The Dispatch Podcast - China's Hypersonic Missile Ambitions

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

On today’s podcast, our hosts tackle a wide range of topics. From China’s hypersonic missiles to the ongoing situation in Loudoun County, Steve, Sarah, Jonah, and David grapple with what those issues mean for the country with heavy doses of concern and skepticism. Plus, some good old-fashioned rank punditry. Sarah asks whether political operatives are responsible for ruining our politics? And some level-setting on Jonah’s third party idea that has caused a stir on the right. Show Notes: -“The Greatest Cold War Myth of All” - Charles Krauthammer -Jonah’s Los Angeles Times column on a third party -Jesse Singal on Loudoun County Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgird, joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and even David French. This week, we've got plenty to talk about China, Jonah's third party flotation device, a little on whether campaign operatives are ruining both political parties, and finally, a deeper dive of sorts into the Loudoun County debacle. Let's dive right in. David, a lot of news coming out of China this week. Yeah. So one of the interesting things about this news is we're not 100% sure about the news. But here's what we know. It has been reported that China has tested a nuclear. capable hypersonic missile that, to quote the New York Times, circumnavigated the globe before speeding towards its target. The paper, this was reported originally by the Financial Times, giving one of the scarce details about the test said the weapon missed its target by about two dozen miles. Stop for just a moment. That's a big miss. By the way, that's a big miss. But anyway,

resuming, essentially that there are reports that some have cast doubt on that China conducted a surprise test of a hypersonic missile. Why is this significant? It's because hypersonic missiles, even though they are flying slower than intercontinental ballistic missiles, are much less easy to defend against. A ICBM is following a predictable path. It's a path identified early in its flight. In theory, is easier to defendive against. a hypersonic missile is much more difficult to defend against. So, Steve, let me start with you. Are you, is this the signal?

Are we getting a signal now that this is a new Cold War? How should we interpret the significance of this test? It's very significant, as you said in your open. And I think the way to look at it is yet another piece of evidence that this growing Cold War is potentially getting hotter. We had heard in recent months and weeks increasing chatter in U.S. intelligence circles and from U.S. lawmakers who work on committees associated with these issues, the intel committees, the armed services committees, about growing concerns of China's advances in sophisticated technological warfare,

for lack of a better term. You could, Anytime you talked to a member of one of those committees, that would be what was on their minds. And we now, I think, have a better idea, at least in part, of what they were talking about. Having said that, the Financial Times and others have reported that the U.S. intelligence community was surprised by this news, surprised by this test, which is not a good place for the U.S. intelligence community to be. I think what this does is it should refocus our national attention on the fact that China is an actual growing threat and not a theoretical threat. We've talked about China, I think, in the easy terms of theoretical threats, distant, far off future potential threats, much less than we have, sort of taking stock of what China is and is becoming. And we don't have time to do that any longer. You know, I don't think that we should be alarmist about it, but I think we should be sort of a careful, methodical way, really take stock of what China has done.

And where China is at this particular moment, you know, I think there's a sense that China is a little bit like a, you know, a cornered animal. The economic slowdown in China has been precipitous over the last three quarters from something like 19% GDP growth to, I may get the figure wrong here. I think it was in the neighborhood of 6%, the latest estimates. You have the sense that China wants to be on relatively good behavior. I won't say it's best behavior because China still has work camps, concentration camps, housing more than a million Uyghurs. until the Beijing Olympics. But the saber-rattling on Taiwan, which we've talked about here over the last several weeks, the moves in Hong Kong, the broader pattern of belligerent rhetoric suggests

that something is happening there, and it's something that we ought to pay attention to both in terms of technological advances, which this presents us and also with the way that China is talking about itself. So, Jonah, I have two questions for you. One is, and this is a little bit esoteric, but it is the testing of this hypersonic missile, the reports that we've seen from previous months where Russia has allegedly deployed a regiment

of hypersonic missiles, all of this for the first time in more than 30 years or so is raising the possibility that the United States no longer possesses just this absolute qualitative edge in military capacity.

Are we ready for a world where we're not the hyper power anymore? And the second question is, can you say any other Jonah's stuff that comes to your mind? Let me take the second question first. All right. Go for it.

Yeah, look, I mean, the, it seems to me that all these people who were pissy about missing the Cold War because of the stability it gave the world and all this kind of stuff. You know, this is Charles Crowdhammer, we'll put in the show notes, probably his greatest, one of his,

certainly one of his greatest essays was on the greatest Cold War myth of all, which was this idea promulgated by Bill Clinton that everybody was unified during the Cold War and that this was a time of, you know, national social solidarity. in America. And meanwhile, everyone was kind of like, there was a lot of really silly stuff being said in the 90s when we were the sole superpower in the world. It's good to be the

sole superpower in the world. Because when you're the sole superpower in the world, you have basically, you're safe and your friends are safe. And to a certain extent, you know, even some of your enemies are safe because there's a global order. The idea that a Pax Americana is bad because a bunch of sniveling, self-hating jack wads from, you know, some English seminar think that America is just this evil country full of

white supremacy and whatnot. Get ready for a global order that's run by the Han Chinese or by the Russians and get back to me. But more, like, more seriously though, like, I'm very worried about this. I think the idea of America not

having military supremacy is a very scary thing. In part, because, you know, Steve used the phrase saber-rattling. Part of the problem with saber-rattling is that people, that other players in the game respond unpredictably to saber-rattling, and then the people who rattle their sabers do not want to lose face, and they can't back down from something. And I think China's, you know, I think Steve is going by the best available numbers

on what China's economy is, but my hunches is it's much worse. China lies about its economic numbers. We've known this for a very long time. Just to be clear, just to be clear, those are from external estimates rather than China's own self-reporting. But I still think they're guesstimates, right? I mean, so, and because it's very, I mean, Derek Sissor says this whole thing, trying to figure out what the real economy of China is. And it's just, it's a kind of a black box. But my point is, is that China is more scared of its, China, the Chinese Communist Party is very scared of its own people.

