The Dispatch Podcast - A Guilty Verdict in Minneapolis

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

People across the political spectrum had all sorts of different reactions to Officer Derek Chauvin being found guilty on all three charges in the death of George Floyd in Minnesota. Jonah says most of those reactions have been far from encouraging, “While a lot of the right-wing reaction makes me ashamed and embarrassed and infuriated and disgusted … a lot of the left-wing reaction, or a lot of the MSNBC reaction, has been very bad, too.” Plus, the gang also discusses Biden’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan and how the news of Officer Brian Sicknick’s cause of death will affect the history of January 6, and Chris Stirewalt explains the Cook Political Report’s new Partisan Voter Index. Show Notes: -Derek Chauvin found guilty -The 1619 Project -David’s French Press on racism in America, adopting a black daughter -President Biden’s remarks on withdrawing from Afghanistan -Latest casualty status from the Defense Department -Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voter Index -Latest Sweep from Sarah, Chris, and Andrew -Officer Brian Sicknick dies of stroke -Sohrab Ahmari’s tweet on January 6 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Jonah Goldberg, David French, and the one and only Chris Steyerwalt this week. We've got lots to talk about. We're going to start with the verdict in the Chauvin trial. Then we're going to talk about Afghanistan. New competitive congressional districts pop up in a new study and revisiting the history of January 6th. Let's dive in. And before we do, actually, just by way of explanation, we taped some of this podcast on Tuesday afternoon, anticipating the verdict in the Chauvin trial. It didn't come in time.

So we taped the part about the Chauvin trial on Wednesday morning. So you're going to hear some stuff about it being Tuesday, April 20th. And you're going to hear some stuff about it being the morning after the Chauvin trial. Bear with us. It's all out of order. All right, guys. The Chauvin verdict came down yesterday. You know, there were some things happening in advance of the Chauvin trial, including Maxine Waters, the Democratic congresswoman from California, saying that if Chauvin was not convicted of murder, protesters should, quote, stay in the street, get more active, get more confrontational.

Joe Biden also weighed in on what the jury should do in advance of actually finding out the verdict. So there was a lot of tension heading into the announcement of the verdict. A lot of buildings, for instance, in D.C., where, you know, I live relatively close, had boarded up in anticipation of potential unrest, quote unquote, First Amendment activity. And we got the verdict, guilty on all counts. David, I'm going to start with you. Where does that leave the country? Well, you know, I think overall, overall, it is a healing moment with some exceptions. I believe justice was done in this verdict. I believe that, you know, especially when you compare, and a lot of people were forwarding this around on Twitter last night, some of the original, the original

Minneapolis police statement of what occurred versus what the tape showed us, having occurred, where's a sharp contrast. And that's a position where activism does come into play to say, wait a minute, this anodyne statement about what happened doesn't match what we saw with their own eyes. Something must be done. But here's where activism, especially from politicians, should not come into play. And that is, especially with Maxine Waters, appearing to coming awfully close to threatening violence if there is not the verdict that she likes. I think what Joe Biden said was improper as well.

Now, what we have to realize is what they say versus what the jury heard and what the jury knows are two different things. So you can talk about something and it can light Twitter on fire and it can happen without the jury. knowing any bit of it at all. And if you just dive in on the evidence here, if you dive in on the evidence, I think the evidence supports the verdict. Now, on some of the counts, closer than other counts. And I think Andy McCarthy, who'd been critical of the evidence in a couple of the verdicts, our mutual friend, former colleague of Jonah and mine and Andy McCarthy from National Review, he was more critical of the evidence on one of the counts in particular. But he said yesterday, that there is a rational basis for supporting this jury verdict and all of the

counts. So this is a situation where the evidence supports the verdict. There was proper, I think, activism and pressure that changed the initial sort of anodyne, nothing to see here approach that the Minneapolis police took to this. And there's one thing that I want to say in caution is there's an awful lot of people who are now saying, I saw the whole trial I watched the whole trial, and this was a miscarriage of justice, and you're seeing that particularly on the right. Now, a couple of things about that. One, take with a grain of salt that they saw the whole trial.

And then two, the other thing that I would say is, if you're watching a trial and you're watching everything that goes to the jury, you're watching everything that goes to the judge, you're then watching all of the commentary about the case from your favored news sources, that's not the juror experience. And so if somebody is sitting there saying, I know how this should come out because I saw all of these things, that is not what the jurors saw. And this is something that I realized when I watched the whole O.J. Simpson trial back in the day, I realized that there was something very different occurring when only the jury was there versus what was occurring when the jury was out of the room. And I think that's a really important thing when you're hearing people opine with such authority that,

that they know how the jury should have ruled and it should have ruled differently when they didn't experience what the jury experienced. I just want to put a pin in that because I think people don't really fully understand that. But I think overall this was a verdict that was good for the country. I think there was, and it was supported by the evidence. It was justice. Now, there were reactions to the verdict that I think were not good for the country, reactions to the verdict that I think were damaging. And a lot of those were in kind of the hard right, which went volcanic and ballistic last night. Chris, let's bring this over to you because I think that's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about, which is the politics of this movement, this verdict in particular and where

it sits in the movement, it doesn't feel to me like this is a time where the politics are coming closer together. It feels like folks on both sides are using this once again as a wedge issue on race, on police, on what part of the country you live in. Am I wrong? Did we get any closer together? Well, I think the problem here is the amount of surprise that people have expressed about the verdict. I was in no way surprised that this guy who killed this guy was convicted and is going to prison. This was in Minneapolis, right? This wasn't in, and I'm sorry, Dothan, Alabama, but this was not like a deep south, whatever. This is a progressive city in a progressive state. Minneapolis does not have a huge African-American population, but like one in five, or one in five Minneapolisans.

