The Dispatch Podcast - A President's Final Days

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

“The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” said Rep. Liz Cheney late Tuesday afternoon. “Everything that followed was his doing.” This week, our hosts discuss the brewing showdown over impeachment between Cheney—the House’s No.3 Republican—and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. How does one party accommodate vastly different levels of acquiescence to a rogue president? What is the value of impeachment and conviction over censure? Should the president be pardoned after conviction in a concession to Republicans? To David, one thing is clear: “He needs to be so thoroughly defeated in the here and now that there is no possibility of a later,” he says. “He has to be deplatformed, he has to be defeated, and he has to be discredited.” Show Notes: -Take our podcast survey -Amazon filing in response to Parler’s lawsuit, citing violent content -Rep. Liz Cheney’s statement in support of impeachment -Video from Capitol Hill riot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to another dispatch podcast. I am joined, as always, by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, David French, and that makes me, Sarah Isgher. We're going to continue our conversation from last week, the events around January 6th, but also what has happened since then, what we've learned, what the House and Senate plan to do about it, the censure of the president, the impeachment of the president, the removal of the president. And then, of course, we'll talk about what social media companies have also done in the week since January 6th. Let's dive right in. I think the biggest. I think the biggest story today, at least, is the break within the Republican caucus. You have Liz Cheney coming out to say she will be voting for impeachment. She is the number three Republican in the House of Representatives. We'll call that the Trumpless caucus. And then you have McCarthy. Kevin McCarthy is the number one Republican in the House of Representatives saying he will not vote for impeachment, coming up pretty strongly against it, though unwilling to whip the vote, as in convince members not to vote for impeachment. And he, Axios used this term, and so I'm going to borrow it, the fade away caucus where they just think Trump will go away.

that a unnamed Republican put it very well when they said Republicans have been waiting for Trump to, quote, fade away and do himself in since he came down that escalator in 2016. They will be waiting a very long time if that keeps happening. Steve, I know you have been mulling this around in your mind grapes of late. I have been, and I've even been doing some reporting, which is it's fun to get back in in the reporting game. Yeah, I mean, look, I think if you want to pull back the picture or pull back the camera a little bit and try to see kind of the bigger picture focusing here on the intro Republican Party dynamics. I think for what it's worth, I think it's very clear that the president

has ought to be impeached and ought to be removed. I think it should be expedited if possible. So I'm coming to it from that point of view. I thought Liz Cheney's statement yesterday was very strong. She ended it by saying there has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution. Basically, the most stinging indictment you can possibly imagine, and as Jonathan Martin of the New York Times pointed out, something that puts her colleagues on the spot to a certain extent because it keeps them from being able to avert their eyes. That is a strong and direct accusation and something that I think many of them will have to address, if they, particularly the people who vote not to impeach. She put out a

statement yesterday and I think it changed the dynamic in the intra-Republican party debate to some extent. Kevin McCarthy had basically been leading from behind to steal a phrase from the Obama era on all of this stuff. He came out in November 5th, declared echoing the president that the election had been stolen and has been basically making that case ever since. He quietly, after refusing on a call with House Republican members on January 1st, quietly organized with the Republicans who were going to object to seating the electors. and even gave advice to other Republicans that this would be an easy vote.

And then voted even after the insurrection at the Capitol last Wednesday, voted in favor of objecting to Pennsylvania's votes. So it is no surprise at all that Kevin McCarthy is no for impeachment. I find it ironic that his arguments in the last 48 hours have, emphasized unity in the country and the need to avoid being divisive. This from somebody who

knowingly, we should point out, knowingly misled the country for two months about who won the election. McCarthy had in conversations with Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report and NBC News said that he knew Donald Trump lost. There wasn't really a question in his mind whether Donald Trump won or lost, and he made the arguments anyway about it. About it. as bad an example of leadership as you can imagine. I think the Cheney statement at least gives pause to Republicans who are going to, for procedural reasons or others, vote no on impeachment. I'm not sure at the end of the day that it swings a lot of people or brings a ton of people

over. The open question is Mitch McConnell. And what does Mitch McConnell do? There are reports today that he's open to voting to convict. The question is whether he brings the Senate back. early indications are that he will not. But there's a lot we don't know. Steve, quick follow-up on the politics of this,

because Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney are in very different places in their career. I have seen some people say that this is a political move by Liz Cheney to up her chances of being speaker the next time around. On the flip side, I've seen it that Mitch McConnell would vote for impeachment because this is his final legacy in the U.S. Senate.

And so he wants to be an institutionalist who help preserve, you know, the Senate. Yeah, I mean, look, especially if you're thinking about the last several years, it's probably wise to make a bet on cynicism. So I understand why people would come to those conclusions and immediately assume political motives are behind this. In the case of Liz Cheney,

I think on its face, the claim is absurd. Wyoming voted 69 to 26 in favor of Donald Trump. It's a very strongly Trumpy state. The current chairman of the Wyoming Republican Party said that Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, even after the insurrection at the Capitol. As I said, she voted opposite of 138 of her colleagues who voted to object to Pennsylvania. electors. So it would be a strange way to climb to the top of power in a House Republican conference that disagrees with what she's doing. So it doesn't make much, much sense.

Jonah, you and Steve got into what others, I think, wanted to build up into a full-on Twitter spat. In the conversation of censure versus impeachment, explain. how you feel about the censure movement? Yes. So first of all, I think people thought it was going to turn into a spat because he began by condescendingly referring to me as older and wiser, and I responded calling him I meant it. I meant it.

