The Dispatch Podcast - Blame the Voters? | Roundtable

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

It’s officially an election year, and Donald Trump seems to be running away with the Republican nomination. Morose and resigned, Sarah, Steve, and Jonah discuss: —Steve and Sarah’s ‘high steaks’ 2024 election bet; —Jonah’s campaign advice to GOP candidates; —Claudine Gay’s plagiarism; and —What a certain former Trump administration official thinks isn’t worth your time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgar and I've got Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes. I almost called you Jonah Hayes. I don't know what's going on today. It's a new year and, you know, when you have children, right? That break is not a break. That break is the hard part of the year. So I'm back. I'm sleep deprived. I'm all the things. And, uh, you know, we're heading into the Iowa caucus. Steve, where are we? Yeah, I mean, it's here, right? We've been talking about this for not only many months, but really several years. And we're going to have people caucusing within the next two weeks. I mean, I think, you know, and we can sort of set aside discussion of our bet for now. Sarah, we'll, you know, we'll revisit that. some point. Over stakes. Yeah, the bet about who's going to be the nominees of the respective

parties. I think it's fair to say that Donald Trump has consolidated his position as the sort of runaway front runner in the Republican field. It doesn't mean that we couldn't see some surprise, that there might be underlying support for Nikki Haley, that, you know, you can, if you squint, see how she overperforms and comes in second in Iowa and then really surprises in New Hampshire. But then even in her own home state of South Carolina, you know, Donald Trump is awfully popular there. And at least right now, Nikki Haley looks less popular. You know, I think if there were a result, whether it was in Iowa or New Hampshire, where Donald Trump looked vulnerable, it's not crazy to think that this thing could get. scrambled. But certainly if you were making a bet today, you would bet that Trump just trounces

the field and is the Republican nominee. The telling details came this week, not in Iowa and New Hampshire, in my view, but back in Washington, where you have had a series of Republicans, some of them skeptical of Trump in the past, some of them who have warred with Trump as recently as just a couple months ago endorsing Trump for president. And, you know, they seem to want to be on what they believe is the winning side here. And, you know, notwithstanding what they said about January 6th and his fitness for office and Trump leaving the stage and all of these things that seemed to matter three years ago this month. They don't seem to matter much.

So, Jonah, what was it all for? Like, rather than looking forward, because I think Steve's right about that, like, yes, there's some possible, like, no, nothing's over till it's over. But look, I mean, as I'm looking at this, the polling would have to be incredibly far off. Nikki Haley, even overperforming in Iowa,

even winning Iowa. Donald Trump has already said that if anyone beats him, cheated, right, that like the whole thing's rigged. And even if she legitimately wins New Hampshire, they're going to say that it's because Democrats voted for her. That's going to hurt her from that point forward. And even if she wins Iowa, she wins New Hampshire, she wins South Carolina.

Super Tuesday is such a firewall for a candidate who's ahead nationally because you can't really do retail politics in advance of Super Tuesday. It's basically a quasi-national primary election. Yeah. Yes, fair enough. Look, I agree. It looks like it's going to be Trump. It's very real, very difficult to.

It's easy to come up with a bunch of scenarios where it's not Trump. It's just not easy at all to come up with a bunch of scenarios where, that are likely. Right. That said, I do think you give short shrift in your death rattle moan there to what is actually the historic case, which is that if you. Now, first of all, if you get the first three wins, votes switch really quickly, right? Which is to say that mass psychology tends to move en masse. And it's why I keep bringing up Howard Dean thing in Iowa in 2004.

Everyone thought that was a lock. And then something happened in the room, in the caucus rooms in Iowa, and they voted for Kerry instead. And Dean, who had been the runaway, he was 19 points ahead nationally. he was ahead in almost every state, ended up only winning Vermont in D.C. And that was it is because people would just sort of move together. But that's a rule for normal times, right? And I like a scenario like in the man who would be king

where they, Sean Connery cuts his hand and behold a God who bleeds and all of a sudden everyone changes their mind about it, right? Like it would be great if there was some, you know, like seen from face in the crowd where, you know, in the face of crowd, which is I think probably the best movie for understanding Trumpism. Andy Griffith has a bad open mic moment and it destroys him. The problem with Trump is all his open mic moments are in the public eye and people forgive all of them. And so I don't know what revelation you could have about Trump that would change that mass psychology.

So yeah, I think he's going to be the guy. And what was it all for? I just want to do some like backward facing could this have ever turned out differently? Were there choices along the way? Because otherwise, this has all been really pointless if this was inevitable. If there's nothing that any of these candidates could have done differently.

I'll start with that. I think if you look back, there was a time where it seemed perfectly rational that DeSantis, that Trump's odor was so bad, 2022 was bad, people, the results for Republicans were so bad that people are like, this guy, it was finally dawning on people that he was poisoned.

I think if you just do the post-mortem on all of it or the premortem at this point, point, it was the brag indictment that changed the mass psychology of it. It was like, how dare you? This is the first indictment out of New York, the one that hasn't gone anywhere since. Right. Which was a purely selfish, political, dumb thing to do. Even though I think Trump is completely guilty of the basics of what he's been charged with. It was just the Trump law. It was the kind of thing that shouldn't have been brought. It, it, but what it really did was it tainted the jury pool among Republicans to say attacks on Trump is being persecuted and

and victimized. It caused people to rally around them. And I think, just to be clear, it's an incredibly dumb reason to rally around a bad candidate. You know, as I put it in my column yesterday, you know, Richard Jule, the falsely accused, the guy who was falsely accused of bombing the Atlanta Olympics, he was really railroaded by the federal government and by the FBI and got a really raw deal. That doesn't mean he should have been nominated as the GOP candidate for President of the United States. I mean, like, just because you're getting picked on doesn't mean you should be the candidate. Yeah, but in fairness, Jonah, this goes the other way, right?

