The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Dan McLaughlin

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Noam Dworman and Dan Naturman sit down with Dan McLaughlin, senior writer at National Review online and a fellow at National Review Institute. His writings on politics, baseball and law have appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines and legal journals. They discuss responsible reporting, conspiracy theories and the Trump indictments.

🎵 This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of the world famous Comedy Cellar. With four showrooms and a fifth to be added soon. Maybe in a year or two. This is Dan Natterman, comedian and regular of the Comedy Cellar with Noam Dorman, who's the owner of the Comedy Cellar. As well as a musician and I don't know, what else is he? Renaissance man.

Pundit, gadfly. And we have with us Daniel McLaughlin, who's a senior writer at National Review. Perrielle is not here. I think she's, where is she? On vacation. Somewhere in the Caribbean or something. She is in the Caribbean with her husband and child,

and hopefully having a good time. We do miss her. But me and Noam are here and we are joined again with Daniel McLaughlin. Isn't a gadfly a negative? I think it's somebody who's annoying. Well, you are annoying to some people. So are you. Well, fair point.

But I think a gadfly has a connotation of sort of a political element, too. So before we bring – can I call you Daniel? Dan. Dan. Before I bring Dan into the conversation, because I'm always thrilled to meet anybody smart from the National Review, Dan asked me before we started. So I started doing – just today. I downloaded an app to practice my arithmetic.

And this is what I've noticed about getting older. And I don't know if anybody else can identify with this. I can still do math as well as I ever was able to do. As a matter of fact, I did like a little thing among friends

where I asked them to write a formula to try to calculate how many five-star reviews we would need to increase our Google rating from a 4.6 to a 4.7, presuming that we were at a 4.64, which I would round down. Out of X number of reviews. Yeah. And I asked some very smart people to come up with a formula, and I was one of the only people who got the formula right. And ChatGPT actually could not.

ChatGPT kept getting me. Well, that's not good at math, ChatGPT. Well, not good at this kind of math. It kept solving for X incorrectly. So anyway, so the logic of algebra has not, I still have it. However, the part of my brain that used to be able to generate answers to a math problem, without me really being aware of where it came from or calculating it or how I, that would just come to you, which is a big thing.

That part of my brain, I've noticed, is no longer reliable. Do you still know all your times tables? Yes, all my times tables. It's not reliable anymore. And that's very disturbing. And I don't know if it's because it's been years and years and years since I've had to do math.

Even in business, I don't do math. Well, what kind of math problems were you able to answer without even knowing how you got the answer, other than times tables? Years ago, if somebody said they were born in 1995, I could say, oh, you're 20. I could say whatever your age was.

I can't do that anymore reliably. You have to know the month, obviously, as well. Yes, yes. So, well, I do. Well, yes, you're right. The month you're born. So, anyway, so that spooks me. And when you're young and you can't figure something out,

you get it wrong, whatever it is, you're like, ah, whatever. But when you're older, you begin to wonder, is this it? Am I in the decline? So I just started doing some arithmetic just to see if I can get that part of my brain back into shape. There is, I mean, Freud was wrong about everything, but he was right, in my opinion, about one thing, which is there is a part of your brain which is doing stuff and you're not aware that it's doing it. Whether it's motivations or figuring something out or trying to remember.

Sometimes you can't remember a name, and then you're not even thinking about it, and it comes to you. So obviously, there's still a process, if you want to use the computer analogy, going on in your brain. So I'm just concerned about that math process is just degraded. I don't know. I have two comments. Number one, I don't think everything Freud said was wrong. I think

most people agree that a lot of what he said was right. Like what? I don't know because I'm not a student of Freud. All wrong, in my opinion. Well, in your opinion, but I don't think that's the general consensus among the people you probably think are quacks anyway. That is the field of psychology and psychiatry.

I really think he's all wrong, but go ahead. Second point, there's a guy I follow on Instagram called Presh Talwakher, T-A-L-W-A-K-E-R. I believe his last name is. And he posts problems on Instagram and also on YouTube, mostly geometry, but some other stuff. Which one week when I was particularly bored in Las Vegas, I was doing some problems. But they're tricky problems. So if you want to take a look at those, you can do so. Anyway, as far as cognitive decline is concerned, I guess that happens, but you really only need to worry when you start repeating things.

And of course, you won't know. Why is that the only time you have short term? Well, because the first the first thing to go, as I understand it, when we're talking about dimension, cognitive decline is your short term memory. So my short term memory is gone. Go ahead. Well, that is the first thing that that that, you know, suffers, as I understand it. You know, I can't remember names like i used to like if i if i gave you like you know uh three three words and then i asked you in in two minutes what those words were you'd probably be able to camera man woman trump's uh yeah that's what that's what they do they'll give you like you

know uh giraffe uh giraffe ice cream and shovel and then in two minutes we'll ask you to remember giraffe, ice cream, and shovel. In any case... Not to belabor this, but obviously decline is to be expected. I guess... Well, there's a degree of somewhat of decline, but then there's where you have to start worrying. And then there's dementia and all.

And I guess that's on a spectrum. Well, I guess... The kind of thing that they can see via an autopsy is a disease, right? But then just regular decline, I don't know. At some point, I mean, I want to be sharp. Anyway, and other aspects of my thinking, like, seems sharper than ever. But, yeah, I don't know.

Can you remember names like you used to, Dan, you told me one time you, you, you were on stage and you couldn't remember the name of a comedian that you'd known for 20 years. And, and you were a spook. Can I tell you that?

Yeah. I remember you telling me, you remember that? There are, well, not that specific incident, but sometimes there'll be somebody I've known for a while, not a good friend,

but somebody I've seen around here. Cause I see a lot of people here over the years that were not friends, but I see them. And I had to look at the lineup sheet, you know, and it jogged my memory. When I saw their name on the lineup. I won't say what their name is. They'll get offended. But I had to look through the lineup sheet. I mean, sometimes I had to do that.

I've had to, like, go through Facebook and scroll to get, you know, somebody's name. I'll tell you one other observation I've had. What were the three words that I... Giraffe, ice cream, and I don't remember the last one. Shovel. Shovel. So, another thing I've noticed, this is interesting stuff, actually, is that

there's a certain type of memory which seems to me only... I stopped being able to write to at a pretty early age. Like I could rattle off the characters in Star Trek or the Mary Tyler Moore show or All in the Family literally like I could count to 10 instantly.

A sitcom, even Seinfeld, like a sitcom that I saw later, I can come up with the names, but it's not the same. I come up with it, I think about it, I picture it, and then I put a name to it, whatever it is, but it's not the instant, it's just not the instant recall.

I can remember all the people I went to grammar school with, their names, boom, boom, boom, or summer camp with. I can remember people I met, musicians in their 20s or whatever it is, but it's not the same. There's just nothing is the same. So I don't know what that is either. Maybe it's the novelty of new things that you learn. It really is that your brain slows down in the formation of memories. That's why people have trouble with short-term memory as they get older. I mean, all of us do, right? Is that your brain still retains all those old memories. Sometimes even things that come to the surface when you're, you know, very old and have lost a lot, but it's the formation of new memories that slows down. And is this because, is there some limit? Like I hear some people say,

and I feel like it's a rationalization, well, my brain's so full of stuff already that it's harder to put more stuff in there. I never really believed that. I think that may be part of it, but I think a lot of it is simply that, you know, your brain's just not as elastic as it is when it's, you know, like when you're like a toddler.

