The Dispatch Podcast - Cries for Freedom in Cuba

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

Cuban citizens have taken to the streets to protest the oppressive communist regime, but what can the United States do to help? Should we do anything to help? The gang considers the moral and political implications of United States foreign policy toward Cuba. David notes that vaccine hesitancy is having severe consequences as positive covid cases continue to rise. How should we go about persuading the vaccine-hesitant to get the vaccine? Plus, Texas Democrats have left the state in protest over a new voting bill, and Sarah has some thoughts. Is this bill an example of voter suppression or just over-eagerness from Democrats to have a talking point? Finally, tech companies face legislative threats from the state level. Chris questions the unintended consequences of big-tech bills. Show Notes: -Jonah’s column: “Vaccines Save Lives. Anti-Vax Hysteria Kills.” -Chris’s Article: “Anti-Vaccine Pandering Poses Risk for GOP” -Ramesh Ponnuru’s column on Biden’s response to voting bills: “Biden’s Voting Rights Bluster Recycles Failed Strategy” -CPAC 2024 Straw Poll Results Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger, joined by Jonah Goldberg, David French, and the one and only Chris Steyerwalt. This week we will talk about the protests in Cuba, vaccine hesitancy continuing, the Democrats fleeing Texas over voting, and the social media and tech bills popping up in different states. let's dive right in jonah protests continue in cuba yes and i hope they continue for a good long while um uh there's a lot of there's a lot of wishful thinking and a lot of um known unknowns and unknown unknowns i for one i'm glad that that formulation has come back in the in the wake of of Don Rubbsfeld's death because it's actually a great way to go to understand, you know, decision trees. And so the current dictator in Cuba has only been in power for about four months, something like that, five months. And it's unclear whether he's got the sway, the swag,

and the, the skills to actually take care of a burgeoning democracy, pro-democracy movement. and I'm cautiously optimistic and I can get to my reasons why in a second and I also have some half-baked ideas about what we should be doing. But I guess we'll start off with the sort of basic foreign policy question before we get to the political question and I'll throw it to David.

What should Biden be doing and is he doing it? Yeah, that's a really good question. You know, one of the things that happens whenever we begin to see an uprising in a totalitarian foreign country is, you know, the easy layup thing is that we stand with the protesters to declare that unequivocally. That's kind of the layup. And of course, protesters like it when the most powerful nation in the world declares publicly for their cause.

it doesn't change the facts on the ground. It doesn't concretely adjust the power balance in the country. It can certainly help. I mean, it can help in the sense that dissidents know that if they over, they topple the regime, that they have the, that, you know, that they'll be recognized by the U.S. But when I say it doesn't concretely, doesn't necessarily provide the additional force in the streets necessary to topple a regime. I mean, we've declared for protesters many times in the past and protests of proof and fruitless. For example, as we've seen in Iran. So the then question is, do you declare for the protesters, and then what? And then what? That is a highly contingent situation-specific answer, to be honest. And the

answer, I've got a really unsatisfactory answer to that. I don't really know. There isn't a lot of direct intervention possibility here. There isn't a desire for direct intervention here. You could certainly imagine a situation in which you could have a humanitarian crisis that would require intervention or should require intervention. But beyond declaring for the protesters, I do know one thing that we should not do is if some of these protesters, flee, we should not shut our doors to them. We need to continue to be in the business of opening our nation to those who are fleeing tyranny and oppression. So I do know that we should not shut our doors to people who may have to flee Cuba. I know that we should declare ourselves

unequivocally for the protesters. And then what concretely that means, and that should be more than just words. There should be more than just words. It should be more than just good wishes. But what that means concretely, certainly if Cuba cracks down, a lot of the openness that we have, or as Cuba cracks down, a lot of the openness we have indicated the regime should change. Sanctions, for example, but the precise tactical method of leveraging these protests in a way that is strategically in our interest and supports the interests of democracy and human freedom is highly contingent and fact-specific. And I'm not quite sure that I've got the five-point plan on it, to be honest. Before I go to Sarah and Chris, and I know I want to be cognizant of Sarah's, you know, no foreign

wars, passion and commitments here, I have a couple ideas about things we could do. Maybe some of them are half bake, some aren't. One is reach out. We got to have, have to have all sorts of intelligence assets on the ground, diplomatic and otherwise who know how to talk to their opposite numbers over there. Offer to bribe the stuffing at everybody conceivably possible. It'd be pennies on the dollar savings to just sort of say, hey, look, Edie Amin got his, you know, got his villa in Saudi Arabia and, you know, who was it, who got the duchess in France? I mean, there are lots of dictators who have been sent abroad. Uh, there one thing that we know about secret police types is that they're survivors and that they are open to, uh, changing masters if need be. Uh, but another thing that is a little more half baked, I grant you is, it seems to be the key problem that they've got is not, is that the various groups around the island can't communicate with each other because they keep shutting down communications in the internet.

Get Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and whoever else you need to get. Park some barges. I was the first talking about like airships with like Wi-Fi above the island, but that's more probably. problematic, just park some barges with some portable cell towers and beam free Wi-Fi or internet access into the island. I think that would be hugely helpful as well. Those are my two half-baked ideas. Now, Sarah, you're free to respond to all of these wonderful ideas. So I was surprised by your, that your half-baked ideas did not include where I assumed it would, which is, Yeah, having a... Letters of Mark for somebody? Something like that.

Having a foreign war for the purpose of nation building mixed success at best. But you want to annex Greenland. This thing's 90 miles off our coast. Let's make it a twofer. Let's just go get both. I think you could even consider Mexico because that would then make our southern border

real tiny and very manageable, actually, if we annexed Mexico. and then you add in Cuba and Greenland. Like I, you know, I was surprised that wasn't your idea, frankly. Well, if you want to get Puerto Rican statehood, maybe the way to do it is the way we got Alaska and Hawaiian state would is you have to do one for one, a Democratic and a Republican place. Maybe Cuba would vote Republican.