Richard Jewell was picked on for, you know, reasons, but no reasons having to do with his politics. Donald Trump was indicted in New York because he was going to run for president because of the political environment. So it is different and why people rally around him politically. It's different in a lot of different ways. I mean, Donald Trump is a former president. and Richard Jewell was a part-time security guard.

I agree. It's the analogy only goes so far. That said, no, Jonah, I'm going to make you stick with it for the rest of the podcast. We're going to talk about the differences between Donald Trump and Richard Jewell. It's similar waistlines. No, but like, so I think the, this sort of victim martyr thing is just wildly powerful on the right. For, again, I think really stupid reasons. And I think that poisoned the well on all future indictments.

So, like, it's an interesting question. What if you did it? What if the first indictment was a narrowly tailored one from Jack Smith on the classified documents? Would that have been different? Maybe, maybe not. But I think that's the, that is the basic story is how Trump turned it around. And it's what's sustaining him now as well, I think, to a large extent. So there was nothing Republicans could have done.

There was a lot of stuff that Democrats could have not done. But that's a hard thing to get them to, you know, buy in on that kind of reasoning. I mean, I'm not sure there's nothing Republicans could have done. It depends when you, when you want to start the discussion. Certainly, as I think as we've all said, Republicans, I think largely because of political cowardice, whiffed on the opportunity to end Donald Trump after January 6th. The House moved rather quickly, pushed the impeachment, voted on impeachment, and then the Senate, led by Republicans, took a pass.

And, you know, I suspect if you were. to ask Mitch McConnell and some of the others today if they would have behaved differently knowing, you know, then what we know now, I suspect most of them would say yes. It would have required more courage than they have shown really at any point. But that was on Republicans. Republicans totally punted that. And the reason that we still have Donald Trump here is because Republicans didn't do what they should have done in January and February of 2021.

Okay, so the footnote to that asterisk is, yeah, but we talked about this at the time that Nancy Pelosi did delay the impeachment after January 6th for two weeks, not inexplicably, inexplicably if you actually wanted to stop Donald Trump, very explicably if it was a political move that had no interest in actually stopping Donald Trump, but had an interest in forcing Republicans to team up with Donald Trump, i.e. she very much created an environment in which it appeared that her political goal, her priority rather, was to like screw over Republicans in the midterms. And again, to Jonah's

point, it's still Republicans' fault for teaming up with Donald Trump. But she knew what she was doing. and when Republicans had offered to draft articles of impeachment, she didn't have any Republicans involved and instead created this very broad impeachment. It wasn't actually January 6th that he was impeached for, and I feel like people call it the January 6th impeachment, and it's just not accurate as far as why it failed so spectacularly with Republicans, because when you actually go read it,

to vote to convict on that would be to vote to convict them, because it went back to behavior he had before the election, things he said in speeches before then, and they had endorsed him. So if they impeached him for things he said before the election, when they had endorsed him, how was that going to work out? And Nancy Pelosi knew that, and it gets to my, a similar frustration with Democrats, you know, Chuck Schumer at all, putting money into Republican primaries to support the MAGA candidate. This is the same thing. it does not absolve Republican primary voters from voting for the MAGA candidate or from supporting Donald Trump or Republican senators from not voting to impeach him. I don't mean any of that.

But don't absolve the other side either because that's what they were moving their chess pieces to do as well. So yeah, I agree with you to a certain extent. I mean, I don't think you can argue that this was sort of delayed forever, right? The resolution was introduced on January 11th. They voted on the 13th. That's within a week of the actual offenses. I take your argument that it was cast pretty broadly, although the language in the actual articles of impeachment was very close to the language in the censure, a document that was being offered by Republicans at the time. So Republicans were sort of in the same place. But I take your point on Nancy Pelosi, and yeah, you're right. We talked about it at the time. But Steve, can I ask you a counterfactual?

sure if the articles of impeachment article of impeachment coming out of january 6th was brought on january 8th i mean i'll give them some days january 8th and it was on dereliction of duty on january 6th failure to protect the u.s capital do you think it would have been different and i'm totally open to the answer being no by the way yeah i don't know i mean yeah i i think in the moment, you know, that came when you still had, you know, the, they were having to grapple with what had just happened. So yeah, I mean, I think the faster they could have done it, the better. But think about the things that Republicans were saying, you know, when they cast votes on impeachment in the House on the 13th. And frankly, when they were giving speeches when sent

Republican senators were giving speeches condemning Trump weeks after that. I mean, they were still offering these harsh condemnations of Trump, including people like Lindsey Graham, who, you know, said his relationship with Trump, you know, his support for Trump was over. He'd been on this ride and now it was done. You also had a lot of Republicans at the time, particularly again in the Senate, I think Republicans looking for a way to avoid voting to convict. but to still be on what I think they thought then,

