The Dispatch Podcast - All That Fluff | Roundtable

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Megan McArdle joins Steve, Jonah, and Sarah to adjudicate the minutiae of the least consequential civil war you'll ever regret hearing about: between the Bulwark Front of Judea and the Judean Dispatch Front. The Agenda: —Harris’ first interview —Moving to the right —Does media matter? —Killing the primary system —The Twitter Spat —Against endorsements —Why it’s important to be honest Show Notes: —John Berman’s interview with Michael Tyler on fracking —Nick Catoggio on The Twitter Spat The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isger, joined by Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and my forever crush, Megan McArdle. Megan, forget those guys. I'm so happy you're here. I'm so happy to be back too. Let's store nails after. Okay. Megan, I am going to start with you because this week we're going to see the first sit-down interview with Kamala Harris and Tim Walls on CNN interviewed by Dana Bash. Do we think we're going to get the answers that we've been looking for? No. That would be insane. I would like to know, for example, what this insane price gouging proposal is that they've, Politico just reported that they made it deliberately vague so that they could kind of mott and bail you know, like, oh, no. we're just going after excessive corporate power.

Also, we're definitely not going to let them raise prices on you. Are they going to answer that question? No, even if she asks it, she might. They're going to give some vague, dumb, you know, Harris-like centorian oratory on, you know, how middle-class families are suffering under an unnamed president, who Harris has nothing to do with. And she, Super Harris, is going to ride in and save them from the me. mean price gaugers.

Jonah, you've said this before, though, you know, when Harris gets asked about these policies, fracking, immigration, stuff that her campaign says she has changed her mind on, but we haven't yet heard it from her. You know, my question is obviously, okay, when did you change your mind and what new facts did you learn

to cause you to do that? You've made the point that, like, we should be really welcoming people who change their mind, especially when they changed their mind toward our position. So should I be happy, when she says, I will not ban fracking, or I absolutely will increase security at the border and

starts chanting, build the wall. And by the way, that build the wall comments, like funny, not funny, like she now in her advertisements has pictures of the border wall and seems to now be in favor of a border wall. So I think you can score this a bunch of different ways. I think certainly if you are a right of center person who would like to see both parties move towards the middle, it's good news that Kamala Harris is running towards the middle to get elected. You can also think she's a big, fat liar when she says those are her actual positions, and you can judge her accordingly. But if it's good rhetorically for the campaign, doesn't that mean it's probably good in practice if you're president? Well, that's my point, is that it, we have a jar at the dispatch where you

have to put a quarter in every time I use the phrase the Overton window. But it, uh, it does, um, it does make it much more difficult for her to then get elected, if elected, then go before the American people and say, now we're going to do Medicare for all. When you said, I don't really believe in mandates, but when you've laid no predicates for an argument for going left, and in fact, all of the predicates, all the things that you've stipulated to get elected were appeals to the median voter, where you reassured them, you weren't a crazy left winger, it puts a certain amount of constraint on what she can get away with as a politician if elected. I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed,

and I will sign it into law. I will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself. We will pass a middle-class tax cut that will benefit more than 100 million Americans. That's good, even if you don't want her to get elected. Like, even if you're still going to vote for Trump, it's better than her running like a full tilt Bernie Sanders and getting elected, right? you want to move the center of gravity of American politics if you're conservative rightward you want to move the center of gravity of American politics to saner ground if you're a sane person whether you're on the left or or the right the fact that she's doing this I think is an unalloyed good regardless of whether or not it's good or bad for Republicans or good strategy now I think it's also good strategy which is also good for America right like if America if our politics and you And you can make the exact same case from the left about Trump and abortion, right, is if Trump is unwilling to defend the pro-life position in any meaningful way,

if you're a committed pro-choicer, that's great news, right? That is moving the Republican Party to the left. And if you're a committed pro-lifer, that should really worry you. And just a quick last point, if you were, just for the sake of illustration, if you're a purely strategic single issue voter on abortion, right, which there are very few of them, but certainly if you're the head of an organization that cares solely about abortion, moving, having the Republican Party become a de facto pro-choice party is probably worse for you than Kamala Harris winning. I think that's starting to dawn on a bunch of people, because

if you now have no party where you have influence, that's worse than having influence in the party that got defeated because of a crappy candidate. And the party you can argue got defeated because they abandoned their position on your issue. Steve, I have a theory of why Harris has rhetorically been better for conservatives than I think Biden is was, which is that Biden was never trusted by the left wing of his party. He was considered a centrist Democrat, and so he constantly had to prove himself to the left in order to maintain base support. And so while he sort of campaigned on being centrist,

he would have to constantly throw, you know, meat to the left lions that were threatening to eat his face every now and then. Harris is trusted by the left, and she's having to prove herself to the middle, which oddly is allowing her to be a much more politically strategic general election candidate because she doesn't need to convince,

the far left that you know she's one of them wink wink and so instead rhetorically they allow her to move to the middle now again to jonas point this doesn't say how she's going to govern but more about the interesting strategic question if the party on the left thinks it's in their interest to sound like a centrist party that's meaningful and so in that sense oddly as you see these squad members lose in their primaries, you see the other squad members become less squatty. So on the one hand, like, people are like, oh, look, AOC is now far more powerful in the Democratic Party than she was. She's getting a primetime speaking slot, all that stuff. And it's like, yeah, but is she the same AOC from before? Rhetorically, at least, I think the answer to that is no, because she has

credibility with the left. And now you see this, again, they think it is strategic to sound like they're more centrist. Yeah, they're really interesting differences in. what we've seen with respect to the Democrats on this question exactly, and what we've seen with Republicans on the people on their sort of right flank. The incentives, for whatever reason, they don't respond to the incentives the same way. I would say that you look at people in the Freedom Caucus, for instance, or some Republican senators who have come in, and I think this has everything to do, of course, with the looming presence of Donald Trump. They are doubling and tripling down on the kind of right side squad-like behavior.