and um and one of the things that autocratic regimes do when they're scared of their own people is they give their own people something else to hate this has been vladimir's bladerman putin's playbook for 20 years he's convinced his populace that we are in fact that russia is in fact at war with the west and he's the strong man who can protect them the fact that china may be going in that direction should terrify a lot of people and i i think that china is is testing us a great deal right now, seeing how we respond to these provocations with Taiwan, seeing how we respond to this hypersonic missile,

which really is a very scary acceleration in the arms race, which lastly brings me the Jen frickin-Saki. I'm sorry, but saying we welcome competition. You stole my whole thing, Jonah. I feel robbed. Can I at least read what she said? Because I do think the full context is important. here. It doesn't make it all the way better, but it's relevant. We have made clear our concerns

about the military capabilities that the PRC continues to pursue, and we have been consistent in our approach with China. We welcome stiff competition, but we do not want that competition to veer into conflict, and that is certainly what we convey privately as well. Okay. Changes not much better. Yeah, not much. It is absolutely fine if they want to compete with us on. Not much, actually. I can't come up with anything where I'm like, you know what? I wish someone were closer to us in. Wow, China.

Wow, China. I'm so glad you have something like an F-22. Isn't that good for you? No, not even the Olympics. She's using a phrase that makes some sense in like the Olympics or in market economics, right? We welcome competition because we believe in a global free trade and all that kind of stuff. In an arms race where liberals have been telling us for 50 years, that the most threatening thing in the world is the global arms race and that the nuclear arms

race is terrifying. And it's why kids can't sleep at night in the 1980s. And it is like Barack Obama's abiding passion for his entire adult life was to get rid of nuclear weapons. And then to say about a hypersonic missile that can carry a thermonuclear warhead, we welcome competition. That's weird. And it's profoundly unsurious. And the idea that somehow the administration did not have better talking points provided to it by the NSA or the Defense Department or somebody to respond to this, sends a bad signal to me, which is all important, but also to the Chinese. You know, the Chinese are seeing whether we're serious about this stuff. And if that's the message, it's a bad message. Yeah, the message is basically, it's on like Donkey Kong.

Yeah, I guess. I would rather have that than we welcome competition. too. Yeah. And if she then took the mic and dropped it on this press room floor, and it was like, Socky out, that would have been cool, but not this. The world is probably a better place that I never was at the podium, but also a less fun place, frankly. So, Sarah, we have been turned inward for a while now, ripping each other to shreds over Twitter beefs

and ripping each other to shreds over Netflix specials. And meanwhile, China's out testing a hypersonic missile. A, will this do anything to our politics? Not should. We all know the answer to that. A, will this do anything to our politics? B, is there such thing as a coalition of the serious on this? And C, if there is, who's in it?

That's a multi-part question. Yeah, so not yet. And say other Sarah's stuff, just to be consistent. And other Sarah stuff, yes. On the first question, will it change anything? Not in the short term. The missile launches and things like that fade into the background because, you know, North Korea launches something into the dirt and we're like, oh, eh?

So no, something more tangible and concrete will have to happen with China. Now, I am remarkably unconcerned about whether it will change our politics because something concrete and tangible will happen with China at some point. So the answer is in the short term, no, in the long term, absolutely it will, because I don't see this heading any other direction. You know, I was wondering whether this could be comparable to our thoughts about Japan in the early mid-90s. And I think it is quite clear just in the last six months, no, it is now moved quite differently from the Japanese comparison. Two, is there a coalition of the Syrius?

I actually think there is because, interestingly, they're foreign policy experts. I've used that term kind of loosely, but not really, maybe, are overrepresented in the United States Senate in both parties. And that is a good thing.

I wish there were overrepresentation of all sorts of experts in the U.S. Senate, but I'll take foreign policy. And so I think that we will, in fact, it could be a nice little bright, shiny moment in the Senate as perhaps these people will put on their serious hats and start pursuing this as a real place of oversight, potential legislation, hearings.

There's things that senators can do. And I think there is bipartisan will to some extent. I don't think it has become tangible enough yet for them to put aside the other stuff that's on their plate, be it the infrastructure bill, be it inflation, whatever else. But I think that will happen more quickly than the overall politics shifting to it. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace. of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online

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something that's quite relevant to that, which is, I've talked about the bipartisan coalition that could exist, Jonah. But what about the tripartisan coalition that could exist? There will be no tripartisan coalition. So just a little backstory. We debated what we're kind about with the topics that weren't repetitive of stuff that we did last week, because sometimes the main news stories are the same stories week after week and whatnot. And then Sarah said something about how she'll burn herself if we have to talk about infrastructure again. So we opted to talk about this kerfuffle that started up because I floated first in my LA Times column and then at length elsewhere for the dispatch, an idea of essentially

turning the consistently conservative or right of center anti-Trump faction of the GOP or the right, whoever you want to come up with it, and turn it into a third part, a standalone third party that would operate in much like the way the conservative party of New York, at least nominally operates, which is to say if the GOP nominate someone sane,

who's in favor of like free markets, limited government, and with the proviso now that you have to add free and fair elections in the United States of America, that that party called the, I don't know, what do you want to call it, the Jonah party? Would then just simply endorse the GOP candidate and call it a day. But if the GOP nominated some Marjorie Taylor Green type or whoever, then the third party could play the role of spoiler

and simply say we're not going to endorse this person. We're going to put up our own candidate in this state or this House district or in the presidential election. And the idea, just so I'm clear with everybody, because a lot of people, I know you might find this shocking, but sometimes people don't actually read what you write before they comment. What? And a lot of people are like, don't you understand that would just help the Democrats, which I explicitly said, I understand, which is why I've always been skeptical of third parties.

You know, Richard Hofstetter had that famous line where he says third parties have their effect by stinging and then they die. that's and that was for me a feature not a bug because all I was trying to do was propose one way to impose discipline and seriousness on the GOP rather than actually come up with its with an actual thriving 50 state party alternative to it which is a much heavier list the piece elicited a lot of responses and I think at this date there are four or five at National Review and Eric Erickson chimed in and David French came to my aid for I acted boldly and great forces came to my aid. And it's become kind of a thing now to talk about this.