I believe today, was put them on the right side of history. They talked about holding Donald Trump criminally accountable, right? I mean, this was what Marco Rubio said in his speech. He's considerably less enthusiastic about that today, I would note, as are lots of the other Republicans who said, hey, basically, we can't do this because the timing isn't right. We can't impeach somebody who's out of office.

doesn't work for all these, these reasons, most of which I think were nonsense. Let's see how the courts handle us. Let's see how the legal system handles. And now they're opposed to that as well. So I'm going to interject here. And first of all, say, I think this conversation is poorly timed. Because the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries haven't happened yet. And if what we think is going to happen happens, then that's a perfect time to say, where did we go wrong or how did this happen because we're going to have to do it again in a couple weeks anyway and second of all we like when I answered the question originally I was talking about in the in the in the in the political sphere of the primaries right if we're going to do the

why don't we have a time machine and go back and strangle baby Hitler kind of conversation I mean we can pick all sorts of moments where the right screwed up in and throwing their hat in with this guy. And then, I mean, the number of exit ramps there have been is very large. And I just think that, look, I still think there is a chance that the psychology of the right breaks somehow, and Trump isn't the nominee. It's just that you can't make the wish the father of the thought here. And I just don't have a great scenario where I say, okay, and this is how it's going to happen.

But I think I am more open to that possibility than most people, including you guys. Yeah, I was reacting to your point that this was largely the fault of the Democrats, unless I was misunderstanding what you said. I mean, you pointed to the Alvin Bragg indictment. Yeah, I'm just talking about in the political, in the primaries, there wasn't, Republicans didn't indict Trump. Right. I don't think that DeSantis or Haley or any of those guys, once those decisions were made, those exogenous

decisions were made to indict Trump. And I'm willing to defend a lot of indictments, just not the brag one. There was no argument that was going to work because they couldn't, the brag one was so bad. They couldn't condemn. They couldn't. They could. I don't agree with you. Yeah, I don't agree with you.

I think they deserve a lot of blame. I think DeSantis deserves blame for not taking advantage, for not actually making an argument and taking on Trump when he was seen as the Trump alternative. He chickened out. He didn't want to do it. They came up with a strategy for winning the Republican primary, which I think was, I thought was crazy at the time. It certainly looks crazy in retrospect, where he was going to try to peel off a small percentage of the Trumpy base, the Trump's hardcore supporters, and then win over everybody else. I guess by showing that Donald Trump was was defeatable, was vulnerable.

It's unclear. Then the indictments come. I agree with you entirely on the album brag indictment. I don't think that because there was one bad political indictment, Republicans were then incapable of critiquing Donald Trump for his behavior on all of these other indictments. I mean, certainly, I think the Bragg indictment complicates their case. But why couldn't they have said, boy, this Alvin Bragg indictment seems to be a massive overreach and concerns about politicization of law enforcement, of legal proceedings. proceedings is a legitimate concern. But look at the evidence here on the classified documents thing. We have videos. We have photos. These are serious things. Nikki Haley could have invoked her time

dealing in classified information as UN ambassador, as ambassador to the UN. Ron DeSantis could have talked about his time serving in the U.S. military and the need to protect secrets. They chose to do none of this because they were weak and they were cowards. They didn't want make an argument. And I think we're living with the consequences of that to this day. I don't think that was a silver bullet. I don't think you say, okay, if these, if only they had done this, this would have inevitably led to Donald Trump being unseated. And I think you're, you're right that there was a sort of rallying around Trump effect that took place after the brag indictment. But I also don't think that the brag indictment itself made it made it a foregone.

I just think they all had focus group data and polling data and real world empirical data that said you can't do this and they listened to it and the fact that Chris Christie has done pretty much what we would like all of them to have done and he's the most unpopular Republican in the Republican Party to me suggests that like your way might have this is a point Sarah's made a bunch of times. You can have the best. smartest, most correct strategy possible, and it still may not be adequate to changing things. And I think that we have a healthy, most people have this sort of healthy desire or inclination or instinct not to blame voters themselves. And I just think voters deserve

a good share of the blame here. Yeah, I agree with that. And that these guys were going with, you know, the politicians by their nature think the customer is always right. And or at least the customer needs to be led to believe that they're right. And they acted on it. And that's why we're here. I mean, I guess, yeah, I guess last point now shut up about this. There was also public information that suggested that Trump was vulnerable. I mean, you know, we've talked here about the polling by Anne Seltzer in Iowa, by NBC News more broadly, that you had a Republican electorate that was, again, depending on the poll.

70 plus percent of them were willing to support candidates other than Donald Trump. My argument is those candidates didn't really give those voters much of a reason to support anybody other than Donald Trump because they just amplified Trump's arguments. But that's also the kind of thing voters just say, right? You know, you ask people, do you have an open mind? Well, yes, I do. And that doesn't mean they actually do. It's like a social desirability response.

But anyway, we can debate this a lot because we're going to be. living with the consequences all this for a long time. We visited the ghost of Christmas present, the ghost of Christmas past. Now I want to do the ghost of Christmas future, but only the next two three weeks future. What can DeSantis and Haley do to change

any of this? And don't all talk at once with your great ideas. I spoke a lot last time, Jonah. Why don't you take this question? I don't know. I mean, I could spitball. I mean, this is why I hate getting calls from politicians saying,

what do you think I should do? It's because I don't want to be in that position to tell you what to do. I think Haley could orchestrate some sort of back channel thing to get Christie to drop out an endorser. I think that would almost lock her to win the New Hampshire primary. If I were Ron DeSantis, I would be calling the people who handle my ground game and saying, how's it going?