behavior less in a policy-driven way and more in I would sort of a behavioral way. But what you've described what we're seeing with the Democrats is exactly what's happening and they're responding to political stimuli. I think if you look at Harris specifically, I don't expect that she's going to answer these questions. And I don't think you have to go that deep into sort of strategory to come up with the explanation. She brought in David Pluff and Stephanie Cutter. They're very smart Democratic strategists. They understand that there are getable, persuadable voters in the center and that the key to her winning

is to finding them. Many of them, former Republicans, frustrated Republicans, suburban women, what have you, and making Harris seem acceptable to those voters. That's what they're doing. That's what she's doing. I don't think it's much more complicated than that. To Jonah, point about whether this is an unalloyed good, I would put an asterisk. I don't think it's an unalloyed good. I mean, as a conservative, I'm glad that she's sounding conservative themes, and to the extent that it boxes her in or even makes her just listen to to conservatives if she were to be elected, then that would be good. I think, however, this really helps drive the cynicism about our politics in a massive way. When you have Kamala Harris who staked out all

all of these left-wing positions. I mean, these are not positions where she's been particularly subtle about what she supposedly believes. She says them. She's proud of them. She campaigns on them, as you say, Sarah. She's appealing to the left,

the squad side of the Democratic Party. And then to come and just sort of flip on a dime, whatever you're talking about, really, I think if you're a voter who doesn't have the luxury of paying attention to every twist and turn in every single race and, you know, jump from website to website to website following politics every day, you look up when you do have to pay attention because you've got to vote and make a decision and you say, gosh, these people are, none of these people are trustworthy. This is awful. I can't believe this. As I was just grabbing a cup of coffee before I joined you, I was listening to an interview between John Berman on CNN and Michael Tyler, who's Kamala's communications director. And John Berman asked a simple question. pointing out that Kamala has changed her position on fracking.

And Berman, I thought the question actually the way that he did it, there's this tendency, I think sometimes, and I do it when I'm interviewing newsmakers, to get too involved in the question. And Berman didn't do that. He kept it very spare. He said she used to want to ban fracking. We are told she no longer wants to ban fracking. Why has she changed her position on fracking?

It's a very simple question. And there should be a very easy answer. And one that they're prepared for. This isn't like it's a new, a new thought that someone had. Especially for her because there are 70 of these things, right, in the last few days. And Michael Tyler says, Kamala Harris is very proud of her work in the Biden administration on energy and economic issues more broadly and 15 million jobs and dada. And just, and goes on, you know, I don't know, 45 seconds for this.

And Berman sort of patiently waits and then puts the question to him again. So I understand all that. But why has she changed her position on fracking? Well, Kamala Harris has been stood side by side with Joe Biden as he's been president. And you just think like, man, can you just not give it? Like, unfortunately, I think the actual explanation is because she wants to be elected president and she knows that is baggage if she wants to be elected president. But man, there's all sorts of things you could say.

Fracking turns out to have been a much bigger economic boon and much safer environmentally than when she originally staked out her position. and because she's been presented with new evidence, she's changed her position as all mature adults do. I mean, I don't know. Like, say something that even approaches honesty. You know what would I think really work in 2024? Yeah, she changed her position because she wants to be elected president.

She's realized that's a deal breaker for Western Pennsylvania, and she's happy to make that compromise. They believe strongly in it. So, yeah, she's not, she may personally wish that we had less fracking in the country, but as president, she's not going to ban fracking. And that's a promise she's willing to make. The old Mario Cuomo position. Yeah, are you suggesting honesty?

No wonder you're no longer a political strategist. I like the Mario Cuomo position on fracking. I'm personally opposed, but it's not my place. It's not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. There's no place to get between a Pennsylvanian and his mining engineer. Yeah. I don't understand why in 2024 you wouldn't give that answer because any other answer

people aren't going to believe anyway. And she gets tripped up when she tries to give the answers that you were making fun of, Steve. Spokespeople, for whatever reason, we're very good at, like, tap dancing within these, like, guardrails that we're given. That's like a talent, I'll put that in quotation marks. For whatever reason, she's not. I bet she's probably pretty good, though, at actually saying what she thinks if you'd allow her to say it, understanding that, you know, it's going to be a little shocking to people to hear a

politician say the thing we all know is accurate. Right. Do it. There was a whole movie about that, right? Bullworth, wasn't that the... Exactly. I want the Bullworth candidate. Megan, here's my question. And it's like a bit of a media question.

You know, when you work for a principle that everyone wants to interview, you get courted. You get like a menu of increasingly delightful things to order. Every news outlet will tell you, like, here's what we're offering. Now, things they won't offer are taking topics off the table, for instance, or, you know, the questions in advance, things that like sort of conspiracy theory people who don't work in this business don't realize, like those aren't negotiables, but there's a whole lot else that is negotiable. For instance, having your vice president sit next to you,

which will make follow-up questions to really drill down on Harris much harder. You generally, and I don't know CNN's negotiations here, but I certainly had the experience where they're like, you pick who interviews. You know, like, we have all of these people that you can pick from. Why don't you tell us who you want to do the interview and do you want it, you know, live?

Oh, you would like it to actually be taped and then edited after? Obviously, the principal doesn't get to edit it, but an edited interview is much better because then if you filibuster for a while, you know they're going to have to cut it out because they don't want to just show 16 minutes of one answer.