So I think Steve and I are, I mean, this shouldn't come as a shock to many listeners, but given how we put out an editorial. the only editorial we've basically ever run calling for impeachment that Steve and I are actually on the same page about how impeachment is the better option and I actually said so in my initial tweet which I think Steve, you know,

just because his reading comprehension skills are not what we would want them to be, missed that point in it. But I think that the, my point was that and this is a point I was making in my little set to with Hugh Hewitt yesterday is that I would credit people who said they were against impeachment for these prudential

reasons or these constitutional claims. And even though I disagree with those arguments, but I think people can sincerely hold them. They are not on their face unreasonable some of these things. Plus, there are certain questions about, you know, concerns about what if Trump is acquitted again and claims vindication. I think that's a real concern. I have answers to it. My point is, if your argument is that impeachment is the bad idea because there's just not enough time or for these other technical considerations, it would be perfectly reasonable to say, and therefore we are pushing for censure of this guy, right? If the argument is that impeachment isn't wrong because if you're not saying that Trump doesn't deserve to be impeached, then you're conceding that Trump did something wrong. Then say so. Be forthright about it. This is my huge complaint. You have the entire sort of snowflake whiner caucus of Republicans out there saying

how unfair it is to be tarred with the acts of a few bad apples. This has become a new major victimization narrative on the right. And I have nothing but sympathy for people who feel unfairly associated with the actions of a few bad apples. You know how you clarify? that you're not part of them by condemning them. And if the GOP were sincere about this, that's what they would do. I think it would be a smart political move. We saw this happen with the Bill Clinton impeachment.

It was seen that the hope for censure was a way to siphon off enthusiasm for the more draconian impeachment move. And my point was not that I prefer censure, but that if the Republicans were serious about actually condemning this, they would take efforts to condemn it and say, okay, we've done enough.

we don't need to impeach, but they really weren't doing that, at least when Steve and I got into it. But Steve, I took your point to be actually a little bit more antagonistic to Jonah than Jonah's reading into it, which is that you feel- Well, you have those hopes. Sarah, you're inciting. This is inciting. You're meeting the Brandenburg standard right here. Show strength, Steve. It's inciting. It may not be exciting, but it's inciting. You have to fight. Steve, I took your side of the argument to be that you actually are, against any movement towards censure because you think it would undermine the sort of black and white

choice that faces Republicans on impeachment, that it gives like sort of the weasel word out for those who are like, well, I don't want to be politically brave. So you are actually against censure, not that you think it's less good than impeachment. Yeah, I am against censure. And I think the problem, it's really more a matter of sequencing. The problem is if you give people the censure option early, it gives them safe harbor from having to do the more difficult and I think the correct thing, which is to vote to impeach. If, as somebody I know and admire, for whom my admiration knows, no ends wrote in a column recently that might be up on our website today, if you can't impeach the president for this, what is impeachment for? So I don't think they should have an alternative.

censure strike, it would be a meaningless vote that allows them to sort of half oppose the president condemn what he's done without having to think about the consequences of their vote. And if there's any education, go ahead. I just want to be clear about one thing. I wasn't saying that we're getting is an ought confused here. I was making an analytical point. I was just simply saying if the Republicans were sincere about all of this, they would make those kinds of efforts to say.

that, and that would be a reasonable thing to do. I wasn't, I wasn't advocated. You guys want to be political consultants. I don't want to be a political consultant. I was trying to help you make the distinction between descriptive and normative and just clarify that for people who might have been confused. But if there's, if there's, if we needed any indication that this is, that this would be a weasily option.

And to be clear, I think Jonah is right about the sequencing. If you do impeachment first and it fails, you could do censure just to get them on the record. But to put impeachment first, I think would be a huge mistake. And we know that it is, I think Sarah used the word weasily to describe it. We know that it is weasily. An insult to weasels, by the way. An insult to weasels. If after in the moments after Liz Cheney put out her statement saying that she was going to vote to impeach,

an aide to Kevin McCarthy told a reporter for Fox News, who then tweeted, Kevin McCarthy is seriously considering bringing up a censure resolution, which is basically an announcement of the fact that he wants to do something totally toothless and create that safe harbor. In criminal law, in a lot of jurisdictions, you are not allowed to include lesser included offenses for this exact reason, because juries will just split the baby and decide that basically reasonable doubt

loses some meaning if it's like, well, we don't want to convict him of murder, but we're also not totally sure he's innocent, so we'll just go with manslaughter. That has now become pretty disfavored in a lot of jurisdictions. This seems like a impeachment version of that.

Yeah, I mean, here's my view. My view is you drive towards impeachment. you do not include any sort of option for a lesser included offense. If impeachment fails, you're still going to be doing a thorough investigation of this event. And when I say impeachment fails,

I don't think impeachment will fail. He'll be impeached today in all likelihood. I mean, conviction fails. Now, what we also have to realize is we're going to be learning a heck of a lot more about these events in the coming days and weeks and months.

So my view is you drive for impeachment, you have a trial as we're learning more about this, and then if conviction fails, then, and there's evidence, the evidence is emerges of the full magnitude of the wrongdoing here, I think there's another measure you take short of censure. I mean, that's greater than censure, and that is you pass a law under the 14th Amendment, Section 3, that bars Trump from future office. that's the next fallback in my mind if impeachment and conviction fails. I think censure is sort of like

if someone is held up a bank and then they plead down to disturbing the peace. Yeah, like trespassing or something. Or trespassing. But yeah, I think that there's a long way to go before you even consider censure, given the magnitude of what we're dealing with. David, following up, how does the Republican Party continue as a single party with, I've said

this before, with Mitt Romney and Josh Hawley with now Liz Cheney and Kevin McCarthy? Are we weeks away from having two different parties? Is this somehow going to mend itself in a way that I don't see? Yeah, you raise a really good question. I mean, it's not, you know, it's not just the leadership it's it's down to the the freshman incoming freshman members i mean you've you've you've got you know um marjorie taylor green and you've got uh the the new representative is at nancy mace um that they have already um gotten into a pretty furious fight um i'm gonna i'm gonna say can i can i just be super on brand dispatch for a moment and say um i'm I'm going to have to press pause on that analysis for this reason.