I mean, I do wonder if there is a limit. I mean, you know, the brain is a physical structure and you would think- There is a limit. Given that, there must be some limit to how much shit you can pile in there. The question is, do you ever- I mean, I don't think you ever get close to it,

but I wonder what the limit would be. And, you know- You know, I do believe novelty is a very interesting thing because, for instance, I noticed time slows down when I'm doing something on vacation. Like the last three weeks went like this. One week in Greece seems like a very, very long time. Now, even complaining about memory, I can remember very well entire days in a foreign country for the first time where I saw things new, saw things I'd never seen before. So at some point or that plots of movies are similar, so it's harder to remember the plot of a movie. But if you see something like Inception or something like it was never related to anything you'd seen before, it does cut a bigger groove in your mind.

And obviously when you're younger, everything is novel. So I think maybe logically it seems like that would be something about it. Yeah, I mean, I was at my 30th college reunion last weekend, and I'm a big kind of memorizer of things. So like when I was a freshman in college, I looked through the business back when there was a literal Facebook, right. And memorized the birthdays of almost everybody in the,

in the freshman class. And like for years I could rattle all those off and people were testing me and I don't quite, you know, I still have a lot of them, but I don't have nearly that recall that I had 10, 20, 30 years.

And it's upsetting, right? Yeah. It really is upsetting. I guess maybe if you were really years ago. And it's upsetting, right? Yeah. It really is upsetting. I guess maybe if you were really, really sharp, it's upsetting. Either I haven't noticed because it's gradual or I don't have this issue, but I haven't.

I mean, other than forgetting people's names, but I know more people now, so I don't know if that has anything to do with it. I used to remember everything. I went to law school, too. When I went to law school, I would just sit in the classroom and i remembered it i remember like uh and it's not same thing as intelligence but i remember i was taking not calculus calculus was another world but pre-calc i remember at the end of the year i didn't need to study for the exam i just

remembered the algorithm for everything they had showed us and i took the exam and got in the 90s again not i i'm it sounds like i'm saying it's smart. I don't think it's, I mean, it's related to intelligence, obviously to be able to do it, but it's not, it wasn't that I was so smart, but memory was just effortless. They could show it to me once I knew it, which, you know, whatever. And, and, you know, when they teach you a math as an algorithm, that's really not. I mean, if you just do the algorithm, it's not really intelligent. Okay. So anyway, so the reason I asked Dan to come on the show, Periel, our producer, we love her.

But it's totally moot what I wanted to bring on about, which was the Fox News Dominion case. Because I was heavily Team Fox in this case. But maybe actually we could still talk about it. Not Team Fox because I was heavily Team Fox in this case. But maybe actually you could still talk about it. Not Team Fox because I love Fox. Team Fox because I thought that it was... I can't remember now. But what I thought essentially was that to make so much of the fact that people thought

they knew that the people they were bringing on the air were not telling the truth was a ridiculous standard. It doesn't matter whether they thought the people were telling the truth or not. They didn't know whether the people were telling the truth or not. And I think that that same notion has gotten many networks not into legal trouble, but into incompetency trouble in a sense that people thought they knew that the people claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was real. People thought they knew that the people claiming that the Nunes memo was so they didn't bring these people on. And I just thought it was ridiculous to introduce that into the legal standard. But yet,

now Fox paid almost a billion dollars. So obviously I'm missing something. So what's all your thought on all that? Yeah, I mean, and it's not – the litigation is not all over because I think they still have a case pending by Smartmatic, which was the other voting machine company. But Smartmatic is a different situation because they really were not involved in the election. So it's a whole different set of facts. But I mean, I think there is a real kind of First Amendment-y issue, both a real First Amendment issue and a sort of broader philosophical issue of, you know, this is newsworthy stuff. You're a TV network. You're putting people on the air. There has to be some space around that to let you bring in people who are going to, particularly people who are like representing

the president of the United States in a contested national election. But, you know, at a certain point, I mean, the legal standards for most of this stuff were developed in the context of print journalism. So it's a little different when you're talking about, oh, you know, you could fact check this, you could do this, you could do that. Well, you know, when it's live on the, so it's a little different when you're talking about, oh, you know, you could fact-check this, you could do this, you could do that. Well, you know, when it's live on the air, it's a little different. But they did have a lot of these people back repeatedly.

And, you know, in some cases, the Fox hosts, part of the reason they were in so much trouble was the Fox hosts were not simply letting people talk and interrogating them and pushing back against them. They were in some cases, Lou Dobbs in particular was kind of at the center of the lawsuit, really, you know, very much echoing what these people were saying. And so at that point, you know, the judge said, look, you're not just, you're adopting these statements as your own. I mean, it's a little bit complicated in the area of suing an organization, too, when

you say like, well, what did you know, right? Because it's not just like what you personally knew to be true or false. You have to look at, for the organization, you know, who was responsible. And again, with a print article, it's easy, right? It's like, who's the writer? Who's the editor, right? For New York Times versus Sullivan, which was a case where they ran an ad. Right. So it's like the Supreme Court said you have to bring the knowledge home to the people responsible for running the ad. Again, it's a little more complicated when you're talking about ongoing series of live TV segments. You know, it's the host, it's the producers. It may to some extent be the people in management who at least had some oversight responsibility for this show and could look at what was on yesterday's show and say maybe it's time to stop bringing this

guest on i guess but first of all i think that um people echo what their interlocutors whatever tell them all the time. He sexually assaulted me. I was crying. Oh, that must have been awful for you. How did you feel? I mean, you get in with it. At some point, I think Lou Dobbs, it's ironic because Lou Dobbs seemed to be like a real true believer. So Lou Dobbs was like, well, I believed them.

Like, I didn't claim to the viewers, I don't think he claimed to the viewers, that I did my own research about this or I had any facts. I just assumed that the person telling me something was telling me the truth. What do you want from me? Yeah, and that's where it gets complicated because I think Dobbs probably did believe a lot of this stuff. He's a crazy person.

But some of the producers had reasons to know that they shouldn't be going on with this. I mean, again, I do think that there's some gray areas. But on the other hand, look, I spent a good deal of my legal career doing false statement cases of various kinds. And the evidence that they had in this case, as you look at fraud cases and defamation cases, was pretty damning.

And I can't help feeling there's some politics to this, the notion that, and, and by the way, other people on Fox did push back, Tucker pushed back, Tucker pushed back pretty, and I, by the way, I hate Tucker Carlson. You know, we live in a world where if you, if you give a devil any due, people assume you love the devil. I don't, I hate that guy. I've been, now he's into aliens and bioweapons labs in Ukraine and telling people not to get vaccinated. Well, why hate, though? Why is hate the...

At what point... Why do I hate Tucker Carlson? At what point do you cross over from disagreement into hatred, typically? Because there are people that I don't hate, but I totally disagree with them. And then some people, I guess I do hate. I'll tell you why I hate Tucker Carlson. I hate Tucker Carlson. I hate Tucker Carlson

because I think that he's irresponsible and must know he's irresponsible wielding his influence especially in the areas of public health

where I think people actually probably died because they listened to his half-baked idea about the VAERS database. Now, having said all that, he might even turn out to be true about correct about a lot of that stuff, and a lot of the anti-vax stuff

actually was true. But he doesn't know what the hell he's... But do you hate O.J. Simpson? Well, I don't hate O.J. Simpson. That's what I'm saying. It's like hate. Sometimes people are horrible, but you don't hate them.