I don't know. So that actually is, to me, the politically interesting part of the protests going on in Cuba. And Haiti's unrest. I mean, I don't, you call it unrest when they assassinate, you know, with their president. This is a politically dangerous stretch for Joe Biden. Afghanistan,

you know, you and I have argued over this, but like it or not, the American people are very much where Joe Biden is on Afghanistan. They're done with this. Yeah, that's fair. When it comes to Cuba and Haiti, that's a Florida problem. And it's a big Florida problem.

It is not, I don't pretend to speak. on behalf of all of the people of Cuba. I do not know the polling in Cuba, nor would I trust the polling in Cuba. And it is certainly self-selecting the people that come to the United States. However, of the Cubans who make it to the United States

and vote in Florida, they know liking the communist regime. And there's now a chance for the communist regime to be toppled in their eyes. And if Joe Biden does not do something and take advantage of that opportunity, you know, the Cuban voters were heavily Republican, but not 100%, not monolithic.

Haitian voters less so. Florida is pretty important as a state generally. You have the Senate race up this time, the governor's race, the Democrats would obviously like to knock off to Santis because then it would knock him off for 2024, most likely. And certainly 2024 for Biden, it's very important. So not only will he have lots of voters in Florida who want him to do something about the Cuban regime, but also hit, as you, as David was mentioning, there will be doubt people,

extra people trying to flee Cuba. And the Biden administration policy, at least as stated, is that they would be turned away potentially. That will be a big problem for Biden that has not presented itself so far in his presidency. So, Chris, given that I am still in many parts, a roaring anti-communist democracy-promoting bagel-snarfing neocon. Your hair. And someone who wants to see this sort of Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party disinterred and revived by any means of necromancy possible. What is, isn't it possible, just possible, that doing the right thing vis-a-vis Cuba, more or less,

is actually in Joe Biden's political interest. Just, I mean, isn't the right foreign policy aligned pretty well with the right politics? If he gets denounced by Bernie and AOC for having his head and his heart wired together for some full tilt boogie for freedom and justice, isn't that a good thing for him politically as a sort of sister soldierish kind of thing? And isn't it a good foreign policy? Well, I mean, it depends how. I think the problem in a situation like this is knowing what that right policy is, is challenging even for people who have devoted their lives to studying Cuba and how to proceed is an open question. We are at first, if you don't think there are simple answers, you're not looking at it. That's right. That's right. That's right. The challenges here, you know, Cuba has been a domestic American political issue.

since before the civil war. And Cuba, more than Mexico, maybe more than any other country, except for Canada, has been a part of American political discussion. That's before they sank the main in 1898. It's complicated further from a political, I don't pretend to know what the foreign relations right answer is. But I know that from a domestic standpoint, Cuba is a Republican issue more than a democratic issue. There are core democratic voters, like you say, who are Sandinista curious, who have a long, like Bernie Sanders, have a long history of sympathies for communist dictatorships. I don't think of this dictatorship is particularly communistic. I just think of it as an authoritarian state. And the test now is, does this guy have the power to do what is

always necessary in authoritarian states, which is kill large numbers of people and torture them so that they will live under the regime that you insist. on. For Republicans, there will be a bidding war, depending on how long this goes on, there will be a bidding war among Republicans, and especially since there are so many prominent Florida Republicans, including the former president, about who can be the most hawkish and most aggressive on Cuba. So they will bid that price up pretty quickly if this doesn't resolve itself soon. And you could even see, depending on how things go in Cuba, that this could be a pretty substantial issue for 2024 for Republicans as each of them try to take out the most

maximalist position on this. All right. Let's move to vaccines, David. Well, this is all just teeing up for Chris, because I know he's got an album side on this. He's written about it in thedispatch.com. Check out our wares, thedispatch.com. All right. So it's safe to say that the vaccine effort is running onto rocky shores.

the total number of vaccines down to about 500,000 a day, new cases, 14-day rolling average up 109%. According to the New York Times tracker, new deaths up 17%. We know deaths are a lagging indicator. So the 14-day average 25,000 new cases, as of July 13th, 14-day average of 330 deaths per day. and we also know that the vaccine uptake is not evenly geographically distributed across the United States, that basically the Biden states are taking the vaccine at a higher percentage than the Trump voting states. And it's a pretty remarkable correlation. And so, Chris, you wrote about this, and you had a couple of points that you made. One was, wait a minute, let's dig a little deeper into these numbers.

and it isn't quite the neat Democrats like vaccines, Republicans, don't like vaccine story that a lot of people say, not that there aren't political implications, but it's a little more complicated, but there are also political factors and political implications. So no question, just Chris, go. Well, first, I want to be clear. I was going to be super uncharitable,

and I will just say, doofuses, like the guy who Jonah played on the remnant who was talking about how maybe vaccinations work against God's plan for culling the weak from our species. That's a hot take. Isn't that awesome? It was just true.

You're like, you're going to land this, right? Then he just crashes it right into the side of the mountain. I'm just asking questions. That guy, what Tucker Carlson's doing, Ron Johnson, Chip Roy, the rottenness of either broadcasting your own superstitions or cynically playing on the superstitions of others is wicked. It's bad, bad news. And it has a negative effect. But just as you say that the states, the Biden states are vaccinating and the Trump states aren't, you could also say that about obesity. You could also say that about smoking cessation.

You could also say that about a host of cultural ills because, and I was, Max Boot, wrote the most sneering, snod dripping with scorn about these people. And he listed the states. Well, it's no surprise that it's the worst states for vaccination are Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Yeah, you know what else they are the worst at? Income and education. That's also what they're all in the bottom five for all those measures. West Virginia, my home state, is usually contending for those numbers. West Virginia, Kentucky are usually hanging around in that same neighborhood, but have done

a little better job here. I think the major reason that people do not get vaccinated may be the same as the reason that they're susceptible to authoritarian populist nationalism. It may be cultural resentment. I think they spring from the same place, but they are not causal. I don't think that it is republicanism that is causing people not to get vaccinated, but I think they spring from the same place. And the other point I made was Republicans are very right to talk a lot about how crime

and critical race theory, which now doesn't mean anything, but you know what I mean when I say, that as Republicans say, those things will be liabilities for Democrats in 2022. This vaccine pandering will hurt Republicans with suburbanites. so enormously. And if we look at the new Pew data on the comprehensive post-election survey, where are the votes? And the votes are in the suburbs. Donald Trump did better in rural America, which is the hardest place for vaccines of any Republican, I would imagine, at least since Nixon. I couldn't go any further back than the 80s. But in a long time, he got 65% of the vote.