How's it going? every 15 minutes. I do think that a lot of Trump voters may not, I think there's like a good 30% to Trump's lead, not 30 points, but 30% of his lead is among voters who are not going to show up at the Iowa caucuses, right? Who are not going to go out in the cold and sit there.

He is so top-heavy with low propensity voters that I think there's margin there for DeSantis to do better if they're really organized. But I don't have any sort of like, here are the 10 magic words that one of these people can say. So, Steve, I'm going to make your question easier,

which is if DeSantis, Christy, Vivek, if everyone dropped out today, would Haley win? And vice versa. If Haley, like, if everyone dropped out, like, is there any prisoner's dilemma

version of this where it makes a difference if everyone dropped out? And that, I think, is incredibly unlikely. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think a lot of DeSanta supporters would go to Trump. There's polling that suggests as much.

Christy has, he's now running ads declaring that he won't drop out. So I think the likelihood of him dropping out is slim to none. You know, I'm with Jonah on the question, I mean, the possibility that you see something in these results and it shakes. up the race. We've seen this. That would not be unprecedented. A comeback of this. Wait, wait, what do you mean? No, not involving Trump. You just mean we've seen it in our lifetime in politics. Right. Sure. Yeah. I mean, this stuff can get really jumbled. There are often surprises. I mean, look at Rick Santorum in Iowa in 2012. You know, you can have. Rick Santorum wasn't declared the winner until two weeks later.

Yeah, but if you look at where he was a month out and where he ended up, I don't remember the exact number. but I think it was like 4% to 26% or something. You can, surprises are not unheard of. So I think we should be open to surprises, both in the context of the Republican primary and certainly in the context of the next year. Part of the reason that people were so stunned by what happened in 2016 was a failure of imagination.

We should not repeat the failure of imagination. And I think people in our line of business should be humble about our ability to make straight-line projections. Having said that. So wait, just before you say that, I think that's really, really fair. All of that is true. But I also think that if any of that happened, we would regardless have to acknowledge it was a huge surprise. And anyone who's like, I knew this would happen, is also going to sound not real.

For sure. And I think that happened also in 2016. You had people who, you know, who said in passing in one, sentence out of a 10-minute monologue, like, don't write off Trump, right? And they're like, I predicted Trump was going to win. And most of them did not. No, I mean, look around today and look for the person who's saying Trump is going down. They don't exist. That's not happening. You don't have people making that claim. I just think we should be, things can move quickly. And, you know, certainly given the speed of information and the speed of our politics today, this sort of

the group dynamics in the information age are very different than they were in, you know, even in the late 90s or early odds. So having said all of that, it's very hard for me to imagine a scenario, including the one that you present as a hypothetical, where Nikki Haley wins and then keeps winning. Trump is very popular in these other places. You know, I think the big question. He's going to say she cheated. He's going to say Democrats supported her. Look, she's not going to cheat.

I have no real concerns about the integrity of these elections. But if she does win New Hampshire, it certainly will be because independence voted for Nikki Haley. They're not going to vote for Donald Trump percentage wise. I don't mean no independence will. So there'll be some truth to that. And I don't know how she gets around that. Yeah, I mean, I think she would, she would and should say, we, you know, we Republicans need to win in November. And the way to win in November is to win independence. And we've already seen, look at 2020, look at 2022. Donald Trump can't win independence. They can't stand him. I can win them. I'm, you know, there's a good argument for her to make. And I'm open to the possibility.

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away, New Hampshire primary. So that's 6 p.m. in Concord, New Hampshire. If you're a member of the dispatch, you should have already gotten an email about this. But yeah, check that all out. All right. Next topic. Yeah, we're going to talk about Harvard. So if you've been living under a rock, which I kind of hope you have then, because it's been the holidays. And while New Year's is a dumb holiday, it is nevertheless a holiday. So here's what's happened. There was a massive attack in Israel on October 7th, a lot of universities had anti-Semitic pro-Palestinian events on their campuses. They were then called to Congress to testify. The presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn showed up.

It was catastrophic. They were unable or unwilling to say that calls for genocide on their campus would violate their policies. Fast forward, the president of Penn is pushed to resign. the president of Harvard, they make very clear, is not going to resign over the congressional testimony. Right-wing news outlets, including reporter Aaron Sabarium at the Free Beacon, at that point, publishes evidence of plagiarism

in her past scholarship and going back decades. I believe in the end, there were 47 instances of plagiarism. Chris Rufo, a right-wing activist, really pushes this on social media, et cetera. I believe, actually, it was the New York Post, who was the first out of the gate with any of these stories. And they were asking about plagiarism

before even the congressional testimony, but after events on Harvard's campus that had made a lot of news related to Israel and Gaza. And drumroll, the president of Harvard resigned just a couple days ago. So given that, there has been so much conversation about this, including a New York Times op-ed from Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard herself.

So why are we talking about Harvard, Steve? Well, mostly so that you can point out to people that you went to law school there. I think that's the main reason. Well, I went to a little school outside of Boston. That's right. That's right. Usually within the first paragraph or two, we get that. As someone who went to Harvard.