I mean, I hate any murderer, I guess. That's a good way to put it, Dan. But I'm saying that... And then he'll say something one time like, there's bioweapons labs, American bioweapons labs in Ukraine. And then it'll turn out, and you'll never mention it again. But it seeps into the public conscience.

This is just quite irresponsible. I mean, say what you want. When we had three networks, I'm sure the gatekeepers were getting a lot of stuff wrong. But at least they were careful with what kind of stuff they were injecting into the public consciousness. And I think what we're really learning both with this on the left and on this right and RFK and whatever it is, that we're just, there's a huge segment of our population just suckers for half-baked conspiracy theories, especially when, and the best conspiracy theories

always do, there's elements of truth to them i don't know if you want to talk about it yeah i mean look i think there's no question first of all that the american people look i mean part of this is we have all the social media and stuff so we see what people believe and like you know if you talk to the average person who voted for abe lincoln or george washington you would not want to know what some of those people believed right so some of this stuff has always been with us. I mean, look, I think we have a broader problem across our institutions that the people who should be able to do gatekeeping of various kinds have so degraded their own credibility that nobody listens to them anymore. I mean,

part of the job of, I think, you know, if we had the kind of responsible mainstream media that we should have, it's not so much to gatekeep things by saying, you know, we're not going to put certain ideas on the air, but to be able to go on the air and credibly say, you know what, this isn't so. And I think there's almost nobody left who has that kind of broad credibility that, you know, the sort of proverbial what people thought, you know, in the 60s of Walter Cronkite, right? That like people just don't listen to anybody and say, well, I guess that is the way it is. So Tucker Carlson, I mean, I can't resist him. He's entertaining, you know. And I listened to his, was it his first Twitter show or monologue? And he says, well, and there are aliens from other planets.

We know that now. That's been established. You'd think the media would cover it. Now, first of all, like, does he believe? Obviously, there's no, I mean, obviously, there are not. I mean, there are aliens probably. But I'm saying we don't have alien bodies hidden in the Pentagon. And Tucker said, and we're studying their craft for our own weapons program. This is obviously not true.

I have to believe you know what? I have to believe that if if the federal government really had evidence of aliens somewhere in the past seven years, either Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or both of them would have blurted it out. So I just— Well, these aliens, they make it all the way across, what is it, light years? I mean, all the way to Earth. And then at the last minute, they keep crashing. At the last minute, they're like, ah! They don't have the technology to avoid capture.

And they always crash so that the United States military could pick them up. They never crash in front of a camera. We've had Instamatic cameras around in Poland for many, many years. No, they always crash. And it's so obviously bullshit. So, well, this is an interesting question. But you do believe there's intelligent life somewhere in the universe? Well, I mean, I don't believe it or disbelieve it.

I understand that the scientists say with the odds and a number of planets that that's a statistical highly likely. Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks yes, but we had a guy on here who thinks it's a 50-50 chance. Yeah. So I don't have it. So now, what's an interesting question. Does Tucker Carlson believe what he's saying? Who the hell knows, you know?

But it's possible he doesn't, and that's just his brand. You know? But we live in a world where everybody's got their brand, and they've got to stick to it. Now, either alternative is not great for him. If he really believes it, like, how could they have a guy? And if he doesn't believe it, then he... Well, that's worse, I think, if he doesn't believe it.

I'm saying, but to have a guy that... They're both bad, but in terms of... To have a guy that powerful as he was in that spot, the most powerful guy in cable news, essentially, and certainly the most powerful in terms of injecting opinions. Like he, there's a,

if Bill O'Reilly was still on that position at Fox, there would be a lot of things different about our politics. I believe a lot of things would be different about the way Kovach interpreted. So to understand that either way you want to look at this guy, this guy should not have this kind of power. I know Rogan's had people on his show talking about how the ancient Egyptians were helped by aliens, but I'm not sure if Rogan believes that.

I don't think he was adamantly against it necessarily. I think Rogan does fall in a little bit for definitely the anti-vax stuff. Dr. Malone and Brett Weinstein, if you listen to these guys, to me, they're crackpots. But I don't know. Rogan is...

Rogan's powerful too, but you don't expect the same level, perhaps, of journalistic. I mean, RFK Jr. Did you listen to the RFK Jr. interview with Rogan? I did not. So I did see even some fact checking on it. Some of it checks out. Some of it doesn't check out at all.

Like you said, the diphtheria polio dpt protesis dpt yeah whatever yeah dpt yeah um vaccine was killing or or causing brain damage one out of 300 people before it was and i couldn't find that anywhere does that sound? I mean, I don't buy really any of RFK Jr.'s many, many theories. But there is evidence that in Africa the vaccine net was a net minus because

there's a lot of, this is my interpretation of it, there's a lot of fragile people there who would then die from the vaccine more than would be safe from the vaccine. Who knows? Whatever. So, so,

but like I said, with all, with all these conspiracy con men types, they always do use a healthy dose of true things. And very often the true things that the responsible people don't want to admit, which makes them vulnerable to these things. Same thing with the anti-vax stuff.

It's, I mean, there's a really good case we made that natural immunity was ignored, that young people really didn't need the vaccine, that perhaps Pfizer kind of hid or de-emphasized some evidence of myocarditis. These things are all true. And when you can use that, and then you have this big – use that as a launching, as a trampoline to then make these other ridiculous cases, people are fooled by that. But I don't think a responsible person believes that people of a certain age and with a certain risk profile should not have been taking the vaccine.

I think it's clear they should have been taking the vaccine. I don't know. Yeah. And I mean, and again, I think if you look at what happened to the public health establishment, I think they really paid a very bad price. And we're still paying a price for them spending their credibility in ways that they shouldn't have. Telling people the things they knew were false, telling things they didn't people, things they didn't know were true. You know, jumping to conclusions without adequate basis. And, you know, you sort of send the man in the white coat out there enough times to do that. And eventually people start, you know,

doubting everything he says, even the stuff that is extremely well supported by, you know, science. Yeah, I mean, it's a perfect storm of all these things. We're just jumping around. But like, and then people from the New York Times tweeting that it's racist to say that the lab came from a Chinese lab. I mean, it's just, it's a crazy time we're living in, right? So many things which should not be controversial. And somehow it's not racist to say that this was because, you know, Chinese people eat bat soup or something. Well, they do eat bat soup. So anyway, so getting back to the Fox News thing, just tell me one more thing about it.

Assuming they did cross the line, how do you get to this, how much, 700? $787 million. How do you get to that kind? How could this company possibly have been damaged to that extent? I mean, look, I think your good name and credibility as a voting machine company is enormously important and valuable. That being said, look, I think they got something like half of their or more than half, I think, of their claim damages. And boy, from the settlements I've seen over the years, that's really, really high, right?

I mean, normally, you have a really big money claim, you're going to get a much smaller percentage. That's the biggest payout since Tracy Morgan. Well, I mean, your name, your good name matters, but wouldn't you have to show evidence that you were getting fewer contracts because of that? Yeah, yeah. I think they were, and I think they were prepared to show that that you were getting fewer contracts because of it? Yeah, yeah. I think they were – and I think they were prepared to show that they were having – Like red states didn't want to use this.