If you had gotten 100% of the rural vote, it still wouldn't have compensated for his deficiency in the suburbs to Joe Biden. This anti-VAC stuff is a poison when it comes to these suburban educated voters. So, Sarah, Joe Biden floats a suggestion of door-to-door, not door-to-door making you get the vaccine, but door-to-door, hey, here's how you can get the vaccine. The vaccine is available, which is kind of a conventional sort of way to reach out to people who are, you know, who maybe don't have a lot of resources and they don't have a lot of information. But that's toxic now, right? Because that was turned into a culture war issue by the very political factors that Chris just mentioned. Is there anything we can do? Is there

anything we can do right now, concretely, in the populations that are most vaccine hesitant to get them to take the shot because people are still dying by the hundreds every day. A few things. Let's talk about what you shouldn't do first. What you shouldn't do is have all this talk

about how you're going to need a booster shot, then say you're not going to need a booster shot, then have other people whispering, yes, you will. Because if the vaccine isn't going to actually protect you very long, or maybe it's not protecting you, I mean, even I am like, well, wait a second.

What? Huh? That is going to undermine confidence in the vaccine's efficacy as a whole. Second, and this is, I think, much more in our control. And frankly, for Joe Biden to launch into saying that we need to go door to door before he has given instructions to his own team to stop wearing masks if you've been vaccinated. That is a huge, huge continuing problem. The message needs to be once you get vaccinated, life goes completely back to normal because that's what the science actually shows.

And instead, what you have is once you've been vaccinated, you still have to wear a mask a lot of the time, including, and I think, you know, this, I find it shocking. Obviously, my kiddo is one-year-old, so I guess I've got twice as much of his life to go until he's two. but the idea of getting a two-year-old to wear a mask on a plane, I know is causing a lot of people not to fly if you have a two to three-year-old because it is simply not going to happen and they don't want to spend the money on a plane ticket only to then be turned away

because their two-year-old is incapable of keeping a mask on their face. There are things like that that would, I think, be far more carrot to folks who are vaccine hesitant. And instead, the door-to-door thing, which again, like, do I find that offensive? No, I just don't think that's going to do much. If you're like, please get vaccinated, it's so important.

It can save your life. Now, you will need another booster shot in a couple months and you're still going to have to do all the things you're doing now, including wearing a mask all the time. Well, I don't, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And again, the other thing I would note, that should not happen is also the mask culture warring that I think is being driven by everyone. And I've had this rant before. My drone business as to why someone might wear a mask

who doesn't need to be wearing a mask in your view. Again, I will use the same example that I used before. If you are pregnant, they simply really don't have a ton of data on the vaccine on women who are pregnant. If you're a pregnant woman and decide to wait to take the vaccine, you know, eight months, which would sort of be the max, you'd be, I mean, at this point, even less months. Just like back off. You don't need to really get into someone's business as to why they don't feel like taking the vaccine right now. And I find that to also be part of this of sort of the nosiness and look down upon this and paternalism of the whole thing. Like, Just, you know, don't worry about it quite so much.

It's okay. Okay. So Sarah just ran through all. I said Sarah just ran through all the things that won't work, but I asked her what would work. So, Jonah, in addition to your thoughts, your addition to your, any other thoughts you might have, what can work? All right. So let me start by saying I agree with everything that Sarah said there with, with excessive, except for her use of less instead of fewer when talking about months.

And she headed off, she actually made a good pre-buttal to one point that I was going to make, which is that a lot of my smart friends on the right who are utterly responsible about the vaccine and say that the vaccine is good, people should get vaccinated, they are vaccinated, some of them tend to fall back on this argument that, oh, well, you know, but the, but Biden's messaging was really bad. And I agree that Bacera is the worst person to put out there to reach out to, you know, conservatives and rural Americans and all that kind of stuff are one of the worst people. Just to be clear, that's Secretary Bacera, not just a weird version of my name that Jonah uses as like a pet thing. Yeah. Bcerra.

A pet thing. And be your best Sarah. It's not the B side, yeah. But the, and the point that Sarah makes up wearing masks and not wearing masks, and boosher shots, that's all, those are all good examples of bad messaging and incoherence. But the idea that saying, if you actually listen to Biden and in the context that he says it, that people may have to actually go door to door to actually, you know, spread the word about how to get vaccinated and explain to them where they can get access.

to it, to immediately go to this idea that this is all a dry run, as Madison Cawthorne put it, for the seizure of our Bibles and our guns is not an example of Biden's bad messaging. It's an example of the craziness and the deliberate fueling of paranoia that you get on big chunks of the sort of CPACified right. And it's also where a lot of these voters actually are. and so in a sense they're just being spoon-fed the garbage that they want to want to hear so you know I have a broader theory actually floated in the LA Times it's up at the dispatch today that a lot of this is actually a function of just the fact that

people are losing their minds that the pandemic has caused people on the left and the right to get super touchy super thin skin super paternalistic or super you know judgy about all sorts of things um I think it explains a big, the huge spike in just an unruly passengers on planes. I think it has a big part to do with the crime surge. As, you know, I mean, I think the dem rhetoric about cops and cops leaving is important and part of it too. But one of the reasons why there's just an uptick in these kinds of crimes, including road rage incidents, which are really going up, there's just people have just, you know, they're just going stir, they went stir crazy and bonkers. And the

humans are wired to deal with things like disease and hidden, and hidden, you know, killer is very badly. Our brains go weird during times like this. And I think the part of the problem is that the GOP has now got stuck in the anti-vax position, which makes no political sense to me, given that the same vaccine that these people are saying will make you magnetic, was actually brought to us by Donald Trump. And it was supposed to be a heroic effort by our president with Operation Warp Speed. So what can we do about it? I don't, I mean, at this stage, I don't really know other than I would love to see a lot more without the max booty in condescension, but a lot more coverage of what's going on and say