It's a diverse city and it's a very democratic city. The idea that this guy who was recorded on tape killing another person would be convicted. The idea that that's surprising. So I understand why many people view it as surprising, because if you accept the worldview of the 1619 project, if you accept the worldview, that America is a fetid sewer of racism, irredeemed from the days of Jim Crow. If you don't know what Jim Crow was and you think we're living in a new Jim Crow,

then you're going to be surprised that a normal, thing happened out of a tragic outcome. The system working seems like a surprise. That's how it goes. Big whoop. The danger comes in when people believe that it was the threat of violence that caused that result to occur, right? The Al Sharpton, the Maxine Waters, and there are, by the way, those who, on the nationalist

right, who have violence threat envy. as we saw manifested on January 6th, that the only way that you get justice in this terrible, terrible broken nation of ours is to pose a credible threat of civil unrest and violence. It's so dumb and it's so dangerous. And if the lesson that people take away from this

is that the reason this normal outcome occurred is because of the threat of mob violence, that's bad for everybody. Jonah, I go to you for like my big picture history, I don't know, my thoughtful friend. I'm wondering if when you watched the verdict, you had the same thought run through your head

that ran through mine, which is a little taking off of what David said. This never would have happened without a bystandard videotaping it on their phone. That technology has only existed for, I mean, 10 years at this point. How many of these happened that we never knew about We never even looked into the police put out the statement. Nobody really could challenge it.

And that has been the history, at least in part, of some of our country, up until the last few years. And that that's really what explains why these events have become such cultural touchstones in the last, you know, well, since 2014, really. Yeah. I mean, uh, I keep going back to something David talked about on one of the dispatch live events where having an African-American daughter exposed him to a different understanding of race relations in America. And it was just basic mathematical thing, which David will correct me if I get it wrong, which was that if you're not a racist white person, you probably don't know a lot of racist white people. You might have known them when you were younger, but you don't want to hang around. racist anymore. So almost 100% of your bubble is non-racist. So, but in reality, let's say 90%

of America, just for the sake of abstraction, 90% of white Americans aren't racist. That means if you're a normal African-American person or a person who's the parent of an African-American person, it's conceivable that, say, one in ten of your interactions have a racist component to them, that can feel the way your brain works like an enormous number of racist interactions. Now, the 9 and 10 thing, who knows what the real number is? My suspicion is in many ways it's a lot smaller in that, but it illustrates part of the problem with the cop stuff. If you have, if your few interactions with the cops, if you only have 10 interactions with the cops in your life and one out of 10 of them are racist, you're going to have a very different

view of what cops are about in this country. and justifiably so. And so while I am skeptical that the idea that there are as many showven type cases pre-body cams than like what Al Sharpton might claim or whatever, I think just as a matter of honesty and logic, you have to concede we missed a lot of stuff because it wasn't visible to us. You know, you can only, it's like the drunk looking for his car keys where the light under the street light because that's where the light is good.

If you can't see it, you don't think it exists in a lot of cases. And I think that's entirely true. I do want to flip it around a little bit because while I agree with David, a lot of the right-wing reaction makes me ashamed and embarrassed and infuriated and disgusted. And I can dunk on that all day and maybe I will later today. A lot of the left-wing reaction or a lot of the MSNBC reaction has been very bad too. where, and forget the pundits for a second, Keith Ellison coming out and saying,

this is not justice. You know, this is just accountability. And it's a start, but this is not real justice. He's the Attorney General of Minnesota. They just won on every single charge in a murder trial against the cop. And the message he's sending out

is don't be satisfied with this. I've listened to a bunch of people on NPR. I listened to the first pundit to talk on MSNBC yesterday when the news, came out was this guy Jason Johnson, who I generally like, and I think he's a smart guy and all that kind of stuff. His first reaction was anger, bitterness, and dissatisfaction that were even in this situation, which I get, but refuse to concede that there should be any joy, maybe the wrong word, but sense of justice in this, I just think sends a signal that there

a lot of people out there just as the right you can something there's some people we don't have to name them but there's some people on twitter there's some people on on on cable news on the right who are almost you almost you can almost see the little spittle coming out of their mouths as they salivate for some sort of race war and you get the sense that there are people on the left who kind of feel the same way it may be a little you know it's a different flavor but it's it's it's it's kind of the same sentiment and i think that is just profoundly depressing to me and dangerous. And so, you know, there was this shooting in, there was this shooting in Ohio and Columbus. And immediately, a bunch of people were trying to put this into, see, this changed nothing.

This, you know, another black person was shot. Now, we don't know everything, but from the camera footage that we've gotten from this and from the facts that as we know them, which could change, this person sounds like they deserve to be shot because they were about to stab somebody else. Now that may not be true, but regardless of whether it's true or not, it is certainly different than putting your neck on the back of a man who's handcuffed and who's unconscious for the last four minutes of his life. And the race for people to put everything into these literally, literally black and white categories of good versus bad, black versus white is so pernicious and so dangerous.

and I listened to Eddie Glaude Jr. this morning on MSNBC talking about how great this is because at least he was excited and happy about this thing, but he was talking about how we're finally leaving the era of Reaganism, which was all about law and order and all of this kind of stuff. And this is going to be a better era. No, it may not be. It may be an era, you know, my friend Ian Murray had a piece of the dispatch this week. We may be moving out of the old era of ideological combat in the era of identity combat. And that's far more ugly and dangerous. And so I worry about all this. I'm delighted by the ruling. I'm sort of where McCarthy is. I think reasonable people can argue about murder too. But the sanctimony of people

who are like, he was definitely givenly a manslaughter, but is outrageous that he got murder too. That's a perfectly legitimate thing to debate about. And like maybe he was overcharged and all that kind of stuff. But let's not turn a guy who even his defenders concede was guilty of manslaughter into some sort of glorious hero for Whitey. I mean, it's just, it's so infuriating to me. All right, I want to leave the topic there, but we will be interviewing former U.S. Attorney Zach Terilliger on Friday to talk about what it's like as the prosecutor in some of these cases. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important.

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I'm generally fascinated by this. I don't think that there's an American out there whose opinion anyone should respect who isn't exhausted by the Afghan conflict and who wouldn't like to see us get out of there on, you know, some terms. But what is remarkable to me, and I'll throw this to you guys in this way, is that the debate about doing this has been so stifled and so muted and I think part of the reason for that

is that there's a big chunk of the Trump right which is basically the right these days that doesn't want to have this fight because they wanted to get out too the left doesn't want to get out for even longer and no one wants to get called a dirty neocon imperialist and so the debate has been

incredibly muffled even though every expert that you see on TV, every expert who writes about this stuff credibly without a partisan ax to grind, says that odds are this is going to lead to something like Saigon all over again with Kabul falling and the Taliban resurgent and lots of bad things happening, particularly to women.