That there were people considering canceling contracts or actually canceling contracts. That's an incredible amount of money for them to pay. Why do you think they didn't want to go to trial? I mean, I think that they, frankly, I think they should have settled much earlier, but it always takes two to settle. You know, they were taking on a lot of bad publicity. One of the things clearly I think that pivoted towards both the settlement and probably towards the firing of Tucker Carlson was the producer on his show, Abby Grossberg, who left Fox and then filed a lawsuit against them and started sort of dumping through her lawyers a lot of dirt on the company in public. And, you know, look, when you're bringing a case like this to trial, you don't want to let people go, right?

You want to keep them, you know, sort of inside the tent pissing out, not outside the tent pissing in. And so once you start losing people who, you know, have an ax to grind and have been inside the company, you know, then you're more vulnerable. But I really think that they should have tried to settle this much earlier. No one else is interesting about the whole Fox thing? And I have to be wary of this as a business owner, and I am wary of it. Things are true again and again until they're not. Fox let Glenn Beck go. Nothing happened.

Then they let O'Reilly go and nothing happened. And I think that really gave them this sense of security that, oh, it's the network. It's the time slot. No talent has that much. Like this will be fine. And then they let Tucker Carlson go. And it was completely different for probably a number of reasons, including the fact that people stream and people record, and he's more of a cult of personality,

and people kind of understood why O'Reilly was like that. You could stack on the reasons why, but boy, they have really gutted their company now. Yeah, and I mean, you know, the ratings were fine the first night, but that was partially probably because people tuned in not having heard the news or they're curious or whatever. I mean, I think in the long run, they should be able to do well still in that time slot. The time slot is valuable real estate. But Tucker is a unique.

Look, he's really good at television. He's very entertaining. And he's just fundamentally different. I mean, you know, both his fans and his distractors would agree on this. He's fundamentally different from most anybody else you're going to put in there. He's not a company man. You know, he's not a guy who's with the program necessarily. He's going to go off and do his own thing.

So it's good. That makes good television. Yeah, he is good. I mean, it's the only thing I used to listen to. Cable news all the time. Now when I listen to it on XM radio, he's one of the only things I would turn on to listen to. Again, just because at least he's entertaining. When I listen to John King or Wolf Blitzer,

I mean, talk about, you know, what's the word? Soporific. I mean, like, just unbelievable. One thing he has in common with Trump is that they both have this kind of winking sense of mischief with the audience. Right. That like, oh, we're all in on the joke here, which also makes it hard to tell when people believe them and when they when they're just enjoying going along for the ride. People seem to believe. So let's jump from let's just let's do a landscape of the thing. So what do you think about this Hunter Biden thing? I mean, it's you know, it really looks like they're trying to wrap this up.

First of all, I have a suspicion that that he would not have gotten indicted had they not indicted Trump. But I think they at this point, the Justice Department recognized that it really, really looked bad to have just, I mean, the gun charge they had against Hunter Biden was just open and shut. The tax case more complicated because the tax case always more complicated, but it was, it was pretty powerful case. What is concerning is the sense that, you know, there are these ongoing investigations into, or ongoing questions about the Biden family finances. And, you know, there are these ongoing investigations into or ongoing questions about the Biden family finances. And, you know, when you cut that deal with Hunter, you're kind of publicly announcing that you're done, right? Because you're not going to keep this hanging

over his head to try to get more out of him. I mean, the other interesting angle to this is there was some talk that he might try to make some sort of constitutional challenge to the statute that he pled guilty under, right, which is a statute basically says that if you're like, if you're a drug addict, you can't buy a gun. And, you know, there's some reason to think that there might be grounds under the Second Amendment to challenge that. And it would be enormously embarrassing to Joe Biden, who was largely responsible for a lot of these laws getting written, to have his own son out in court saying this stuff is unconstitutional. That would have been delicious, right? And then perhaps Clarence Thomas be the guy who saves Hunter Biden. I mean, can you imagine how much money the NRA would raise just from fundraising emails?

Help us side with Hunter Biden to show that, you know, Joe's law is unconstitutional. So to me, and this is just another comment on our times, one of the things that put me off a lot of things, but one of the disgusting things that goes on on the right now, not the National Review, I don't believe, is the way they ridicule this poor Hunter Biden for his drug use and the crack use and show these pathetic pictures of him. And this bleeds over into the way they make fun of, really make fun of with hearty belly laughs when Joe Biden falls, when Nancy Pelosi's husband gets hit with a hammer. I say, what is the matter with these people? To somebody like me, who is very sympathetic to a lot of their politics, it's so

off-putting to see that kind of disgusting glee in people's misery. I sense you probably agree with me. I mean, yeah. Although, I mean, look, frankly, ridicule is, has always been a very powerful political weapon. And, you know, it's certainly not something that's either unique to the right or new for our time. So, well, there are definitely, there are definitely times when you, when you say, you know what, let's just not go there. I think it's new to the main, no, like that would be something you would hear, I don't know, on Breitbart maybe. When you start seeing it on Fox,

when they're laughing at, literally laughing at Paul Pelosi getting, like this is, it did feel new to me. I don't ever recall that before. And the way they constantly put up these pictures of hunter by look i have a lot of feelings about how corrupt i mean absolutely corrupt you know so many things are with hunter biden and and it's interesting to talk about but the fact that he became a drug addict

most people are one or two degrees of separation away from that tragedy. And I actually don't have it in my family, but I know people and I certainly know people who it can happen to anybody. It can happen to any family. It's just not. And you talk about the Christian thing to do or the it's just like, is that your problem with Hunter Biden that he's on drugs? The problem is that obviously because that they're the father is in charge of the banking committee and MBNA hires him. And then the father is in charge of Ukraine and then the Ukrainians hire him, which is obviously corrupt. Just – I mean it's obviously – Yeah, I mean that's one thing to say, well, anybody would try to make sure that their ne'er-do-well son with a substance abuse problem gets stuck in some phony baloney job somewhere.

And I think most people would look at that and they'd be like, yeah, that's a little fishy, but I understand. But most of those people don't get corporate board seats in Ukraine or have the spy chief of China paying him a million dollar retainer. And there's, you know, there's two aspects of the second aspect I'm going to bring up doesn't get spoken about nearly enough. I actually don't think Joe Biden would do something knowingly to the detriment of the United States of America because of his son. I don't, that's hard for me to believe. Having said that, if he's put in charge of something that really doesn't matter, which Ukraine could, he might, but I'm not accusing him and there's been no claim beyond this prosecutor that he did anything. But from the other end of

the telescope, in a country like Ukraine, but let alone United States of America, when you hire the son of the vice president of the United States, everybody lays off. So whatever the government of Ukraine would properly have done in terms of regulating or treating or prosecuting Burisma,

they don't need Biden to say a word. It's like Godfather 2 when the Pantangeli's brother shows up. Like, everybody gets it. So Biden doesn't have to do anything. It's obviously corrupt. As soon as everybody knows Hunter Biden's working at Burisma, only a total moron would make any move to do anything to upset Burisma. Right.

I mean, it's outside, you know, in almost all of the world outside of the United States, people wouldn't even need to explain to them. Right. It's just like, oh, yeah, you, you know, you bought off the, you know, the leader's family. Imagine I hired Eric Adams' son here, the mayor, as a manager. And then the health inspector comes in. So I'm manager Adams. Oh, you're the mayor's as a manager. And then the health inspector comes in. So I'm manager Adams. Oh, you're the mayor's son? Yeah, yeah. Do you think I'm getting anything less than an A?