Arkansas hospitals and in these various places where people just do lots of interviews with people who said they were against the vaccine and now may be dying of COVID. And that that kind of testimony does a lot more than lectures about it's your own good. And, Maybe stop putting Anthony Fauci up there. I mean, I think a lot of the anti, a lot of the anti-fouchy stuff is a little unfair. Some of it is totally fair. But regardless, it is what it is. And people, you know, when you got, you know, ridiculous Sarah Palin impersonators at

CPAC referring it to as the Fauci-Occi. It's a sign that it's just, if you want to reach out to people who take that kind of stuff seriously, don't put them out there that much anymore. Hey, can I just add one other thing about all of this? So as I mentioned, having a 13-month-old, 13-month-olds can't get the vaccine, not allowed. It'd be really great if everyone else in the country would get vaccinated to protect all of these kids who cannot get vaccinated. That would be really helpful for me and my ability to go places and take my son places.

You know, we're going to, I don't have a plan right now. But at this point, we have to be very thoughtful about going places indoors, knowing that he's not vaccinated, and that a whole lot of other people might not be vaccinated. You know, do I think it's some enormous, super, super high risk like it was a year ago? No, but it is still a risk. And as people refuse to get vaccinated, that risk increases for my son and all of the other young kids out there. And so I do think there's something kind of selfish about that and would just like to note that. I've got a couple of notes. One is, look, this movement, this pandering on the right to sort of the worst elements of the base is one of the more cowardly.

So here's the thing that gets me. These folks like to think that they're strong. They're casting themselves as strong. We are strong to fight the left. It is one of the most cowardly and craven things I've ever seen. in my life, in politics, to sort of take, okay, here's the angriest, loudest, most unreasonable people, and we're going to just go ahead and go all in with that. I mean, it's just, it's just cowardly. I mean, there's no other way to describe it, because all of these guys, they know better,

or I would say almost all of them, they know better, they know exactly what they're doing, and they're absolute abject, they're not strong, they're cowards. So that's, I am so, sick of cowards calling themselves strong. So that's one. The other thing is, Jonah, I think you're really on to something about this, about this idea that on just multiple fronts, people are more touchy. I have had people who are not at all into politics. You take that back. I'm agreeing with you. And people are not at all into politics. you know, road rage, touchiness, just hair trigger anger at people who are giving the prescriptions at a CVS or serving food or it is really amazing. And I've even seen it down in the very,

very polite South, you know, where this is supposed to be, we're sugar and spice and people are nice and no, it's gotten a lot more touchy. And so I think there's absolutely something to this and it's not just corrupting sort of our political discourse. It's absolutely corrupting the way in which we interact with each other as human beings. And it's breaking out all over. 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

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slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Well, speaking of people reacting on both sides. Let's talk about what's going on in Texas a little bit. So I just want to start with some history, actually. In 1979, there were the killer bees. They fled the state over a bill that would move up Texas's primary. Sort of a fascinating piece of Texas history. There's a great write-up of the history by the lieutenant governor at the time, Bill Hobby, where basically the killer bees leave and Bill Hobby's like, you know what, actually, you're right. And they come up with a compromise and like the world kind of works like it should. That was 1979. So then, fast forward. Just two second clarification, because I really thought you were going with like the killer bee scare

of the 1970s and the and then the John Belushi skit about the Mexican killer bees, which was awesome. Can you explain what killer bees is in fact a reference to? Because it's not part of national law. It was a reference. It was the name that the lieutenant governor had given to this group of Democrats who fled the state because he said, quote, you're never going to know when they strike next. Okay. So it was playing on the killer bee panic of the 1970s. Okay. Yes. So fast forward to 2003 and Democrats decamped to Ardmore, Oklahoma. And then really hang out in Albuquerque, New Mexico for several months to try to prevent

the redistricting legislation in Texas from passing. One of them decides that he misses his family, comes back, is brought to Austin and forced to vote. The redistricting passes. Now, in 2021, 50-plus Democrats have made their way to D.C., 50-plus Texas state legislators,

Senate and House Democrats, have made their way to D.C. by plane train and automobile. The famous one is the private jets that they took two private jets with Miller High Life in one of the seats, at least. But some took commercial flights from Southwest. One guy drove with his 17-month-old daughter. Lots of folks suddenly in D.C. So what are they protesting?

They don't want to vote on this. the two House and Senate, Texas House and Senate, voter voting bills, which they say are voter suppression. They don't have the votes to defeat the bill, but in Texas, it's like the version of a filibuster. You have to have two-thirds there for a quorum by leaving they can deny the body quorum, and therefore there isn't a vote. Again, very filibuster-esque. And in Texas, while the governor can issue arrest warrants for legislators and bring them to Austin and force them to vote. He can't force them how to vote, obviously. That power only extends to the boundaries of Texas. And vast, though it may be, these folks have slipped the surly bonds of the Texas

borders in D.C. So here's the deal, like a filibuster. This is like a real filibuster, though, where you have to like stand and talk until you fall down. These guys cannot come back Texas. So as Chris Siliza put it, here was his headline, why Texas Democrats are doomed to fail. They actually just are because at some point they're going to come back to Texas. Some of them, in fact, I would guess since there's so many of them in D.C., very few of them either understand that they're expected to spend several months outside the state or that was never their plan to spend several months outside the state. The plan was a press conference and then to just come back and take the vote and lose. So we've got a lot to get through. A, is this