And so I figured maybe we should talk about it too. Actually, Caleb thought we should talk about it. So with that said, why don't I go to David, who's the one who's actually written on this most explicitly and say what is your overall reaction to the kerfuffle? Do you find the kerfuffle surprising? And do you still think it's an idea worth pursuing?

I'll take the last point first. Yes, I do think absolutely I think it's an idea worth pursuing. And the reason why I think it's an idea worth pursuing is that the issue with the GOP right now is not just personified by the man named Donald Trump.

If the issue with the GOP was just personified by Donald Trump, then you would have a cure for what ails the GOP, and that would be either Trump sort of does this slow fade as he drifts from the news and sort of decides not to run again, or he's defeated in a primary election or perhaps defeated again in a general election, and then you move on. But it feels to me that what we're dealing with is let's imagine it's 1970. And the Republican Party hasn't, not only is still zealously loyal to Nixon, it is all in on Nixonism at the grassroots. And the problem that I have with the GOP right now is it's not just that it has the success of loyalty to Donald Trump, which remains inexplicable to me, especially given his losses and his continued erratic and horrific behavior. but they're increasingly in on at the grassroots level at an organizational level with this

kind of reactionary populist vicious trumpism and so it is simply not the case in my view any longer that the GOP is a party that represents my political ideology or my values in a concrete way So I think a lot of people are underdiagnosing the extent of the GOP's problems. This is a GOP, and in my defense of view, what I did is I dove into, what's the substance of the problem that I have with the GOP right now? Well, it's less committed to the First Amendment to start out with. It's less committed to economic freedom to continue. It's less committed to the kind of foreign policy that I think is best for the security of this nation. I just went down thing after thing after thing.

And those circumstances, you just don't throw your hands up and go, well, I guess this crap sandwich tastes like maybe 5% better than the crap sandwich coming from the other side. And you say, I don't want to eat a crap sandwich. I don't like them. They're not good. They're bad for you. So I'm going to try to cook a burger, an actual burger. And so to me, I look, it's really hard.

It's very, very difficult. nobody says it's easy nobody says that it but the idea that we just say it would never happen it would never work just ask just ask the people that sarah stands for to this day the late lamented wigs it there was there there have been parties that have come and gone in this country and so to just say nope it will never work instead of dealing with a situation where there is a real perception in this country that these parties are broken. There is a real perception in this country that their brokenness of these parties is breaking our nation.

And then to say, well, we just got to work with those guys. Nope. Count me out of that. So, Sarah, I had David Drucker on the Remnant to talk about his new book. And we didn't quite get into the third party thing per se. But one of the things, I asked him this question, I ask a lot of people, Lala reporters, you know, who cover Republicans up close, you know, how many of them actually believe the stuff that they say or they just, you know, going along. And he emphasized that for a lot of them, it's just pragmatism and that in their hearts they don't really agree with a lot of this stuff. And that kind of dovetails with some of the more thoughtful responses I got from people,

which is to say all of this stuff is just a populist fever and fever's break. And why not just try to keep the GOP from losing its mind before until, you know, bide your time, help it like ride the storm out? What do you make of that? So there's a few things to note. here. One, as Chris Steyerwalt, who wrote up your piece and discussed it in the sweep, our other political campaign-related newsletter, he talks about, I think, the main detraction in the short term, which is McMullenism, as I'm not sure if he coined that, but I will adopt it.

The idea that you have someone who's kind of irrelevant, who takes up the banner of this, and they do it for relevancy, and then it, you know, dies and shames the movement in which it was founded. I think that is a short-term concern that you don't have anyone to take up the banner of this.

And worse, you could have the wrong person take up the banner of it. The long-term concern is more what you're talking about, which is this will work itself out anyway, so you're spinning your wheels in the mud and kicking up mud, but that's about all you're doing. And, you know, as soon as it dries, the car is going to move right out of the little mire in which it finds itself in. The car in this metaphor being the country, the puddle being,

I don't know, the rain being Donald Trump. I'm not sure. But you get my point. Yes, I do think this two shall pass. The rain will stop. The mud will dry. The question is, what has the damage been in the meantime. You know, if it takes a couple weeks for the mud to dry and you're sitting in the car and you starve to death, well, then maybe you shouldn't have waited for the mud to dry if death was the result. And I do have concerns about that, that while this two shall pass, we may not make it to that point with our constitution and our institutions intact. So I also take your point about the current movement, we'll call the Bill Crystal Miles Taylor folks who are former Republicans who say, hey, vote Democrat for now because that'll teach the Republicans a lesson and why

that doesn't work either, because nobody will follow them to do that, as you point out, asking people to vote, you know, for democracy's sake to begin with is maybe a heavy lift when they disagree with the person they're voting for on abortion guns, foreign policy, and tax and spending issues to name a few that you name. First of all, yeah, I think absolutely people don't vote for these like meta,

high-level philosophical reasons. So I think that is doomed to failure. Or they might, but they have to be really persuaded that that's really on the line. And there's so much bubble group think about Democrats, they just take it as a given now and they don't try to persuade people that that's on the line, you know, and that's another problem,

but we can talk about that another time. Well, we'll get to that a little bit in our next segment. So that's all to say, I found it weird that anyone thought this was kerfuffle worthy because it seems like such an obvious thing that I thought we'd been talking about for five years, but I guess we hadn't been. And the part, though, that I have come back to over and over again

for the last five years is you have to have a standard bear who is already relevant, already has legitimacy, and is bigger than the movement that they are simply taking up the banner for and it is hard to know who that is right now. Like, for instance, could Tom Cotton do that? Yes, I think Tom Cotton could. But then you come to the very practical problem.

Will Tom Cotton do that? Absolutely not. I mean, I'd put more faith in someone like Romney or Sass at the same time, I don't know how many legions would follow them. But I take your point, I mean, it's like they wrote the Constitution with George Washington in mind, right? Yeah, right.