I think a lot more is going to come out. There's a lot we're going to learn. And this isn't over. That's another thing to keep in mind. I hope it's over, but the odds are that it's not over because we're seeing a lot of open chatter about everything from threats to murder journalists and members of Congress to armed protests at every state capital in the U.S. And there's a chance that when all this shakes out, what you're going to end up with are some people who are going to very conveniently be able to say, well, if I knew that after this is all over, if I'd known that, kind of in the way that sort of like the diehard Nixon supporter after, you know, a few years after 1974 was kind of hard to find.

And I think that's one of the ways that political parties sort of paper over and Band-Aid over their differences is it's sort of, well, I mean, I didn't have all the facts. And so I think that that's a possibility, although it's far from a certainty. Speaking of which, I wrote a short piece really frankly just for my own, like, feelings on Friday night. But then we published it in the dispatch, very thankful to Steve for that, even though Steve disagreed with it. So I want to explain it. Although I would say that similar to Jonah, it was more of a analytical and less of an ought. But nevertheless, I do now want your ought feelings. And that is that Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell could sort of strike a deal, votes for pardon, basically, that you could ensure conviction in the Senate.

and give those 15 or so Republicans you need left, maybe it's less now, maybe it's more like 10 Republican senators that you need to convince to come over now to get to the magic 66 number, that it would help provide them cover to say that they're getting something for the deal. And what they could get is a pardon for Donald Trump.

And Steve, you feel, I think, pretty strongly that Donald Trump shouldn't be pardoned. I just think there's a good reason for the country that we don't want to spend the next several years investigating, prosecuting, et cetera, Donald Trump. On the other hand, I very much understand, as David mentioned 1974, that this is very different than 1974, where Nixon took responsibility, resigned, and said he was putting the country first, and then Gerald Ford pardoned him. So with all of that, I am curious for your thoughts. Yeah, there's been zero contrition from President Trump, none, zero.

He, during the assault on the Capitol, he was calling senators and representatives and trying to get them to block the peaceful transfer of power. Rudy Giuliani, the president's lawyer, obviously working in coordination with the president at 7 p.m. as Congress was set to reconvene to continue the process, was calling senators trying to get them to block the process. And in a statement that the president made yesterday at the White House, he continued to claim that this was, that he was the victim in all of this. So he's shown no contrition. He does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. He certainly doesn't deserve to be pardoned. And I think there are likely to be real and serious legal questions about the things that he's done. I think you made the very best case for a bad argument. the you know your piece was very smart and judicious and i think wise but i don't think it will have the intended effect i don't think uh that kind of a deal from joe biden would

bring temperatures down because it would seem outrageous to so many people who voted for joe Biden and plenty of Republicans who oppose what the president has done as well. So I don't think it would ultimately solve the problem. And finally, I don't want to make it easier for Republicans to do the right thing. I want to make it harder. They should be on record on this because it really matters. Harder to do the wrong thing, you mean? Yes. I want to put Republicans on the spot. I want them on the record if they won't support impeachment and removal. I think we should all know that. And I don't want to give them safe harbor.

Jenna, what about the argument that impeaching Donald Trump, removing Donald Trump, or even just preventing him from running for office again in 2024 is the wrong way to do this? That what needs to happen is that voters need to reject Donald Trump. That's the only way you kill Trumpism that otherwise you're. martyring him. I saw someone say you're making him Jesus Christ, that this is an undemocratic way to do it. Why isn't that the better option? First of all, I do not want to start eating out of David French's food bowl, but if you think you're turning him into Jesus Christ, you really, you really need to hit the books a little bit harder um uh so um look i think there's i had i did the whole

remnant podcast this the first one this week uh with keith whittington who's a professor of law at princeton and his expertise is on impeachment stuff he wrote his dissertation on it and um and then i had a conversation with yasha monk which is coming out later where we talked about this and It seems to be the only arguments against impeachment are purely prudential arguments. Like, there is no, I personally, I'll let you lawyer types duke it out, but I personally think the constitutional arguments against it are kind of dumb. But the principled arguments against it, I think, are just non-starters. So it's a question. what does it look like if the if trump is acquitted and he claims vindication right is that a good

thing or a bad thing for the country is that worse um and i don't know the answer to that my suspicion is like as and as you guys were talking about on the advisory opinions podcast the the senators who voted against the belknap uh impeachment or conviction um a big chunk of I just want to save you a lot of emails. Yeah, you're going to get about 100 emails now. Bell nap. The K is silent, it turns out. Yeah, yeah.

We got more angry email over the mispronunciation of Bell nap than almost anything else in advisory opinion's history. Interesting. Okay. So, can we get into a fight of whether it's gerrymandering or gerrymandering or gerrymandering? But so the senators, you know, they took a weasily way out and they said, said, hey, look, we actually can't impeach somebody after they've left office. And as fascinating me, this is not something I knew. According to Keith Whittington, a bunch of state constitutions, including Virginia's from the founding era, only allowed impeachments after you left office.

You couldn't impeach while in office, which suggests to me that in the founding era, the original understanding of impeachment included the ability to do it after you left office. regardless, I think that the, I've lost my train of thought here now because of this whole bell-natt scandal. I apologize. But look, I think those are prudential questions, but we can't possibly know the answer to it. And so my view is, if you're faced with a choice of doing what is transparently the right thing, or transparently, which could go wrong, or transparently the wrong thing, which weirdly could

go right in some unproven, unprovable way, opt for trying to do the right thing. And that would be impeaching the guy and removing him and barring him for public office. And if it turns out, that's the point I want to make. My hunch is that a bunch of senators will actually vote to acquit, but their public statements will be, much like in the Belknap thing, that we shouldn't be doing this because he's already left office. Obviously, he's guilty. It'll be a variation of the Lamar Alexander thing. And that's a verdict of history, too. And that's a better verdict than not impeaching him at all. David, do you have thoughts on the sort of democratic aspect that it would be better for the country if voters rejected Donald Trump in the primaries or in the general for 2024 than preventing him from facing voters again?