So I'm curious if you think this will be enough. Because basically this pageant game gets harder as you have to do more and more interviews because at some point the news outlets are like, nope, now we have to do something different, so you're going to play by our rules. But if she can get away with just one interview with her and walls,

very few follow-ups, for instance, because of that, and I don't know, maybe this goes her way. Or maybe we'll be sitting here next week going, those were the prepared answer those are the like you know what the questions are going to be this is how you wanted to answer yeah i was hoping you were going to go on like lavish weekend for two a beautiful mount dairy lodge no that's you and me me me just you and me oh sorry they closed it i'm so sad the only jono will know what i'm talking about this is like the endless loop commercial for this horrible singles hotel in the polonos that had heart-shaped beds and champagne uh hot tubs

It sounds perfect for us. Yes, it does. It's maybe especially because it's now a molding ruin. Because Jack Nicholson's running around with a hatchet. I think that probably she's going to get away with not doing very much media because, I mean, look, we saw this with Biden. And it eternally shocks me that people are almost open about saying this. But like when you read the media reporting, certainly when I did a report. column on how somehow almost all of us missed the Biden story. Not me personally. I was early on

that story, but how it got so dramatically undercover is that you hear people saying, you know, they don't want this to be Hillary's emails in 2016. And like, that's not your job. Like, our job is not to figure out who should get elected and not give them undue negative coverage because Trump might get elected. And I say this as someone who is voting for Harris, who loathes Donald Trump, thinks he is unfit to be president. I just still think, I actually, funnily enough, had a conversation about this with my Uber driver in New Mexico on Sunday. And he is someone, he is a nice liberal high school English teacher and wants to hear the media, like, really go after Trump. I was like, dude, we did it. I swear, I know it doesn't

feel like it. And it didn't work. And we should just do the thing. where we say the thing that is true and let the voters decide. We should stop trying to do mass exercises in like communications management for Democrats. But that's the reality is almost no one in my profession

wants to be the person who forced an interview that goes disastrously. And it could, I mean, you know, you talk about like she should say the thing that is true. She, did you see that when she went to, uh, with Biden, to meet the Russian hostages coming home.

Did you see the answer she gave? It was like, this was the most predictable possible question. Why do you, like, how do you feel about the hostages coming home? Answer good. Like, pause for testimony to the power of liberty and democracy and how much we love our fellow Americans, now happy we are. And instead she goes off, she's like, this is just a testimony to the power of diplomacy and how diplomacy is powerful.

and like, what was that, right? So she really could screw up a live interview, even if the questions are relative softballs that she should have prepared answers for because they appear to have problems coming up, as Steve said, with very prepared answers to very predictable questions that you are definitely going to get asked.

And so I think that they're very wise from a political point of view, well, you know, not so wise from the democratic point of view, small D, Democratic. Their strategy is to hide in a basement as much as possible, have her give speeches off of teleprompters in front of small and extremely amped up crowds, hope that the TikTok videos will mostly substitute for sitting down for live interviews.

And I think it is going to work. Honestly, I think, you know, the people in the media are like, she can't do this. Yeah, you know, it's 2024. And, like, young people don't watch news. they watch social media and, you know, I kind of actually think she can do it and is probably going to. And the people who were never going to vote for Harris aren't going to vote for her if she gives an interview. And the people who are voting for Harris, I don't think are going to peel off if they say, wow, I really haven't seen her sit down with George Stephanopoulos. I think the stuff

she needs to do is to be on the stump in swing states, right? She needs to go there and make them feel warm and fuzzy that she came to their state and that people who went to the rally, go home and tell their friends, but how awesome she was, and that moves the needle on the margin. But I don't think she actually needs to do television interviews, honestly. I wish she did. I wish I could honestly say that, but as a reporter, my job is not to say the thing that I wish were true or to try to help get the outcome I want. It is to fearlessly tell the truth. And here I am. She doesn't need to do interviews. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online.

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All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Jonah, speaking of fearlessly telling the truth, let's see if you'll agree with this. Jonah Goldberg really wants and needs Kamala Harris to be the next president of the United States

because it will kill the primary system that he hates as we know it. Because if the candidate who didn't have to go through this primary wins, for all the reasons that Megan just said, right? When you've only got a few days left on the clock, you can have all sorts of different strategies that are very helpful. It might have opened up Republicans, for instance, to ditch Donald Trump in 2016,

if that had felt like a viable option in a way that Joe Biden's debate performance opened up that Overton window, quarter in the Overton window jar, to the possibility of doing that. If she wins, this could really kill off primaries if, like, yeah, you have the primary to see who the voters want.

And then we see how they do for a few months. And when they're horribly behind, when it comes to the convention, it's sort of like a retention election. But it's real. And it's a real retention election. This seems like the perfect like Jonah Goldberg and Sarah Isger have a primary baby. Yeah. So I had Jonathan Rausch, who's another member of our, he knows all the handshakes. He's part of our team when it comes to this stuff, who did a big, you know, nature's healing piece for the Atlantic after the switcheroo.

I wouldn't go as far as saying that this puts a stake in the heart of primaries because I There will still be primaries. There will still be primaries. But also circumstances this time were special. You had Joe Biden who everybody really understood you needed to get rid of. And you have a lot of the time the person who wins the primary will be very competitive. You're not going to replace someone who's very competitive or you think they're going to win. But in Trump in 2016, the Republicans didn't think would win.