And if it had been Aaron Burr in mind, it would be a very different constitution. Well, I think in fairness, you know, they had Aaron Burr's in mind as existing, obviously. They're, you know, no men are angels, all of that stuff. I think if Romney's exactly the type of person who probably can't do this. And by the way, when I say Tom Cotton won't, I don't mean because Tom Cotton doesn't have the interest of the country at heart.

I think he very much does. I mean Tom Cotton won't because he thinks that the rain's going to stop and the mud puddle is going to dry up much sooner than perhaps I do. And so he just thinks we're going to be able to drive out of this and it's worth waiting. Yeah. I mean, I think we agree on that. I just, my point is that you need someone, no one is incorruptible, but less corruptible. And like the idea that, you know, and this was a Michael point. that Michael Brendan Doherty made about the problem of you create a platform that attracts people who want the limelight and by definition, a lot of those people are bad news. I mean, people forget what a complete clown show, the Ross Pro's Reform Party became because of federal matching money to it. And all of a sudden you had everyone from Pat Buchanan to this guy,

Donald Trump, trying to run on the Reform Party platform just so they could get the political matching funds, there was no ideological coherence to it at all. And that point, as I, as I said, one of my legions of responses, I agree with entirely. The McMullenism, as Chris puts it, I think is entirely fair. But Steve, one of the things that I keep going back to is if you don't, and this is just like a trial balloon. People write columns, they say, here's an idea, right? I perfectly willing to, I concede all over the ways.

It's hard. It would be difficult. but one of the things I ask people who say my idea is super stupid nanny boo-boo to come up with their own alternative. And that's very rare to find. And meanwhile, an enormous number of people of various degrees of sincerity and good faith from a lot to scientifically undetectable. I've accused me of being a wrecker, a spoiler.

a traitor, all these kinds of things. And as many of... Not a feminist ally. As many of them were in fact mouthing these words. Donald Trump came out and said that unless everybody solves the problem of me not being the election being stolen from me,

no Republican will vote. And that's obviously not true. But by virtue of him saying things like that, fewer Republicans will vote. And that is... someone ought to check the math, many orders of magnitude more bad for the Republican Party

than anything I'm scribbling about. And yet he gets a free pass for this stuff. So doesn't that just sort of highlight the sort of the long-term simple problem is that the GOP has both a Trump and Trumpist problem and it doesn't know how to deal with it? And instead it would rather either train fire on the left

or train fire on people who'd actually want to look the, who don't want to just wait out, reign to steal some of Sarah's metaphor. Yeah, I think that's right. I think the problem I have with Sarah's analysis, in addition to the fact that I'm far too slow to pick up, to get the metaphor. It was almost like a, I don't know where I am.

I think I like to think I'm the tow truck coming to pull you out of the mud, but that would probably be like chauvinistic or, you know, obnoxious. White male savior, white male savior. Yeah, right. So, no, but I think my fundamental disagreement is I am not confident that this two shall pass. I think the most compelling aspect of your entire case is the presumption that this two will not pass, that this is different. And I think if you look back at the number of times over the past five years, where leaders in the report, Republican Party have made the assumption that this two shall pass, they've been wrong again and again and again and again. And I would say most recently and most importantly, after January 6th, you had all of these Republicans, including people who were the closest allies of Donald Trump, like Lindsey Graham, going to the Senate floor, denouncing the president assigning directly,

but without qualification, assigning him blame for what had happened. Mitch McConnell was in group. There were dozens and dozens. John Cornyn said that he would support an independent commission. Marco Rubio was supportive of all this. And then it came to it, and many of them didn't vote to impeach him, despite the fact that they had said that he was at fault for this, and then didn't even vote to support a commission to look into this. So this too shall, and we see where he is right now, 78% of Republicans see him as leader of the, the party. So this two shall pass crowd, I think, has been wrong pretty consistently for five years. And the reason I found your idea appealing in part was it's worth doing something.

Like, I don't think you have to know where this ends up. And I don't think it's obvious that this would be a negative either for Democrats or Republicans. And to the extent that Republicans continue to embrace election lies and the kind of quasi-authoritarian things that we've been hearing from otherwise sane Republicans over the past eight months over the past several years, there's not really much reason to want to save that Republican Party, as David suggests. So that would be my first point. My second point is it involves the workability question. I get that people think that we can draw these straight lines out from how we are seeing this political moment today to how it will play out based on their understanding of what's happened in the past.

But think about how many people in the summer of 2015, myself included, insisted that there was no way somebody like Donald Trump could ever win the Republican nomination, much less be elected president of the United States, inconceivable. couldn't happen. We'd never seen anything like it in our politics. And here we are. And, you know, not only did Trump do both of those things, he governed for four years. And he remains, despite all of this, the de facto leader of the Republican Party. I just, I guess I'm surprised at the lack of humility from people who have reassured us again and again and again that they can tell us what's going to happen in American politics. And then they've been wrong. It's time for more humility. We are in a moment of extraordinary political volatility. I think I've mentioned this before, but if you go back to 2006 and look at the elections that we've had every two years

since then, every one but one of them, we would consider a change election. Going back to 2006, where Democrats took the House, 2008 Obama's elected, 2010 is the Republican sweep, 2012, that's the exception that proves the rule. Obama stays in power. 2014, Republicans win the Senate. 2016, Trump is elected. 2018 Democrats do better. That one I think we could probably argue. And then 2020, Joe Biden is elected. That's just extraordinary shifts in political power with very close margins. I think in that, in this moment of volatility, it's really foolhardy to suggest that we know what's going to happen because of the inherent instability in the system and the kinds of frustrations that we're seeing from, I think, people of all political stripes.

I have a short story from mine. I think I'm the only person here who considered a third party run for anything. Yes, I think we can say that. I still, whenever those words come out of my mouth, I still have sort of this like out-of-body experience. Like, did that actually happen? It is how we met, though. It is exactly how we met. So there is a demand. I think that the supply side question is the key question. Who takes up that standard?

