The Dispatch Podcast - Curb Your Inflation

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

On today's podcast, our hosts discuss how to solve a problem like inflation. Will Biden's Build Back Better Act actually bring down prices? Plus, Sarah and the guys discuss pandemic fatigue driving voters to the GOP, what's going on at the Naval Observatory, and what the Kyle Rittenhouse and Ahmaud Arbery trials tell us about ourselves as a nation.   Show Notes: -TMD: “Can the Build Back Better Act Curb Inflation?” -The Sweep: “Dems’ Permanent Pandemic Mindset Deepens Midterm Gap” -CNN: “Exasperation and dysfunction: Inside Kamala Harris' frustrating start as vice president” -Harris has a Veep moment -David in The Atlantic: “Kyle Rittenhouse Is No Hero” 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, Declan Garvey, and Chris Steyerwalt. We've got a star-studded panel today. We're going to talk about inflation, the politics of COVID, the White House approval ratings, not doing great, but the Naval Observatory, doing even worse. And we'll end with some discussion of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial as the jury is still deliberating on day two. Let's dive right in. We're starting with you, inflation. Absolutely. So probably about an hour or so after you guys recorded this podcast last week, we got some new inflation numbers for the month of October. we are seeing on a nationwide basis, inflation is up year over year, about 6.2% in October. And that is the highest or fastest rate of increase since, I believe, 1990, which was five years before I was born.

So I've never experienced anything like this. And I'm, you know, I recently got a car and have to pay for gas for the first time on my own. and it's not fun, and it's causing a lot of problems in Washington with a lot of finger-pointing. And it started this really, or it's continued this debate that we've been having for months about whether inflation is quote-unquote transitory or if it's something that's going to be here for a long time and we need to kind of orient all of public policy around combating it. And so last week's numbers kind of gave in many people's eyes a big win to that second argument that this is something that we need to really be focusing and drilling down on.

But the Biden administration has pretty limited tools at its disposal at this point to deal with it. But at the same time, the administration has kind of, in recent weeks, as the build back better agenda is trying to barrel through Congress here and get all the Democrats on board, this argument has emerged that that is what's going to solve the inflation crisis, is adding another, you know, $1.75 trillion in government spending. And so I'll kick it to Chris, to you first. Do you think the argument that the Biden administration is making here is that by advancing this agenda, it will increase worker productivity by allowing more parents

to reenter the workforce and by freeing up child care. And we'll eventually kind of get back to a more equilibrium in supply and demand worries about inflation be damned. So do you think, is that an effective argument? Do voters believe that argument? How old were you when you got a driver's license? I was 16. But you didn't get a car till now. You were a mooch. You were, you were a leach upon your family using their vehicles. Is this accurate? I was. I was. And depending on where I was driving, I did, I would have to pay for gas some of the time, but some of the time I totally did mooch off of my parents. So, okay. Just

Just making sure, because remember, you spend your life until you're 16 wishing you could drive places, and then you spend most of your life after you're 16 wishing someone else would drive. So this is, well, welcome to the club. Thank you. Inflation is like critical race theory. It means different things to different people. But there is a general, so when economists talk about inflation, they're talking about monetary supply. They're talking about those that are talking about macroeconomic issues.

When normal Americans talk about inflation, they mean just what you said. Gas is high. Stuff is expensive. Why does stuff cost so much? The argument for buildback better, which have been thoroughly destroyed by the dispatch crew going through the legislation, it's basically a junk drawer in the kitchen that you pull out and there's some crap in there. Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema have basically, you know, put sugar and ants in the drawer. It's a disaster. They're going to say never, I guess I would just put it simply, never listen to partisans about the arguments for why this legislation would be good or bad after a certain point.

They're just going to say whatever they're going to say about this because they're, they're honor bound to try to see it through. but I believe Joe Biden would be plenty happy if this thing died. I think he'd be perfectly content if this spruce goose never made it off the deck. So there's been kind of a mini drama in D.C. the past 24 hours or so, very niche, but the Congressional Budget Office, which is a nonpartisan entity that grades legislation kind of projects what the spending effects will be, how it'll affect the deficit, kind of, you know, it's, politicians love it when it's not their legislation. They hate it when it is. And it's, it's supposed to issue a report on Friday, around Friday, grading the Build Back Better Act,

this massive $1.75 trillion over 10 years. And early indications are that it's not going to be good for Democrats, that despite claims that it's fully paid for by offsetting, higher taxes on the wealthy and stricter IRS enforcement that actually this bill is not going to be fully paid for. It's going to inject more money into the economy, and it's going to increase inflation that way. The Biden administration's response has been interesting where they're essentially now attacking the CBO saying it's not fully equipped to do the kind of dynamic scoring that is necessary to really understand how much growth this agenda will lead to. You know, this is a debate we've been having, dating back years.

