The Dispatch Podcast - Crankworld and Normie Republicans | Roundtable

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle to discuss the chaotic fiefdoms within the Trump administration, from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure atop the Department of Health and Human Services to Kash Patel’s leadership of the FBI. Plus: How is The Dispatch crew thinking about artificial intelligence? The Agenda:—Firing Dr. Susan Monarez—The GOP divide over anti-establishment figures—How we got to the point of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading the CDC—The effects of AI on journalism—The gang’s favorite TV shows Show Notes:—Aaron MacLean for The Dispatch: Not Letting AI Master Us—Jim Pethokoukis for The Dispatch: AI: An Engine of Human Progress—Sen. Bill Cassidy’s floor speech in support of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Is the Secretary of Health and Human Services a public health threat? We'll also get into AI, and it's a fact. on journalism, and I'll ask the panel, and not worth your time, what they do to distract themselves from the nonstop news cycle. I'm joined today by my dispatch co-founder Jonah Goldberg, along with David French of the New York Times and Megan McArdle from the Washington Post. Let's dive right in. I want to start this week with the chaos at the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services. It was just a little over a month ago that the Senate voted to confirm Dr. Susan Monares as the new director of the CDC.

Four weeks later, she was fired. When she was confirmed, the CDC put out a nice statement on social media, welcoming her, touting her credentials, seemed to be bringing stability to this agency that had seen chaos on its own, sort of inside of the chaos of HHS more broadly. And now she's gone. David, can you give us your best big picture understanding of, what's happening at the CDC and HHS? You know, I feel like what's happening at CDC and HHS is very similar to what's happening at the

Pentagon or the FBI or in the national intelligence agencies. And that is, you have somebody who's been brought in into this MAGA world, from this MAGA world, who has, in many ways, their own agenda. And they're put into a spot in the government. And they're going to implement that agenda. that whether Trump is really tracking it or aware of it or whatever or not. And so I think the reality is these cabinet members have learned, especially the cabinet members who have a real agenda, like say a Hegseth does

or obviously a Robert Kennedy has, that they kind of make, they're just making hay while they can doing what they can. And so long as it doesn't rise to the level of a problem for the ball, he's giving them free reign, just free reign. And so to me, you know, when you look at things like somebody comes into the CDC, they're celebrated by the Trump CDC, or by the Trump administration, they come in and they're there for a very short time and they leave. That's sort of broadcast that they're sort of one type of person in this broader Republican coalition might be somebody who was frustrated with the establishment for some really good reasons, was very open to

alternative ways of thinking through things, but also still a very serious person. And I think those are the people who come into the administration and sometimes have been walking in and realize, oh, oh, okay, this is not what I thought it was going to be. And those of us on the outside are looking at it going, well, what did you expect? But it is still very clear, I think, that if you look at sort of the larger MAGA universe, there is a subset of people who, are in that category, that they've had a lot of legitimately terrible experiences with the establishment. You name whatever that establishment is and whatever arena. Legitimately terrible experiences are looking for alternatives, like that MAGA was a big tent, and then just

didn't know what they were getting into. And I think that that is a category of people that these are some of the maybe earlier exits that we've seen from the administration. But the bottom line is I look at the CDC and all of the Robert F. Kennedy fiefdom the way I do all of the other fiefdoms. They're little independent kingdoms. They implement their agenda. And so long as it doesn't arise to the level that the boss cares about, they're going to have a lot of freedom. Yeah, Megan, Semaphore reported this morning, we're recording Thursday morning, September 4th. As there's been more coverage of this and concerns raised even by Republicans about what's happening at HHS, what's happening at CDC. Semaphore reported this morning, citing a source close to

Donald Trump. Donald Trump is perfectly happy with what he's seeing from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and intends to give him a long leash. In effect, this is what he was brought on to do. You'll remember shortly before the election, Trump signaled that he was going to nominate Kennedy to this position and said that he wanted Kennedy to, quote, Go wild, unquote, on America's public health sector. Should any of what we're seeing today be surprising? No. No, it should not be surprising. And the Republican senators who suggested otherwise when they voted to confirm him

really have some soul-searching to do. It was just, it was shameful to see a doctor. Senator Cassidy supporting this. I am still gobsmacked. And to, you know, he claimed that RFK had given him assurances, which were, I mean, I don't have words. I just don't have words to express how dumb that sounded even then and how moronic it looks in hindsight. He gave you assurances. Isn't that nice? Do you also take the assurances of the Nigerian princes who are emailing you to offer you incredible opportunities to make, you know, $20 million on oil rights? And so, you know, this is not surprising. This is exactly what was predictable. If, you know, I read before he was confirmed, I read his book Vax-NoVax, which is so bad.

such a farrago of nonsense and isolated demands for rigor that I actually threw it across the room, which is a problem because I was reading it on my Kindle. Kindle did survive. But, I mean, it really is that bad. What would you say is the main thesis? I mean, this is, to your point, it's not as if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. just started making the arguments he's been making of late. I mean, this has been literally decades of work for him.