No, I think there are reasons to talk about this because I don't think it's, I mean, it is about Harvard, of course, it's about Harvard. But, you know, as Claudia and Gay herself argued in the, New York Times yesterday, as Christopher Rufo, who's on a, on a PR tour taking credit for her downfall is arguing, it's about Harvard, but it's about a lot more than Harvard. I would say, I mean, Jonas G-File yesterday about this, which we will link to, is very much worth reading on this. It's the reason we're talking about it and the reason it's about a lot more than just Harvard is because of how various institutions at the center of this, including

Harvard, but well beyond Harvard, have behaved. And the likely lasting damage to those institutions to people's trust in those institutions will be. And, you know, I'm thinking of academia in general, where, for sort of for starters and journalism, too. And I'll focus on on journalism, because it's where I'm most frustrated right now. You have had journalists openly making the argument that the charges against Claudine Gay, the plagiarism charges, which are down in black and white,

there for anybody to see, shouldn't be taken seriously, maybe shouldn't even be covered because the people who are publicizing them are doing so as part of a campaign to change higher education. And they point in particular to Christopher Rufo. It's a horrible argument. It's bad for journalism.

The fact that we have people making it explicitly, there was a prominent writer for Vox, who's made this argument. There are folks at MSNBC who have made versions of this argument. There's a woman at the New York Times op. page editorial board member who've made versions of of this argument. And, you know, I think this episode collectively is likely to take what little trust people have remaining in journalism and incinerate it. Right. It's not the case that you can just ignore the substance of

the claims here because you don't like the people who have made the claims. And on the substance of the complaints and the substance of the charges against Claudine Gay, she's clearly, demonstrably, provably guilty of plagiarism. There's no question about that. There's not really much gray area here. She did what she's accused of having done. She didn't own up to it right away. She and Harvard on her behalf tried to downplay it, tried to avoid this outcome.

And they failed, and they failed. largely on the basis of the claims themselves, on the basis of the facts behind the claims themselves. And there's a Washington Post article out today that walks people through, that purports to walk people through what's happened here. The article goes through the chronology of what happened and has literally one sentence about,

the plagiarism charges. It's all about the political back and forth, and it's all about the arguments that conservatives have made, about everything except for what I think is the reason that Claudine Gay had to step down. Jonah, again, there have been complaints, for instance, not only why are we talking about Harvard, but we've talked about Harvard for four weeks. Look at all these other stories that didn't get this kind of attention. So I ask you again, why are we talking about Harvard still? Yeah, I mean, I'm somewhat sympathetic to that. Someone posted something in Slack earlier

some guy complaining that the Trump administration losing this massive classified folder of documents about Russia interference in America was a 12-hour story, but the Harvard plagiarism thing is a 12-week or 12-day story or whatever. I think there's some merit to that, right? But there's always a case

where there's other important stories that aren't being covered enough. The affirmative case for talking about this is that, first of all, this didn't start as a Harvard story. This started as a higher education, elite higher education story because you had leaders of, was it, four of the top universities in this country, testifying before Congress

and basically offering these mealy-mouth, legalistic, smarmy, condescending, smirking answers about whether or not there was any contradiction between their school's values and calling for genocide of Jews. And the reason why that really mattered

was that these places are essentially you know, if the old Rust Belt was the heart of the automotive industry, Those schools are the rust belt of DEI. And if DEI cannot deal in a straightforward, if DEI cannot extend its principles about how speech is violence and you can't cause harm and you have to be inclusive and all that kind of stuff,

but it has a carve out, as we've discussed many times, for harassment of Jews and calling for the genocide of Jews, then DEI is just a fraud, right? Right. And so it was their answers on that that put them on a path, which got, admittedly, some activists types like Chris Rufo. I'm not a huge fan of Chris Rufo. I disagree with them on a lot of sort of stylistic, tonal kind of things. But he did not go back in time and cause Claudine Gay to plagiarize. And the simple fact is that once you find out about the plagiarism, you have to take the plagiarism. You have to take the plagiarism. seriously. And then I think it becomes a story worth discussing on the merits because of the determination of so many other elite institutions, including a lot of journalistic institutions, to circle the wagon around this woman. And to change, you know, it is so weird. We are constantly hectored by ideological commissars that you need to hire

for the sake of diversity, that hiring, that diversity is a major qualification. In some cases, it's more important than quote unquote merit, right? And there's this whole war on the concept of meritocracy and the concept of merit and that diversity is a, is, is, is as important to qualification as, as specific skills and knowledge set. And I'm open to some of that at the margins and all that. But then you say, and the argument is that there are no tradeoffs when hiring for diversity. And then you celebrate hiring this woman for the sake of, in part because of the sake of diversity, and everyone's enraged by the mere suggestion that she was a diversity hire. And then they're enraged by the suggestion that the standards that you claim she cleared

should actually be applied to her in an intellectually consistent way. And so I think what is revealing about it is this sort of self-serving, almost public choice theory way in which elites, progressive elites, particularly in higher education and in journalism, are really just protecting their food bowls more than they are making any sort of

principled serious kind of argument. And just to touch quickly back on the journalism thing for just two seconds, I had my say in the GFI about all this. I talked to Yvall Levin a little bit about this on the remnant, but I keep hearing people saying