Now, of course, he ended up winning, which on. undermines the whole argument. And God willing, we're not going to have a candidate like Trump again for a while, knock on wood. And so I think that it was sort of the convergence of Biden, Biden's too old, Biden can't beat Trump, Trump is running, could get reelected. And whether you think it's accurate or not, that a lot of Democrats truly and sincerely believe he's an existential threat to all we hold ear. And so that gives you a permission structure to do. things you might not otherwise do. I don't know that like if Gavin Newsom in 2028 or 2032 won the primaries and then was looking bad towards the end that he would um willingly go along

and not fight back against the party elders if if there have been no changes to the rules between now and then. I mean, it was one of the funniest lines. But boy, it's so helpful that that the candidate didn't have to withstand all the attacks in a primary and then six months of a general election that is boring and grueling for the first six months of most general elections. So like forget who the candidate is. It's actually really helpful to the party to not tell the other side who their candidate's going to be until August. I agree. Look, I agree. Declan asked me three weeks ago to write a piece on on how we should do it like the Brits do and have 60-day elections. And if if they're constitutional structure,

allowed for it, or could require it, that'd be great. But I don't think that's how it could work. Is that piece with Steve's piece on Afghanistan? I didn't agree to write it, so there's a difference there. And so... I like how you're just, hey, Declan, I know you asked me to do that thing. No, and anyway. Yeah, well, he suggested it, you know. And, no, but I was going to say, one of the funniest lines in the Democratic convention, which was last week, right? Bill Clinton, praising Joe Biden said, let me just tell you how rare it is for a politician to voluntarily leave office. And it's a sign of statesmanship and character and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I just thought the balls on this guy. Because at the, at the, at the, at the nadir of the

Lewinsky scandal, lots of party elders were telling him, it's time for you to go. David Broder was like, you got to go for the good of your party, for the good of your country. And Bill Clinton was like, I'm going to keep fighting to the last dog dies on a scalden mule and blah, blah, blah. And so, like, and there's an argument that, like, him staying on is why Gore didn't win. That's a hard contrafactual to just play out. But, like, you needed these, for this circumstance to work, you needed Joe Biden to be strong-armed strong arm a bull, right? It needed to be able to work on him. I don't think it would work on a younger, fitter, more competitive candidate in a normal time. And so I think it's progress,

but the primaries are going to be around for a little while. I would just add that, you know, like Biden is a party guy from an era when the parties were strong. And none of the people younger than him are. They're all kind of political entrepreneurs. And so, it seems less likely that that's going to work in the future just because there's no one who has that old sense of the party as a vehicle for loyalty as well as personal self-aggrandizement and I just don't think that I mean I wish I like Jonah I wish but the game theory would be fascinating but I mean I think we can have people who who are talking about the benefits of the shorter primary

for all the reasons that you all have suggested and I think it's obvious to people and you know Lord knows I've been hanging out a lot in Wisconsin lately and you watch any television and it's just all political ads all the time you can't watch anything else

I think there really are very few other ads that appear if you're watching Jeopardy or the Green Bay Packers or what have you and people are so sick of it it's awful so I think you'd have a lot of support for people to shorten all of our political debates over the course of an election year, if you could. So you might have, maybe it forces that kind of a discussion, but I agree that the, I think

the circumstances with Biden were so unique because you had, you know, a Democratic party that had long understood, I think, most of them, that Biden was as badly suited to run for a second term as he was. And you had some people talking about it in public, even if you had others going to great efforts to kind of bury it. So when he has that debate performance, it confirms everything that the people who had been talking about it had been saying. It confirms what we had seen in polling from Democratic rank and file voters that the guy was too old. And it forced people who were shilling for Biden to be almost embarrassed to say, like, look at this guy who just participated in the debate. Of course he can be the leader of

the free world for the next four years. I mean, it didn't make any sense. So I think that the circumstances really were unique in a way that probably are, they're not replicable. Well, you guys are all terrible humans. Steve, speaking of terrible humans, you got into a Twitter spat and I'm confused. And so I would like all of you. I assume you're saying that I'm the terrible human and that. I mean, grammatically, that's what Sarah just said. Just want to be clear. Not the people. I'm, I, she said, speaking of terrible people, you got into a Twitter spat. Pron noun antecedents, man, I love them. Twitter spats. Everyone involved in Twitter spats are sort of by definition terrible people. I want to read how this started. You tweeted, grim moment in our politics. Some conservatives embracing a nutty conspiracy theorist like RFK Jr. and others fluffing a status progressive keel Kamala Harris. What a mess the modern conservative movement is. And this, it appears, broke open a. Rift within a very, very, what I have to imagine is still small group of people, right?

It's people who hold conservative political and policy beliefs and who don't think Donald Trump should be president. And then the question becomes, what responsibility does that put on you? If you believe that Donald Trump shouldn't be president, should you be helping Harris to win? Because that's the opposite of Donald Trump becoming president. or not. Is it just you're not supposed to vote for Donald Trump if you don't think Donald Trump should be president?

Can I just narrow that very quickly, narrow that even further? I would say, and in particular, journalists. So take the subset of the subset of the subset of the subset that you're talking about and then layer on journalists, which is sort of the perspective I was talking about. But yeah, continue. So, yeah, I'm kind of confused about this whole thing. And I'm hoping that you can explain where you think the disagreement is.

And whether maybe it's a real disagreement in the sense that maybe everyone just wants to find disagreement when you're sort of in the losing group here. And let's be clear, conservatives who don't vote for Donald Trump are already in kind of a minority of losers. Is this just fights among the losers? Might even call it a remnant. I like losers, Jonah. Speaking of blunt honesty. Remnant is another word for total effing. losers. I'll take your advisory opinion. Yeah, look, this is, I mean, this is, look,

there are interesting, there are interesting questions and issues to be explored here. We've had versions of this debate several times before. We have them in our staff meetings. We talk about them editorial discussions. We've had them in public. And I do think there are, there's an interesting question. I mean, I get the question from a lot of people, Republicans or former Republicans who don't like Donald Trump and say to me, what do you think we should do? So it is something that people in this world and not just DC insider types are actually talking about and thinking about. Having said that, I mean, is there anything more annoying? I mean, Nick wrote about this in his newsletter a couple days ago than an angry Twitter fight

on a Friday night. It's just like among this small group. Probably. That's why Nick and I keep our fights on the Slack channel on Friday night. Well, I don't, I mean, The great irony is, so I can just give you the circumstances here. I was preparing dinner. I'm here in Wisconsin preparing dinner for my family. And I just jumped on Twitter, which I don't do very often. I mean, mostly I'm on Twitter these days to tweet dispatch stuff, right? I don't do a lot of weighing in.