It's what he's devoted his life to doing. I wouldn't call it a thesis so much as a conspiracy theory. Look, what he has is a kind of in its sense that things that are natural or good and things that are unnatural or bad, which is weird because he's also, like, taking hormones clearly and jacking his body up with all sorts of synthetic substances. But, like, be that as it may. And what he does is he just applies completely different standards to anything that suggests vaccine. are bad, than to things that are suggesting vaccines are good. So the most egregious, the absolute, I cannot believe I am reading this, I wish I could, I had the courage to rip my eyes out in despair, was the discussion of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who for listeners who do not

know, is the doctor who really kicked this all off, all of the anti-vax stuff, by suggesting that there was a link to autism. It later came out that an investigative journalist actually went through. It was a very small study. It was a case study with a few people, a few kids who parents thought had developed autism as a result of their vaccinations. As it turned out, the case histories that he presented did not, in fact, match the case histories of the patients later reporting showed.

Also, it turned out he was on the payroll of some lawyers who were looking to do a lawsuit about vaccines and autism against the vaccine makers. And the paper was retracted, and it's just nonsense. And he says, he presents this as Wakefield, having been like pursued and hounded by the establishment. It's like, yes, if you fake things while you were accepting consulting fees from lawyers who would benefit from the things you faked, then the scientific establishment should properly hound you. Meanwhile, any kind of the evidence for vaccines is dismissed because they've never had placebo-controlled trials. This is, in fact, first of all, not true.

They did have placebo-controlled trials when they were first invented. But we now do not test things against an inert placebo because if you don't vaccinate, because that would involve taking a bunch of patients. and not giving them a vaccine that we know is effective at preventing disease. And no, we often don't do that in some cases we do. And also, there are other reasons you don't use an ender placebo, for example, because vaccines can have side effects. And if you get side effects, you know you got the vaccine. And if you don't get side effects, you might suspect you didn't.

And therefore, you can confound your results by people who say that you can, Basically, you can get a bad placebo effect if you use an inert placebo rather than, say, another vaccine that might cause a reaction at the injection site, for example. So there are reasons that we do things the way they do. But that is like, you know, he really cares about the science, and this is not scientific. And that level of double-think is just this is what is now at the head of our Department of Health and Human Services. So well done, everyone. Yeah, Jonah, about a week ago, Kennedy was quoted. There was a clip of him floating around social media.

It's been scrutinized by people who know a lot more about this than I do, saying that when he's in the airport, he can identify mitochondrial challenges in children by staring at them when they walk by because they're sort of, you know, they have empty eyes and you can see. Can you do this, Jonah? Can you do identify? No, but I think David might be able to because, like RFK, David went to law school and they teach that in law school. True, yes, yes, true. Yes, thank you, thank you for acknowledging and recognizing this, Jonah.

No, whenever I worry about I have potential mitochondrial damage, I get David on the phone because, like, I know he can talk me through it. I mean, it has to be FaceTime because he needs to see you. That's right. I do need to see. I didn't need to, but I've been able to tell by just tone of voice of late. So your powers increase over time, David. That's interesting.

Yes, yes. I have to give props to John Adler, who's a friend and a great lawyer who, when I was at National Review, he was our regular go-to guy to point out that RFK was a crank and a crackpot. and he once compiled a list of all the pieces he wrote for NR. And he wasn't alone in writing these. He has been a crackpot and a liar and a grifter and a fool for an extremely long period of time. And the idea that somehow he stopped being one when he endorsed Donald Trump is such a strange leap. It was like, oh, no, that now he's a serious person. and so he had no business being appointed he had no business being confirmed he's no business

in the job um it is an embarrassment to the country it's going to cost lives um but uh and he's cost lives before with his anti-vac stuff where he's gone places and and led to people led to kids dying so uh all that said i used to be at point but now like every now and then the guys over at A.O. Steal My Thunder about how Congress is broken. What's A.O. for the, I mean, there might be people here. Advisory, uh, advisory opinions. I think that's what it's called. I'm not even get intervened because everybody knows. And, uh, so like, there used to be a thing in Washington that cabinet secretaries were terrified of senators who were like chairman of the committee that oversees them, right? That used to be like part of like the schoolhouse rock, how a bill becomes a

law, kind of like Washington 101 stuff. And, you know, we're recording this Thursday morning and there's a lot of pressure on, on Senator Cassidy from Louisiana to like get some of his manhood back. But I just, you know, this is what can, this was from, this is from Cassidy's floor speech, explaining why he supported RFK's confirmation. He goes on and on on about how close the relationship is, how many insurances he's had, and all these kinds of stuff, how dedicated he is to sound science, yada, yada, yada, says, Mr. Kennedy has asked for my input into hiring decisions at HHS, beyond Senate confirmed positions. This aspect of our collaboration will allow us to represent all sides of those folks that were contacting me this weekend. He is also committed

that we will work within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring system and not establish parallel systems. If confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes. CDC will not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism. Mr. Kennedy, the administration, also committed that this administration will not use the subversive techniques employed under the Biden administration like Sue and Settle to change

policies enacted by Congress. without first going through Congress. He goes on and on, on, on. And it's like a checklist of the things RFK has actually done. And there was a time where when a Congress was healthy, a cabinet secretary couldn't get away with so humiliating and beclowning the key vote that got him confirmed from a senator who has oversight over his cabinet.