The Trump administration did the same thing around tax cuts. But then it was a much bigger, you know, attack on norms and the nonpartisan CBO, all of that. Jonah, what do you think about how the Biden administration is handling the politics of this? But first of all, the CBO words are as old as time. There were, I mean, I literally think one of the last things the Stegosaurus ever heard was the CBO isn't doing a proper scoring. They're very, very old. And to pick up on what Chris laid out, and I apologize to listeners, some listeners have a hard time distinguishing us. So just so you know, I'm the one with facial hair.

That should clear it up. But also, I tend not to use the phrase goat rodeo. And other than that, I can't help you with the audio doppelganger problem. So all that said, to pick up with something my audio doppelganger said, don't trust partisans on this stuff. Look, if someone is saying, we need this thing, we need this thing, don't worry, it's not going to cause inflation. It's not going to cause any problems.

no one's talking about inflation and you don't meaningfully change the legislation when when inflation is all of a sudden a major concern you say ah but you don't understand this thing will actually reduce inflation that's motivated reasoning at the ying yang i mean that is car salesman you know what do i have to do to put you in this buick today and then someone says, oh, my God, do you see that zombie horde? And the car salesman, oh, yeah, but zombies hate this color. You know, that's one of the best things about this Buick. That's that kind of crap. And I dismiss it entirely. So I don't know if Chris has any living memory of 1970s inflation, other than the way I really mostly remember it, which is through the TV shows at the time, where it was a big thing.

Inflation was a big, big thing. And one of the problems is I think that the Biden administration and the Republicans are basically all living off of the memory of the inflation of the 1970s to make their arguments. And the problem is that the kind of inflation that we have now isn't the same kind of inflation that we had in the 1970s. By which I don't mean that the prices aren't rising. They are rising.

But what I mean is that this is the supply side caused inflation. which, you know, the classic Milton Freeman definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods and you have to add services, but too much money chasing two food goods. The problem with that is that in the 1970s, it was the too much money part. It was a monetary thing that the Federal Reserve had the power to do something about. This time, inflation is a supply side thing, which it's the too few goods part. We had a, we shut down economies all around the world. We shut down labor markets all around the world.

then we tried to restart them from a cold start and, you know, surprise, it created problems. And now the problems have cascading effects on other problems. And so it's not just that the ships are docked out front of the ports, it's that once the ships unload this stuff and they empty those containers, they don't know how to get the containers back to the place where they need to be refilled at infinitum. And that's why we have all those supply chain problems. As someone said on Twitter the other day, supply is born free, but everywhere it is in chains.

And shout-outs of Rousseau for you. So the, the, part of the scary thing about this is that all these people, it's like generals talking about the last war, when the real analogies might be to 1948, you know, which is a point Paul Krugman made about,

you know, post-World War II supply line problems. That said, you can still get old style, the other 1970 style inflation, if everyone changes their behavior, If you think inflation's here, you're going to act like inflation is here. And inflation is here right now. And its causes are different from those of the 1970s. But if you behave, if you respond to inflation by

raising prices for your products or demanding more, you know, more wages or saying, crap, I really got to get this flat screen TV for Christmas no matter what. And you willingly buy more, spend more on it, you're sending all sorts of price signals to the market to get people to change the behavior as if we have an inflation. And I frankly do not think that this administration has the first clue of how to deal with this problem because most really smart people who actually have diagnosed the thing correctly have no idea how to deal with this. And so sure, it's transitory. But here's the thing, until the sun goes out, everything is transitory. That's sort of a meaningless thing. And the idea that it'll operate on a timeline

convenient to some election cycle is a really big bet that I wouldn't want to make for our either party. And so I, you know, think everyone should buy gold. Thank you, William Devane. Sarah, that kind of gets to my question for you. It seems to me that the Biden administration is essentially making an enormous bet here, that because this is a supply side issue, supply chains will work themselves out over the next several months, maybe helped by some of the provisions of the build back better or the infrastructure bill, maybe not. But the market will adjust. Things will start to trend back to normal. And by getting out in front of this and saying