And I'm constantly hectoring Jonah to avoid Twitter fights. Like, don't do Twitter fights. Nobody ever wins Twitter fights. They're stupid. It's a waste of time. Even if you win a Twitter fight, what does that do? And then like that scene from Arrested Development, Has it ever worked for anyone?

No. Could it work for us? Maybe. No. There was no. There was a first time for everything. But Steve, what, like, what was the instigation? You saw Kinsinger's speech?

What was it? No. I got on Twitter and I watched, you know, one conservative after another in my Twitter feed, who I used to maybe like or agree with or admire, talking, embracing RFK Jr. talking about how great it was that RFK Jr., you know, Mr. Chemtrail-Vax conspiracy theorist, Putin apologist, was endorsing Donald Trump. And then on the other side, I saw other conservatives treating Kamala's speech on Thursday night almost as if she were the second coming of Ronald Reagan.

And so literally this was a 10-second observation. Oh, my gosh, this is really crazy. The conservative movements sees people on both. sides of it, you know, embracing, you know, one of them embracing RFK, one of them, um, fluffing Kamala Harris, which apparently is a, is a, there's another definition that, um, there's only one definition. Wasn't my intended, wasn't my intent. No, you're going to fluff a pillow, Sarah. Ah. Shilling for as I, as I, as I, as I quickly clarified shilling for. Anyway, so I sent this tweet and I, and I, and that was it. And I went back to making dinner and, and hanging out with my

family and then discovered a little bit later that it had greatly offended Sarah Longwell, who's the CEO over at The Bullwork. Speaking of that, let me just read what she wrote in response, because I think what she wrote is also correct. And this is why I'm confused how there's a fight. She said the sad state of the conservative movement has nothing to do with some conservatives voting for a Democrat to keep Trump away from power. I think you'd agree with that.

Like, Megan's voting for Harris. You don't think she destroyed the conservative movement. And then she says, Well, let's be honest. That's not how you destroyed it, Megan. Fair, fair. Sweet, sweet, lovely, Megan. And then she said, the wide, Sarah, the widespread other Sarah,

the widespread capitulation to an ultimate embrace of Trump destroyed the conservative movement. I think you'd also agree with that sentence, Steve. Sure. Yeah, I don't agree with the first sentence because it's not what I meant. But no, no, no, but, but, blah, I know. But she didn't say that's what you meant. She said the sad state of the conservative movement has nothing to do with some conservative

voting for a Democrat to keep Trump away from power. You agree with that sentence. Sure. Yeah. What the hell are we fighting over? Yeah. She posted that tweet in response to what I had just said, which had said nothing about voting, as John has pointed out, and others have pointed out.

But isn't it meaningful that in order to disagree with you, she had to say something that you totally agree with? Yeah, but that I didn't actually say. that was that was the point so if she's responding to me i have to do it no that so the the the the way that this continued i think was um you know what started with sort of pushback on on my comment about fluffing or shilling for or spinning for Kamala Harris quickly became a much greater critique of the things that i've said things that jonah said to the point where she literally actually accused us of refusing to take a stand against Donald Trump, something that

I think probably people listening to this podcast would raise eyebrows at. Look, I don't want to get into motives. I don't know. I don't quite still understand why she was as frustrated with what I said as she apparently was. But I think she was confused about why she was attacking boss. I think she wanted to have a fight and she chose to have a fight. At first, she said the thing that was frustrating is that all of my analysis downplays what a threat Donald Trump is. And literally like a couple tweets later, short few moments later, she said, what's super frustrating is you see exactly the threat that Donald Trump is and you are unwilling to do as much as you should be doing about it. I think ultimately what it comes down to it. My point, and I've used Joe Scarborough,

in this conversation, I've used others to make the point. I don't think it's good for conservatives who have policy differences or other differences with Kamala Harris is to pretend that those differences don't exist. I think it's important to say it. And if you want to vote for Kamala Harris, vote for Kamala Harris. I mean, you know, Megan's doing it. She's on this podcast. Nick is doing it. He makes that case on the regular. Obviously, I don't have problems with conservatives who are going support Kamala Harris, and I may end up doing that myself. I don't know. I haven't made a decision.

But I voted for Joe Biden in 2020, so it's a little silly to suggest that I can't stand people who are supporting a Democrat to stop Trump. I think that's basically where this ended up. So Jonah, if Kamala Harris were running against Stalin in an election, would you really feel that it was sufficient to go on this podcast and say, you know, look, she supports price fixing and Stalin supports murdering tens of millions of people. So, you know, I'm not going to vote for Stalin. Like, would that be sufficient? No, I can't imagine you don't grant that there are some problems with this hypothetical. I'm trying to steal man their argument, which is...

No, I get their argument. So as the leader of the people, people's front of, as a leader of the people's front of Judea. Let me tell you what's wrong with the Judean people's front. I had a philosophy professor once who did this exercise where he explained how different professions have a different, have different definitions of what primary colors are. Like in printing, it's these colors. In painting, it's these colors. And in glasswork, you have this many. You know, it's like, and they're all right because there are different professions, right? I think Sarah Longwell, nice person. I don't know her personally. I can't remember the last time I met her. I'm sure I have, but we're not like

buddies. Tim Miller, who I know a bit, you know, and even Bill Crystal, who Steve has a long history with, but I would still consider her friend. They, particularly Tim and Sarah, come from the world of straight up politics, right? Campaign consulting, messaging, being in the arena. and I think that they look at a lot of this stuff through that prism. I am a curmudgeon who spends most of his time with Kleenex boxes on his feet like Howard Hughes in my basement. I do not try to think in those terms. I try not to even be friends with politicians. I failed a couple times, but I try really hard.