And we should also point, he's in the normal times, in the before times, Kennedy's behavior would have enraged a president who made assurances that he wasn't going to do the things that he's going to do. And so I have just zero patience of tolerance for anybody who, like, has the goldfish memory problem of, oh, well, this controversy started today. Like, this has been a rolling controversy since RFK was even floated as a cabinet secretary. Yeah, we've had pretty significant public pressure ramping up. since the firing of Dr. Susan Monars.

You've had past leaders of the CDC. Every past leader of the CDC dating back to 1977 collaborated on a New York Times op-ed, arguing that Kennedy, quote, has fired thousands of health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attack, strokes, leading lead poisoning, injury, violence, and more. And they go on and provide some great detail. Jeffrey Flyer, who is former dean of the Harvard School of Medicine and current professor at the Harvard School of Medicine, says that Kennedy is a threat to the public health in America. This pressure is leading up to a series of hearings that are taking place on Capitol Hill today.

Again, we're recording Thursday morning, September 4th, so we will not have a reaction to those hearings that take place later today. But going into them, Republicans sound like they might actually press him. a little bit. John Thune said that Kennedy was, we'll face hard questions from fellow Republicans at these hearings. Senator John Kennedy, no relation to Republican from Louisiana, said, I want the chaos to stop. You can't have the institution of public health in turmoil. Other Republicans suggesting that they're ready to put his proverbial feet to the fire. Megan, do you expect that? I mean, we've heard this before. On the one hand, it's uncommon for Republicans. senator just to say anything like this, right? They've been just sort of happy to go along,

reluctant to offer even the mildest criticism. So this in and of itself is somewhat notable. On the other, when it comes to doing anything, going back to the confirmation hearing itself, and you had these kinds of questions raised about Kennedy beforehand, because as you pointed out earlier, none of this is new. We'd seen all this before. There's literally decades worth of evidence that he's a crank. Is there any reason to believe that they're actually going to press him, that they're going to take their complaints to the White House, that there might be any kind of a change? Oh, they were, they were going to be tough. They're always going to be tough, some unstated point in the future. And then they cave, right? They're afraid of his voters. And that's what it comes down to. And look, the reason that RFK Jr. is our HHS secretary is that he, before Trump, had his own block of voters who were super,

super motivated, super devoted. And Trump's promise and then actually making him a judge, HHS secretary was aimed at securing that voting block. Well, the Republican senators, maybe they'll, maybe they will grow spines and sit up straight and do the right thing. But the other fact is, look, are they going to impeach him? No. So what levers do they have?

And the normal levers that Congress has against secretaries is that the secretaries want to do things, right? They have policy agendas that are part of the administration's agenda and they know that if they don't play nice with Congress, Congress could cut funding to their pet thing or not vote for something they want. All he wants to do is wreck the place. They can't stop him. He's like, he doesn't need their cooperation to wreck the CDC.

And so I am not hopeful, let us say. I don't know. Maybe there will be some fun theater, but I really don't think this is going to change much. So, David, I mean, thinking about the constituency that Megan mentioned, that Kennedy does have, right? He did have a following. He had a following. He ran for president. He had, you know, I would say a small but valuable group of supporters.

My view is that that group of supporters has actually expanded. as he's served as HHS secretary, right? He's brought more people into what they call the Maha movement, make America healthy again, by sort of broadening his appeal, talking about things like unnecessary dyes in food, talking about, you know, eating healthier in general, taking out processed, super processed foods.

That resonates with people. And if you look at the context in which we're having all of these discussions, I think one of the reasons that Donald Trump was able to nominate and have Kennedy confirmed was against the backdrop of the diminishing trust in these public health institutions that came out of COVID. I was looking at a political headline from five years ago about, you know, when there was a big march and a public rally, and all of these public health officials who'd been telling people, stay inside, don't interact with other people, wear your masks all the time.

We're suddenly justifying huge outdoor rallies on behalf of Black Lives Matters because social justice was itself a public health issue. How much does that, I mean, we can't separate what we're seeing play out right now with that history, right? Yeah, okay, so this really gets me this. And you saw this all over, you know, Twitter over the last few days. Well, if you want to understand. understand why we have RFK Jr. Look at that COVID-era stuff, okay? No, no, okay. The COVID-era stuff where you have

these public health officials who obviously, transparently, incandescently lost their minds in the middle of the George Floyd protests. This was something that was obvious to the almost everyone outside of the far-left bubble at the moment that that was an obviously transparently political thing that these that these public health officials engaged in, none of that excuses craziness on the right. Why is it? Why is it that if you point out to something that somebody did on the far left or on the left that was just nutso, that that is therefore, what, a get out of responsibility free card to be nutso on the right? No, the answer to extremism or the answer to radicalism or the answer to ideologically charge science is not saying,

oh, we can do that too and more. No, the answer is to say, well, no, if you're engaging in unreason, we're going to engage in reason. If you've sacrificed science for your far left political point of view, we're not going to sacrifice science for our point of view. That's the answer to it. You don't look at what a bunch of public health officials did in COVID. and turn that into some get out of accountability free card for whatever craziness arises in response to it. And I think, yeah, there are some people who maybe became a little bit more open to alternative ideas as a result of some of that. But I think actually, really, what you're dealing with is a giant amount of rationalization and what aboutism from people who know better. So you'll have people who totally disagree with RFK who think all of this is nonsense, but because they want to stay.