my agenda will do this, then Biden can then take credit for that happening, that kind of more natural process happening. We saw yesterday, I believe, U.S. retail sales. increased 1.7% month over month, that kind of shows that at least in October, this higher inflation was not necessarily dissuading American consumers from going out and buying things. On the flip side of that, if inflation continues to rise, they're going to be pretty significantly on the hook for it because they're tying it to their policies. And so, do you think from a political perspective, should reducing inflation be priority number one for the Biden administration, and all be all. That is what their job is for the next year before the

midterms. Should be, yes. Is absolutely not. And we see that in lots of other policies. So I actually simply do not care about the infrastructure bill, the build back better social infrastructure bill. I don't think most Americans know what they are. They certainly don't know the difference. this will be inside baseball forever and ever infrastructure week at infinitum. What I do think people are very aware of is this is just an example really of how the Biden administration has not prioritized inflation because they haven't prioritized supply chain issues because they haven't prioritized labor shortages that their policies are having an effect on. So for instance, and let's be clear, listeners, I am fully vaccinated.

I think everyone should be fully vaccinated. But if you roll out a vaccine mandate, when in fact, you know, the delta variant is subsiding, you've had the vaccine for a year, you know, there's all sorts of like why nows that are going to become very legally relevant, by the way, to whether OSHA had the emergency power to do this. But set all that aside, the result is that businesses that were already strapped to find workers as the percentage of workers quitting their jobs is also at an all-time high, this is going to lead to more of that, and it's going to cause more disruption in the labor market,

circa Christmas. And that's going to have effects all the way through. It's going to, once again, cause wage increases, which are good for the people who get the wage increases, bad for the people who don't switch jobs, don't get wage increases, prices go up because of the wage increases. And so again, the bottom quintile of the labor market gets hosed because of inflation, because the wage increases aren't actually lifting all boats. And it then reverberates through the supply chain and inflation just keeps going. Now, look,

I think even holding all things steady economists are saying inflation at this point doesn't level out until after the midterms. So I don't think the Biden administration believes that this is a political maneuver so much as Joe Biden says I've wanted to be president for 30 years, this is it. This is the only shot that I've got if I want something on my epitaph,

I've got a few months to do it. And so whether they're sort of clumsily trying to tie this to like, oh, it might reduce inflation or something, I don't know. I don't think Joe Biden, as a person, cares one iota what effect this has on anything.

except that he wants this to be his legacy, therefore it needs to get passed. So I disagree that Biden himself would be fine if this bill gets killed. I think he very, very much sees this as the last chance for a Joe Biden legacy. I make one last political point on this. I think the, you know, it's funny.

I keep forgetting the guy's name. Help me out, Chris, the Nixon land historian guy. Oh, uh, yes. I know who you may. Yes. I'm weird. It's like my brain will not. Yes.

Yes, yes, it is. He got a lot of grief about a month or so ago. Rick Pearlstein. There you go. Thank you. Saying that he had cracked the code about inflation and the political salience of inflation in the 1970s. And it was, had nothing to do essentially with economics.

It was code for loosening social and cultural norms, for feminism, for civil rights. And it became a meta. It was, inflation was a metaphor for white panic and white male panic. Oh, it's kind of nonsense kind of thing. And it was not a very smart, insightful thing to say. But if you flip it around, there's actually a real point there, which is that inflation creates a thing in people's lives. that makes them think everything else is out of control, too. It gives you a sense of life out of balance, Kianna Skotsky, whatever you want to call it,

where you don't trust elites, you see your life savings going away, you're working harder and earning less in effect, you're worried about your kids, and you marry that sense of fear and disquietude to, I think, one of Biden's underlying problems, which which is that he's not up to the job or that he and the Democrats are distracted by other things and not actually addressing the things that people care about, it is particularly poisonous to do. And I take Sarah's point about him wanting this legacy thing, but the legacy could be a poisoned chalice for him. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how

quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same-day coverage and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly, with options up to

$3 million in coverage. With a 4.8 out of five-star rating on trust pilot and thousands of families already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ethyos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. all right star while your topic's up next not unrelated well so the democrats have come to terms now with the fact that they are uh in line for a old-fashioned ass weapon uh in midterms cruising for a bruising as my mom used to say and um so you can speaking of of partisans you Partisans tend to misread cues like this in a couple of different ways.