Very, very unlikely. I didn't, the mayor, I didn't have to do anything. It's just they see him. No, who's going to, nobody's going to get into that. So that is just so self-evidently corrupt. And, and Biden, you know, he, he signed off on this. It's despicable self-evidently corrupt. And Biden, you know, he signed off on this. It's despicable, in my opinion. And I just find that all the stuff about his son's drug use and prostitution just complicates the very pure case of the thing. And I like it. So the next thing, what do you think about the Trump indictment? Well, of course, we have to say Trump indictments. The first two, because there may be more coming.

I mean, the first— And I don't mean the brag one. I mean the— Yeah, yeah, because the brag one is ridiculous. It's—it literally—it's like, you know, you lied to your checkbook. That's literally the whole case. You lied to your checkbook. I like to put it with an additional layer. The theory of the case is that if Trump would be – was a proper law-abiding citizen, he would have taken campaign money and paid Stormy Daniels with it.

In other words, I'm an old lady. I'm donating to Trump's campaign. And that's what he's supposed to do with my money, which that sounds more like a crime than – Yeah, I mean during the John Edwards case, if you remember that, they literally changed tack from one theory to the opposite theory. And I think they could use both. They would threaten to use both against Trump, which is like, OK, if you use campaign money for this, that's an improper way to, you know, that's that's improper because it's not a proper campaign purpose to pay off your mistress. And then when you don't report it as campaign money, they're like, well, this is a campaign contribution because it really benefits your mistress. And then when you don't report it as campaign money, they're like, well, this is a campaign contribution because it really benefits your campaign. It's like, damned if you do, damned if you don't. It's the wrong way to do it. Although I would be sympathetic,

much more sympathetic to the idea that paying your mistress with campaign money was a crime in the sense that, and I imagine it's the intention of the law, that people donating to your campaign would never in a million years expect you to use that to pay off your mistress. They want you to use it to get elected. I mean, yeah. Yeah, but, you know, Congress hasn't written a rule that's real clear on that one way or the other.

So it's, I mean, look, when John Edwards got indicted, you know, I found him loathsome. I thought it was hilarious, but I still thought the indictment was horrendous. All right, but the real one. But the real horrendous. All right. But the real one. But the real one. I mean, this is a real one. I mean, look, the scandal, you know, people are up in arms on the right about this, but the scandal is not that Donald Trump got indicted.

The scandal is that Hillary didn't. They have Trump really, really, you know, they've got him pretty dead to rights. I mean, the biggest obstacle that the prosecution is going to have here is the fact that, you know, they have to say, look, these documents are, you know, these are the documents that were in the boxes that, you know, you have to trust the FBI agents that, you know, the chain of custody and all that. And they contain sensitive national defense information. And you, the jury, can't see them. That's going to be their problem, right? And frankly, ordinarily in the Southern District of Florida, you would have a case go to trial. They've set a trial date for August, right? And in an ordinary case, they could do that if they didn't have the classified information issue. But they could easily be tied up for like

six months to a year just fighting over what information can and can't be introduced in court because of the fact that, you know, I mean, if the prosecution just declassifies all this stuff, they've admitted that their case is bogus, right? And from the sound of it, it sounds like certainly the way they've described these documents in the indictment that they really are. It's like battle maps and stuff like, you know, this is really sensitive stuff. Now, you can produce a redacted copy of that, right? You can produce something that shows the classification markings. You blur out the sensitive stuff.

You know, you might show what agency something came from. But that can take a while. But really, I mean, they have incredibly strong stuff in the indictment, assuming that it's all stuff they can, you know, if they really have the recordings that they say they have and everything. What a moron he is, right?

Absolutely. And I think, you know, Trump, look, Trump has been very cagey for a very long time. For a guy with a very low ethical standard, there's a reason he's never been indicted before. Right. All those years he's testified as a witness dozens of times, you know, in his civil cases. He's been you know, he's been playing cat and mouse with the IRS for years and years. There's a reason he hasn't been indicted before, because he always had a kind of instinctive sense of where the line is, where the gray area is. OK, he'll he'll go as far into the gray as he can get.

But he kind of knows what lines not to cross. And and I don't think that Trump's fundamental character has changed. But I think that his I think there's a sign here that his judgment is not what it was. You know, he just turned 77 years old. I think he's, you know, he's just he's not as careful as he was before in sort of figuring out what he can get away with. I mean, to not turn over the documents. Now, this is what I think that I'm quite convinced that he's guilty of whatever they charge him with. The question is, a lot of people say, well, the law is the law and, you know, nobody's above the law.

But, of course, there is this 60-day rule, which you could probably explain it more precisely. But essentially 60 days before an election, the Justice Department will not normally bring an indictment if it might interfere with the election in some way. And that to me, although this isn't 60 days and blah, blah, blah, but that to me is a clear admission that the law is not the law, that when it comes to legal matters, which can affect our democracy, there are competing concerns. And so how does that, how ought that logic apply to the idea of, and if you, you know, if you assume the government wants what it says it wants, they would like the candidate of the one party locked up at the time of an election by the Justice Department that the other candidate is in charge of.

That just seems to be unwise to me. Yeah, I mean, look, the whole picture of it stinks on ice to a lot of people, and understandably so. It's particularly because of how politicized so much of the Justice Department has been. And look, again, in terms of spending your credibility, I mean,

you know, under Garland, the Justice Department has taken a lot of really, really hard-edged ideological stances across the board. They've done a lot of things, really hard edged ideological stances across the board. They've done a lot of things that were not terribly, you know, they have they have they have acted like, you know, the blue state department, not the Justice Department. And I think that that doesn't help their credibility. I mean, at the end of the day Trump went around saying lock her up and he never had his

Justice Department do it there's so many arguments that are trotted out and it's always worth to go over all of them so one natural argument and it would pass by you if you didn't think about it we don't want to set a precedent well

what would the precedent be here the precedent would be that the next president would just be sure to say, this is all declassified, because that's really all he did. It's really just, in the end, it's really all a technicality. He could have taken every document he wanted, and I don't think anybody questions that, and declassified them. So the next president is not any less likely to do this. He'll just be more careful about the way he does it should he want to do it, which brings me to the next point that I think Trump is a singular guy. I'm not really worried about the next president trying to do what Trump did.

I don't really think that's likely. Yeah, well, I think one of the, you know, the two most telling things in the indictment, one of them is the part where he's telling, you know, the two most telling things in the indictment, one of them is the part where he's telling, you know, basically telling his lawyers, hey, Hillary's lawyers like fell on their sword for, you know, they took care of everything. Why don't you do the same thing? But the other one is there's a whole exchange and it's widely assumed, you know, based on the reporting that this is, he's talking about General Milley and talking about Iran, but where he's basically, you know, he's waving around this document saying, oh, this guy says that I wanted to invade them and here's his war plan. And that I think is the

closest we've come to getting some idea of why on earth did he want to keep this stuff, right? Because a former president who has some real need to see classified documents, you know, he still has a security clearance. He can just call up the current president and be like, you know, I'd like permission to do this. And they do it. He can just take a picture of it on his phone and return a document. Well, yeah, no. I mean, not legally, but like, yeah, they would. If he returned a document, they're not checking his phone.