on side, they will say, well, the real problem is the left. No, you're responsible for your own actions and ideas here, people. So I think there's two groups that we're talking about here, and it's useful to separate them. When you're talking about elites, David, that's completely correct, right? That is, they know better. They should not have gone along with this. When you're talking about ordinary people, let's, I mean, let's remember a few things. First of all, vaccine skepticism or hesitancy is not new. People have long worried about these. People don't like sticking needles in their body and injecting foreign substances. It's a little scary, right? So that's number one, is that those people have had those, and I think those fears, and I think that watching

the public health establishment just put up a giant billboard saying, no, yeah, it's all politics. If anything comes into conflict with the politics, the politics wins. In order to overcome that hesitancy, you need high trust in the public health establishment that they're going to tell you things that are true and make recommendations that are not about their personal agendas that are about the best read of the science and what is going to make you healthiest and best off. Public health flagrantly violated that. And when you lose that trust, you then lose that trust, you then, lose the ability to overcome what was already a natural hesitancy towards and on the part of many

people to sticking a lot of shots in their kids. Now, I completely agree with this as a critique of elites, but I think it is not realistic to expect voters to have a high grasp of how scientific papers work and how to parse which scientific experts are legit and which methods are legit and all that. They never will, right? That is just not a reasonable expectation of your average voter who has a life and does not necessarily have the education or the interest to parse all of this research, which means the institutional trust really is paramount. And it really does matter. And there is public responsibility from the public health people for not taking the need to maintain that trust seriously, for abusing their power. And for

I would say even worse, right, I think a lot of the people who signed those letters and did all of the performative social justice stuff, I think a lot of them understood it was a bad idea. But they were afraid. They were afraid that if they didn't sign the other grad students in their program or some of their peers would make a big deal out of it. And they thought, okay, well, this is a bad idea. But the cost to me is high and the cost to the public is low. And that was wrong. First of all, the cost was not low. And second of all, that's not how you should think about a job like that. And look, I get it. Everyone does. But we should aspire to better. And beyond that, I mean, it was, you know, somebody like Anthony Fauci, remember at the beginning of the pandemic, was questioning the efficacy of masks, suggesting that it wasn't necessary. It probably wouldn't work.

And we later learned that he basically did so as a noble lie. to keep the stock, the supplies of masks and other PPE high so that doctors would have them not recommending that the public at large use them. But doesn't that contribute to this lack of trust? I'm entirely with you, David, on the question of rationalizing. So the crazy that we're seeing now, there's Hawaii Senator Brian Shats, who's a Democrat,

weighed in on a sort of a long Twitter back and forth. I won't bore you with the details of it. But he acknowledged that there was this diminished faith in public health institutions and leaders, in part because of the sort of evolving guidance, the things that they said that weren't true, but says there's smart response to this, however, isn't to put someone in charge who will cause measles to make a comeback. What do you say about somebody like Anthony Fauci and this noble law? I mean, doesn't that contribute to this environment? Doesn't that sort of make people more likely to believe the crazy stuff that RFK Jr. is peddling? People just don't know who to believe, right? So, okay, I encounter this again all the time.

And a lot of times what I encounter is this. a person will say x whether it's about vaccines or whether it's about um the election in 2020 or whatever they'll say they'll make an assertion that's really really wrong really wrong and then you say okay that's not correct for reasons a b c and d and then the fallback is well i don't know what to believe and a lot of times i got to be honest with you it feels a lot more like a tactic because what at the end of the day happens is when the, the message that they don't know whether to believe is the one you're saying, and they continue to believe the other message. Okay, so people are trusting people here. People are trusting government officials here.

Robert F. Kennedy is a government official now. So a lot of what's happening here is he has collected under his umbrella, a large group of people, and we've already went with this, the demographics sort of that Kennedy has a group of people who are very, very committed. We've known for a long time that there is a big cross-section of Americans who are suspicious of mainstream medicine. Way before COVID, we were hearing about homeopathic remedies and essential oils and all of the stuff that we hear about now was way before any person kneeled during the Black Lives Matter protest, way before that. And so I feel like what has happened is you've had a, but there wasn't a universal, sort of a political salience to the health and wellness movement.

Yeah, you had some far left Marin County, anti-vax, far left moms, you know, but you had homeschool Christian moms who were into essential oils. And you had, but what's happened is, and this is in a number of areas, Trump has sort of taken the entire sort of anti-establishment universe and collected in. So now that that sort of anti-established universe has moved from not necessarily all Republican or all Democratic has become much more Republican. And so then it gives it much more power, much more political power. And so I don't necessarily think if you're, you know, if you look at the at the polling around the assessments, say, of risk and COVID and things like that, there was a pretty consistent pattern and going all the way back to the beginning, which is if you were pretty much on the left, you overestimated the danger of COVID. If you were partisan on the right, you underestimated the danger of COVID.

And then there's a big chunk of people who got it basically right. And I don't know that that really wavered all that much during all of this, during all of this. And so I think what's actually happened is that the Republican Party has collected just almost all

of the kind of crank world of alternative medicines, etc. The whole thing is now under its umbrella. And then for those people who are still normie Republicans who are looking and wondering about what happened to my party, well, it's the left. It's the left.