I think he's one of the most destructive individuals in the entire United States of America. I think that he has become the spiritual and in some ways the operational leader of an actual violent insurrection. and I think he needs to be so thoroughly defeated in the here and now that there is no possibility of a later for him. I think that what we have right now is, and what we have to do, let me back up a little bit. I wrote about this at length, and I'd encourage you guys to go to the dispatch.com and check it out.

We cannot look at what happened on January 6th, there's some sort of one-off accidental, spontaneous riot that nobody could have really foreseen and nobody really intended and this is just the emotions that people got the better of them. What you've seen instead is a propaganda-fueled, violent, insurrectionary attack that is not the only insurrectionary act. So we have had not just the relentless lies from the President of the United States. We have had relentless efforts to physically intimidate public officials, Democratic and Republican, who have followed the law and attempted to certify this election.

And then you have potentially planned events in the future. What do we know about how to deal with insurrections? One of the things we know is to get rid of the leader of the insurrection. That's one of the reasons why I, even though I'm fully aware of the problems with the slippery slope problems with social media bands, and I have been against them, this is a situation where he needed his lines of communication to this mass of followers needed to be cut off. That is a elementary element. I mean, this is a basic element of this.

In addition, his narrative of victory has to be completely discredited in the short term, not three years from now, not four years from now. His narrative of being heroic victor against overwhelming odds has to be completely discredited. So he has to be de-platformed, he has to be defeated, and he has to be discredited.

And the other thing you cannot do under any circumstances is allow the mob to dictate whether or not you do the right thing. I mean, this is something that we're seeing on Fox and elsewhere. If you think it's bad now,

imagine if you impeach him. No, we don't apply that. We don't apply that in our actions against insurrectionary movements overseas. We don't do that at all. We rightly say, no, you don't give into the threats of violence. You don't give in. The threats of violence, in fact, they motivate you

to apply the law more. So I think, I think what you do here is you defeat Trump immediately and decisively, and then also his primary propaganda enablers. The force of law should be deployed against them vigorously. So we know, for example, on the actual rioters, the DOJ is looking at these, is looking at you know charges of sedition and conspiracy these are major charges and that's all appropriate but also civil law i welcome the dominion the dominion filing a 1.3 billion dollar lawsuit against sydney powell i encourage them to keep filing these cases um i'm a free speech attorney but defamation law is in is been a part of american law since the founding of the republic and it was never intended, defamation was never intended to be part of the freedom of speech

encompassed by the First Amendment. So hit them hard. There has to be a separation of the propaganda arm of the insurrection and the actual insurrectionaries from everyone else to give everyone else an opportunity to breathe and come to their senses. David, can I challenge your premise on that. I can imagine, I can imagine people listening and saying, look, I think Trump was bad. I think he acted poorly. Of course, he shouldn't have lied about the election, but he's not really like the leader of an insurrection overseas in Iraq or somewhere else. I mean, he's not, as far as we know, he's not giving, wasn't actively giving directions to the folks who assault the capital. He certainly didn't have any command and control, again, as far as we know,

of his putative forces. Aren't you taking a step too far? Well, I would not say that he was the paramilitary leader of the forces, for sure, but he certainly was responsible for assembling. Had he not endorsed that event repeatedly on January 6th, then urged people to come, that event would have been a shadow of itself. It would have been, you would not have had the numbers there. So he was responsible in many ways for inspiring the size of the gathering itself

and did nothing to tamp down, did nothing. And in fact, did the opposite. He did nothing to tamp down the energy surrounding the event. He hyped the energy surrounding the event. And one of the things that we cannot do, what we must not do,

is merely categorize what he's done post-election, as lying. He has used, he has engaged, and to me there is now very strong evidence that he's engaged in actual criminal acts to try to overturn this election, that he has been personally involved in criminal acts to overturn this election. If you listen to the transcript, read the transcript of the call or listen to the call with Raffensberger, I mean, those, there are federal conspiracy to violate civil rights implications throughout that call, throughout that call. We now know he had another call with

Georgia election officials where he was attempting to coerce them. There's case law here that is applicable. So again, we're not talking about a guy who just merely tweeted lies. We're talking about a guy who engaged in intentional acts to conspire. There's strong evidence that this that implicate conspiracy statutes that he whipped up the crowd that made it orders of magnitude more dangerous intentionally he intentionally helped facilitate the creation of the crowd what else do you want me to say i've not accused him of leading the charge physically you know he had there were paramilitary groups that did that but creating the crowd yeah fueling the crowd with fury yeah I would just point out to bolster your first point, the rally was named for using Donald Trump's language, Stop the Steel.

I mean, that was part of it. I think it was called Save America, this one. I thought it was not the Steel, too. Yeah, I should say the groups who helped organize were named and taken from language that Donald Trump used. There was another, you know, Trump had a tweet in December, urging people to come to the Capitol on January 6th, promised that it will be wild. And another one of the groups that organized used the term wild. I mean, playing directly off the president's language. And people who were interviewed who were part of the assault on the Capitol said they were here because the president asked them to be

at the Capitol. So can I focus? I want to, I don't necessarily disagree with David. I mean, I think the distinction between Trump more as Mullah Omar than has bin Laden, you know, he created the permission structure rhetorically and otherwise for it, I think is right. But this, I think you're wrong to a certain extent to say we shouldn't focus on the line because this is an analogy I used the other day. If someone takes, uses Photoshop or deep fake video stuff and actually convinces me that my daughter is being held captive in some chamber where they're running out of oxygen, some horror movie sort of scenario, and says, if you don't go kill so-and-so in the next