But I will never forget, while I'm in the middle of all of that, somebody went to, you know, like how a media always goes to when you're from a small town, they always go to the local diner. Okay, that's every, it's not McDonald's. It's not the Walmart. it's the diner to ask people. So they asked three people there about me. I'll never forget this.

One was like, the question was, do you know David French? Now, this shows how difficult it was. They're in my town. And one person says, yeah, I, I've heard of him. Yeah, I know who he is. Another one says, I think I've heard of him. And then the third person said,

I've never heard of him. But if his name ain't Trump and his name ain't Hillary, I'm voting for him. And the funny thing was that basically mirrored the polling that we had, which said that if you could get somebody enough recognition and enough sort of momentum, you might could pull up to a third of the electorate, which was really fascinating to me. But I loved that in my own, that showed the challenge.

In my own freaking hometown, they had three people, and I think the other two lied that they didn't know me. But the third guy was your base. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Speaking of which, next topic, I want to talk about campaign operatives and how the two political parties are breaking themselves. First, confessing error, which I know Steve really prides the dispatch on our ability to say when we got something wrong.

So Steve, I would like to say that I got something quite wrong, big wrong. I have been on this like turnout is the only thing that matters. There are no persuadable voters. And while certainly turnout is like everything in the sense that if you're, if you don't get more votes than the other guy, you do lose the election, that I think 2020 proved that persuasion was far more important that I gave it credit for. And I got that wrong. So I want to say that.

And in light of that, some Democratic operatives. have been chittering this week about 2022 and how bad things are going for them, a CNN analyst was looking at the enthusiasm of Democratic voters and noting that 20% of those who are extremely or very enthusiastic about voting next year are the very liberals,

while only 11% of the very liberals aren't very enthusiastic about voting, meaning that the low-hanging fruit for the Democratic Party is the very liberals, correct. But they're already going to vote. So, yes, you need to spend time making sure they do vote, kind of. But, like, as we have now seen through, for instance, that voting suppression, academic study, people actually tend to vote who tend to vote. And so when you're looking at putting your limited resources into turnout,

you want to look at the people who might be less likely to vote. For the Democrats right now, those are not the very liberal. They are the far more moderate. And this brings me to David Schor's point, which is when you look at who's working on the Democratic campaigns, David Schor points out, they're all the very liberal. They're white, they're young, they're all college educated, and they're very, very liberal. So they're not the people, like when they knock on the door of a potentially, you know, turnout voter who they're trying to get to vote, the likelihood is that that person,

is moderate. And they don't speak the same political language. And Shore had this incredible study that he ran about Hillary Clinton's ads. A full 20% of the Clinton campaign's ads made viewers more likely to vote for Republicans than people who hadn't seen the same ads. So it's literally having the opposite effect. It is an ad saying, hi, we don't represent you. You should probably consider voting for the other person. Like, that's a bad ad. And he said most hilariously, the more that Shores-owned staff

liked the ad, the worse it did in the general public. Shores-on-staff being most representative of Democratic campaign operatives. Now, I think to some extent, the same thing is happening on the right, except that for the right,

it is somewhat counter because it is also going to be young college-educated people. who don't speak the same language. But those young college-educated people are, of course, if they're working for Republicans, some are far more likely to be very, very base. And then some are likely to be very, very moderate. And so it's actually a different problem on the right.

So perhaps we can concentrate on the problem on the left, because I find it really fascinating and something that it's not easy to fix. There's a reason that it's all young people on campaigns, right? It doesn't pay well. You're out in the field. You're eating pizza. you're away from your family. So Steve, starting with you, how funny is this? Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. I have to say, just to interject at the outset, it could be the

case that the 20% who were more likely to vote Republican after seeing Hillary Clinton had were just reminded that it was Hillary Clinton running. And they don't like Hillary Clinton. I do think that that was part of it because she was viewed so negatively by so many people, including Democrats. Let me tell you one of the ads that was most likely to turn someone to vote Republican. I'll just describe it briefly.

It was young girls, some people may remember this ad. It was young women, girls, young women, looking into the mirror. And as they looked into the mirror at themselves, it would then play Donald Trump

saying disparaging things about women. Hillary Clinton was not in the ad. Hmm. That is interesting. And that resonated. I would not have guessed that. I do remember that. I do remember that.

So that resonated. The Clinton campaign thought it was, yeah, they thought it was very effective. They thought this was the ad. It was going to, like, it moved some of them to tears. Like, they loved it so much. And it was one of their least effective ads. Countereffective. Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting. So, I mean, I think we're seeing this to a certain extent play out in the way that the Biden administration has approached governing. With these small majorities in the House and Senate, they're governing as if they have this huge support of majorities in the country. And I think it's plainly wrong. I mean, polling suggests that it's wrong. I think the

difficulty that they're having convinced Democrats suggests that it's wrong, the way that they've taken a partisan approach, suggests that it's wrong. But it is, you know, I think reflective of the way that, particularly the Biden staff, who came up through these campaigns in many cases, sees the Democratic coalition. It's driven largely by progressives. You know, I've mentioned here conversations that I've had with Republican elected officials who have sat down with Joe Biden and others to talk about COVID relief, to talk about infrastructure, to talk about the big package, and think that they've made some progress on coming up with some kind of a bipartisan, moderate, centrist solution only to have the White House staff, in their view, push things back to the left. So I think you're seeing Joe Biden sort of play this out. But the problem is clear, I think, from the examples that you give from shore. And also what we saw in the Republican primary in 2016, I mean, the most active, you know,

the most passionate activists on both sides are going to be the people who are often most ideological. We saw that certainly in the Republican primaries in 2016, where, you know, You know, you had Donald Trump pick a few issues that separated him from many of the other Republican candidates, particularly immigration, some trade issues and political correctness, and hammer those home in a way that appealed to the base of the Republican Party and drove them there. Now, I think the age thing isn't quite at play the same way on the Republican side as it is on the Democratic side. But Democrats would do well to listen to David Shore. he turns out to have been right an awful lot over the past several years. And the fact that he gets sort of drummed out of a lot of democratic conversations suggests that they aren't taking seriously the problems in their own house.