voter suppression or is this a bunch of hype and over, you know, over eagerness to have a talking point? David? So one, there's no question that the proliferation of bills as a result of after 2020 from Republican, from red states, that that's a reaction to the stop the steel garbage. So there is an aspect of this that is absolutely a result of the stop the steel garbage. Number two, that doesn't mean that all the bills are draconian or bad. I mean, many of these bills, and I, you know, I'm not going to say that I have read all the dozens and dozens that have been proposed, but many of them, by the time they get into their final form, actually leave voting rights in a position where you have easier access to the ballot in many

of the blue states that are furiously condemning some of these red states. So the actual substance of the laws themselves does not match the incredible rhetoric, the incredible rhetoric that you are hearing. I mean, Joe Biden yesterday, this is where, and I've said it, before on this podcast. This is where in some ways you get the worst version of Joe Biden, the put y'all back in chains version of Joe Biden, where he's calling up comparisons to Jim Crow, or he's calling up, you know, not since the Civil War, have we seen something like this? Which is just absurd. It's just absurd. So there's an incredible amount of over-the-top rhetoric. Right. But something, Sarah, that you have been learning at your feet as you dispense political wisdom, a lot of this is about having the issue. You know, and the having the issue of voter suppression is a great way to get out the vote. Now, I think Republicans might be learning that saying that the election is rigged, it might not be a great way to get out the vote. But telling your base voters that they're trying to keep you from voting, so you have to fight.

through this whole thing to get there, to throw them out of office, is a really effective issue to have. So I think all of those things are in play at once. One, there's laws that are motivated by Stop the Steel ridiculous. Ridiculousness. Number two, the laws themselves when they reach final form are not nearly, not nearly the problem that Democrats say, but Democrats still believe and I think probably do profit off the issue. And then the one last thing that I'll say is, look, the real problem isn't any individual method of voting. The real problem is look for any reforms that make it easier for a political body to invalidate the results of an election. That would be the red flag kind of voting reform that I would worry about, which is one of the

reasons why I think we need reform on the Electoral Count Act, an act so obtuse that you and I, Sarah, on advisory opinions, spent a lot of time just trying to figure out what the darn thing means. So, yeah, that's my, that's my nutshell. So, Jonah, you and I were discussing yesterday, how, like, how much of this is sort of pulling back on voting extensions, let's call them, that were made during the pandemic. As in, would any of this make it harder to vote than it was in 2018? So I just want to run through some of the things that are in the Texas bills. Now, mind you, the Senate bill is a little different than the House bill,

and I don't think we really care enough to go through all of those details. So this is high level. A ban on drive-through voting. That was a 2020 change. Expanding early voting, but banning 24-hour voting. banning the distribution, the automatic distribution of mail-in ballot applications,

not the ballots themselves, mind you, the application to get a mail-in ballot. You can't just automatically send that. Someone has to request it. And photo ID requirements or the last four of your social security number for mail ballots. And this one's a little

monthly citizenship check. on the voter rolls and a few other provisions that are frankly don't really make it easier or harder, you know, poll watcher protection for partisan poll watchers. And if you're convicted of a felony, the judge needs to tell you that you can't vote, that it would be illegal to vote because there was a woman who was charged with that, who just did not know. So Jonah, most of these are changes that were made in 2020 that they now want to restrict moving forward. I think Republicans are saying,

you know, calling this voter suppression and the worst thing since the Civil War and all of that, that's silly, not being able to vote 24 hours a day or drive-through vote, a thing you couldn't do in 2018, you weren't being suppressed in 2018. So how can you possibly be suppressed in 2021? On the other hand, there is absolutely no evidence that the drive-through voting that happened in Houston

had any even increased risk of fraud. You pulled into the Toyota Center, the parking lot, where the Rockets play, and it was the same as if you were in a building, but you were in your car. And it was really, really popular. So how should we think about this?

Okay, so we've already touched on how the rhetoric is crazy out there, and I don't want to dwell on it because it will make me dispeptic and effulgent with various negative emotions. But when you were listing these things and you said, you know, and you point out to how in 2018 you couldn't do drive-through voting

or overnight voting or 24-hour voting, that's all true. And I think that's an important point. And I will probably write a column about that point. But you know when you really couldn't do 24-hour voting, particularly if you were black, in the Jim Crow South of the 1960s. Like, this issue of reducing, I mean, I think it is such a long-term strategic disaster for the left to say that voter ID and banning ballot harvesting and drive-through voting is just like the days of Bull Connor.

It's just a weird, weird argument. And I've made this point about Nazi analogies for years. if you if you if you if you compare losing your car keys to the holocaust not only are you wildly exaggerating the horror of losing your car keys you are wildly minimizing the horror of the holocaust and the idea that like and i got into a little spat on twitter this morning about this with hannah nicole jones and you know and she was like i wonder why you think the most violent moments were like on the edmund peddard this bridge, which was all about voting rights. And the answer, first of all, I told her, I don't think your question is making the point you think it is, because the violence on that bridge is not on offer right now in America. There's no one, the stakes are not about releasing dogs on black people and fire hoses or like giving a free pass to people who want to lynch black people.

It's about getting rid of drive through voting. You know, I mean, come on. I mean, you can be against getting rid of it, but that doesn't make it. even if you think it's terrible, it doesn't make it Jim Crowe. So I think the way to think about this is A, going back to my previous point, people are losing their frickin minds.

And B, that the the narrative that a lot of people are locked into is that the GOP is now anti-democracy. and Donald Trump is anti-democracy. Donald Trump, for sure, is a would-be strong man who doesn't have the courage to be a strong man who wanted to overturn and steal an election. That's true.

And people who defend the lie about the election being stolen, shame on them, they are de facto anti-democracy. But most of the people who talk about this stuff on the right believe sincerely that they are pro-democracy. They've been duped by this BS propaganda stuff, but these efforts are about to strengthen democracy. If you actually watch the New York Times video about the siege of the capital, no one is out there saying down with democracy, up with, you know, Sorab Omarian post-liberal nationalism. They're all saying they're four, they're all saying they're for democracy. They believe they're for democracy.