And what is one of the more, two most remarkable things about it are one is when the White House talks about how this can't be conditions-based, basically no one is willing to sort of call BS on that and say what you're really saying is this is unconditional withdrawal because that's what non-condition based withdrawal means is unconditional withdrawal and second I think it is just an abject scandal that they decided to make the deadline for this September 11th I think this is one of the dumbest public relations moves ever this is sort of classic Biden thing where like remember after 9-11 he reportedly said, you know what we should do, we should send $300 million to Iran. You know, that'll assure them that we're not mad at them or something. I mean, it was one of these crazy ideas that staffers just said, okay, Senator, and moved on. And the fact that this has gotten so little pushback, even though experts from both sides,

almost all guarantee that this is going to end badly, and no one seems to really care. And I just, it's a very strange thing. in my lifetime to see something so momentous happened with such little, so few bangs and so many wimper's. David, am I wrong about this? No. I don't think you're wrong and I especially don't think you're wrong given a lot of the recent history. So I'm kind of getting this deja vu feeling because during Obama's first term, Obama elected to pull out of Iraq, there was there were an awful lot of people who said, hey, look, if we pull all the way out of Iraq,

the following things will occur. The government will destabilize. Jihadists will rise. And we could face a return of, really, in the return of a strong and powerful jihadist presence into the heart of the Middle East. And that is exactly what happened. I mean, that's just exactly what happened.

And sure enough, just a few years later, the United States is back. It's back in Iraq. It extends its reach into Syria. American troops, thankfully without as many casualties as during the first Iraq war, were engaged in some of the most intense urban combat the world has seen in a generation in cities like Mosul and Raqa. And in hindsight, that withdrawal from Iraq was an epic mistake that cost thousands and thousands and thousands of lives. and what made it all the more tragic is we didn't have to have many troops there in Iraq to prevent this from happening.

So here we fast forward to Afghanistan. We don't have very many troops in Afghanistan right now. They are more than sufficient to keep the government in power. They are more than insufficient to keep al-Qaeda from creating safe havens. And now we're pulling up stakes again, again. And look, this is both a, this is an issue that is both vitally important for Afghans themselves, our allies, the people who've depended on us and what will happen to the women Afghanistan, what will happen to our allies, the possibility of a, of a Saigon-type fall of Kabul, that's very real. And also, we know that Afghan soil has been used before to plan a horrific attack on a, America. So it's not like we can say, well, American national security has nothing to do with

what happens in Afghanistan. And look, I get it. I get it. I totally get it. This has been a long, long, long time. But two things. One, it has been successful at stopping Al Qaeda from having safe havens and hitting us again really hard. It has been successful on its core mission of national self-defense. And number two, the obligation of national self-defense, is perpetual. It doesn't end when we're tired of defending ourselves. It doesn't end when defending ourselves takes a long time. It's a permanent obligation of the United States government is to defend the country from its enemies. And so long as the enemies seek to do us harm, we need to defend ourselves. Yeah, I mean, according to Biden's logic, since no one can explain to him what

the conditions would look like for withdrawal, we have to withdraw unconditionally. And, you know, we don't talk that way about crime. We don't talk that way about forest fires. We don't talk that way about all sorts of things because they're perpetual problems, right? I know, Sarah, you are of the school that I'll paraphrase it unfairly. Foreign policy doesn't matter.

By which you've qualified to say in politics. Yes, that's an important qualification, Jonah. But I'm also sure you had something of an asterisk when it came to things like war and terrorist attacks. So anyway, what are the politics of this? Are they, is this just all win for Biden? Is there, what's, how do you score it? So here's how I think about it, which is the reason that foreign policy, it's really tough for it to matter in politics is because it doesn't last long enough.

Pulling out of Afghanistan and then something bad happens to the folks who are left behind, It fades from our news. No one remembers it. But here's the alternative, which is the rise of ISIS, for instance, in the Middle East. And what happened with that? Who gets blamed for that is the question? And if it's far enough after the fact, sometimes not the person who might actually be to blame gets blamed for it. It's more just like who's going to solve the problem now.

And to some extent, maybe that's the healthier way that politics should work. It should be forward-facing. Well, we've got the problem now. It doesn't really matter who's to blame. I think that what you would say, Jonah, to that is, sure, but we still have to learn from what went wrong and maybe not elect people who think that that was still the right move if we now see the results of it.

I think the biggest problem on the politics of now with the Afghanistan conversation is the lack of what's the alternative. I mean, David's, what's the alternative that I just heard is you stay there until there's no longer a problem, that's not a viable alternative after 20 years. It's just not. In Korea, we've been there for 70, right? Germany, Turkey.

Japan. We have people lots of places. We don't have as many KIAs in those places. No, that's right. That's true. That's totally fair. But to be clear, that the casualty rate in Afghanistan has dropped dramatically, dramatically.

Yeah, what's the casualty rate in Korea last year, David? Same as Afghanistan. Is it really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Wait. Now, there might have been some soldiers who died of accidents in Afghanistan, but I

believe the last KIAs in Afghanistan were more than a year ago. Now, we can live fact chat that. We could live fact check it. There are people who die in, and try. training in training accidents in Korea. No, I meant actually killed. I thought there was an ambush in the last year in Afghanistan. Chris, you want to settle all this for us?