I don't try to be friends with many other people either, but for different reasons. And so I think that one of the things that I, that aggrieved me in Longwell's response, and I'm using Longwell just to keep it clear which Sarah I'm talking about, is she immediately transitioned to this voting thing, right? And as we talked about last week, as I tried to write about it my thing with David, when you try to sluice these issues through who you're going to vote for, it reduces it down to this binary thing and clears the field for places of nuance and truth-telling. And one of the things that we at the dispatch kind of pride ourselves in is that we,

We try to be about the nuance and truth-telling first and the voting, not even a distant second, but sometimes even not at all, right? And that's why we got a lot of grief for not endorsing anybody. We don't want to do endorsements. Part of my longstanding gripe about the conservative movement is that it confuses itself for a political consulting firm and thinks too often that what's good for the Republicans is good for conservatives and what's bad for Republicans is bad for conservatives as our discussion at the beginning in this podcast sort of demonstrated, I don't think that's necessarily true. The best thing

could possibly happen to the conservative movement in this country, or to conservatism, forget the movement in this country, would be a bidding war between the Democrats and the Republicans on who moved to the center most, right? About moving that, Kaching, Overton window, just a bit more to the right, even if it hurt Republicans. Can I just, as a point of clarification, just very quickly. We have an institutional policy against endorsements that I inherited from Bill Crystal when I became the editor of the Weekly Standard. I thought it was a good policy. We adopted it. It remains our policy. We won't be doing endorsements. So there's a there's a difference sort of right there, I think. And so anyway, look, as I put it in my my foray into this, which was brief and

regretful, you wouldn't expect, if you asked a plumber, are you going to vote for Harris or are you going to vote for Trump, and then they say, well, I'm going to vote for Harris. You wouldn't then expect them to only fix toilets in a way that helped Kamala Harris. But there is this weird presumption in our line of work that the second you say who you're going to vote for, you create this expectation that everything you're doing, forget everything that you are doing, everything that you should do should be geared towards helping the candidate you're going to vote for. I don't give a rat's ass who anybody on this podcast is going to vote for. I would give a rat's ass if anybody on this podcast suddenly came out and said,

you know, you shouldn't listen to the economist. Price controls can work, right? That would help Kamala Harris. It would also be a lie. And I just find that the debate about voting, which I think comes from a good faith place, a sincere place, an understandable place, is a massive frigging distraction. from the kind of stuff that at least Steve and I think the dispatch should be doing. Okay, but maybe then there is a real disagreement on how much of a threat Donald Trump is.

Because to my Stalin point, if you think Trump is Stalin and Stalin's going to kill tens of millions of people and Harris believes in price fixing, would you really say, you know, boy, Trump is, Stalin's bad, Harris is bad too. on the whole, I think Stalin's worse. Or would you not say so many bad things about Harris? I would definitely vote for Kamala Harris. All right, first of all, if I was running against Stalin. Yeah, okay. Yes. And second of all, I think I would probably be helping Kamala Harris more

if I were honest about her shortcomings and then just ended every sentence in that regard with, but the other guy is Stalin. That's what I find really interesting, is that the idea that, like, making it sound like Harris holds different positions or better positions than she holds? I don't think helps Harris.

So this is, just to read from Sarah Longwell, this continued back and forth. All your analysis, referring to Steve, simply ignores how dangerous Trump is. Beating him requires making an affirmative case for the alternative. There's no betrayal in that. We are clear where we disagree on policy.

But if you're making an affirmative case for someone, And that's where, I guess this goes back to what I think Harris's answer should be to that question. I think we're in an age right now where people are incredibly cynical about what they hear from politicians, pundits, like this entire class of people who have these hidden agendas and think that the best answer is the one that just gets you where you need to go instead of the honest one. I just think you are more likely to persuade people with the honest, messy, gross answer. I'm not going to ban fracking because then I wouldn't win Pennsylvania, you dumb-dums. Since you brought up Stalin twice now, it gives me an opportunity to go back to this quote I've been using since 2015 with regards to the Trump era. Alexander Soljoneson, not a big fan of Stalin, said, you can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this.

Let the lie come into the world. Let it even triumph, but not through me. If I'm going to get a tattoo, that's my tattoo. I just want to point out, I mean, you know, again, I think people who listen to this podcast regularly probably wouldn't accuse me of underplaying the threat that Donald Trump is. I catch myself because I have said so many times that he's a unique threat to the Republic, that you shouldn't want to reelect somebody who lied about an election in order to steal it to remain in office, that he contributed directly to January 6th. I mean, on and on and on. And those are just the things that I've said since January 6th. I mean, I wrote in 2015 that I wasn't going to vote for them, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think it's just a little silly to make that suggestion. This is my point, Megan. Megan, my point is this is all a little silly because I actually think when you put the correct question to each side, hey, do you think you should lie about Harris's policies to make them sound more conservative than they are? the bulwark folks say no and when you ask the dispatch folks hey do you think you should downplay the threat that Donald Trump is

they say no so if everyone actually had to answer not the sort of fake version of the other side's position where's the actual disagreement well I would say a few things first of all I think that those of us

in the sturdy never Trump remnant are still working through some grief from 2016 and that that can And as in many grieving families sometimes cause us to have arguments that are heated and that reflect not exactly the facts on the ground so much as the fact that like we all lost something and we can't get it back. Second of all, I would say that, look, I grapple with this question a lot because people are always asking me like, how come you say you are going to vote for Kamala Eras and then all you do is criticize Kamala Harris? I'm like, first of all, this is not true. I am saying many bad things about tariffs all the time. They are bad.