They're not checking his phone. They're not checking his phone. But but I mean, you know, so there are there are cases where if you have a genuine, you know, like, oh, like, you know, you get asked by the current administration to go be an envoy to something. They'll show you classified stuff. But why did he keep this stuff other than just sheer bullheadedness? But I think that was the one thing in the indictment that gave a sense of what maybe his motive was, is he still had these kind of grievances against people in the national security establishment and he wanted to keep around the documents to be able to wave and say you guys are lying about me so if i take it step by step as i try to be non-partisan american i say okay well what's the first issue so as i said well if if we don't prosecute him is it likely that we're going to endanger our classified material in the future? I don't find that convincing.

If we don't indict him, the next president is going to, you know, learn horrible lessons. I don't find that convincing. So then do I care that Trump's, you know, pay his, I don't really care about that either. So then I come to the point where I say, okay, now what's it going to be like to have Joe Biden as president, where, I don't know, 25, 30% of the country believes the reason he's president is because Trump was put in jail.

And then we have these pictures of Trump with the exposed commode and in prison, whatever it is. And we're going to live this way for four years. And if that's a possible outcome here, that just seems to me to be so obviously not the right thing for the United States of America. And I don't see any upside to it. Yeah, no, it's I mean, even even if you think and look, I mean, I, I definitely think that, that just as a, as a legal matter, that they've got a strong case. Yeah. I'm assuming he's guilty. I'm assuming. And I understand why they, I understand also that even if you take politics out of the picture,

like it, the way Trump acted as kind of a normal prosecutor would regard that as kind of waving a red flag at him, oh you know i'm daring you so i understand all of that but it is absolutely very unhealthy for the country uh and particularly because of the fact that look the the explanation that jim comey gave basically for not indicting hillary boiled down to the idea that look this is candidate for president you know the people are going to decide, like, I just, I can't pull the trigger on this without a really, really compelling case.

You know, if I have any doubt whatsoever, I'm just going to, I'm going to, effectively the argument was, and all of the people who ran around yelling and screaming about Trump for saying lock her up, right? So much of that was just, they weren't

making an argument that she did nothing wrong. I mean, some of them did, but an awful lot of them just went out and said, this is America. You can't do this. You can't threaten to put your political opponents in jail, even if they're guilty. You just can't do that. It's not what we do. And so, you know, look, Trump voters aren't blind, right? They saw all of these arguments made, and now these same people have turned things around, and they've got him under indictment. Yeah, I went back and read a little bit about this guy. Wasn't it Kirk Kerr with a C, like an Italian name?

The guy who deleted all Hillary's emails after they were subpoenaed, after there was an order not to destroy them, and then he changed his story. Like, it seems very, very likely this was every bit as much obstruction of justice as what Trump did. Yeah. And I mean, look, you can make, you can make excuses for Biden, for example, and some of the other people who have gotten in trouble that they were just careless, right. That they just, they took stuff home. They didn't keep track of whatever, all of which is bad. But maybe, yeah, but it's bad even if it's not criminal, right?

It's just, it's reckless. I sense that a lot of these documents are nothing. Yeah, but go ahead. But, you know, what Hillary did was, it was not at all unintentional, right? I mean, she deliberately set up this server and, you know, it's in some ways even worse, right? Because Trump was taking home stuff that was probably still very hot and sensitive, but it was also, you know, the idea of setting up an insecure server so that some foreign power who was able to hack it would have real-time access to the thinking, the agenda of the current Secretary of State.

That's really bad. And, you know, particularly – and it's not like she can argue that that's not a major risk. Like her whole theory of why the election – she thinks the election was stolen from her is that they hacked like the DNC's website, you know, the servers. Hammering BlackBerry's. It's over the top. And, of course, it's legit, although it makes people angry to say it. There is a big difference, which is that she's granted access to classified documents, but he's the president. He can actually do what he wants with them, and that's why we have to be careful who we elect as president.

And even the law which regulates how classified documents are handled, really it seems to me that was not written with the president in mind. It was written with the people who were going to allow, that were going to grant as part of the process, we're going to allow you these documents to access. And as a condition of your clearance, these are the rules. They don't really apply to the president because the president, all he has to do is say it's hereby declassified.

Right. I mean, this is one area where the president really is above the law because the law exists in this area while you are president to serve the president. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know. I hope it all works out. I think that, like, can we just be rid of this guy? I know this is totally naive,

but couldn't Biden have said, look, we have him dead to rights. We're just not going to go forward on this because it's bad for the country. And we're going to let the voters decide. Put all the evidence out there. This is what I said. Let the voters decide.

People like me would go vote for Biden just to have somebody say that. Yeah, I mean, you know, the sort of political pundit fantasy that I've seen a few people talk about, and it would be, you know, a wonderful thing for the country had it happened, but it didn't, is if Biden basically just went to Trump and said, you know what, you agree not to run again, I'll agree not to run again, no charges will be brought, and we all go away, and we get some younger people here who aren't 77, 82 years old. But, you know, it's nice to dream. But yeah, it's just, look, I mean, I, you know, I have the feeling, and I think a lot of the American people have the feeling,

even though somehow they're not getting hurt on this, that how on earth can these be our only choices? It's crazy. Do you have an explanation for that, Daniel? year olds, basically. Each of them really, you know, on the left side of some curve for 80 year olds, with Biden. Biden is not Mick Jagger or even Fauci. But, Dom, you're a big believer in that the people

know. Does this shatter your faith at all? You always use the Beatles analogy. Yeah, the Beatles. The people knew the Beatles were great and the critics also knew. So the people were right. No, we have, the Beatles analogy. Yeah, the Beatles, the people knew the Beatles were great, and the critics also knew. So the people were right. No, we have, there's a whole system, a structure, which somehow is producing bad results. But is it not based on... I mean, they're going to go on primary day and vote for, you know, their very limited options.

I don't know. I don't know. Does it not all stem from what the people ultimately want? If Trump had to run in a binary primary with just one other Republican candidate, maybe he'd be in a very, very different position. Maybe that'll happen. Yeah, we may get to that point. I don't think we're going to get to one-on-one, but we may still get to the point where the other people run out of money and, you know, other than some very minor people that essentially you end end up with mano a mano but it's a long way from here to there you know Chris Christie with Bridgegate you remember the Bridgegate thing at the time that happened I found that to be the most outrageous thing any person of

power could ever do putting people in traffic but it seems like such a nothing in retrospect I would vote for Chris Christie I'd be happy to over Chris Christie so who would you like to see as a Republican candidate that you would vote for? Some moderate, sane person. I don't know. I actually... People are going to get mad. There's a lot

about DeSantis I don't like, but I thought he was a competent administrator, and he seemed to handle COVID in retrospect pretty damn well in Florida. I don't know if that's because he got lucky or because he really had uncracked, had cracked the code, but you know, he, he didn't put the old people, he didn't put COVID in old age homes and he got people,

the monoclonal antibodies and he, he had the highest risk population in the country. But ever since that DeSantis blip, now he's pandering. And even, I don't believe in punishing corporations, but all right, in baseball, what is it,

brushback pitch? He did a little brushback pitch against Disney. But then enough already. This whole, I think Disney does have a First Amendment case here. You can't just go after a company because you don't like their politics. Enough of this guy.