And that is the dynamic that I object to. I think that what we are not necessarily seeing is the vast migration of people who were once trusting of science, who are now not trusting of science. But much more what we're seeing is the migration of people who were not trusting of science all into one political.

party. And then the people who just general have been more trusting of general scientific consensus all migrating to this other political party. And so I'm not sure that we've actually had a blow up of trust after the COVID so much as a concentration of those who lack trust in this one big party. I don't know. I think you've seen some some polling that really suggests that trust in experts has fallen dramatically since the pandemic, but I think it's all, I mean, I don't know that we've had falling trust for a quarter century on all fronts. I would be very interested to see, for example, if you could track material changes post-COVID that were, and including in behavior, that were not, that were material derivations from pre-COVID trends.

Jonah, last word on this to you. How much of this going back even further than 2020 in COVID? How much of this is attributable to the general widespread availability of bad information? Could we be in this position in sort of the pre-internet days when people like Kennedy and others, people who propagated these kinds of conspiracy theories were, sort of left to, you know, distribute pamphlets, write books that very few people read. Whereas now, you can publish it on the Internet, has worldwide distribution, seems plausible.

People come in thinking that they want to believe this, they believe it, and we've created these silos. Yeah, look, that's part of it. I think this is one of these wildly overdetermined phenomenon, and we can connect dots on five or six different, that got us to this, this point on this stuff, you know, one of the reasons why people create institutions is to do things, right, is that you need many hands make light work to run a bake sale or all, name your thing, right? And one of the reasons why institutions are, are eroding

is that technology lets you do things as an individual where you don't need the many hands make like work. You don't need everyone to be in it together to do something together. And part of what comes from that is that people don't physically participate in institutions the way they once did. And when you don't do that, you start seeing the people who run these things as abstractions rather than as real human beings. And once you start seeing people as abstractions, it's very easy to fit them in when you start seeing all of reality through screens it's very easy to to line them up into the narratives that you prefer and to demand the information that you want i mean i think artificial intelligence is a great sort of metaphor for this kind of problem where you is very

easy to get AI chatbots to tell you whatever it is you want it to tell you and um you know when i had Emmett Renson on here a while back and he was talking about how, you know, one of the kids who killed himself was because he just prompted the chatbot to tell him, no, really, you don't need to be on your meds. You don't need to follow your doctors and start. You are Superman. You are Jesus Christ. It's very easy to get them to tell you to say that kind of thing. Metaphorically, I think that's a problem that we have across our culture is that nobody wants to hear that somebody else is the boss of them or that somebody else is an expert. The whole, We mock it a lot, but the whole idea of do your own research,

what it really means is I'm going to go out there spulunking in the Google Caves, and I am going to find whatever tidbits I need to ratify what I want to believe already. And a lot of the stuff about NIH and CDC and all that, it's just one aspect of that much broader thing. You can see it on Israel. You can see it on the Ukraine War. you can see it on, you know, economics. I mean, it's just everyone thinks they're an expert now

because they can read search results or get chat GPT to say, you know, that's brilliant. Can I just circle back on one thing really fast? I do think that you do have an accelerationist component when you have one party becomes completely identified with a position that then other people in the party sort of, think, oh, that's what we do now. So this is who we are now. And sometimes you can mistake that shift momentum for like genuine conviction. I think the Democrats kind of made this a lot of

this mistake around some of the trans issues where they got extreme, the small activist base got very, very, very intense about it. And a lot of the larger bulk of Democrats just kind of went, It wasn't something they really cared about, but the ability to dissent from that point of view or what became very limited, the party was centered around this particular identity, and then it brings a lot of people with it, but not out of conviction, just kind of out of that herd instinct. I do think some of that is happening in with the public health. I mean, you don't hear as much about far left vaccine hesitancy anymore because that's out of the cultural zeitgeist. that's now seen as that right-coded. And now you, I have had people around me, Republicans, who would have taken every possible vaccine are now, they've never really thought much about it, but it's part of

what we do now, what Republicans do, is question vaccines, and so they're kind of going along with that. I do think when something becomes very, very partisan, it both pulls and repels people independently of the merits. Yes. And I think a lot of this has to do with sort of evolving sense of authority. I mean, if you look at the polling on who Republicans believe, they believe Donald Trump overwhelmingly as compared to any of these institutions as compared to mainstream media outlets, again and again and again, polling suggests that Republicans see Donald Trump as kind of the ultimate sort of truth on these matters. And so if he is saying these things or if people that he likes admires and promotes are saying these things, there is, I think, this sort of partisan movement to go along and to believe the same things. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. Not long ago, I saw someone go

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All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Before we return to the roundtable, I want to let you know what's going on elsewhere at the dispatch. On the next episode of advisory opinions, David French and Sarah Isker are joined by Justice Amy Coney-Barritt. They discuss the flurry of emergency docket orders, what impresses her when she's listening to advocates make their case, and her upcoming book. Look for the interview on September 9th and make sure you don't miss it by searching for advisory opinions in your podcast app and hitting the follow button. Now, let's jump back into our conversation.