Yeah, let me just square this all up for it. Easily resolved. So you can attribute Gerald Ford's rebound in 76 and his performance in part to national. Some of it was national shame at what had happened in 1916. 75. Democrats certainly paid a price for what was seen as Bill Clinton and the Clinton administration's unserious approach to national security in the wake of the embassy bombings and the World Trade Center bombings. I certainly think you can make an argument that Donald Trump was hugely advantaged by Barack Obama's mishandling, just even in the politics and the messaging on the rise

of ISIS. We all remember the day he was on Martha's Vineyard and under pressure came to the microphones to issue a statement about the killing of the American hostage and then went and played golf. That kind of stuff sticks. And Biden doesn't believe that he is that kind of Democrat, right? He believes that he is a tough guy, right? He believes that he is a tough Democrat, not a, that he's not going to get zinged with this stuff. What it comes down to is Are there consequences? Sadly, it is probably true that if Kabul falls or maybe the people in Kabul say that they, for one, welcome their new insect overlords. However, that goes down, maybe there won't be a consequence in the United States.

But I got to tell you, this sets Biden up for real peril politically because if things get bad, if there is a terror attack, if there is something, Republicans, will immediately forget that this was Donald Trump's idea in the first place and hammer Biden for it and he'll pay a price. So let's do the fact check. Four members of the U.S. military were killed last year in Afghanistan. Army staff sergeant Ian McLaughlin died when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in southern Kandahar. He was killed alongside Army Private First Class Miguel Villalone. and Paul

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Paul Voss was killed when the bombardier he was piloting crashed and he was

killed alongside Air Force Captain Ryan Fanov again in that plane crash you know those are guys

they left behind families children that's pretty different than Japan or Korea it's been 14 months

since the last hostile fire casual casual fire casualty. Okay. And just one last, one last point on this. The whole, I get the whole idea of pivoting to, you know, Biden White House says we're going to pivot to geostrategic competition with, you know, geostrategic competitors, i.e. China and maybe one level down,

Russia. having a base in that neighborhood is not a terrible thing if that's your new strategy, you know, is to deal with the stuff on the ground, particularly since China and India are actually like fighting over border right now, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat in the mountains, just seems like, you know, it just seems like this is a, we're all tired of it. Even Colin Powell said something remarkably dumb about this. And since everybody started with it, you get a freebie to do what you want to do on this politically is how I feel about it. Well, David made the point that there haven't been any casualties since we signed the deal with the Taliban in February, late February of last year, which you guys poo poohed at the time.

So which is it, David? We shouldn't have signed the peace deal. and we should have more guys killed there? Or the peace deal was pointless? I mean, we had these four guys. You're right that they were all killed before the peace deal, but you guys were against the peace deal. It hasn't been peace.

I know, but you just use that as like why we should leave people there. There's a difference between. So the bottom line is what we have is a very small footprint that is largely not engaged in direct combat, but is still very important for, preserving the gains that we have made. And so that is, that's the reality right now. And what you're doing is you're saying, we're going to pull out that footprint and that is not engaging in direct combat to nearly the scale that we used to. And, you know, what I, the point that I was trying

to make is that we have a stabilizing effect. In 2011, when we pulled out from Iraq, I don't believe we're having combat casualties at that time either. And so, but what ends up happening is when you pull out these stabilizing forces, you destabilize. And the point that I was trying to make is, is not that there isn't risk. It's just that I think that people have a sense of what our forces are doing and how many casualties we're taking that is not, that's not up to date, that is resting on previous year's experience. And we have had a change of mission. But I don't think that there's any chance that the Taliban could take Kabul with this current footprint that we have. You yank out the footprint. They can take Kabul. I think that's the basic reality of it.

And same way, when we lifted out the footprint that we had in Iraq, they were able to take Mosul. They were able to take Fallujah. They were able to take a big chunk of that country. And Baghdad was under threat. Kurdistan was under threat. Until we, got back involved. All right. We're going to leave this topic. We're going to come back to domestic policy. Chris, talk to us about the voter index.

Oh, yes, yes. So, Cook Political Report, every... Praise be upon it. Peace be upon it, very much so, with such a fantastic crew, and it's Dave Wasserman who heads up this effort for him, for them. And after every presidential election, or after every redistricting, they reweight all of the 435 House districts in terms of the average of their previous two presidential votes compared to the nation as a whole.

So you've seen when a district is R plus 8 or a D plus 21. What that means is that it's that much more Republican or that much more Democratic than the nation as a whole. And they just came out with their new ones. And these are very interesting because this is two. Trump elections. The previous ones were not that useful to us because it was Romney and Trump. So it didn't catch all of the stuff. Jonah, you had Dan Crenshaw on the remnant recently. His district is one of the districts that move the most. It went from being an R plus 11 to an R plus

four because it had two knocks of Trump in it. That's a very affluent, educated Houston suburb. So we care about this because it helps us pick races. It helps us look at which seats are in jeopardy in which seats are safe. But what happened this time for the first time since they started doing this in 1997, and I wrote about this for Sarah today in her newsletter, which is that for the first time since 1997, the number of competitive districts that are R plus 5 to D plus 5, the number actually increased for the first time. After going down and hugely down. It went from being 36% or so, mid-30s of seats in Congress were competitive to, at its lowest point, which was in 2017, it hit the lowest point and then stayed there,

went down to 72. So we went for our 72 seats are 16%. So we reduced by more than half the number of competitive districts in the United States. First, we have to remember, this is not about redistricting or at least not substantially about redistricting. This is about the great sorting that took place in the United States over the last 20 years. He uses West Virginia's second, Wasserman used West Virginia's second congressional district as an example. This is a district that goes from the Ohio River to the D.C. suburbs hasn't been redrawn in all this time, but it's moved 20 points to the right in that time. People have sorted themselves out and we all know there are not any liberal Republicans or conservative Democrats to speak of anymore, at least not in any significant number. So, this is a result of sorting that this is how it goes. And then we have a idiotic primary system that means that you're doubly incentivized to be a bad member of Congress, right? You don't have to worry about the general election, number one. And then number two, you do have to worry about the primary election. And I think it was, was it John Kyle who when somebody asked him whether a primary challenger could get to the right of him? And he said, if they can get to the right

to me, God help them. And so that that kind of thinking came in hard. Now, look, it's only, I think, six or eight more seats that are competitive this time. And maybe it's just a Trump phenomenon. Maybe it, maybe this is a mirage that will evaporate next time around because the Republicans probably won't nominate Donald Trump again or they won't. I think it's unlikely that they will, whatever anybody says right now, I think it's unlikely that they will repeat the mistake that they made. But so they could go back and those districts like Crenshaw's could swing back to strong Republican. But I was just very encouraged for a minute to see more competitive districts because if you want to save Congress from itself, they have to have the right fears and

losing in general elections is the correct fear for members of Congress to have. If you want to know why guys like Paul Ryan were good in Congress, because they come from swing districts. And the solutions that they have have to be palatable. That's a district that Obama carried the first time. Paul Ryan's district was. So you have to have solutions and answers and rationales that can work with general election voters. So two cheers. I think there's two things that are worth underlining in that. Let's hold the gerrymandering constant, which is hard to do because while gerrymandering does not account for all of this, it certainly accounts for some of it. He said, I think he said, what did he say, 15%.