All right, David. You know, I keep thinking of what I think is kind of a basic law of human nature, and that is the people that care the most tend to define the institutions that they belong to. And so you can poll something all day long, but it's the day-to-day individual engagement that really shapes something. So you name it. You know, there's this old saying in churches where they say 20% of the people do 80% of the work. I think that's actually wrong. I think it's about 10% of the people do about 90% of the work. But it's those people who engage who shape the institution. institution. And what we have right now is a situation where the people who are really investing

the time and the energy and the sweat equity. And we're not even just talking about campaign workers. We're talking about the people who spend all day on social media, for example, are people who tend to be younger and more progressive and more culture war focused than the vast majority of the Democratic electorate. And the problem we're running up against, I think, is that you can know that intellectually. You can have the intellectual knowledge that this creates negative feedback loops and this is leading us astray. And it's still overwhelmingly difficult in the day-to-day reality of life to counter or to constantly keep that perspective when all of your immediate inputs are heading in one particular direction. And I think this is

something you see on both parties, for example, we're focusing on the Democrats. But I think it's something you see, for example, in a real time on Twitter. We know, by this point, if you don't know that Twitter is completely and wholly unrepresentative of America, you're just not paying attention. And yet, in spite of the fact that we know, beyond a shadow of it out, that Twitter is not representative of America in any meaningful way, we still have people constantly. constantly reacting to Twitter disputes as if they're touching the third rail or as if they're getting shocked with a cattle prod. When the reality is, the reason for that is you're dealing with deep stuff about who we are.

We respond to the people who are in our face talking to us. We don't respond to the theoretical people who may exist. Well, they're not theoretical who may exist, but they're not talking to us. And so it seems to me that you've got to do work to break out of this bubble. You have to affirmatively try to find and get into your space people who don't fit this young, educated, progressive paradigm, and that's hard to do. And until you do it, the only discipline, the only disciplinary function is the once every few years voting pattern. and that's not meaningless, but it obviously doesn't solve it. But it's open to a lot of interpretation, too.

Every election has, you know, 50 different reasons that happened. You weren't progressive enough. You were too progressive, you know, et cetera. Yes, exactly. Jonah, I, and as I get older, one of the core things that I feel like I learn with age is how people don't always think the way that I do, which sounds like such a basic point. But I do think when you're younger, you think everyone sees the same thing you see, or rather as long as they see the same thing you see, they will draw the same conclusions, have the same reactions. It's all a matter of not being presented the same facts or not watching the same, you know, real.

And I think what this shows is like, no, very much no. And the Democratic Party hasn't figured that out. It's not that you just haven't shown them enough about climate change or abortions. or pronouns or whatever the, you know, the moment-dejure topic is, that there's just something, there are fundamental disagreements within the Democratic Party that aren't overcome and the Democratic Party operatives don't seem to accept that. Yeah. So I have many thought, but I'll try to be brief.

I think part of the problem is with higher education, which tells these kids, which imparts these kids a certain amount of epistemological hubris that says what we're telling you is the objective truth even when we're telling you there's no such thing as objective truth that's the objective truth go make the android neck to spot melt down because you tell him that and the um uh and i keep going back to this conversation i had with josh carousher last time i had him on the podcast about how he has had conversations with people in the bide administration and the democratic Party young people who he can persuade that they're doing something that politically doesn't make sense and they say they don't care which as a campaign aide you're not supposed to say

that never mind do that right and i mean unless you're talking about some first order issue of you know major moral question right and and what and that's i think part of the problem is all these kids think everything they're dealing with is the equivalent of the civil rights era. And so that therefore it's a moral crisis to bend a little bit. But I also think this is not just a problem of the Democratic Party. It's a problem with Netflix. We're recording today and they're going to have a walkout because of the transgender issues raised by David Chappelle and all this kind of thing. And it's an issue at a lot of journalist organizations that we know were the young people, you know,

Mao, Mao and threatened the boomer management class into, you know, getting rid of people like Kevin Williamson or whatnot. And they, the Slack channels might as well be at like the New York Times, might as well be the saloons and bistros of revolutionary Paris, where these guys work each other up into Sandskulat kind of rage. And then it spills out on the op-ed page. And everyone's like, where the hell did this come from? Why are they so angry?

And lastly, I think the thing I keep thinking about, maybe because I'm on a sort of a Russian history jag these days, is the going to the people movement of the 1870s, where Bakunin Lavrov had this theory that the peasants could be converted into a revolutionary class and overthrow the system. So like 2000 hyper-educated, a feat, either aristocratic or high bourgeois kids,

went out to the Stettles and the villages across Russia to turn, to convince them all to become revolutionaries. And all these like basically very socially conservative peasants did is, first of all say, I don't even understand what you're saying. You know, like this is all crazy talk. And a lot of them, a lot of the peasants arrested these guys because they, you know, you're going to kill the czar. What are you talking about? We like the czar. And this this cultural mismatch between this sort of elite overproduction we get from universities and the actual voters out there is a profound problem, not just of a Democratic Party, but I think for the country, and the best example of it was that the

median black voter in the Democratic primaries was to the right of virtually all of the candidates on the stage. And none of the Democrats on the stage, with the exception of Joe Biden, really took that in any way meaningfully to heart. And now they've seem to have forgotten that with amex platinum access to exclusive amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side so being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime that's the powerful backing of amex pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race terms and conditions apply learn more at mx.ca slash y annex all right last topic steve what's happening in this one county in virginia well it

It's not so easily summarized. Last week, we mentioned briefly an article by Luke Roziak of The Daily Wire that was generating a lot of buzz, particularly in Sarah's mommy group. It was a long story, 5,000 words reported on the happenings in Loudoun County, Virginia, where there have been fierce fights over critical race theory, transgender students, et cetera, et cetera. There's no way to actually summarize a 5,000-word report, so I'm not going to really try. But the controversy involved a parent named Scott Smith, who'd been arrested at a school board meeting in June, in which these issues had been discussed. Smith was present at these meetings when a superintendent, the superintendent downplayed parental concerns about allowing biological boys, identifying his girls, into girls' bathrooms.