He's pandering to me. I mean, look, I think, I mean, first of all, I think that I do think as a, you know, from my perspective as a conservative, I just think DeSantis is kind of the only game in town to stop Trump. And I say that as somebody who, you know, I love some of the other candidates in the race and would be very happy to go to war behind them. But, you know, you have to be realistic. I was, you know, 2016, I was originally a Bobby Jindal guy. Oh, you're a true believer. Yeah, there were like five of us. So great guy, great governor. But, you know, at the end of the day, you needed to oppose Trump with one guy. The Disney thing, I think I mean, I think there is a real case to be made that, yeah, that that a brushback pitch, you know, under the circumstances that there was some justification for that just because of the, you know, this sort of long series of controversies where, you know, big corporations were using not just their right to free speech, which, you know, they ought to have, but sort of using their

economic... Liberals didn't think they were supposed to. It's always worth saying that Citizens United is all of a sudden embraced wholly, right? Yeah. And it is funny. And it's... But look, I mean, I think there was something to be said for sending the message that, look, there's, you know, it's not all one-sided, right? That there's some pressure that can come back to you as a corporation if you push around conservatives too much, too. I still think, and DeSantis is, you know, I've been following the litigation with Disney. I mean, I think he has some, you know, he and his board have some pretty good arguments on a number of points. But I do think that it would be better for all concerned if they just kind of found a way to bury the hatchet. Because it's not like, it's not in Disney's interest to leave Florida.

And it's certainly not in Florida's interest. No, they can't. You can't pick up the park and leave the resorts. They're still planning to invest like $17 billion there. They cut a small part of that that the CEO never liked anyway. And by the way, then, I'd be very comfortable with a moderate Democrat too. Not because I – I mean the lesson of my wisdom of 60 years is that none of these things matter nearly as much as they were told to me that they mattered. And none of the people who said these policies were the answers turned out to be right.

Or none of the people who said these policies would be disasters, for the most part, turned out to be right. Foreign policy matters. I would have been fine with Hillary, even though I disagree with her on a number of things, the level of minimum wage, whatever it is. But just to have a sober person in charge, really of an emergency situation. So, like, I would think it's interesting, who would have been, in retrospect, who would have been the best president to handle COVID? I know who I think it was. I don't know who. Well, I mean, in retrospect, I think I, in retrospect,

I would say DeSantis would have been the right guy. Cause you know, we saw that he, I think he did end up being vindicated on an awful lot of things where he took a lot of grief. He and Brian Kemp too as well. But you know, at the end of the day, I do think it would be much healthier for the country to have two candidates who were, you know, younger and more hands on and just fresh faces where we're not just dug into. I mean, look, I'm 51. I was I was a sophomore in high school when Joe Biden started running for president. When you say younger, what age would you consider young?

What's the oldest age that you would consider a young person? Well, I mean, look, I think it would do us good for a while to have some presidents who are under 70, certainly. I mean, young at this point in presidential politics under 60 certainly under 50 but um you know i i mean i i don't obviously look i i you know i grew up as a big reagan fan i don't think that being 70 is the end of the world for a president but at that time it was that i thought it was a big deal it was a big deal and and uh you know and reagan was a guy who was an unusually good physical shape and everything i believe he was losing his mind a little bit i mean i think i think he retired when he was 77 it was time it was time um you know i think his the the alzheimer's didn't really start to set

in until after he was out of office but you know he was slowing down at the end um you know he was fortunate in his last year of office that it was his last year of office. But, you know, even then he was still doing summits and all this stuff. Is 70 not what it used to be or that we're just older so it doesn't seem what it used to be? You know, Treat Williams just died. He was 71, the actor. Yeah. And he died in a motorcycle accident.

It was almost like Jeff Ross's joke, you know. But my first thought was how young he was so young yeah i don't know that's because i'm getting older because 70 is younger than it used to be well there it is there's a risk of you know it's like actuarial like at a certain age the risk of a mind problem, either being present or emerging, rapidly increases. It's not like a... So when you elect somebody, I think, older than 70, you're introducing risk that, you know, you kind of like to avoid if you could. Having said that, so I thought Bloomberg would have been a very, probably a very good... He's whizzy now.

He's very old. He's older than Biden. Yeah, but I thought he'd been good to have in charge of COVID. Just somebody who understands data and can interpret data and is not a jackass. But it's always interesting.

We talk about, look at Fauci. Whatever you think about Fauci, all the different things he does, the guy is sharp as can be. There seems to be, I mean, he remembers names and new drugs and statistics like a young person. Even if he started declining tomorrow, it'd be probably five years before you would notice

it. But you can't count on that if you elect somebody his age. And Biden is clearly, I don't want to say he has dementia. I don't know that he has dementia. But he's like a more typical old man. You can see, yeah, I mean, you know, you can't lie to your eyes, right? We can all see that he's not the same guy. You know, I mean, I remember watching the vice presidential debate with Paul Ryan in 2012.

And Biden was, you know, he was so, he talked so quickly, shouted down Ryan. He just had this force about him that he doesn't have anymore. And look, I think we are playing with fire. It's not for sissies. Yeah, we've had a few Supreme Court justices in the past who stayed on until they were really pushing it far into civility. Douglas was one. Justice Field in the 1890s. Those are the two

longest serving justices, not coincidentally, where they kind of had to get pushed out. I think Field just died on the bench. But sooner or later, we're going to have a real crisis with a president, with the Supreme Court justice, with somebody who's in a big position that's hard to get rid of, that is just visibly not able to do the job and nobody's able or willing to get rid of them. Unfortunately, these aren't important jobs. You know, I mean, I say that tongue in cheek, but you can kind of, you know, work around it. A Supreme Court justice. Yeah.

But a president. I mean, I was listening. Do you ever listen to this podcast, Presidential Recordings? It's a podcast where they just, you know, go through various presidents that were recorded on the phone or in the Oval Office, whatever it is. And you hear John F. Kennedy talking to his generals

during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I say... And say what you want about the guy. The guy was sharp. And he was on top of things. And, I mean, I was really impressed with how fluid his speaking was and how rarely he had to stumble for words or thoughts.

He was in his 40s. Yeah, but you know, Kennedy's this guy that's kind of, we're told that he was overrated in some way and maybe he wasn't some way, but anytime I've actually learned about him, I say this is this was no amateur. This guy was pretty formidable. Can you imagine listening to Biden's conversations? You know. I mean, almost, you know, he's so well guarded at this point.

Right. I mean, you don't people don't really get get that. I don't think there's a large circle of people who get in to see him. You know, he doesn't do freewheeling interviews. You know, the New York, he hasn't sat down with the New York Times. And they say that they're trying to get him a meeting with the head of China, Xi, whatever. I can't imagine what that meeting would be like. Well, that was Reagan's line about when they asked him why he hadn't met with a Soviet leader before Gorbachev, and he's like, they keep dying on me.

They keep dying. Well, well. And, well, anyway, we can talk about- You hear those recordings with Nixon talking about, you know, his more racist recordings? I heard some of them on YouTube, yeah. He talks about all the family. He loves Archie Bunker. Archie was Archie, because he was a gay guy,

and he goes, no, I don't mind, you know. I don't mind them, you know. So they had Nixon in this podcast. It's a pretty interesting podcast, and he had them talking to J. Edgar Hoover about there was some shooting of a policeman in New York, whatever it was. And, of course, Nixon was very law and order.