I am saying many bad things about Donald Trump all the time. He is bad. But what they feel like is if I, they think it's a lie, right? They think that I am actually pretending to vote for Kamala Harris so that I can get extra cred when I criticize her. And I think what is true is that you are always choosing what your focus is. Even if you're not saying things that aren't true, you choose and I actually have chosen to focus on Kamala Harris. And there's a few reasons for that. Number one, I work for an opinion

section that, like, has to coordinate an entire suite of columns. It isn't that, like, I just write what I want and damn the torpedoes. If seven other columnists are writing columns bashing Trump, I do not need to add my voice on the eighth. The second is, I mean, and this is the thing that actually I do worry about what I think about is, like, I am bored with criticizing Donald Trump, not because he has ceased to be a problem, but because I have said everything. How many times can I say that this man is a barbaric vulgarian with a terminal case of verbal incontinence

who cares for not but himself? I have written that column, I don't know, hundreds of times, and I'm kind of out of new ways to insult him as witness the fact that I just ripped all those insults out of earlier columns. And so I write about Harris because what she is saying, is new. And what Donald Trump is saying is not new, with the exception of a few things like the tip, you know, the no taxes on tipped income, which is a bad policy that she then promptly ripped up. And so I think, but I think that when you're deep in it, and again, I think Jonah is right,

that when you are minded towards elections rather than journalism, right, where you were socialized really matters, less than I think it used to, as you can witness from the many journalists who are kind of vaguely behaving like DNC flags. And it matters how you think of it. And I think of it as my job is to say the thing that is true and matters. My job is not to produce an outcome, in part because, like, we are bad at producing outcomes. The press thought that, like, what it needed to do with Donald Trump was completely lose its mind and do nothing but talk about how terrible he was.

And that didn't work. Donald Trump is still here. We are bad at predicting what the ultimate result of what we say is, but we can be good at like saying the thing that's true. But I think that when you, but look, it's an honest disagreement how, because you don't have to lie to choose to emphasize the stories about how good Kamala Harris is or how bad Kamala Harris is or how bad Trump is, right? Those are all editorial choices that people make. But once you've made them, especially because I think we're all still working through that grief, sometimes you look at other people and you're like, why aren't they making those choices? Are they really on my team? Or are they just pretending so that I won't yell at them? But really secretly, like, they aren't taking the threat as seriously as me or secretly they want Trump elected. And I think you just understand guys, like everyone's, everyone's, you know, got their own journey.

This reminds me of the fight on the pro-life community side between the people who want to ban abortion versus the people who want to emphasize reducing the number of abortions. And it's funny because the fight can get really vitriolic. They're all trying to get to the same place, but you're right, Megan, it's a matter of emphasis. The people who want to ban abortion will accuse someone who doesn't want to ban abortion of being for abortion, even if that person makes the argument that, like, actually, I think the best way to lower number of abortions is not to have a ban, but to do X, Y, and Z and put more money into this and make, you know, persuade people and have a cultural change. And they're like, why don't you

want to overturn Roe? Why don't you want to ban abortion in this state? And of course, what we've seen is that the ban abortion folks have won in a number of states and that overall across the country, the number of abortions has gone up. And I guess that's how I feel about the like focusing on Donald Trump part. I get it. But it hasn't worked. So, Instead of saying that somehow that means I'm secretly for Donald Trump, maybe I'm trying to get to the same place you are, and I just think there's a different, more efficient means to get there. And Steve, I want to read you what Andrew Eggers said the difference was.

For me, the difference between where Steve's coming from and where us bulwark types are coming from is that we look at Harris, quote, now trying to run away from her rhetoric and record, end quote, as a good thing. She's responsive to political stimuli pulling her to the center. The system worked. To which Joan responded, that's exactly what I've been saying, to which Andrew responded.

I think we're all telling the truth as we see it, and I don't think anybody involved would take issues with calls to do so. Three cheers for the truth. And then once again, I have no idea what we're arguing over, when everyone seems, at the end of the day, when actually pushed to their real position to agree, except maybe Megan's position that it's a matter of emphasis. They want to ban abortion, and we want to reduce the number of abortions.

And so, my God, let's get the pitchforks and set them on fire and go attack them. Yeah, see, I think if you actually read Sarah's own words, it is a little more involved with that. I mean, the frustration there, I think, from her, as I understand it, is that we're not doing enough to fight Donald Trump. We're, you know, we may be saying things. I mean, for a while she seemed to deny that, but we may be saying things. We may be making arguments. We're not doing enough. And that is, I think, a difference.

They are doing things. as Jonah said, you know, a number of them are involved in daily politics. Sarah's got a 50 million super PAC to try to keep Donald Trump from being elected. So she has, in a real sense, stepped up and she's doing things. She's being very active about it. I see my role just very differently. And my view is, and, you know, we've had these conversations since the launch of the dispatch. Part of what I think the problem is is partisan journalism.

It's in our manifesto. We talk about it a lot. Most people immediately hear that and point to Fox News for good reason. But partisan journalism could exist on the left or the center left or the never Trump, whatever we are these days. And I think it's a problem here. And I don't think it's necessarily the case that everybody's approaching this stuff with the kind of intellectual honesty that I would like to assume. I would like to agree more with you, Sarah. I would like to think that the people who are making different choices are making different choices because they just are coming at it from a little different angle.

But again, I'll use Joe Scarborough. I mean, you remember Joe Scarborough's famous rant, not long before Joe Biden left the race, saying, F anybody who thinks that Joe Biden isn't the best Joe Biden he is right now. F you, F this, F that. Joe Biden is great. I spent time with him. He's unbelievable. This is the best Joe Biden we've ever had.