Great. So, but regardless, let's hold it totally constant, pretend there's no gerrymandering. The effects we're seeing that are not attributable to gerrymandering are basically people gerrymandering themselves, which is fascinating. I mean, when you think of the great sort in those terms and that you actually have two forces working at once, you do have gerrymandering, but you also have people moving gerrymandering themselves. themselves. No wonder. It's like a plane flying in the jet stream. It's going twice as fast or however you want to think about that. But the people didn't, this isn't about people moving into districts, right? This is about the people to use the second congressional district as the example. It wasn't about migration. It was about the people. And even their attitudes didn't

change. Their party registration changed. Yeah, fair. I mean, I still sort of think of that the same way, because generally it's not that the people themselves are changing their mind. Some are, but it's also that they're, you know, some folks are dying off. Some folks are becoming older, like they're moving into different voter brackets, if you will, the same way that most people sort of change their politics over their lifetime. The old joke, you know, if you're not a liberal Democrat when you're 18, you have no heart. And if you're not a conservative Republican, when you're 45, you have no brain or whatever it is. I find that part fascinating.

I also think that this could be a really good silver lining. It's not even a lining. It's like a whole bolded outline of the two parties reshuffling themselves. As we have that realignment and the Republican Party shifts dramatically in terms of what it stands for, and the Democrats have to sort of reach that equilibrium to maximize their vote as well, maybe we'll get some more competitive congressional districts out of it. Not the worst thing in the world. So my prediction would be that you will see a continued trend of a trickling of a few

more competitive districts if the parties continue to realign. Jonah, what do you think? So I like your Nature is Healing take on this. And I would like it to be true. I honestly, I don't know. I mean, I think both in the sweep and here, Chris was strategically wise in not... That sounds like a weasel wording. Strategically wise is weasley.

I'll stand by that. Not to overinterpret this data because you need a trend line, right? And so, like, this could be a blip or this could be the beginning of something, this beautiful silver cloud that Sarah wants to see on the horizon. And I just, I honestly don't know. I think there's just too much stuff. There are too many caveats and questions that I would have to turn it into a prediction off into the future too far.

But, you know, this raises, this is something I've been fascinated with for a really long time. And I keep meaning to like do a grown up thing and like do some deeper research on this. Because I have this problem with the way intellectual historians talk about various political demographics in America and they make it sound like there's this group of people who have a set of ideas and they're born into this world the way you're born in with like light skin or dark skin or you know that make it sound like it's like identity politics and an form of immutable identity to be a evangelical or to be a you know part of the paranoid right or

a socialist or all these kinds of things and then when you actually meet actual human beings out in the world. It turns out that a lot of them have changed their minds about all sorts of things over the course of their life and that people aren't necessarily born into these hard categories. And so one of the things that this raises for me that I think is really interesting is this, you know, this the the gerrymandering of the heart thing. Most of these districts are the same people, right? They're they haven't moved to this district in West Virginia because they decided they want to be Republican. So they left where they live, probably for the most part.

And what is interesting me is how the incentive structure and the feedback you get from media and all of these things has actually turned a lot of people who were once moderate Republicans into kind of rabid Republicans and turned lots of people

who were once moderate Democrats into, you know, seize the means of production Democrats. And that process is both more disturbing but also more human. And it would be interesting to see if this is evidence

that maybe that's changing that would be that would be really good and i think the trump effect feeds into that because there are a lot of people not a majority alasp there are a lot of republicans who were just like look yeah i agree the one on policy stuff but this aesthetically morally ethically whatever this ain't my bag and i don't want to be any part of it and that might make them weaker republicans but it also might make it that the center is the driving incentive structure for elections again which i think would lead to a healthy your polity. David.

Not much to say on this that you guys didn't say. I guess where I'm interested, and the thing that I'm interested in looking at is suburbs. The cities, it seems to me, are just growing more intensely progressive. Rural America is becoming sort of more intensely populist. And what are the suburbs doing? is are these competitive districts becoming are they coming disproportionately from suburban America that that's that's what's interesting to me that's what's interesting to me and that is

is this in along the sarah realignment thesis that seems to be consistent that you have this geographic section of America that is in a process of realignment um realigning away from Republicans, and I just don't know if that is a lingering Trump effect or if that's a real thing. You know, living in the suburbs, I've moved from sort of core Trump area to maybe one of the Trumpiest suburbs in America, but it's still temperamentally quite different from rural Trump. It's very different. You can tell that the focus is much more instability. The focus is much more on chilling out than it is on fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. And part of me wonders if, you know, one of the keys to the hearts of the suburbs over

time is going to be who's going to offer more stability, who's going to be the force that's going to be the one that is going to be least disruptive, least likely one to want to burn it all down? Because the fact of the matter is, if you're going to take a part of America where things seem to be going pretty well, it's in the suburban slice of American life. And so that, to me, is going to be very interesting to see where we move. And is this move away from the GOP permanent, semi-permanent, or is it just a knock-on Trump effect? Well, it'll just depend on what they do, right? I think what we have to remember in this whole discussion, no matter what is events, right? Dan Cranshaw's district didn't go from 27R to 4R just because the people