But if this was the only thing you ever heard about this guy, you'd say, that guy sounds pretty good. There was that recording of Nixon talking to Biden after Biden's wife and, was it his son that were killed in the car accident? Yeah, his son, yeah. So there's a recording of Nixon calling up Joe Biden. His wife and daughter, yeah. Wife and daughter. Oh, daughter, yeah, yeah.

Son died of cancer. Oh, right, right. So it seemed a little kind of cold to me. I don't know if you heard the recording. No. Reagan was cold? No, no, this was Nixon calling up Biden just saying, well, you know, we got to move forward or something like that.

I don't know. You know. Anyway. I don't know if you heard the recording. Do you think— Worth was not Nixon's strong suit. No. Do you think that that level of personal tragedy,

I mean, I can't even imagine... Yeah, it's unimaginable. ...losing a son and a daughter. Well, yeah. A wife, I don't know, and a wife. Could you think... Absolutely. But that has a neurological effect?

I think so, yeah. I think trauma does have... I think I've read that it can have that effect. I do wonder sometimes if people get used to tragedy. And a son who's a drug addict being humiliated in the news. I actually, I didn't say this before, but one of the things I wonder when they show Biden's son

that way, I was like, do they take a second to think of the effect they're having on the person that's flying our plane, as it were? It's like, why are you doing this to him? It's just, it's gratuitous. Do you think some people are used to tragedy? I mean, the Kennedys, I think at some point,

they're just like, yeah, this is kind of what we, kind of our thing. I mean, the tragedies are obviously the most sympathetic thing about Biden, right? The thing that people can most identify with. I mean, look, my dad buried two children and the second one broke him. Now that happened when he was older the second

time, but I think... It's personal, but I'm curious what you mean by that. He ended up in a home. And you attributed it to that. Yeah, it was the turning point. He was in his mid-70s at the time. But

look, I think, I mean, I honestly think that had Biden's son, Beau, I think, I mean, I honestly think that had, had Biden's son, Beau, not died, I think Biden probably would not have run again. Right. I think he, I think he was ready to sort of be, you know, what George H.W. Bush was when his son ran for president. Right. He was ready to reach that point in his life where he's the elder statesman and he's the, you know, the sounding board, the conciliary for his son, watching his son rise through the ranks, maybe someday reach that stage that Joe never did. So I think in a, I mean, that's my read on Biden is that I really think that he, he didn't really,

this wasn't his life plan. Like he ran, he ran, he ran and failed, ran and failed ran and failed and i think he had his had beau not died i think he would have been ready to uh step back and and just let his son and make money in china with the bubble and you predict it would have had a uh could have had a big career uh in politics maybe i mean he certainly look i mean with the the Biden name and in a small state like Delaware, you know, I mean, he was state attorney general. I think he was going to be on track to be senator, governor, what have you, maybe both. He was my year at UPenn, I believe. Do you think Donald Trump Jr. is going to go into politics? That wouldn't surprise me. That wouldn't surprise me. Although, obviously, you know, the way his father is, there's there's there's room for only one. So as long as as long as senior is on stage, he's not I don't think a younger Trump will run for anything.

I mean, we have to end. But all of this, all of it really does show how the strength of America is America, not its leadership, right? It's the system, it's capitalism, it's the 300 million people making individual decisions, innovating, blah, blah, blah. It's a lesson that's tried to say out loud, but it's so important that people understand that. Yeah, no. And I think the, look, I think that one of the key lessons of the whole January 6th and everything that led up to it was that the system worked. The system held. Now, the system depended still on having good people in key positions. It could have been a lot worse if a few people had made different decisions.

And you can't put the system under that level of stress too many times without sooner or later breaking it. But I think it proved enormously resilient under an incredible challenge. And it was because power was distributed, because people had respect for the system and the institutions. And that, you know, people talk about, you know, Weimar Germany or other places that fall to tyranny, and it's because the roots weren't deep. The system wasn't as, people didn't have trust and faith in the system. Yeah, one of the nice

and would have been honest things that the Cheneys and the rest of the January 6th, people who concern themselves very much with January 6th might have pointed out was whatever you want to say, you got to hand it that even in his inner circle, Bill Barr, Mike Pence,

they didn't spend even a half a second considering going along with this nonsense. They really were patriotic and they didn't have to be cajoled into it, you know? And, you know, you'd think people would have pointed that out. I understand that's naive because of politics being what it is. But as Americans, I think exactly what you said. We're just like, oh, son of a bitch. They're not all just hacks. Barr is not just a henchman.

Pence is whatever. We actually have some serious people. Yeah, and I'm sure we'll hear more from Mike Pence about that as the campaign goes on. Because that's kind of a big point of what he's talking about. I love that, you know, so when the right is, you know, accusing Garland of being political and

all of that, and you hear people saying, you know, how dare you think that the Attorney General, this is an independent position, the Attorney General of the United States would not take politics, blah, blah, blah. But when Barr was Attorney General, anything out of his mouth, he was Trump's henchman. Immediately, right? That's what they believe.

All right. I think Barr looks pretty good, actually. I think he's come out of all of this looking very good. Yeah, yeah. I'd like to meet him. All right. Sir, you're a very, very interesting guy. I'm really happy to meet you and have you on the podcast.

Maybe you'll come on again when there's a hot issue, if you think we're not a waste of your time. Happy to be here. Also, we'll extend our usual invitation for a half-price meal downstairs. No, no, it's a place for a lunch and take-up. And how's the National Review doing? We live in interesting times, which is always good for, you know, readership and writership and controversy. But, you know, it has been a sort of a challenge of principles the last, you know, eight years to keep going back to asking ourselves what we, you know,

what do we really believe in? You know, what things, you know, as the winds in the party have moved and as, you know, as we've had to deal with the challenge of Trump, you know, it's a challenge. The National Review was very much against Trump in like 2015, 16, whatever it was. And then there was some issue, right, like before 2020, where I think most of the writers said they were ready to vote for Trump. Andrew McCarthy was like, of course, yes, and whatever it is. Yeah, we had no.

Well, there was a yes, a maybe, and a no in that issue. I mean, we had, I think really almost all of the writers came to a general conclusion that Trump was bad, individually bad, that the administration for the most part was good, that the Democrats are institutionally bad. But people weighed those factors differently in saying, you know, can I pull the lever for Trump or not? I couldn't. Other people could. The problem was everything they had accused him of up until he actually... He vindicated everybody

on his way out the door. If he had simply just conceded the election, he would have made fools, using quotes, scare quotes, of everybody who said he was a dictator and a Hitler. Like, here you are.

He came to four years. But he proved them all right. He snapped defeat from the jaws of victory or whatever it is. And I think that made him, yeah, nobody, nobody can in good conscience support him now, I don't think. If he hadn't done that, at least you could say, yeah, this is on the one hand, it's all the nonsense. On the other hand, he was effective in a certain way. And you know, there's a method to his madness where you could rationalize it whatever way you want. Now we've seen what's really under the rock of Trump

and who could in good conscience elect that. Anyway, alright, sir. Our pleasure to have you on. Dan, you want to say anything else? That's it for me. Podcast at ComedyCellar.com for comments, questions, and suggestions. Thank you to... You have a Twitter handle?

Lions. Baseball Crank. Baseball Crank. Oh, we should talk about baseball. I'll get Harry on. Maybe World Series time. We should get Harry and you on. Have a baseball episode.

That'd be fun. Okay, good night, everybody.