allegations of plagiarism. Right. And I hear it on NPR. I read it in the lot of New York Times. I hear it on cable news. We all know a lot of journalists, a lot of the journalists, and including editors, right? Most of them do not have a lot of expertise in cold fusion or marine biology, right? They got to go ask experts. We do it all the time here at the dispatch when we don't know about something is we go ask people who know what they're talking about what to think about something, right? That's the basic big part of the job of journalistic explain. and whatnot. You know what editors know a lot about? Plagiarism. There are these manuals. I mean, Steve, I don't know if Columbia Journalism School actually teaches about anything that

actually matters, but I presume that there was talk about plagiarism. Like every style guide, every major media outlet in this country has internal rules and standards by which they use to judge whether something is plagiarism or not. And yet all of these, These media outlets are just sort of like allegations of plagiarism, suggestions of plagiarism. Like, go look at it yourself for frickin' sake and figure out whether you think it's plagiarism. We had this immense conversation in this country for years about whether it was okay to say Donald Trump is a liar in print, right? Whether you could use the word lie. And the self-enointed journalists, I think rightly said, yes, we can.

We can use our critical faculties and we can decide whether something is the truth or not the truth. And if it's not the truth, we can call it a lie and blah, blah, blah, blah. Fine. You made that decision, bully for you, your heroes. You can use the same gray matter to address the question of plagiarism. It's like your freaking jobs. It's like, anyway, it's my rant, but I hate it. It drives me crazy. But I think it's really important. Blah, blah. Hold on. I just want to note for anyone listening to this podcast who comes to it to find out what happened in the news this week, the president of Harvard resigned. And we haven't actually said that. So to back up, perhaps, there's this catastrophic congressional hearing

testimony. The president of Penn is pushed out. Then the president of Harvard is clearly not going to be pushed out for what she said at the congressional hearing. That's when conservative news outlets go look at her past scholarship and find 47 examples of duplicative material, as has now have been called, which some would like to call plagiarism. To me, that's the difference, Jonah, between things that are not true versus calling something a lie. There's no question that it's duplicative material. The word plagiarism has some other connotations with it.

I'm happy to call it plagiarism on this podcast, but it's 100%. There's just no question. It is duplicative of other people's work that came before hers that was not cited. But Steve, like, isn't it part of this story that the right-wing media, atmosphere was the one that found this? And that can be good or bad, for instance. Why wasn't anyone else looking into this? Why was it required to come from the right when, you know, whenever anyone else becomes famous,

we dig into everything they've ever said on social media and then we find out some horrible thing in their past. It's like a meme, a joke at this point. Nobody in the mainstream media was looking into any of her scholarship? Yeah, apparently not. Look, I think it can be part of the story. that this was pushed by, you know, conservatives, some conservative activists did reporting on this, include that as part of the story.

But it's not the central piece of the story, and it's certainly not the reason that she resigned. I mean, if it were just the case that a bunch of angry conservative opinion mongers were throwing around evidence-free claims about Claudine Gay, Harvard is not caving here. The point, the reason she had to resign was because some of these outlets, in particular, the Washington Free Beacon and the reporter Aaron Sabirium, did a lot of investigative work and came up with the examples of plagiarism. That's what made Harvard's position untenable.

They couldn't simply dismiss this as angry claims from right-wingers. They had to contend with the fact that she plagiarized repeatedly and that their own, you know, certainly the rules that they have for students against plagiarism would have gotten her in trouble. The rules for faculty are a little bit more convoluted, but clearly she was guilty of plagiarism. it's that central fact that matters most. And I think Washington Free Beacon and Aaron Sebarium deserve a ton of credit for the actual reporting here. That's what did her in is the reporting. I think it's fair to ask why these other outlets didn't do the reporting, particularly when some of this was known and seen, you know, people who have places that have, in some cases, multiple higher education beat reporters, did.

and do this. And as Jonas said earlier, too often wrote stories that sort of glancingly touched on the claims at the heart of this story in order to right circle the wagons pieces. I mean, if you're writing a story that runs in today's paper and it claims that this is really all about a political campaign and there are allegations of plagiarism at this point, honestly, I think, that is engaging in misinformation. You're peddling bullshit. This is not what happened. There's a Washington Post piece that ran today extraordinarily long.

I would call it comprehensive, but it's not. It pretends to be comprehensive. And after some throat clearing at the top about the political views of the people who most forcefully made these charges, I just want to read this paragraph. It's in journalism at J school, we would have called this the nut graph. It's the paragraph, usually three, four, five paragraphs into a story that's supposed to say, hey, this is what it's all about. This is the brief nut graph in this Washington Post story today.

The downfall of gay was tied to multiple controversies. Amid sharp debate over Israel's war in Gaza and rising anti-Semitism on college campuses, gay and other college leaders appeared before Congress where they declined to state plainly that a call for genocide against Jews would violate their university's code of conduct. Those comments upset people from both parties. Then came allegations of plagiarism against gay, which were publicized by conservative activists. I sh-you-not. That is the only discussion of plagiarism in the entire piece.

That's it. So the way that anybody who reads this in the Washington Post leaves this story about this controversy, believing that there are just allegations about plagiarism, that they were pushed by conservative activists, and then the entire rest of the story is about the politics of the campaign against gay. They don't even give you examples of the substance, of the evidence that these people that this reporting brought against gay that made Harvard's position untenable. That is just not journalism.