hour, she's going to be dead. Now, whatever jury makes of me for going off and killing so-and-so, because to be honest, I probably would. And the jury would be much angrier at the person who convinced me of the lie, right? If actually my daughter wasn't buried somewhere, wasn't in any danger, she was just in communicato because she was at the movies with her friends or something. That lie is, it isn't just bad. It's pre-it, it is, it is mandating violence in a certain way. If I actually believe that, I mean, this is something that Sarah was pointing out a while

ago, right, which was that if they were actually successful in, in doing this, that would set the preconditions for civil war. If the Trump people actually stole the election the way they were trying to, there would be massive violence in the streets. And while I don't condone violence in the streets, I kind of understand it, right? Because it would be truly first order, you know, even Tucker Carlson says, if this were true,

it would be the greatest crime in American history. So it would be the end of self-government. Yeah, I mean, it would just, it would be cats and dogs living together in total anarchy and lots of, there'd be blood in the streets. To be clear, Jenna, I'm not saying don't focus on the lies. I'm saying the lies plus. Like if you say he lied, you're not getting the whole picture.

It was more. I agree with that. But my point is that is just that there is a really ridiculous argument out there. And because it's ridiculous, as you would expect, Matt Gates is one of its foremost advocates. which is that it is disrespectful to people who push the lie to say that they're liars and that it's disrespectful to the 75 million voters, all that nonsense argument, to talk about this as insurrection because that is offensive to that. And I get that there are people who sincerely believe the lie.

But that makes it all the more important to point out how this lie actually created this whole chain of events and it was premeditated. and that is the incitement to me. The fundamental incitement isn't show strength or any of that kind of stuff. It isn't even come to Washington. It's wild. It's, you know, the Statue of Liberty

is buried in a tank where the oxygen is running out. And if you don't go hang Mike Pence, right? Then we're going to lose democracy and this puppet from China is going to take over. And even if the crowd wasn't violent, it still would have been impeachable

because what they were trying, to do, as Ali Alexander said, openly said. He says, look, the point wasn't like violence. The point was we wanted to have this, his words, this huge mob outside of Congress that would intimidate Congress and Mike Pence into going along with that. So his point is we just wanted a giant crowd to scare them into committing one of the gravest constitutional crimes you can imagine. Yeah. But we didn't actually want them to beat a cop to death with a fire extinguisher. I actually kind of believe that. Yeah, this is a little bit my point. point about Cruz and Holly, I don't need to debate whether they helped build that crowd,

encourage that crowd to come to the Capitol, whether the violence is in any way laid at their feet, because their stated objective was bad enough. Right. Their stated objective was to give the election to Joe Biden without evidence. Ted Cruz is like hadn't, sorry. Indeed. Breaking news. Breaking news.

Ted Cruz had a little asterisk next to his because he wanted a commission to look into it. His argument was that there's these millions of people who are convinced of the lie and the only thing we can do now is give in to them and sort of help them look into this. But it's all kind of the same. I think that nuance was lost on most people. And Ted and Josh, more than maybe anyone else in the Senate, with a slight exception for Mike Lee, are some of the best lawyers we have in the country. They can read a Supreme Court opinion. They can read briefs.

They know, you know, when a hearing has been held, when a motion to dismiss is not on the merits versus when it is. So, you know, one of the most frustrating things I've seen now is this argument that while the courts never engaged with the Trump campaign, they just, found these technicalities because they didn't want to have this mess on their hands, so they abdicated their responsibility. It's just not true. It's not like, oh, well, they have a point here. Like, nope, nope. It's not true at all.

It's based on nothing. And there's case after case after case where the courts held hearings, asked the Trump campaign to bring their evidence that, you know, and they didn't. You know, in the one case where the Trump campaign presented, all these affidavits, they then withdrew the ones, this was in Arizona, where they found provably that the affiant had lied under penalty of perjury. And so the judge said, so the remaining affidavits are just the ones that you couldn't prove were lies? And the Trump campaign was like, yes. I mean, that's, like, that's a great example of a case where the Trump campaign

absolutely got to present evidence. Wisconsin, a Trump appointed judge. held a hearing. The Trump campaign could present anything they wanted to that judge. And time and again, they didn't. So that's what I find, to Jonas' point, actually, that the lie itself, the words themselves, the stated objectives are plenty here. You don't need to impute everything that happened afterwards. You just don't need to. It's not that you couldn't. Maybe you could. As David has said, I do think we'll learn more as days and weeks progress. And I think the next topic that we have to talk about very briefly before we move to the social media aspect of all this is what happens next. We're certainly, according to the FBI, not out of the woods yet.

There's a lot of things still being planned. January 17th looks like a very specific date that folks are planning for. And then, of course, inauguration day, January 20th. You know, on the other hand, the National Guard is sleeping in the rotunda right now. and it reminded me so much of the pictures and drawings that you've seen from the Civil War where the military is being quartered in the Capitol. And it's terrifying. I mean, that's just disgusting to me that that's where things have come. I also think that that means they're far better prepared than they were. I don't think we'll just see a repeat of January 6th by any means.

And The Daily Beast had some good reporting where a bunch of these right-wing groups now believe that this is all a trap being set up for them. There's different versions of what the trap is. One version of the trap is it's just a trap to have a mass arrest of Trump supporters. Okay. But the version that I found most interesting is this is a trap.

They want us to become violent and to discredit our own movement. Yeah. Yeah. It is a trap. It's not being set up by someone else. It's being set up by members of your own movement. But yes, if you do this and have an armed militia march on the 17th and 20th, I don't see how it's not going to turn violent. And yes, if it turns violent, that will very much undermine your movement.