And what we have right now is two competing moral panics on the left and the right. about the fragility of democracy and in the in betwixt and between them is Donald Trump, the escape monkey from the cocaine study, complicating everything because he's actually against democracy and people are trying to bend their arguments that on both sides to take account of that and make something consistent out of it when there isn't anything. That's my view. Chris, I thought Ramesh Pannuru made this great point in Bloomberg. It's worth some dive. Biden said that 17 states had passed 28 laws making it harder to vote. The same source behind those numbers also reports that 14 states have passed 28 laws making it easier to vote.

Four states appear on both lists, which suggests that the legislation is more complicated than Biden's talk of 21st century Jim Crow assault on voters would allow. So, you know, when I listed what was in the Texas bill, for instance, expanding early voting is one part of the bill at the same time that they want to get rid of 24-hour voting. Expanding early voting will make it easier to vote. Banning 24-hour voting, which most places did not have, even in 2020, actually won't affect that many people.

Again, I actually don't know why you need to ban it. Either you have sort of the staffing for it or not. I don't see any fraud problem with it. I'm not sure what the government's interest in banning it is. I'm curious what you think politically. Is this the type of thing that's going to work for Biden on his side, as David pointed out, telling people that people are trying to prevent you from voting, makes you want to vote more? Are the Republicans pushing back in the right way?

I don't know that Abbott has walked this line very well. I'm curious what you think. Well, first of all, I don't listen to partisans as they describe their own motives. Because what are they going to say, right? What, Joe, you know, duh. The Texas law had a bad provision in it, a real bad provision in it, which is another one of these where it would allow legislators to claw back election results to pre-steel 2024.

And those laws are in place in other states. Arizona is already acting on it. They've already stripped their elected state election, top state elections official of her authority to oversee elections. this insanity is only beginning. You guys are 100% right. Joe Biden is full of beans when he talks about Jim Crow 2.0. And I can't even imagine what a day would be like that you had to begin by a tweet fight with Nicole Hannah-Jones.

So there is a balm in Gilead, Jonah. I hope that your troubles are eased. But while that is all true, the real sickness here is with Republicans who are intensely fetishizing the threat of election theft and then using it so that they can steal a, we had to destroy the village in order to save it. We had to steal the election to make sure that it was secure. And Ken Paxton is sort of on the vent, you know, we saw Ted Cruz. Cruz's grievous misconduct in 2020 with the Pennsylvania suit and then trying to block certification in Congress. Paxton has had jailed, I guess he's been released now, but jailed in a guy faces a

now he's not going to serve 40 years in prison, but charged with double felonies for voting before his parole ended. He had gotten notoriety on the left because it had taken him six hours to vote in Texas. So Paxson got him swept up and jailed to punish him for this. You know, it's out of control. And the truth is it's never, elections in the United States have never been more secure and it's never been easier to vote. Both parties are completely wrong.

The ease of voting is evident. And my, John and my colleague, Carlin Bowman at AEI, brings forward. persuasive evidence to show that there was very little bit, and a statistically insignificant share of Americans experienced any disruption or difficulty in voting even during a pandemic. And we also know that fraud is true. It does exist. But again, statistically insignificant.

So I think this is both parties looking for the issue, both parties wildly exaggerating. And the problem, there's no better way to conduct elections than to allow partisans to conduct them, right? the fantasy that we would have an impartial, that there would be impartial nonpartisan souls who could come and administer our elections or do redistricting or any number of things is fantasy because you just have to have political choosing. People just have to make choices and they're going to do it differently in Indiana than they do it in Oregon and that's just the way that it is. But when you get to questions around elections and the administration of elections,

we are reminded of the deficiencies of that because the partisans, partisan is going to partisan. So I think that's the way that is. Well, I'm taking over unders on how long the Texas Democrats hold out, out of state on this. I think good money is on the under. I do not believe that they're going to have 50 plus state legislators stay out of the state very long. Maybe folks will be able to run the clock out on this special session, which would be a month. And then Abbott has said he's just going to keep calling special sessions. eventually they're going to come back and they're going to vote on this.

I think when school starts, which in Texas is, you know, mid-August, I think they're going to come back. At least by then. I think they could be back next week, honestly. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex presale tickets can score you a spot trackside. 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.

Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. All right, Chris, tech companies facing legislative threats at the state level? Tech companies are facing legislative threats at the state level included in the Abbott primary reelection bill along with the voting stuff and critical race theory and trans athletes was indeed a piece of legislation that aims to out Florida, Florida. and say that social media companies are just dumb pipes, that they're like electricity or water that come to your home

and that they can't refuse you regardless of, and I forget the word that they use, but it's ideological purposes that they have to treat everyone the same regardless of their ideology. This happens concurrently with two other stories that one is President Trump, former President Trump suing social media platforms for not letting him beyond. And also my favorite of these stories,

Jason Miller, a former Trump advisor, starting an alternate social media website that was immediately subsumed into a hellscape of furry pornography and cabloy. So I want to start with you, David, just because I hate Twitter and hate social media.

I find it, except for, I did start a TikTok account, though. We'll see how that goes. Nice. Nice. But I do like Instagram because I do like dog pictures and videos of people's babies and stuff. So that's, I do like that. When we talk about regulating social media, so you are a constitutionalist, you are a free speechist of the first order.

If there was a Frenchian regime, and if you have written about this extensively that I have missed, is there a need for a solution, a quote-unquote solution here to the bias of big tech? And if so, what would it be? So the short answer is there's no empirical evidence of a need for a solution, even if your argument is that, wait a minute, big tech should be that government should move if big tech is biased. Like, let's just presume that's an argument that government should move if big tech is biased. There's a lot of evidence of micro or individual anecdote. There's anecdotal evidence that this person was mistreated and, you know, and sometimes it's accurate. Sometimes individuals have been mistreated.

But the macro evidence is that conservative speech does really well online. Like, it does really well online. I mean, Facebook is a fire hose of conservative speech. I mean, YouTube, remarkable degrees of parity between left-wing speech and right-wing speech on YouTube. So a lot of this is, this will come in some shock to you, Chris. This is ginned up for partisan purposes. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, crazy. I went there.