I'm sorry. It's not journalism. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and stuff. style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your site and email campaigns to stay connected

with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. 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. Okay, but I feel like if you're listening to this podcast, you probably tend to agree, A, that she plagiarized this stuff and B, that that is incompatible with being the president of Harvard University. But if it were simply a story of even the Harvard president,

plagiarizing and getting fired it would not be the national story and it certainly wouldn't make this podcast and we have evidence of that because the Stanford president was pushed out for the exact same thing and we didn't talk about it on this podcast which means there

there is something else going on here there's this cultural moment where Jonah to your G-file point those on the left are doubling down on gay for some reason there's a reason that race has been inserted into this in such a loud way, I think, you know, and there's a reason we're not talking about the MIT

president, for instance, who was also in that congressional hearing also gave a not great answer. Nobody's going through her papers. Now, maybe they have gone through her papers and shouldn't plagiarize anything, which is another problem with this whole thing is like, well, maybe they've gone through Ben Sass's papers too. Who knows? But the cultural moment isn't about plagiarism. It just isn't and like i take your point steve but like the washington post actually is probably being more accurate in a sense about why this is a news story definitely not definitely not being more accurate just register my disagreement we're not talking about it over because we're all debating whether it's plagiarism we're not they're not the left isn't debating really whether this is

plagiarism they're debating whether she should have been fired for because it was a pretense to fire her and because it was really about firing her over race or really about firing her because of DEI or really firing her over free speech on college campuses or a million other things. Or whether it matters the motives of the person who exposes the wrongdoing. And Jonah, this was, of course, my favorite part of your G-File

where you sort of give the example of what the headlines might have looked like if we redid Mark Felt. Mark Felt being not a good guy who wasn't deep throat for the good of the country. Nobody actually really liked him. And so, you know, you have a whole different version of Watergate where really ambitious asshole

claims Nixon did some bad stuff. And the focus becomes on Mark Felt and not on Nixon. Well, I think that's actually the most apt analogy to what's going on right now. Because nobody denies that Nixon did the bad thing. Nobody denies the plagiarism thing. And then it's a question of, okay, but do you stand by Nixon anyway? because the person who's accusing

or who has discovered the bad thing, not accused to your point, Steve, but discovered the bad thing is himself bad or has bad motives or you don't want to be associated with. Yeah, and I think this just this gets at the sort of tribal nature of our lives

right now where people just cannot concede a loss if it means everything's this sort of binary zero something. If my side loses the other side wins, and it's even doubly painful if my side's loss is the result of actions taken by the other side. And I find that this obsession with sides really, really poisonous and

corrupting. You know, my friend Charlie Cook, he hates the Al Capone case where they couldn't get him on murder, so they went and found out that he cheated on his taxes. And that's what got sent to jail for. And I cannot stress enough. how little sympathy I have for Al Capone in this regard. I just don't care, right? If he broke the law, he broke the law. And with Claudine Gay, I'm a big believer if you go looking for trouble.

When you find it, you can't complain necessarily about the nature of the trouble you found. But doesn't that sound like cancel culture? Someone finds himself in a position of fame beyond what they had been in before. And so then everyone digs through everything about them and finds something that the person has done wrong in their life.

And then we ruin their life over it. I'm simply like to that, and I actually don't think that like plagiarism, I mean, the scale plagiarism for the president of Harvard is a different issue, right? You know, but like in general, I'm kind of like a, you get one and a half strikes and then if you learn your lesson and you never do it again, it shouldn't be end of your career, right? But you're on notice that if you ever do it again, you're done, right? And I think there should be a higher standard for tenured professors at Harvard or the president. president of a university. My only point is is that I have no problem with sort of second and third day stories about Chris Rufo and why conservatives went after Claudine Gay and yada, yada, yeah, those kinds of stories exist. I very rarely hear those stories about the left

going after right-wing figures. I mean, like, where are the equivalent stories about all of the stories about Clarence Thomas, right? The effort to sort of topple Clarence Thomas. You know, the Southern Poverty Law Center is not a neutral player in a lot of the stories where it's always quoted as a neutral authority on things. I think the ethic stuff on Clarence Thomas is just worth underlining because there's so many parallels. The purpose of highlighting the ethical failures of Clarence Thomas is because they hate Clarence Thomas and because they wanted to undermine the institution of the Supreme Court because it's not helping their side of the culture war. Those are just absolutely true. And that is exactly what's happened here. They're

going after Claudian Gay because they hate her. And because institutions of higher education like Harvard are not on their team in the culture war. I guess the question. I agree with that. And I have no problem. I would love to read some stories about the lefts war on Clarence Thomas that get into this. I'm agreeing with you. That's all fine. The problem with alluding back to what Steve was getting at is that the factual coverage just sort of skipped that, the part of what the real charges are and what she did wrong and went straight to this meta-analysis stuff that reads a lot like wagon-circling. Yes, whereas we actually had real stories on whether Clarence Thomas did something wrong. We're still talking about whether Clarence Thomas did something wrong, as we should be.

We should talk about both and probably primarily the person in power who is accused of doing something wrong to Steve's point. I want to ask you both a point-flank question, though. believe that Chris Rufo and Aaron Sabariam or all these people went after Claudine Gay because she's a black woman? Is there any truth to that accusation? Look, I think, first of all, I want to be really clear about this because this is the point I was about to make. I think it's really unfair to Aaron Sabariam to lump him in with Chris Rufo. Yes, I agree. Like, whatever you think of Chris Rufo, you can think Chris Rufu is the greatest guy in the world. I'm not, that's not my point.