there had new and different feelings. Events intervened to make it impossible for them to vote for Donald Trump. Similarly, in Lucy McBath's district in the North Atlanta suburbs, different things made it possible for Democrats to win there. And the thing we have to remember is, and I think this applies to the Afghanistan conversation, it applies to all of it. it depends on how it goes, right? If Joe Biden keeps rolling with a 60% job approval rating and he won't, but if he did and things were going gangbusters in the country and everybody felt good, yeah, the shift would be permanent. On the other hand, I just read today, Biden is pledging to cut U.S. emissions by 50% by 2030. That's a great way to lose suburban. That's a fantastic

way to lose suburban seats. Ask Barack Obama, ask Nancy Pelosi how cap and trade did for them in 2010. So this will depend on how people do, but it'll also depend on whether or not Republicans can stop getting high on their own supply for five minutes. Well, you know, one of the things that I wonder about, and both Chris and Sarah, all three of you, how much are, is conservative media creating an environment of doom, panic, and gloom that is walling off culturally? a lot of, you know, people on the right from sort of the, not just the left, but those who are not sort of deeply engaged in politics. It's striking to me how much, even though the pandemic is easing, even though the economy is roaring back, it is striking to me how much the America in crisis narrative is just got a vice grip on a big part of the right right now. And it seems to me, as a political amateur, that could be deeply alien.

from a lot of the rest of the country. Works on the left, too. But part of the reason that Democrats had a disappointing year in the House in 2020 was because of an echo chamber, mostly in mainstream press, where defund the police and all of that flummery was presented as a mainstream opinion when even among Democrats, you know, I wrote about a similar thing with immigration last one, 40% of Texas Democrats want a U.S.-Mexico border wall. So it's like, you know, we got, we have to, the, the, the, the, the, the both sides get high on their own supply.

They just have different dealers. So, Chris, I think I have an interesting question for us to perhaps deal with in the sweep, which is back when you and I kind of started in this biz, uh, donors were at sort of the, um, you know, if you want to think of it like a spectrum, donors were sort of the closest into the center of the spectrum. And so if you wanted big donor money, you know, people who maxed out on those federal dollars, you were saying things in the center.

And then when you talked at a town hall, you were moving to your base, one direction or the other, both parties. But, and I did put this in the sweep, when you're looking at the FEC numbers for Q1 this time and who's got cash on hand, I mean, the world has changed so much in digital online fundraising

you no longer even want really those maxed-out checks because then you've got to sit around at a dinner that's three hours of your candidate's time, sometimes more, when in fact your candidate doesn't have to spend any time raising money if you just do it online. The Q1 top fundraisers were Ted Cruz, 3.6 million, Josh Hawley, 3 million.

Rand Paul 1.9, Marco Rubio, 1.6. Cash on hand, mostly follows that as well. So what's interesting is we're talking about the districts potentially getting more competitive, but at the same time, the donors are going to be pushing these candidates more to the edges, whereas that used to be something that would push them closer to the center. Well, first, don't lump yourself in with me. I have been doing this since approximately since the earth cooled. I am old.

When I started, they were still doing it by Pony Express. The big change, yes, the rage-fueled limbic $5 donation, which is the digitization of the Newt Gingrich. If you don't buy generic cat food so you can send me $15 by mail, I can't stop the slaughter of the unborn. And you're like, but you won't do that no matter how much money, Nellie, of Telequa, Oklahoma. you. So that, of course, that it creates an incentive for the kind of conduct that you see from Hawley, that creates a kind of incentive for Cruz and others. But don't leave out the big piece here, which is because of the double whammy of Citizens United coming on the heels of the awful, awful, awful McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act, the terrible gutting of America's

parties. As a consequence of this, unaccountable super PACs make the difference, right? So these politicians don't have to go suck up to big donors anymore because big donors wait for the end and then American Crossroads or whomever will hover over like the spaceships in V and drop a quadrillion dollars on the preferred target. Yep. All right. We got to cover that in a sweep. Final topic. David, coming to you. Are we already rewriting the history

of January 6th? Yeah, this is something that I have been following for a while. And it has really sort of come to the fore in my mind after the news came that Officer Brian Sinknick, the

medical examiner's report revealed that he did not die as a result of injury sustained. while on duty. For a while, there was an idea that he had been hit in the head with a fire extinguisher that turned out to be a different police officer than possibly that he had died as a result of being bear sprayed. Two people have been charged for spraying him with bear spray or tear gas type chemical

irritant. That allegedly is not the cause of his death. He apparently died of natural causes shortly after the riot, very soon after the riot. Now, this contradicts early reporting from the police itself that there was a January 7th press release from United States Capitol Police that says that Brian D. Sicknick passed away due to injuries sustained while on duty. This has been turned into a media scandal by a lot of people on the right and has been turned into a way to sort of engage in a revision, revisioning. history about January 6 itself. So, for example, this is kind of a typical tweet, comes from Sourabamari from the New York to post. With Siknik confirmed to have died of natural causes, the blue checks attempt to reframe the event as a sort of domestic 9-11, including by calling it

1-6 unravels. It was a dumb, impotent riot, and that's that. This is something that I have been seeing quite a bit on the right, which is essentially, that was just kind of a I mean, a bunch of rubes and, you know, a bunch of people, a bunch of thugs who just kind of an impotent gesture, not nearly as big a deal, you know, and that a lot of people need to walk back, a lot of their drama about one six. And I'm just not having it, y'all, just not having it. We watched it with our own eyes. They stormed the Capitol building violently.

we saw in real time police officers being beaten subsequent video footage showed horrible things occurring to cops and to police officers, including people being crushed, people being beaten with flagpoles, being hit with fire extinguishers, being sprayed with tear gas, in an effort to storm the U.S. Capitol to stop a constitutional process in its tracks to try to reinstall Donald Trump as president. That's a historic, a terrible, historic event in the history of the United States of America. And yes, if some people ran with that Capitol Hill statement and went too far with that initial Capitol Police statement, sure, report what, you know, report this update.