the superintendent said without qualification that he hadn't heard of any reports of assault in that context. Well, he did have a qualification. He said, to my knowledge, we don't have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms. This is what set Smith, the parent, off because he says that his daughter was assaulted in a girl's bathroom at her high school one month earlier by a boy wearing a skirt, a gender fluid student, wearing a skirt, something that he thinks the superintendent ought to have known. We didn't go in depth in discussing this last week because there was very little additional reporting

beyond the Daily Wire story, and we wanted to wait for more facts. Well, we now have some more facts and think it's worth revisiting. We know that many of the details of the Daily Wire report have been confirmed. The superintendent apologized for failing to provide adequate school safety

a school board member has resigned. There's some debate about how directly relevant that was. The father's been giving interviews telling his side of the story and sort of filling this picture out. Jesse Singall of the Blocked and Reported podcast did dive into the story right when it was published last week. He talked about it on his podcast. And he passed along the storyline in the story,

he says now fairly credulously. And he has a new post up that we will link to in the show notes, kind of beating himself up for having gone into the story and talked about it fairly credulously. But to his credit, he said he would do additional reporting on one aspect of the story that he said would be easiest to verify. That part of the story concerns a claim in the Daily Wire that the school, upon first learning about the sexual assault claim

in the bathroom, didn't promptly notify the authorities and instead got police involved only after they called the girl's father to the school, and he acted in a disruptive fashion. Well, Zingal went and got reports from the police about this and looked at what happened in their real-time reports, and those reports strongly indicate that the school did, in fact, alert a school resource officer did, in fact, alert the authorities that there was, that there had been the claim of a sexual assault and that this was not just about calling the police when the father acted out. I guess I'll go to you, David. I know you've followed the story pretty closely. First, is that a fair summary of the state of play right now? Second, are there any significant

details that I've left out because we don't want to talk about it in an incomplete way or leave anything significant out. And third, where does that leave us? Why has this story generated the attention that it has? I break this down into three categories. Normal awful, super awful, and ideological awful. Okay. And I'll explain what I mean. Normal awful. And when I say normal, awful, I mean sadly, terribly, tragically, a relatively common kind of awfulness that we see in schools, which is the existence of a sexual assault where there is a problem in the reporting of the assault, not necessarily to the police, okay, but a reporting of the assault up the chain and a failure to be transparent with the public about risks in the school. This is a kind of thing that is sadly all too common in America. And one of the areas where you tend to find it is in colleges, which, for example, underreport the alleged incidences of sexual assault on campus

to try to make their campus appear safer than it is. So it appears that one part of this awfulness has been pretty darn well confirmed, and that is that there are allegations of sexual assault that the police are investigating and the school district misled parents. So that seems to be pretty well confirmed. Then they're super awful. Super awful is that there's the claim that there was a sexual assault and that the police really were more focused on dealing with the dad than the sexual assault issue itself. And that's where Jesse Singles reporting appears to rebut the initial daily wire story, that in fact the police were handling the school resource officer was involved in this in a way that is

according to procedure. An investigation was underway. It is not the case that the dad had to make that happen and then got punished for it. That appears to not be the case. Again, based on the reporting so far. So we have normal awful, pretty well confirmed, super awful, contradicted by later reporting. And then we have ideological awful, which is, did this fit, this very specific fact pattern of a person, of a, of a biological male taking advantage of access to the women's restroom through a gender identity, through gender identity to accomplish a sexual assault. And that part of it, is alleged, but does not seem to be confirmed by the available documentation or by follow-up reporting. So that seems to be where we are. And a few people have written and they've asked,

well, why were you suspicious of the Daily Wire reporting to begin with? Which I think is a question worth answering. There are a couple of reasons. One, quite frankly, and there are folks I know with the Daily Wire, but it is not an outlet that I'm necessarily going to automatically believe and credit its statements. I have personal experience with people making flatly incorrect statements about me, for example, there. So I'm not going to immediately jump on that and say, oh, man, that outlet, they're just totally known for being straight on the level. I don't agree with that. second there are aspects to the original story that were very there was odd editorializing in it including such things as sort of saying well you know that it might all be worth it to the

Loudoun County School Board because apparently the girl involved the victim the alleged victim of this awful crime is becoming more progressive what's that have to do with anything why is that in there so when you see something like that you're saying there's something here that doesn't that's raising my antenna. And so it doesn't mean it's wrong. Doesn't mean it's false. But there are certain things in there that are raising my antenna. And so that made me say, want to wait to see what was happening. Sarah, why was this getting the attention that it was getting among the people that that you talked to a week ago? And do they, have they been following it closely and does the subsequent reporting, has it changed the way that they look at

the story much? Yeah, so I think there's two parts to it. On the one hand, Loudoun County is sort of this interesting place. It used to be a Republican stronghold, but for instance, Donald Trump lost the county by 24 points in 2020. So changing demographics, it was, you know, sort of far outside of DC. Now it's more of a DC excerpt. And so that, I think, is part of this dynamic of why people are looking at as interesting. But there's also the microdynamic happening, which is Loudoun County became sort of one of the focus points for the CRT debate, the debate over critical race theory being taught in schools. It was sort of interesting. Basically, one of the school board members, along with some progressive activists, started a Facebook group called anti-racist parents.

of Loudoun County and asked the group to list their opponents and organize to oppose their efforts, including to expose their activities, infiltrate the anti-CRT organizations using false names and potentially hack their websites. That included in their list a name of a parent, Ian Pryor. Now, Ian was my deputy at the Department of Justice, has a long career in Republican politics and specifically communication. When that happened, the FBI got involved, but also Ian started his own group that has then, by the way, he dubbed them Chardonnay Antifa.