It's just he's an activist who's doing activist stuff and he's open and honest about that. Aaron Sabarium's just doing reporting for a journalistic outlet, and they treat lots of these media write-ups Lump Subarium and the Washington Free Beacon under this rubric of activists, Rufo and other activists. And that's just gross and unfair to the Free Beacon and to the journalists, you know, who work there. That said, do I think that there's at some layer there is a racial component to this? Sure. is. I just don't think it's like nearly as as remotely the explanatory power that people want it to have, you know, that the Abram Kendi's and Nicole Hannah-Jones, they think this is all

about race. It's really not all about race. They went after, they put huge pressure on the MIT president first. And then it was only because there was the plagiarism turned out to be the chum in the water for a feeding frenzy that they then went after Claudine Gay. If the third president who was on there, turns out to have plagiarism in her, I'm sorry, not MIT, Penn. If the MIT one has it, then, you know, I mean, I think she'll be toast, too. Because on the merits, you can't have people running the elite academic institutions who claim, who got the positions based on quote unquote their scholarship if their scholarship is fraudulent. Yeah, I don't have any, I can't say whether this was because she was a black woman. I mean, Chris Rufo,

has made no bones about the fact that he's going after DEI in higher education. It's the goal. That's what he says. He's taking these victory laps and making that sort of this is, you know, one of the beginning shots in this much longer campaign. To me it is interesting. Maybe this is part of Jonah's point that on the one hand, you say that an important part of DEI is having diverse voices and faces in these positions.

And so, for instance, they were very proud of having the first black woman head up Harvard as the president. And yet at the same time, if then she's under scrutiny because she's the president of Harvard, you can't do that because she's the first black woman and therefore it's all about that. Like, it's really hard to have it both ways in this case. Yeah. And you have seen some activists on the left, particularly from sort of DEI promotion world. having trouble, I think, reconciling that because they want to make it all about race all the time. And then if you respond and say, well, there are these questions. They turn around and claim that you're racist for speaking about it in racial terms. I mean, I think it was Mark Lamont Hill

who tweeted, um, the next president of Harvard has to be a black woman. And then if the next president of Harvard were to be a black woman, could people raise questions? about that if she had what I think was, like Claudine Gay, a relatively thin history of sort of academic publishing and background. It's, it has to be legitimate. If you're, if they're, if Mark Lamont Hill is making this the basis of the selection, he's putting genetics and skin color first in this. He's inviting people to respond that way. Okay. With that, Not worth your time question mark. I'm going to pick sort of a serious topic for this one.

Steve, Israel, Gaza, bombings. We didn't talk about it this week. There's this bombing that we don't know much about. Will you just give us a couple, you know, song lyrics? Yeah, I mean, it's certainly worth our time. And I think if we had more time, it would have been good to spend some time on it. There's a lot to talk about. I'm looking forward to the left wing piece about this episode that says,

Sarah Isgir. Former Trump administration official says dead Palestinian is not worth our time. There it is. Yeah, well, look, I mean, we talked about doing this as a topic and spending a fair amount of time on it. One of the reasons that we decided not to was because I think in my note yesterday I had suggested that we'd have more clarity about what happened with the bombing. We don't. We really don't know. And there are all sorts of charges and counter charges, claims being made by the Iranian regime, public speculation about whether this could have been ISIS, whether it was the Israelis, what have you. There's just a lot we don't know. And in an environment like this, I think it's best to take a beat and try to reserve the conversation when we know more. Having said that, I think

there are, if you take that step back, and regardless of the actual details of this bombing that took place near the morning of the death of Qasem Soleimani, the former head of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps. There are other indications that this is potentially going to become a regional war. This is something that the Biden administration has desperately sought to avoid, I think making more likely the kinds of escalations that they are seeking to avoid because they're so obviously seeking to avoid those escalations. I mean, Iran, there have been more than 100 attacks on U.S. troops or interests or bases

in Iraq and Syria since mid-October, virtually all of them conducted by the Iranians or Iranian proxies. And the response from the Biden administration, the U.S. government has been, shall we say, tepid. And I would say that's being generous. You've had reactions to the Houthis cutting off, you know, engaging in attacks, taking shots at commercial tankers. And the response is a statement with sort of vague threats from the Biden administration. and some of our allies, but not actually threatening military responses, as if that's adequate. I think the Biden administration has worked itself into a position where by so obviously seeking to avoid escalation, and I think by playing politics here in the United States, where President

Biden has lost support, particularly among young Democrats, because he has been insufficiently supportive of Palestinians, makes it more likely that we will see exactly this kind of escalation. And with that, Jonah, you're not worth your time is totally different. Your Christmas cookies were so worth my time. Man, they were incredible. I only deserve credit by helping procure the ingredients and marrying the chef and being the father of the sous chef.

So what's sort of great about this is Jonah's daughter texted me and was like, hey, Christmas cookies, you want some? And I was like, absolutely. So I pack up the whole family, including my dad. And we all head over to Jonah's house. And Jonah answers the door and he had no idea we were coming. Yeah. Yeah. Like literally my daughter is like, oh, that's Sarah or something like that. And I'm like, what, what? And then the entire brood showed up. And it was nice to me. your dad though you're a nice guy cool all right we'll talk to you next week Thank you.