I went there. But, you know, one of the issue, there's a couple of things here. One is when people are saying what we need to do is to dive into Twitter, in Facebook moderation decisions. They don't understand what they're messing with from a First Amendment standpoint, the kinds of doctrines of free speech that they're messing with,

that the government can go and override private citizens' moderation decisions and say, you're going to have to host, you're going to have to use your abilities and talents and skills to host. And a lot of these things go even into the algorithms, like how much you're going to highlight speech you hate this is something that is a grave First Amendment issue.

It is a grave First Amendment issue. And then a lot of it is motivated by, well, let me put it, not motivated by. A lot of it reflects an enormous amount of ignorance of how the online world works and how online speech works. So, for example, I'm looking at the Texas bill. And it says an interactive computer service may not censor a user, a user's expression, or a user's ability to receive the expression based on the viewpoint of the user or another person,

the viewpoint represented in the user's expression or another person's expression. What this is saying is we want all social media to be gab. Gab for those who don't know is an open sewer of a website that allows the most vile expression imaginable. And, you know, I've talked about this many times, My family has been subject to some of the most vile racist speech you can possibly conceive of. And what the Texas bill is saying is you can't do a darn thing about it.

You can't do a darn thing about it. This is the Klan Free Speech Act right here. This is the Holocaust denial free speech act right here. And if you don't think that stuff would blow up like a mushroom cloud, you don't know anything about the Internet. And this is the kind of thing that is that they, here's what they think they're doing. they think they're doing is they think they're protecting my friend Ryan Anderson in his book about, you know, transgender issues. That's what they think they're doing. In reality, what they're doing is they're protecting and empowering the speech of legions of racist basement trolls and others

of equal ilk. That's what they're actually doing with this. And there's a good reason. Which the net effect would be to take away that we would just lose the platforms, right? Because much like Jason Miller found out with his Sonic the Hedgehog pornography, not that was his, but the Sonic the Hedgehog pornography that was, I assume not, that was placed upon his website was that it becomes useless to everyone, right? It's just because unless you really like, is that a great way to win the suburbs for Republicans? Totally. Pro furry porn. Pro furry porn. Totally. Your fundamentally change the nature of the service in such a way that it is, yeah, it is not, it is not going to achieve what they think it's going to achieve. So, Jonah, we have a trend. And you have, you have, I have heard you,

uh, insightfully, uh, observe what it says good about American conservatism that the project of reclaiming the courts over the past 40 years was very successful. And we watched frivolous lawsuits from the Trump campaign, et cetera, et cetera, get tossed out by, uh, judges and all of that stuff. And, you know, to mention, you know, cruises, misconduct vis-a-vis Pennsylvania, they wouldn't have done those things if they would have thought that they would have succeeded, right? The people who brought those cases, I assume, that they wouldn't have done it if they would have thought that the Supreme Court would have said, yeah, let's just, let's crush federalism completely, strip Pennsylvania of its votes, and you're right. Let's, you know, let the freak flag

fly. The legend, Trump's lawsuit in Florida. Florida's equally laughably bad internet regulation, which, aside from David's point about being a First Amendment problem, also has a interstate commerce problem, which is if social media companies ain't interstate commerce, ain't nothing interstate commerce. And also now Texas is, so Texas is law along these lines, all is predicated on the idea that we can pander because nothing will really happen, right? You can do this stuff because it won't really work. I'm afraid that at some point, this stuff will start working, that enough of these bad shots get thrown up again and again and again, that sooner or later something's going to get through

or what's the saying, hard cases make bad law, that some weird shots going to hit on a crack and it's going to get through. Do you share my concern? I share the concern to a certain extent. I also, I mean, I was sort of joking about winning back the suburbs, but the idea that this wouldn't get corrected pretty quickly when your aunt Sharon is trying to talk to your grandmother about their apple, brown Betty recipe, and they're looking it up on some food site, and everyone in the common section is talking about how we're going to purge the mud people. I think that a lot of suburban-night-type people are going to be like, what the hell did you do? And I have to say you, I was a little as well, you left out my favorite moment of the craptacular this of the last week, which was at CPAC, which is all about all of this, you know,

like censorship, blah, blah, blah, blah. They kicked out Nick Fuentes. Now, Nick Fuentes, you really don't need. to know very much about him. He is a leader of a very niche coprophagic phylum of the alt-right, and he has sent his little Groyper

minions, that's what they call their little neo-Nazi punks, to speeches of mine, to harass me, and I mean, just get a sense of where they are. They harass like Charlie Kirk and those guys as cucks and losers

and squishes and all of that kind of stuff. Anyway, and he's a Holocaust cost and iron and all these kinds of thing. And they kicked them out of CPAC. Now, obviously, it's not a straight apples to apples thing, but it's pretty damn close. Insofar as CPAC is an essential public platform on the right. You, if you're in a certain, if you're in certain parts of the right to be denied access to CPAC is to be denied access to the connections and the networks and the megaphones that you need to do your business. And the idea that CPC pack would censor Nick Fuentes from just sitting in a chair and talking to some people

is should be outrageous to some of these people and like I like the J.D. Vance. Yeah, there you go. That's where I thought you were going. So J.D. Vance who said Nick Fuentes was mean to him and on and dishonest about him. And yet he's still in favor of him staying on Twitter, which because Twitter had the platformed are suspended Fuentes. And I love the idea that the crucial issue about Fuentes' speech wasn't his Holocaust denial

or his promotion of violence or arguable promotion of violence or his view that women should be barred from the workforce or any of these kinds of things. It was that he was unfair to J.D. Vance because that really, and that he was magnanimous enough to allow Fuentes to stay on Twitter to talk about those other things

which are not nearly as high level or whatever. Anyway, I think the second these guys catch the car and actually introduce in whole or in part in America where Section 230 prevents the comment sections at Verbo, right? And DoorDash and all of these places.