And he started his own group, Fight for Our Schools. And it then gets outsized media attention because Ian has connections at Fox News, Washington Post, you know, national outlets as well. and the group snowballed from there so it sort of became the media focal point of these CRT efforts

and then of course this event happens at a school board meeting which was already then getting outsized detention in Loudoun County and it's about this other culture war-e issue and I think all of that combined creates this outsized focus on Loudon County in particular

Can I real quick read the paragraph that I'm talking about that may really raise my alarms. Please. Though the, this is from the, this is, um, I, this is the excerpt that I'm concerned about. Though the injection of politics and schools and criminal justice have led to pain where there was none before and enemies where there were once were neighbors, it is possible,

no less surreal than any other element of this story at least, that some elected officials of Loudoun County might actually believe this story has a happy ending, colon, though Smith's daughter has been allegedly raped and separately beaten. at school, the teen has adopted increasingly strong progressive views over the course of her tenure at LCPS. If you're going to include gross speculation like that, I'm going to be suspicious of your story, full stop, period, end of discussion. Doesn't mean it's all wrong. Doesn't mean you got it wrong, but when you include crap like that, I'm going to be suspicious. Sorry. I think that is part of what makes this so challenging. I mean, clearly what we've seen since the initial

report has confirmed a number of aspects of the reporting in the piece. You don't have the superintendent apologizing if the superintendent wasn't guilty of the sort of the main charge. And I think it's undeniable that when you look at the way that Loudoun County administrators have handled these issues, they have been aggressively political, deeply ideological. And it's also clear from that reporting in the Daily Wire and subsequent reporting that they've been dishonest, at least guilty of omission, if not aggressively dishonest in several aspects of the case. But I think, David, you make a very good point. That paragraph is... suggest such a warped view of the facts of this case that it does make it hard to believe

some of the other elements of the story. And, you know, I think the reporter managed to uncover a lot of new facts that were not previously known. But it makes us, you know, reporting is a lot of sort of hard materials and then a ton of spackle. And if you, if you, if you're, if your, if your spackle is bad, the other stuff isn't going to hang together as well as a coherent piece. And I think that's the, the big question. Jonah, does this, does this advance the debate? Are we likely to ever actually understand what took place here? And if we do, if we come to a better understanding, do you think of this as primarily a Loudoun County issue? Or is this something that will continue to get national attention?

Look, I keep thinking about the Covington High School thing, right? The Covington High School thing was a far less serious thing than this, at least among the facts that have been confirmed on this. You know, we're talking about this of an illegitual assault. It sounds like it actually happened. And then the rest of the Kuchreban remains to be cleared up. But that's really bad. There was no sexual assault with the Covington kids at that rally on the mall.

If you've ever been to one of these big protests on the mall, what happened there was entirely normal. The place was full of weird people and also full of tourists looking at the weird people. And sometimes the weird people yell at the tourists in ways that make tourists feel uncomfortable and awkward. And if it hadn't been videotaped, and then turned into this crazy Rorschach test for a bunch of blue checkmarked people on Twitter, it would have been just some stories.

Yeah, you know, a few years ago, I went to the mall and this Indian activist came up to me and yelled at me, and then there were these black Hebrews who said weird things, and it was all weird. And that would have been it. But instead, it became this, you know, this, you know, Dreyfus affair,

Rosenberg trial thing for the culture war. And then that's one of the things, that social media does is it takes these little things, and I'm not saying a sexual assault in Loudoun County is a little thing. It's certainly a big thing for the person who's assaulted, but it takes things that are fairly normal in the course of human events. Bad things happen during, you know, human events in American life, but because it shines a light on them, it takes on vastly more meaning and gets worked into narratives. And I'll just, just speaking for myself, like, as someone who blogged for nearly 20 years, I'm trying to train myself with a

certain amount of muscle memory, particularly since I've been on Twitter for 12 years or something, 10 years, of trying not to be the winner of the race to be wrong first on a lot of these kinds of stories. And so I hold back sometimes, which arouses a lot of outrage from people. Why aren't you outraged yet, right? Which is like the worst form of Twitter. And so I, this just seems like a complicated story and we don't know enough. I will say like the Rolling Stone story about the campus rape, you know, a few years ago, you know, got all attention. I was one of the first people to come out of block and say, no way this happened the way

they're reporting it, because this is not possible. Wrote a column about it, got a lot of trouble for it. I was right. I think I was largely wrong about the Hunter Biden laptop thing. It turned out that it probably was. I mean, the story about how the GOP got it still is super sketchy to me. But certainly the evidence against Hunter Biden that was on that seems to be true and real. And but I don't regret not being the one to sort of rush both feet in to a story that was fast moving during a campaign.

Yeah, and you didn't, as I recall, and correct me if I'm wrong, we don't need to dwell on this as you're beating yourself up. But I don't remember you jumping in and making a bunch of direct claims about what was true or not. I think the position that we took institutionally and that you took in your writings was we don't know enough about what's happened here. And the origin story on the computer is fishy. And we said that because the origin story on the computer was really, really fishy. and certain aspects of it have undoubtedly been confirmed. I mean, I think that the photographic stuff that came out even during the campaign suggested that some of it was real at the time.

But anytime you have such a bizarre story at the outset, I think it would be irresponsible not to be circumspect. No, no, I don't, again, I'm not apologizing for being circumspect. But, and the fact that one of the writers who was assigned to the host story in the first place, refused to put their byline on it. It tells you something. But anyway, we don't need to get into the weeds and all of that. My only point is that it still feels like one of these stories, like a lot of stories

in American history, that people are going to argue about for a while. But I do think we're going to get to the bottom of it. It just seems to me the police have to take it super seriously now. We'll find out what they find out in due course. But it won't be on the convenient schedule that people want it to be. And with that, let's call it a wrap. Thank you all so much for listening, per usual. If you remember, hop in the comments.

Let us know what you thought about today's podcast. Keep it civil. I think if you go look at our comments section, it is some of the best of the dispatches. You guys talking amongst yourselves, we hop in there, talk about things too, and it's a fun place, one of the few fun places on the internet, actually. So thanks for that, and we'll see you next week.

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