On the dispatch homepage today, we have the latest installment of our dispatch debate series where we bring together some of the smartest thinkers on the world's most challenging political and cultural issues, and we ask them to make compelling arguments in a civil and thoughtful way side by side. This week, we have pieces from James Pethakoukis and Aaron McLean on artificial intelligence as an engine of human progress. And I highly recommend their exchange. We'll put it in the show notes. It's really terrific, sort of deep and thoughtful, give yourself a half hour, dive into both of them. For our purposes today, I want to narrow the focus to AI and journalism picking up on the conversation that we were just having. Obviously, journalism, as I mentioned earlier, has seen these profound changes with the rise of the Internet and dramatic increase in the velocity of information, the way that we process, consume and process information. And I hope you'll indulge me for just a moment to read.

a little chunk of the dispatch's first post from October of 2019. The Internet puts an unimaginable amount of information at our fingertips, and yet it makes knowledge and wisdom harder to grasp. Social media connects people in meaningful ways, but also manages to make it more difficult for us to understand each other. It is less a worldwide web linking us all together than an accelerant, quickening trends long in the works. Our confidence in the institutions that once anchored us was declining even before the internet became a fixture in our lives, but its arrival has only made us feel less fixed to a common landscape. Nowhere is this more true than the world of journalism. Not only do we

have too much noise and not enough signal, but the signals we should be heating are often discounted as noise and the noise is marketed as prophecy. And then a very Jonah-esque end to that passage. A great deal of excellent journalism is still available to those who want it, but one has to seek it out like a tourist, trying to find a chapel. amidst the neon signs of some dystopian red light district. That was six years ago, and now... But my prose is timeless, Steve. I mean, it's so brilliant.

In so many ways, the red light district... Leave the red light district alone. I won't ask how you know what that feels, but you wrote with great authority about the red light district. I'll let me put it this way. I have never looked for a chapel in a red light district. Fair. I believe you.

You know, obviously the Internet changed the way that we all do our work, the way that journalism is both produced and consumed. And now we have AI, which I think seems likely to disrupt the news industry on a much greater scale. So, Jonah, since you authored that passage, let me start with you two questions. How will AI change the way we produce the news and how will AI change the way we consume the news? Honestly, I think the consume the news part is easier. because I think I can see where that's going a little easier than how the news is produced because there's a little bit of a snake eating its own tail problem, which I'll get to in a second. But like I know people who already use AI and they say, give me the five big stories

of the day, tell me what happened, right? And they just ask it and the thing coughs it up. And I think we're going to get more and more of that. Sort of like when you do Google searches now, you get that AI summary at the top. that's going to get more and more refined really, really, really fast until it's going to get to the point where, you know, it's like, you know, like in sci-fi movies where you just ask some disembodied voice, tell me what happened today, kind of thing. And I'll tell you. The problem of that is that AI scoops up that information from actual journalistic outlets. And if the AI functionality puts those journalistic outlets out of work, I don't know how AI can summarize what happened today. Now, you'll talk to people who say, well, no, it actually doesn't, it doesn't, it can cut out the middleman. It can go and scrape, um, government provided databases about what's going on with the weather

and what's going on with a war, a school board mirror, and it can transcribe it and summarize it all. Yeah, it can do a lot of things and it'll put a lot of journalists out of business, but, um, it's not going to do, um, in-depth sort of, expose, get to the truth of the matter reporting, you know, where you actually has to get people on the phone and investigate and that kind of thing. And if you kill the journalists of outlets that do that kind of stuff, that kind of stuff isn't going to get done very well. And it'll fall to sort of independent media. And we're hoping we're going to, we can live in this niche space.

But I think we're in for a massive amount of turmoil. Even if I, I am not a, I am more skeptical about the transformative power of AI than a lot of people are. But you can come short of total transformation and still cause a lot of upheaval. Yeah. Megan, Jonah earlier mentioned people doing Google searches and going spilunking for information that sort of confirms their own biases that creates these silos isn't part of the challenge. seeing this, we've seen this in the pre-AI era, but I think it's likely to accelerate with AI. Part of the problem is that information will now come and find you. You don't really have to

go splunking. It's coming to you, and it's coming to you based on the thing, because it knows what you want. How challenging is that for someone who creates the news? Yeah, well, look, I use AI in my work every day. It's super useful. I use it for research. I use Now, look, I don't use it for research in the way that people are worried about where I say, like, tell me this thing and then I just blindly take what it says. But it's super useful at finding links and other things for me to follow. I use it to read long documents, right? You know, if I'm writing something quickly on, say, a 300-page legal decision that just dropped, it is very useful to say, go through, pull out the stuff I need to look at and tell me where that is because I can't read this entire thing. And also, file my column in two hours. I use it, I feed my columns into it, and then I say, fact-check this stringently. And I also want you to point out logical inconsistencies, what someone from the other political point of view might say. It's super useful for that. So it's great. It makes me more productive. I use the extra time to do extra work. Just note to my bosses, I do not use it to mess around,

as some people do. But it's great for that. It is a challenge in a bunch of ways. For one thing, I think that it is going to cut out the middle of journalism. The part that just consists of telling you that the school board meeting happened, and this is what people said or something like that, right? That's just not, if there's a transcript online, people are going to get that from AI. And I don't think there's any way to stop that.