Absolutely report this update. If people went too far, issue corrections. Absolutely. But this is not a reason to revise our understanding of the core of what happened on January 6th. Jonah, your thoughts. So, I, on the big picture, agree with you entirely. I think like, and the problem is you can get really misled by a lot of the Twitter stuff on this where, you know, I mean, the number of people saying that this was, this just shows, you know, like the green, well, Glenn Greenwald, who's basically a human Twitter account, you know, he's saying on Tucker, that this proves the complicit. of like, you know, the media will lie and misinform and use disinformation and yada,

yada, yada. And this just shows that this whole narrative was contrived. And the problem with that is if the media and the deep state were capable of going this far with the Sicknick was murdered story, they would have taken care of the Gisi Medical Examiners report to make sure that it fit the narrative. Right. I mean, there's this, there's a, there's a, the conspiracy The conspiracy mongering of the people claiming that this was a conspiracy is pretty bad. And it seems to me a far more obvious explanation is that this is essentially the equivalent of fog of war. Stuff got reported, got carried, got taken as true, and blah, blah, blah. The only place where I will push back is I do think it is kind of a media fiasco from the media that claims to say, you know, the old Chicago rule of, you know, if your mom says she loves you, check it out, that no one just sort of asked some simple questions to find this out sooner.

that's bad. And the sort of momentum to sort of carry this this far is bad. But there's also this other strange thing, which is related to the, and look, I agree with you. Like, the sickness story could never have happened. What happened on January 6th was terrible and fundamentally evil. And you can talk all you want about how the mall protests were peaceful. And then, but you can't leave out the fact that a big chunk of the mall protest, the peaceful protest, then splintered off and stormed the Capitol and beat cops up and, you know, cost a cop an eye. And I mean, the guys who lost fingers and eyes, is that just part of the misinformation campaign? But NBC has this really interesting new report out that says that in all of the criminal cases that the FBI, the DOJ is pursuing against people, against the people who stormed the Capitol,

they're not using any evidence that this was planned or premeditated in any way. and NBC kind of runs through how this was in fact, you know, there was an enormous amount of stuff. Maps, you know, you know, strategy memos that would go out, you know, with the caveat that this was a hypothetical question of how to storm the Capitol in January 6th. Lots of like pre-event, you know, pre-January 6th stuff about, we're going to give the politicians a choice, you know, confirm Donald Trump president or, you know, you know, go to the gulag or the gallows or whatever. And it's interesting to me that, and I don't want to get conspiratorial myself, but I just think it's very interesting to me that none of that evidence has been brought in in the criminal prosecutions,

at least according to NBC. They may be wrong about that. But, you know, they're touting this as a pretty big story. And it does feel like the need for a 9-11 type commission to just get the historical, right on this is really, really, really important. And I have zero faith in Nancy Pelosi or in Republicans or basically anybody who could get appointed to it to do it in good faith. And so I'm kind of

in this position of I want to have a fact finding, but I don't trust any of the fact finders. Got to be Chris next. Sarah. No. Oh, do you want to do Chris next? Okay. Chris, I want to ask you, so here you have a report from the Capitol Police. And I'm looking at it. January 7th press release. Officer Brian Sicknick passed away due to injury sustained while on duty. Two questions for you. One, you know, I want to hear your thoughts on the meta issue that Jonah talked about about sort of the magnitude of January 6th and a fact-finding commission, but also what's your, what is a reporter's responsibility when they receive a report like this from a government agency that appears to be definitive, passed away due to injury,

but is not supported by underlying evidence. What's your view of a reporter's responsibilities in that circumstance? If the cops tell you or somebody says that this is how this person died, unless there was reason to doubt it, unless it was not the case, you would go with it. The person is dead. The people in power. Now you attribute, you say, police say, you don't say, I say, you say, police say that you died as result of this. I have to admit, I find the idea of truth squatting. Well, John Steinbeck's best book

is the winner of our discontent. And in it, it tells the parable about the Cambellites, who were the forerunners of the Church of Christ, who had foretold the end of the world. And so they sold off all of their things and went out in. to the meadow to wait for the rapture and then ain't no rapture came. And they had to go back to town and sheepishly ask for their bedsteads back and their oxen back so that they could go on with life. I think for a lot of Republicans, that's what January 6th and stop the steel and all of this stuff was. It's good that they feel ashamed. I understand they don't want to talk about how ashamed they are and that they're eager to talk about something else. I'm certainly willing to

let them talk about something else, that's fine. They want to go talk about something else. We all know what it was, right? The president told pernicious lies, his supporters told pernicious lies, and for six weeks, well, for months before the election, and created the circumstances under which this horrible thing happened. And as long as everybody knows that's what it is, then I don't really care. The people in the world who are going to go through, like you mentioned, what's his name from The New York Post, or Glenn Greenwell, or whomever, you know, people are going to click and they're going to go on Twitter and say things to try to excite other people and take positions that they will draw clickbait from and all that stuff. And I could care less. That's just the dumbest kind of who has the time to do it. So I don't care about that part, but I agree with you that there is a serious threat from that wing, from the nationalist wing of the Republican Party to aggressively minimize this.

Ignoring it, I'm okay with. Minimizing it, I'm not. Right. Sarah. I found it very frustrating because it provides so much fuel to both sides in this fight. One says, see, you can't trust

official sources, and the other one says, look, they were pretty close to right. And both have a point, you know, he died from multiple strokes after what had to be probably the most stressful day of his career to that point. To say that that wasn't related

that somehow he just died of natural causes, okay, kind of. Like, let's not miss what probably triggered the stroke here. But at the same time, the statement that was put out immediately after and the narrative that everyone agreed to isn't quite right. And I just find it very frustrating.

This is going to continue to happen. And unlike these other times where you can blame Twitter, you can blame reporters who are rushing to get the story right. You can blame all sorts of sort of these external factors that are just part of our world in 2021. And we long for the good old days of whenever Chris was born in the 18th century. That wouldn't have fixed this, actually.

That's not what caused this. And so there's no solution, there's no hope, and I'm just frustrated. You know, there's part of this, there is a degree here of, in fog of war situations, there is a degree of grace that is necessary. When you're talking about, I do think it is entirely appropriate, as Chris said, if a government agency has said, this is what occurred, it's entirely appropriate to say and to report the government agency has said this is what occurred. That's not a media scandal.