And the dispatch. And the dispatch. And if you think all of a sudden that a lot of Americans are going to to love it when they're looking up some restaurant and all the comments are full

of don't eat here because this is where the Jews eat. I just I see politicians responding pretty quickly to claw that stuff back in. Well, and one thing about the J.D. Vance thing is his, I'm looking at his tweet. Nick Fonte's has been a giant troll and IMO in my opinion

dishonest and it's a tax amendment to me. Don't care. Tech companies control what we're allowed to say in our own country. It has to stop. Twitter is not controlling what Nick Fuentes says. It is not in any way, shape, or form. It is controlling whether or not Twitter amplifies and broadcast that message. And most Americans don't use Twitter. Right. And the, the, the, the J.D. Vance, I think, is a special case here. I doubt he's speaking to his for the donors he's seeking in exactly these same terms. But on the other hand, he might get through that Ohio primary because he may look to

normal Republicans increasingly normal as the others tumble deeper into the sweet, sweet, delicious, angry populism. Sarah, we need your skills as Texan. So Texas, you. used to be a pretty politically competitive state. As a matter of fact, Texas for much of the 20th century was a more politically competitive state than other southern states. And there's a reason Kennedy was campaigning there in 1963. And Ann Richards wasn't governor that long ago. Texas is more competitive now than it was in recent years. But it seems like Texas, Texas,

Republicans are getting really frothy. They're getting very frothy. Are they getting very frothy because of a shrinking pool? Are they just getting frothy because Republicans are getting frothy everywhere? What is going on with the Texas Republicans? So you got a few interesting problems here. On the one hand, you look at one party states like California, and you have very frothy Republicans there, I would say, because they are in such a minority and can't actually win

statewide. And so there's very big fights over so very little. When you then look at a one-party state like Texas, and it absolutely is still a one-party state, you have kind of the opposite problem, but it's like a circle where you come back and they meet. So because then the primaries are the general, you're fighting over everything. And you've had splits in the Republican Party of Texas where RPT, Republican Party of Texas, kind of went off into the crazy land. And then there were the Associated Republicans of Texas, ART. And they became kind of the like more moderate establishment to you, Republicans. I mean, it's been a bit of a political mess. Now, for several cycles in a row, you have Democrats saying, you know, turn Texas blue, spending, I mean,

millions and millions and tens of millions of dollars, only to then be blown out. And I thought, you know, just fascinating numbers coming out of 2020, the Democrats' demographics are destiny argument is falling apart most in Texas and Florida. But like the most, I think, in Texas, a state that they really thought was just moments away from the, you know, demographics our destiny finally coming to fruition and it turned out not only not to be the case

but that the opposite is happening that one of the best predictors of which counties voted for Donald Trump was the percentage of the Hispanic population where you saw those counties along the border going like I mean swinging wildly to Donald Trump counties that had voted for Obama

and Clinton in in the earlier cycles so that leads us to it is getting more competitive, not for the reasons that Democrats expected, but because Republicans are doing worse in the suburbs, right? Oh, correct. And that's happening, not because demographics are destiny, but because Californians moving to Texas is destiny. I mean, it is, it's not lost

on anyone. The Californians are moving to Texas, and up, you know, Illinois, New Yorkers, because of jobs, and then they're voting like they did in their previous states where they left because of the job market. But anyway, that has caused a weirdness in the state. And then you factor in, Chris, as you put it, just sort of the Republican meltdown happening nationwide and put that into a large one-party state with some of the biggest donors,

a knowledge that if you're elected in Texas, you have this national platform. And it's just a recipe for disaster. You know, Greg Abbott wants to run for president in 2024. And because of that, he's both more cautious in trying to like maneuver through that. But also, and that's just who he is as a politician. But also wanting to like, if he sees DeSantis do something, well, then he's got to do it. Because he can't let DeSantis, you know, have a better platform to run than he has.

The problem is he has no name ID. Following DeSantis means DeSantis still gets the headlines and you get sort of the scrap headlines. And the result is the CPAC straw poll that we saw. Again, CPAC straw polls, mind you, in 2012, they went for Ron Paul. And in 2016, at this point, they went for Rand Paul. So I'm not predictive. And it's a very different CPAC now. This is a very, this is a very different gang of guys.

Very different, but I thought what was interesting was not that Ron DeSantis won the CPAC straw poll if Trump was not included, but that it was 68% voted for Ron DeSantis and the next highest person was 5%. It wasn't like, ooh, he's seven points ahead. No, no, no. He's more than 60 points ahead. So I think Greg Abbott has his work cut out from being flanked from the right, being flanked by DeSantis. and having a Republican party that is not going to do him any favors heading into his re-election. Word. All right. Let's end this on a – so I like to find headlines now for you guys. This headline, I don't know. It's really funny to me.

It's called grandparents, resist the impulse to move. It's a whole thing about how grandparents should not move closer to their grandchildren. It's really weird. Why not? So it says, consider the research on retiree satisfaction. Top drivers are fulfilling relationships and good health. Who published this? Right?

And then, but here's the weird thing, Chris. There's a picture of a grandfather holding his adorable little toe-headed. son, grandson at a baseball game, Detroit Tigers, it looks like. The grandson's wearing daddy's future, you know, pitcher or something shirt. The caption on the picture, this is worth the whole thing. It says, cute, but dot, dot, dot, dot. Wait, wait, what's coming after the dot, dot, dot, dot? Who published that?

There is no butt. It's just cute. Was this in Logan's Run magazine? Yeah, what? Seriously. It's Bloomberg opinion. And it's like, I mean, it's really weird. I love it.

It's like, have you thought about being more selfish? Maybe more selfishness would help you enjoy the years before you die. We all die alone anyway. Get started now. By Bitcoin. So, Sarah, I thought you were going to go with this headline that popped up in my Google Alert. David French is a vile, degenerate pig, that is all. From the website, patriots.wim.

Oh, boy, never tweet. Thoughtful. Did they also have a picture that it's like of David, but it says cute, comma, butt, dot, dot, dot. All right, thank you all for listening. Make sure to go rate us on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else. It's not just for our egos. it actually helps other people find the podcast. It is actually very, very helpful. We appreciate all of you and we'll see you again next week.

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