Trump. Well, this is one of the issues that I discussed with Paul Ryan that people are going to be able to hear about later this week when I asked, you were not never Trump, but you say you were never

again Trump. I mean, define the terms never, never again. And he said that he would not support Donald Trump, even if he was the nominee. But he stopped short of, you know, wanting to make the full-throated argument that he is unfit for the reasons you mentioned. And his whole argument is, well, it's because we can't win with him. The problem with the argument that I oppose Donald Trump because he can't win an attempted insurrection, you know, should never be anywhere near politics. But again, you know, people rationalize these things by saying, well, you know, this is the compelling argument. I'm going to make this argument because I think this is what is going to move, you know, the Trump voters. I understand the logic there. And yet I don't know that you're ever going to move past Trumpism until you confront Trumpism. And that's just, I'm sorry,

my head's starting to hurt. Guys like Paul Ryan have basically set themselves on fire within the Republican Party. And yet they're not willing to take that next step, saying, I'm doing it on fundamental principle, as opposed to simply a calculation of who wins and who doesn't win. If you're going to set yourself on fire, set yourself on fire for some fundamental principle. But I guess the habit of the Faustian bargain is just too deeply ingrained, that once you've made all of these compromises, you've made all of these things because you believe in the tax cuts. And by the way, I asked him about whether the tax cuts added to the deficit and all that stuff. But then it's very hard to say, yes, that was a disaster. I was wrong to look the other way when all of that was going on.

Because when I thought we were going to win, I was willing to swallow everything. But now that I don't think we can win, now suddenly we're going to take a different position. If you're going to go that way, if you're going to light the match, just, you know, light the match for something. Right. What if, Charlie, what if principle actually has political power? What if, you know, Vladimir Zelensky, by standing up and saying, I will defend this country, I will defend democracy, you know, rallies the world and this country to his side and

changes the course of history. What if Republicans did what Roger Wicker did about Ukraine, but they did it about Trump? They said, you know, look, here's the principle. The principle is democracy and the rule of law. And anyone who tries to subvert democracy and the rule of law, I'm going to stand up. What if Liz Cheney had a line of other people with Asa Hutchinson and Larry Hogan and a bunch of other people? I mean, she doesn't. No, she doesn't. But I think that's a numbers game, Charlie.

I think that if more of these Republicans who know that Trump is evil would stand up and reject him for that reason, even at the cost of the careers of a couple of them, I think that would start the ball rolling. I think that that is an incredibly interesting question. But I will also tell you that the vast majority of Republicans absolutely believe that standing up for principle is not good politics, that in fact, standing up for principle will get you basically a Liz Cheney-like treatment. They look around and then there are these cautionary tales, you know, look at all of these people who stood on principle who are hanging from lampposts. How many people do you need to hang from lampposts in order to stamp out dissent? Not that many, because everybody else looks at it, and they're all hanging from the lampposts out there. And so you're right, this is the question. The first person that stood up and said, you know, this is where I stand, this is what I believe, and is rewarded for it,

changes the dynamics, but it is deeply internalized on the part of Republicans, including the normie Republicans, that you basically commit political suicide if you stand on principle. Right. You're reminding me now of that possibly apocryphal episode where Zelensky is, well, it's certainly true that the United States offered him a ride out, you know, we'll get you out of your country. And he decides to stay and fight. And what we have in the Republican Party is a lot of people who would take the ride out of town. Yes, exactly. So what else are you keeping your eye on this week? What are you interested in? Well, I'm very interested in this China hearing. I'm really, really interested to see whether the Republican and Democratic

parties, I saw that the chairman and the ranking members, they were on TV together yesterday talking about this, and they were making all the right noises that this is going to be a bipartisan operation, and we're going to stand up together against the Chinese Communist Party. But it is really difficult to do that when you have so much of the Republican Party viewing China as an opportunity to stick it to the Democrats politically. And I think it's going to be really hard for Gallagher to navigate that. I think you're exactly right. You really brought your A-game today, Will. Mark the tape on this one. Will Salatan, thank you so much for joining me this Monday. We'll talk again a week from today. Thank you, Charlie.

And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again or something kind of like this. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.