Do you think Joe Scarborough really meant that? Or do you think Joe Scarborough was making an argument? because Joe Biden is running against Donald Trump. If he really meant that, based not only on his short conversation with Joe Biden a few months earlier, but everything that we'd seen, I would say he's not a very effective observer of reality because that wasn't the case. But he made that argument anyway. And, you know, I've had this conversation, ironically, a couple of times with Tim Miller

from the bulwark who, these have been great conversations. We did an hour on the bulwark podcast. an hour on the dispatch podcast, getting into all of these sort of thorny difficult issues. And Tim did a really interesting interview with John Lovett, who's part of the crooked media crew, was a speechwriter for Barack Obama. And John talked about as an obviously partisan observer making arguments when it's not making arguments when it's not helpful to the person he's supporting. Obviously, partisans do that. Do partisan journalists do that? My argument is that they do and that it's really bad.

It's not good for our politics. So much better to make the kinds of arguments that Megan makes, which is, man, this Kamala Harris price control policy is awful. I mean, Nick had a whole column about this. He called it terrible policy. He said it would be disastrous, said it was dishonest. And then say, yeah, but you know what? I'm voting for her anyway because she's so much worse or so much better than Donald Trump.

I think that's the point. But let me end by a point of agreement, I think not only with you, Sarah, with Megan, with Sarah Longwell, with these others, you know, for those of us who've been doing this for 10 years and watched the rise of Donald Trump, it has been dispiriting. I mean, Megan talks about, you know, still grieving. I agree with that. It's been dispiriting to watch sort of one after another after another of the people you've read over the years, or in my case, looked up to some think-tank people who I'd viewed as sort of intellectual guideposts, one after another, capitulate to Trumpism for a variety of reasons. Some of them it's money, some of them

it's power. Some of them may have honestly changed their minds about these things. You've watched that for so long that you do begin to look around to see who's going to do it next. And I think that's part of what's happening here is, you know, Sarah Longwell at the bulwark looks around and she's so attentive to who might sell out next for totally understandable reasons, I would ad. And she focused on me and Jonah and made claims that, you know, we're sort of not taking a stand against Trump. Like, I think it's silly on its face, but I understand coming from that context, why she's so alert to the possibility that people who have been sort of making similar arguments to hers might one day flip and not make them anymore. And let me add one thing, though, is that I think

that the reason that I want to aggressively agree with Steve that and Jonah, that I think this is the right way to approach it. And that's that Trump is not going to be around forever, right? He is elderly. He's not going to be running for office again in 20 years. And while I think all of us fear that the things we liked in the Republican Party are gone forever and maybe in the, and indeed in much of the conservative movement are gone forever. That someone needs to be, especially if parties are going to be moving towards the center to reclaim

votes, God willing, that's the problem with strategically choosing only to emphasize the areas of agreement is that like Kamala Harris, while she is moving slightly to the center, is really fairly far to the left. Like, price controls are not a

moderate position. The more you emphasize them, the day after when Trump is gone, Like, what are we doing? What are we fighting for? And the problem with all of that emphasis is that you're kind of losing the muscle. And this is going to be a dumb example. But like, I used to write a lot about finance during the global financial crisis and housing markets and so forth. And the funny thing is that I still remember a bunch of the factoids that I accumulated in 2011. But I don't do that as much anymore. And now when I have to write about it, I have to spend a lot more time researching. I have to think about things. I don't have like. easy theories to hand to write about. And so, like, I think part of emphasizing our areas of disagreement is about retaining that muscle for the glorious day when Trump retires from the scene to treat his bone spurs, like, nurture his grandchildren, and enjoy his golfing vacations. I think... Maybe we need to start one of those churches where you just keep writing the

date that the world's going to end on the board? And then like each time you prepare for that and it doesn't happen, you just like write a new date on the board. And I think that worked out really well for them. So look, this week I wanted to focus on this intra not voting for Trump conservative fight. But next week I want to focus on the reverse, which is the argument between it is better for conservatism to have Harris in the White House do crazy liberal stuff. and kind of prove the point the same way that it was good for liberalism to have Donald Trump in the White House, frankly.

The liberal movement was able to raise more money, elect more candidates, all because of a backlash against Donald Trump, okay, argument one side, versus Trump Trump may not be as conservative as you want, but he's still more conservative than Harris. He will still do more conservative things than Harris will do, even on abortion, even on, you know,

you don't like tariffs, price fixing is worse. And so I want to talk about that divide as well and that argument on the conservative, but for true policy conservatives, right? We talked about the fight over not voting for Trump. Next time I want to talk about the fight voting for Trump. Thanks for joining us, Megan. Thanks for having me, Sarah. Bye, Steve.

Bye, Steve. Don't do it, Megan. Perfect. Don't you dare, not right in front of me. I'm that betrayer girl in a nice goal. I'll absolutely like, a minute there's a boy in the room, just head turns. Our bonus content today will be Steve explaining what he thought the word fluff means and what he now has learned that it means.

I mean, can't things have two meanings? I didn't, I genuinely did not know the meaning that you seem to be more familiar with, Sarah. I went to college, Steve. Did you learn that in college? I'm older than you. They didn't teach that in art. Our freshman seminars. I also went to, I went to college too.

I didn't attend classes, which might have had something to do with it. We didn't learn it in class, Megan, Jesus. I think we can agree that my use of fluffing contributed to the confusion. And I will own that and say, I apologize. I didn't, I didn't know that I was doing it, but obviously contributed to the confusion. I tried to clarify how I saw the word when it was apparent. that other people were interpreting it in different ways. Well, look, like Jonah said, he said there was another meaning,

fluffing a pillow to which I would say to Jonah, nope, same meaning, Jonah, just a different context. And with that, thank you, dear listeners, dear members, but mostly dear makeup. You know what I'm going to do.