I'm not saying this is a good thing. I just think it's a fact. Similarly, anything that is a news earnings releases or government data or whatever, you know, AI can just do that so much faster than a person that even if you think the person's still adding more value than the AI, the comparative advantage is not there. So where do I think journalism goes? I think it goes in two directions. One is you can't get what an AI can't do. It cannot get a congressional staff or drunk and get it to tell the AI things, at least not yet. I mean, God knows maybe the congressional. staffers pouring its deep heart into one of these AIs and it will use that information, but it's not supposed to. And so for now, humans are safe in the deep reporting field. And I think we're also safe in the relationship field. Like, everyone on this podcast has an audience that knows them and kind of has a sense of who they are as a person. And that's

valuable because people want, and this actually, I think goes back to weirdly our conversation about vaccines. People want to trust where they're getting their information. And that trust used to reside in institutions, but the institutions for a variety of reasons, I think, have lost trust. And so now I think increasingly that trust resides in people. In understanding how this person thinks, have they played straight with me in the past? Do they correct their errors when they make them? Do you feel like they were approaching things from a position of humility? or if what you want is just the straight ideological line and it never wavers, then do they approach it that way? I like to think that the dispatch audience looks for intellectual honesty, humility, charm, wit, and all the other fine qualities in my fellow podcasters here today.

But that is going to be valuable because an AI can't replace that. And I do think that there is this problem with AI, which is when I'm just kind of when I'm spitballing, When I'm not ready to write a column and I'm just asking questions, I worry that it's telling me what it knows I want to hear. But I do think that the last thing is that just in general, we're going to be competing for attention more. You can do anything with AI. I've been like con-langing, which is making up fake languages with it.

I've been trying to build an AI assistant. There are all these hobbies that you can do. Well, but necessarily when I'm doing that, I am not reading the news. And so that is also, I think, going to be a big challenge. But also, it can really transform what we do in ways, in the same way that the Internet transform journalism, not always for the better, but the kind of policy journalism that I've been doing for 20 years

was literally not possible for the Internet. The ability to just have all of this information, all of the data, everything right there, grabable at any time, not like I had to go find the Think Tank Scholar who had the 90-page volume or 900-page volume, sitting in his office where he'd carefully, you know, tabulate. It's a whole new world.

And so overall, I'm excited, even though I think it is scary. David, are you excited or scared or both? And how to, can you speak to what Megan says about trust? That's the thing that I think about most as we sort of try to navigate the dispatches way through this. How can journalists enhance trust with their readers in an era that is going to be likely dominated by AI? You know, one thing that is interesting to me,

And I may use AI less than anyone here, in part because I think where AI is really lagging is in law. Too many times I have asked basic questions about law or, like, kind of dipped my toes into exploring that element of, you know, and maybe my prompts are bad. I mean, there could be some real user error here. I'm not at all saying that I know how to do this perfectly, but I just keep seeing problems and mistakes. However, I do think that there is a trust opportunity here for things that are relatively easy and basic. And let's get to that question that we've talked about with trust and this I don't know who to believe. One of the things that you're seeing that's unfolding on X is a lot of times people are immediately using GROC to try to fact check what they just saw on X. GROC is the built-in, it's the built-in AI function to Twitter X, yeah.

For me, that seems quite promising. I do think it's a little early to use the, you know, GROC to really truly be an authoritative fact-checker. But if people actually have trust that the AI has not been engineered to just spit out whatever results, then, you know, things like fact-checking basic things and things like that sort of what you're calling that middle tier, I do think that there is some actual possibility that AI could start to restore trust in those arenas because unless people start to feel as if the AI model themselves have been corrupted. So I do think there is some upside there on some elements of AI. But I'm honestly, I am not one of these tech futurist type people. And so when I was speaking at the fire conference not long ago, it was shocking. to me how many of the student questions were about AI. And my bottom line assessment was, I don't know how this is all going to shake out, but the one thing that it does seem to me is that AI is such a leap

over sort of social media, et cetera, that we may, 50, 100 years from now, look back at this era and say that the information age was really the prelude to the AI age, and that the real transformation was the AI age. era and how that is going to work out and how it's going to radiate through our lives and culture. I'm just, I don't know. I'm very open to all possibilities. We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly.

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newspapers and the Internet, they've just decided this is all too much. It's either too overwhelming, there's too much information, or it's too depressing. And they have basically just checked out. We can't afford to do that, because we work in the news and we comment about this, and I think we probably care too much about what's happening on a daily basis. But given those temptations, it is nice to just check out sometimes. So, Jonah, if you have time or can make time to just check out and lose yourself in a distraction, a book or a Netflix show or a hobby, what have you, what's your go-to distraction these days.

Scotch. No, I've always sort of had a thing where, like, after the 6 o'clock news, I do not want to follow news at all. And that has been the case for 25 years. And even the 6 o'clock news sometimes was a real burden for me. And so, like, I, my habits in this regard have not changed all that much. There's some shows that I really like

that I've been watching. I revisit some old shows from time to time. My wife and I've been on a big British drama thing. And I've decided, I don't know if David's noticed this, but I've decided that basically they're only like 35, 40 British actors. Yes, totally. And like a third of them have been in Game of Thrones. And so, like, you'll just see these, like, random guys as cops who, like, last time I saw you, you had a spear, you know, that kind of thing.

I have to say, I've been wildly impressed with alien Earth, which is part of the extended alien universe. It's the best alien-related product or franchise since the second alien movie. Oh. And really great world building in it. A lot of gross stuff. It's sort of half sci-fi, two-thirds sci-fi, one-third horror. But it's sufficiently compelling and well-written that I actually took the incredibly risky move of insisting my wife watched the first episode to see if she wanted to watch it. And she's really into it, too.