Yeah, but at the same time. We kind of knew something wasn't quite right. But I'm not done yet. I'm not done yet. No, I know. And we followed, you know, we followed this story at the dispatch. You also have an obligation that if what the government agency says appears not to be quite right to dig into it. But the initial reporting of this is what they say in attributing to him, that is appropriate.

for a media outlet. The same time, you want to stay on it as soon as something doesn't smell quite right. And then another thing is I've been in a position of generating reports of events in combat within minutes to hours after combat has ceased. And it is hard. It is hard to do.

It really is. And sometimes it takes a wild, to sort things out. So what ends up happening is that we're, to go to your sort of weariness and cynicism, Sarah, we, number one, yes, there are people who don't do their job particularly well. Number two, sometimes these jobs are really hard to do and to get everything right on a prompt basis. And we have no grace for any sort of error that comes from an opposing side. We're always going to ascribe a maximum amount of malice to it and be a maximum amount of forgiving to people on our own side. And it strikes me that we have a combination of some incompetence here

and then just some fog of war, just some fog of war that happens. David, I would agree if it were February 20th today. I have a hard time agreeing. It's April 20th. It did not take this long to do an autopsy. It did not take this long to at least know that something with the official story wasn't right from the official side. And for them to come out and say something, I mean, I don't understand. Nobody's saying he died after mowing his lawn, right? Nobody's saying that this was, that this was totally unrelated to it. This is a, the coroner's finding is about, did a person, can we charge someone with murder as a consequence of this, right? and he might have died after shoveling snow

or he might have died under other things because he had underlying conditions. But this is, he died because of that day. That doesn't mean somebody can be charged for the murder, but he died because of that day, right? I totally agree with that. That's what I find so frustrating is that we should have known on February 6th or whatever

that he died of a stroke. What caused that stroke we're still looking into and we're going to wait for the coroner's report. That's not what we were told. That's not what was out in the public. Instead, they just kept all of that to themselves, and it's April 20th. And that's what breeds distrust,

and it's a little hard to blame people for feeling distrustful when it's now April 20th. The guys all have their thin lips on, you know, or they're like, hmm, we're not weighing into this. No, no, look, I agree entirely. I find the whole thing, it just, I'm with you.

I find the whole thing really depressing because, like, look, murdering a cop we can all stipulate it is a terrible thing, right? The fact, it's sort of like with the Chauvin trial, you know, part of the question is whether or not there was a foreseeable, whether deaths and dismemberment and violence were foreseeable, whether grave, deadly force were foreseeable, whether harm and injury and death were foreseeable. that was, if Sicknick was alive today,

January 6 would still be just as evil in an event, you know? I mean, it would be just as terrible an event. The people responsible for it would deserve the exact same, or maybe some lab can get down to parts per billion, you know, and we can remove a little bit of the shame that they should feel fine. But they should all feel the same shame for it. It should still be a black mark in American history. and this idea that because he died of natural quality

and look Sorob is the guy who published this piece by that Matt Schmertz guy at the Washington New York Post which made a huge deal about how yes it was terrible that Sicknick was murdered by the crowd this is what we thought at the time but people should know he was a Trump supporter and they were trying he was he was trying to invest incredible meaning in that all of this

it's the same ghoulishness you get after mass shootings where there's this weird, gross, quiet, quiet before the storm, where you're waiting to find out whether the guy who killed somebody, and there's almost always a guy, whether the guy who killed a bunch of people was on Team Red or Team Blue. And then the second it turns out, it was like a pro-lifer who was doing it for the unborn, then one side picks up one set of arguments, the other side said, see, this is why you're all murderous bastards.

And then if it turns out, no, no, no, we're an environmental freak or in his Islamist fundamentalist, this stuff shouldn't matter at this level. It is, you know, the people responsible deserve the blame. Stop being so ghoulish about it and stop trying to make it sound like the January 6th thing wasn't so bad just so you can let, I'm sorry to say it, Cheeto Jesus off the hook for setting up that thing in the first place. And if I can just, if I can augment that to say, if you work at a newspaper or you work for a news outlet, why don't you go find out, right? Instead of complaining about the other people who are not

doing their jobs up to your satisfaction, go figure it out, bro. But there's a lot of deeply insincere complaining about the mainstream media where it's like, well, Sorabamari or Glenn Greenwald, I don't think this is what broke their trust in the mainstream media. I don't think that before this, they were like, I believe everything that I hear on the CBS evening news. This has torn it for me. I am over. So it's just, it's so dumb and so pointless. All right. We're going to end on a fast, fast reaction question.

Dogwoods or cherry blossoms? Jonah, I'm starting with you. Cherry blossoms. It is known. Chris. Redbud. Ooh. Pretty good answer there.

Well, it is 420. No. Red Bud is where it's at. David. Heck if I know, I can't even picture what either one of them looks like. Can we explain the listeners what Red Bud is? I feel like that goes back to our conversation on masculinity that that's David's like masculine flux. Like, I don't know what trees are.

Red, red buds. I don't know nothing about no trees. That's right. Flowers. No way. flowers? All right. I'm Googling dogwood blooming. The red bud Jonah, you see in creeks and hollers where it's a spindly tree, but it's one of

the first to bloom, and it has a ripping, vibrant red color, and it is not as beautiful as the dogwood on net score, but it arrives early, and it is a garish announcement of spring. It is really beautiful, and it fills your heart with happy. And it's wonderful to cook meth under. Yes, of course, obviously. They look the same. Red Devil lie. Oh, David.

Oh, David. I also would have accepted the answer of Jane Magnolias, which bloom even before the red buds, and also are like this synthetic magnolia that someone created and named a whole bunch of the different varietals after little girl names, which isn't creepy at all. Thank you so much for listening and for. joining us. We will see you again next week with the dudes. And I'm sure we will have plenty

to talk about that. If you can rate us, it helps people find our podcast. It helps advertisers know about our podcast. And we would be oh so grateful for your support. And of course, you can always become a member of the dispatch and hop into the comment section where Jonah answers every single comment. But you just can't see it when he answers them. It's like a silent response. I yell them into the mirror every morning. Thanks, y'all. Talk soon. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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