And so there's right-wing groups like the really, really right-wing groups, sending out emails, don't show up, don't go. This is a trap. Am I being naive to hope that we are, we were, we were undefed, are prepared on January 6 and we're actually over-prepared for January 17th? You know, I think that this actually goes back to something that we talked about during the BLM riots during the summer. And that is that overwhelming presence can often mean that you don't have to use overwhelming force. It's a palo doctrine for domestic disturbances, right? Right, exactly. Just the presence, the massive presence of the National Guard means that,

any attempt to try to do anything is not is it just a suicidal act of futility and so that overwhelming presence prevents the need for a overwhelming force and so what i would think what i i'm beginning to be less concerned maybe i'm wildly optimistic but i'm beginning to be less concerned about what's happening in the capital and more concerned about what's happening at the state houses um because you know one of the things that is underappreciated about January 6th, it wasn't just the U.S. there wasn't just a presence, an angry protest movement in the nation's capital on January 6th. It was also in many other states. And so, and we have seen armed protesters, for example, shut down the Michigan legislature for a time

earlier in the year. So I'm concerned about what might happen elsewhere, but I'm beginning to feel better about the capital. I still, my mind is just boggled when I look at that those zoomed-out images from January 6th of that incredibly thin blue line confronting this massive, seething, angry riot, they never had a chance. They never had a chance. And that is shocking.

I also just highly recommend the Wall Street Journal's latest on what happened in the gallery as the mob was closing in and just how close it all came. that picture from inside the gallery where they've pushed the desk that the pages normally sit at and they've pushed it against the doors

and you have guys standing sort of outside the view holding their guns as members are under their desks they were told to get their gas masks and hide there and they're hearing the gunshots being fired at the speaker's chamber. I mean, it's a chilling TikTok

of that sort of three-minute period as they're getting the last members evacuated from the gallery right as the protesters enter it. They think there's about 30 to 60 seconds in between those two things. Yeah, you can't read enough of those actually because I think it really is important

for people to understand exactly what happened. There was a 39-minute video taken by one of the insurrectionists posted on YouTube. I believe his name was Jaden X. and it captured, you know, most of the entire beginning of this effort and, and ended shortly after Ashley Babbitt, the Q&N adherent was shot by Capitol Police. But I would say I didn't have a real sense. I've done some reporting on this. I talked to people who were in there. I'd, you know, followed this closely. But I didn't have a real sense of exactly. exactly what happened and how violent this was or could have gotten until I watched that

video. And then to Sarah's point, I think watching the TikToks, particularly the ones that are augmented by video, these multimedia presentations, the New York Times did one that was excellent. The Washington Post has done one in the Wall Street Journal's that she mentioned is really outstanding. There's a political science professor at the University of Illinois named Nicholas Grossman, who's written some pieces for the dispatch. And he sent a tweet a few hours ago, and it posed this question, how would America react if the capital attack killed 50 instead of five with Pence and Pelosi executed over live stream and Congress too shaken to finish the electoral vote certification that night?

Because that's how we should be reacting now. And I think it's obviously very stark, but it's the right way to frame this. also can i mean that's a very dramatic way of putting in it and i agree with it entirely but can we um can we also just i mean i'll make a serious point and then a lighter point the more serious point is this is one of the few events i made this point somewhere else recently but what are the few events i can maybe the only event i can remember that got worse over time like on nine 11, the, we all thought, like, I remember, because everyone was talking to each other. We thought 30,000 people were dead, right? We didn't, we thought there was going to be wave after wave and all that

kind of stuff. And then there was a quiet period afterwards. And it turned out, and I don't mean to be minimizing, but only less than 3,000 people died. You know, when you saw those towers come down, you thought, oh my God, there must be 30,000 people just in there alone. And, and then the networks made this decision, which I actually disagreed with at the time, to stop showing footage of the people jumping to their deaths off the top of the building and all that. And there was this concerted effort to sort of minimize or tamp down the horror of all that. This is a different situation. And media classes will study it for all sorts of things, for all sorts of reasons for years.

But the slow rollout of all of this video and the testimonials are actually making it clear how much worse it was than we thought it was on that day. And that's a different thing for politics and culture. The other thing I would say related to that, which is a little lighter point, can we just have a little gratitude for the rank stupidity of people who want to be terrorists? I mean, some of this reminds me of, remember the first World Trade Center bombers, they caught them because the dude wanted a refund on the rider truck that they rented to blow up the World Trade Center, right? you have all of these jackwads goproing and selfieing themselves throughout their felonies. You know, most bank robbers don't stop in the middle of a bank robbery, lift up their ski mask and pose for a selfie in front of the big pile of money in the safe.

But all of these guys did that. And it must be very satisfying as sort of, you know, finding all these acorns of social media for the FBI. So you're like, thank you for this Viking dude, you know, because otherwise we'd have a really hard time finding you. But instead, you did a five-minute monologue while you were dropping a deuce in the hallway of Congress. And it makes it very easy to convict you. I mean, I appreciate that. I think it's fun. And one form of stupidity led to another.

Like, we're against masking in a pandemic. And so therefore, we're going to show our faces to the whole world while we storm the Catholic. But can I make a serious point off of your lighter points? And I'm glad you made those lighter points because we needed, we needed them. There's a reason, I think, that they were willing to film themselves doing what they were doing. And it's because they believed that they were starting a revolution. And they thought they would be legends. And in the event that this succeeded, they wanted it recorded, they wanted it recorded for history. Right. They didn't think it It was a bank robbery. They did not think it was a bank robbery. They thought that they were on the side of the angels and that it would be important to be able to point people back to the role that they played in this moment. And you had all of this talk of 1776, including from members of Congress, Lauren Bober from Colorado recently elected, tweeted, today is 1776. This was a common theme among the people who stormed the capital.