So I highly recommend it. And if you don't like the first episode, stop watching. Really quickly. Never watch it again. Because if you, it does give you a good sense of what you're in for. I will definitely not ever watch that show. It's not my thing. But that goes with a lot of the grief that I get from you all about my pop culture ignorance.

And I don't. I mean, Steve, you're so lucky. It's a golden age for you. You can watch, you know, old episodes of McNeil Lair on YouTube now, right? I mean, that's how you relax. We had a long discussion this couple months ago, Jonah and a few of our friends all walking through great movies that I have not seen. and the list was really long, and I suppose maybe embarrassing to me if I cared more, but you all thought it was embarrassing that I've seen so little.

We're embarrassed for you, yeah. So if I'm mocked pretty regularly for what I haven't seen, and David is mocked pretty regularly for what he has seen and what he likes. So with that, David, what is it that you're watching these days, or reading or doing? I've got a rave about Foundation on Apple TV, season three of Foundation. A lot of people for a long time said that the foundation works

by Isaac Asimov were not really translatable into TV or movies, just too sprawling. So essentially what Apple TV did was it's based on, it's a story based on, but it really is its own thing. But it's done so well. And the thing that is so interesting, each season sort of follows a different era. And there is, bear with me, a triumvirate, a version of a triumvirate that rules this galactic empire. And the triumvirate are always the same three actors.

They're clones. And it's clones of this original emperor going back hundreds of years. So what ends up happening is the same actors portray very different leaders in any given season. sort of very different personalities, very different temperaments. And one of the, probably the lead of them is played by Lee Pace. And he's just done amazing work. Like if you watch all three seasons, it's playing under somebody who looks the same, has the same voice, a clone, but with extremely different personality,

extremely different temperament. It's really, really well done. It's beautifully shot. I mean, the special effects are incredible. The story is compelling. It's big. It's sweeping. Not enough people talk about the show.

I think it's just fantastic. I have not seen it nor even heard of it. But I'm intrigued enough that I will check it out. Yeah, yeah. It's really good and not enough people are talking about it. See, I think I like it. First season was a little bit of a lift. But it benefits from the fact that I have never read the books.

Like I could, like from my nerd friends who've, Did you read the books, David? Years ago, a long time ago. Yeah, so, like, my nerd friends who are really into those books, they think it's a hate crime, but, I mean, sort of like doing Lord of the Rings with drive-through scenes or something. I mean, like, I just think it's, like, so wrong. And, but I just take it as just sort of as a sci-fi thing,

and it's gorgeously shot. And I like it a lot. the Apple TV show invasion is much slower because I think it was designed by a multicultural committee from a hundred different countries. Is it also sci-fi or fantasy? It's also sci-fi and it's on Apple TV, but it just recently came back. It's weird how we were all talking about sci-fi here. But if you haven't, my wife and I recently restarted on Britbox, highly recommend for people who don't want to get away from all this stuff.

Luther, which is a great crime show. It didn't end great, but like the first few seasons are just phenomenal with Idris Elba as sort of a Sherlock Holmes kind of character, but it's very gritty, pretty dark, but very good. Megan, what are you doing today to distract yourself from this stuff? I am doing many things with AI, for one thing. I am, you know, making up fake languages for fun. But I'm also watching a great show called Department Q, which is, I believe it's on Netflix.

My husband handles the streaming services in our house. Wonderful crime procedural with some kind of character actors from Britain. There's not really big famous names, but it's really well-plotted, slightly annoying subplot about a bariatric chamber is what I think they're called. which has us all puzzled. But overall, it's just extremely good. The acting's good. The plodding's good. The pacing's good.

Everything's good about it. And it's nothing about the news. I love it. My new show, which I love, I'm now in the second season. My wife and I are watching a show called Endeavour. Have you seen it? I know, I haven't seen it.

Yeah, it is terrific. There are four episode seasons. Most of the episodes are about an hour and a half long, so almost full-feature movie length. And it is an old-school British crime drama, tremendous character development, fascinating storylines, and I think the writing is exceptional. I sometimes keep a vocab list as I am sitting there on my computer, watching the show as it goes. So traditional British crime drama.

My two other favorites have been Broad Church and Unforgotten, both terrific, terrific shows. And I've been looking, honestly, for probably six months for something to replace those. And I think Endeavor is probably it. And then following that, I am likely to return to Foils War. Have you all watched or seen any Foils War? I'm not. That is the late Charles Crouthammer's favorite television show, in part because it's a crime drama. that takes place, I believe, in Britain in World War II, and so you have all of this, you know,

sort of killing at scale taking place in the war, and then they're trying to solve these individual crimes, which provides an interesting contract. Very smart also. But that's mine, and it's a welcome distraction. I don't get to them as often as I'd like, but I need to get to them more. That's it. Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Dispatch podcast. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us, and we hope you'll consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at

the dispatch.com slash join. And if you use my promo code, Roundtable, you'll get one month free and help me win the ongoing, deeply scientific internal debate over which dispatch podcast is the true flagship podcast. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at Roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones generated by AI. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Max Miller and Victoria Holmes. We couldn't do it without you. Thanks again for joining us in this dispatch podcast episode. Please join us again next week.