That's what they thought they were doing and they wanted credit for what they were doing. 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. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is, the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why, life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes,

same-day coverage, and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly, with options up to $3 million in coverage. With a 4.8 out of five-star rating on trust pilot and thousands of families already applying through ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ethos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Well, speaking of getting credit, social media has largely deplatformed this movement. Twitter has said they've taken down 70,000 related accounts. Facebook has taken down every mention of Stop the Steel, any sort of organizing for the future. Almost all of them have stopped political advertising. The president's been removed from every

platform and just yesterday was removed from YouTube for a seven-day suspension, I believe. There are people who are cheering this on, you know, about damn time people. There are people who are saying this is a slippery slope and we won't like where this goes. This means anyone can be silenced for unpopular opinions. And then there's people predominantly on the right who say that this is illegal and are suing over it or believe that this is proof that the law needs to change. David, I want you to walk us through those three buckets of people. Who has the best argument? Um, okay. So there's, there's, this is so complicated. Let me try to, um, what, what's the line from Princess Bride? Um, and let me explain. No, it's too much. Let me sum up. Um, so one of the things that I would like to do just as a predicate matter is we have to be dealing with a particular set of facts. Okay. So there, there's a lot of talk about slippery slope this, slippery slope. This, slippery slope. that got it, understand, these social media companies have a lot of power.

There are a lot of institutions in the United States who have a lot of power, and they restrain the use of their power through moral norms, more so than legal barriers. And it's very important to maintain some of these moral norms. The market often helps maintain these norms as well, because many companies don't want to alienate vast swaths of their customer base. And so, yeah, if you begin to erode moral norms of generalized equal access to Twitter or Facebook or to banking services or to credit card services or to web cloud services, there's dangers there. Okay.

So then the question you have to ask yourself is, under these circumstances, are we eroding those moral norms? under the facts that are presenting in the moment are we eroding these moral norms? And I say no, and I say no because of the facts. And one of the values of lawsuits, and this is something we saw during this entire election contest, is that when you get to a lawsuit, you've got to come forward with facts and evidence,

and tweeting what aboutism and all of that crap doesn't fly anymore. And so you have to talk about facts. And a lot of people have pointed to Amazon Web Services as being sort of the chief offender here, the worst actor here, by cutting off access to Parlay. So Parlay, very helpfully, filed a lawsuit against Amazon Web Services.

Now, there's a breach of contract issued that they've raised that the court will adjudicate. It looks to me, we'll see, looks to me like Amazon's and some pretty good ground, but Amazon, in its responsive pleading, raises some factual allegations

that I wish people would pay, attention to when they're talking about this social media issue. And that is that this was not something that came up immediately with Amazon reacting to political correctness after January 6th. No, it turns out that Amazon for weeks had been working with Parley because it was deeply concerned about in threats to incite violence. What were some of these threats? I'm not going or repeat them all because I don't want to give airtime to these threats. I mean, they're vicious, but here's the basic summary of them. And this is from their, this is the opening paragraph of Amazon's response. This case is not about suppressing speech or stifling viewpoints. It's not

about a conspiracy to restrain trade. Instead, this case is about parley's demonstrated unwillingness and this is really important, inability to remove from the servers of Amazon content that threatens the public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens. Now, that other part about inability is really important here, y'all. Amazon came forward with evidence that Parley was backlogged by 26,000 requests to take down information. It couldn't handle the volume of threats. It couldn't handle them.

And so before you say this is political correctness, before you say this was some sort of snap decision, let's look at the facts. And the facts here are we breaking a moral norm or a norm restraining big tech when you've got a company like Parley that is actually housing mass numbers of threats that it cannot even keep up

with to take down. And so in that circumstance, I think, look, this is something, we have to wake up and realize what we're dealing with here. This isn't a couple of mean tweets. You know, this isn't, this isn't, I don't like your view on, you know, gender identity issues and pronouns. This is a backlog of 26,000 complaints of content that was too bad for parlay that they couldn't even handle and then you're saying that Amazon should have to host this? What? So this is where we are. And I totally get it. I totally, and I'll say it a million thousand times, banning Trump from Twitter was a hard call. But we have to remember that had Trump not been president of the United States, he would have been banned a long time ago. So he was enjoying a presidential privilege on that

platform already, already enjoying a presidential privilege. And so that's where I am on this. We have to look at the facts of what's going on here, and the facts here bear no resemblance to, well, I don't like Ben Shvirah's view on gender identity, so I'm going to de-platform Ben Shapiro. No, that is not what was happening here, and we're not in that neighborhood. Jonah, as someone who was quoting Edmund Burke on Twitter yesterday, it's like, it was a perfect quote. Yes, exactly. I wonder whether you might give us a bit of a philosophical. philosophical exegesis on slippery slopes.

Because to me, everything is a slippery slope. The only question is whether we, as humans, can set some barrier along the slope. So I'm very unconvinced by the slippery slope argument, even though it seems to be everyone's go-to. Yeah. So in my very underrated second book, I actually have a long essay about slippery slope arguments. And I am very, I've changed my mind a little bit on slippery slope arguments, but I basically hate them because 90% of the time they allow people to argue what they want to argue about and use a lot of logical fallacies to do so rather than actually arguing the merits. You know, if we disallow this, then if we allow this, then, you know, people are going to be sleeping with horses, you know, and it's that one of, and then you get to argue about how it's bad to sleep with horses rather than, you know, cousin.

marriage or whatever the argument is. I don't know. So my point is, I mean, the way I look at this, first of all, for the most part, there are no slippery slopes. I mean, I understand that there are sort of exceptions to this rule, but for politics, it's only a slippery slope if people say, if we allow this, we have to allow all these other things, and then they don't fight any of the other things. But that's not how politics works. People actually, if you concede this point, you're not necessarily automatically going to concede B, C, D, you know, all the way down the line. And you look at the things that we thought were slippery slopes for most of the 20th century. And a lot of them turned out to go the other way, whether it was, you know, like in 1974,

everyone thought all respectable opinion for the most part was the Supreme Court is just going to continue to embrace this sort of idea of the living constitution. it's a slippery slope. If you allow this, you'll allow that. And turn out and know that the fact that we're sliding in one direction activated people on the other side of the argument to actually organize and create things like the Federalist Society and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you can do this with all sorts of issues.

The way I look at this, though, is I tend to think that moral issues are scalable. That if I have a little book group and someone in the book group says, as one of these parlor quotes from the Amazon briefing says, after the firing squads are done with all of the politicians, we'll go after the teachers. That's a direct quote, okay?

If you say that in my book group, I shall kick you out of my book group. Unless you're joking, right? Unless we like, you know, but we know that these people aren't joking, right? And if you say it on my website, If you say it on the dispatch, Steve and I and the rest of us will kick you off because you can't say that on something that we're responsible for. And you can scale this principle up as far and as wide as you want.

And the idea that at some point, as David was sort of suggesting, that's simply because Amazon is such a large scale operation, it therefore has to tolerate essentially criminal speech, dangerous criminal speech, because if it doesn't, there'll be a slippery slope and we won't allow people. to say, I think Nixon shouldn't have resigned? I mean, I just don't think it works that way. It's not a slippery slope. It's a very steep hill going up that people are trying to argue is actually down and slippery. And that's my problem with this, is that this is a simple moral question. Do I have to endorse and provide a platform for truly evil speech as a private citizen or a private company? And the answer, regardless of my size, it's a Of course not. So it's sort of a simple question for me.

Steve? I mean, yeah. I, well, I feel like I take your point, your philosophical point, that there are no such things as slippery slopes. And I share your disdain for the logical fallacies that sometimes result from people trying to use. the slippery slope argument. But boy, it feels to me like we're living at the bottom of a really slippery slope right now over the past four years with everything that's happened over the past four years. I mean, there have been one, we made arguments at the beginning of this in different, at the beginning of kind of the Trump era,

worrying that there was a slippery slope. This is a slippery slope to that. This is a slippery slope to that. And now I think we're living the results of that. So I take your philosophical point and I tend to agree with it. No, I agree with you. It's colored by my reality. The reason why we are where we are isn't as early because the slope is slippery.

It's that because people were cowardly and lacked the courage to, you know, people have human agency and they're the ones who made it slippery. It is not some metaphysical external thing about the nature of reality. Yeah, it's not some like weak hallmark card version of Marxist determinism. It is just simply that people pandered to audiences and pandered to voters and pandered to whatever. And this is where you get. That's not slippery. That's a bunch of people pushing the boulder down the hill.

Well, David, I think I know what we're going to talk about tomorrow. on advisory opinions, we've got a lot of law to jump into when it comes to the social media platforms and free speech and private corporations and all sorts of things. I think we should leave it there. But wait, wait, wait. We did not get to Sarah on the social media issue.

You know, it seems really simple to me. You cannot walk into a Walmart and scream any of these things or Walmart kicks you out. To Jonah's point, to me it's not that the scale is different, that they're so much bigger. I think the issue is that they held themselves out to be public squares. They weren't. They were never public squares. They were always a Walmart. But they told people, come to our Walmart, it's a public square.

And here's our soapbox. We built one just for you. Please come stand on it and say whatever you like. We support free speech because this is a public square that we've built for you. And now they're saying, well, but you always knew it was a Walmart. I mean, it was always privately owned. This was never a public square. They are right now. This is the correct argument is that they are, they built a soapbox that was a private soapbox within the Walmart,

and they always had the right to kick people out of it. I think that the mistake that they made was for the last 10 years telling people that it was a public square. Legal question. Yeah. Point of information. Uh, in a public square, whatever that constitutes of the legal definition of a public square,

I don't know what one is, a public park, you know, a plaza. A literal soapbox in a public park is a limited public forum. Are you allowed in a public square to call for organizing to murder hundreds of politicians? I mean, can the police say, hey, dude, you can't, I know this is like a Hyde Park free speech zone and we like to get to say what we want to say, but you can't actually talk about raping and murdering people and calling for people to stock up on supplies to rape and murdering people.

Can you tell people to stop doing that? Look, to some extent, you can do that. This is the Brandenburg test. This is the incitement test. But in a true public forum soapbox, yes, you can sit up there and talk about the moral benefits of a society in which, people can be forced to have sex against their consent.

Absolutely. And then you can talk about why we shouldn't have outlawed murdered. Now, of course, you cannot make threats against people, like all the things that apply to speech that is unlawful. But, like, yes, you could not do anything about a true public soapbox if someone went up and said a lot of the things that are on there, not all of them. But not all of them.

Yep. Not all of them. I mean, there's actually a Supreme Court case involving someone who said during the Johnson era, if I'm drafted, first thing when I do, when I get a rifle, is I'm going to shoot Johnson. And that was constitutionally protected speech. So, yeah, Sarah's right about that. But not all of this.

Not all of it. And there's also, so I've shifted, by the way, for the lawyers who are listening, sort of in a cute way. I started by talking about it being a limited public forum. And then to answer Jonah's question, I made it a pure public forum. in a limited public forum, think more like a school that lets other groups use it after schools over each day, Jonah. The school can also turn down folks from using it

as long as they're not turning them down for a protected reason, basically. But more on this, on advisory opinions, of course. But that's my general take on the social media stuff, is that what they're doing now people are hemming and hauling about and that's actually on the social media platform. because this should have been their policy all along. And with that, our next advisor, our next dispatch podcast, I always say advisory opinions,

because obviously it's the flagship, we'll be on inauguration day. And I expect you boys to bring your A-games, your fastballs, every sports metaphor that I don't probably fully even understand the meaning of. I'm going to bring my curling groom. You know,