One way is to say, well, it looks bad, but really we're doing much better. It's sort of like when Donald Trump lost, they're like, but look at Hispanic males. And you're like, well, look at them. Look at them right as you're losing the election. So you can look for the pony in the pile of manure. Or you can do the other thing, which is more common, which is to say, yes, but this is only further evidence of why, and as I wrote in the sweep this week, we have to smash our unpopular policies in the face of the electorate like a grapefruit until they submit, until they finally see the

wisdom of our ways. And so Democrats have engaged in a lot of this stuff. But I think the degree to which the pandemic is, the pandemic in its after effects is the water we fish are swimming in is much bigger, more prevalent than we tend to acknowledge. And Jonah, you have talked and written about this convincingly and at length with the mascofiles of the Democratic Party, who are within the Democratic Party. But I was struck when I listened to Jared Paulus, the very liberal governor of Colorado, basically say to the pressures coming down on him from the left to reimpose. masks, to reimpose distancing, to limit capacity ahead of ski season, by the way, in Colorado, as they had done in New Mexico. And he said, I'm not going to do it. We're going to just tell people to get vaccinated. We're going to tell people who have more than six months in to get vaccinated.

Jared Paulus recognizes that the permanent pandemic mindset in the Democratic Party is bad news. Sarah, when we look at Virginia and New Jersey results, as we've talked about here before, both of those can be read as rejections of democratic over-frothiness about keeping the pandemic standards going. Is that fair? I think that's totally fair. I mean, I've said before, but I think we're getting more evidence for it, that, and this is a very nuanced point. So let me try to make it carefully. While education clearly motivated Republicans in Virginia, the fact that we have such

different topics, but similar results, if not more swinging results, in Long Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, even Minneapolis to some extent, Seattle, shows that while again, education motivated Republicans in Virginia, it looks like anything would have motivated Republicans in Virginia, which makes it still not actually causal. And so there's all this focus on CRT and education and that this is the winning issue. But, Chris, I think you're actually on to something more. Didn't education in Northern Virginia stand in as a coronavirus issue because of the failure? Exactly.

We're talking about it as an education issue when, in fact, schools were closed. So people are like, see education. why were they closed because of the COVID pandemic policies that people then attributed to the left rightly or wrongly, whatever. But I absolutely think it has to do with school closures,

kids wearing masks outside. By the way, is there anything more ridiculous than seeing those, you know, like pre-K where they attach them all to the rope so they can walk them through, you know, Ervin or chain gangs. I love those things. Toddler chain gangs.

And they're all wearing masks. So they're outside. They're attached. to where, I mean, it just, there's like an absurdity to it. So yeah, I actually think that even education that Republicans think is their big winning issue, again, I do think it motivates Republicans, but like inflation, like Jonah said, it means different things to different people and that in fact, education was as much about pandemic policies as anything else. And so I think you are wildly right. That interesting, like, note, of course, D.C.

is lifting its mask mandate for in more places as of Monday. And that's Muriel Bowser, one of the more liberal mayors in the country. So I wonder whether this is all going to fade and far enough out from the midterms that

politically it won't actually have much impact. But we'll see. Declan, or, as you would be known in France, Declan. That sounds like a delicious pastry. Declan. So the problem, I would imagine for Democrats here is the mask, the distance, these became shiboleths.

These became symbols of your progressive forward thinking, da, da, da, da, da, da. And it worked for Democrats for quite a while because the Republican Party resolutely refused to take seriously the pandemic when voters really wanted them to, right? They wouldn't do it. Republicans just couldn't bring themselves to do. Remember, they leaked a photo of Trump wearing a mask and it was a special mask, but he'd only wear it in the hospital. The only place. And all of his advisors would talk about how handsome he looked in it and very handsome, sir. You've never, you've never looked more powerful and virile than when you're wearing your presidential mask. So it would have been the, in the Republican,

best interests in the spring and summer of 2020 to have taken it really seriously, right? And probably could have saved Trump's re-election. If they had to just let Mike Pence do it and taking it seriously, probably would have worked out a lot better for him. How will those internal pressures, though, work on Democrats? Because Jared Paulus is taking heat. I'm sure people are mad at Muriel Bowser for letting this go. How is that going to play among Democrats. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's it's kind of a, you know, broken clock is right twice a day situation where if you're if you were virulently anti-mask, you are, you know, sure there are some situations where it's still warranted if you're visiting someone who can't get vaccinated or

is otherwise immunocompromised. But for the most part now, if if you are vaccinated, if everybody year around is vaccinated, there's not an overarching scientific reason to be wearing a mask unless the goal is now to eliminate all flu and cold transmission for the rest of time. And so, which, you know, maybe, maybe that is. But there's kind of a, if you were, if you were virulently at night mask, you were not following the science in spring of 2020, but you kind of are now. And it's been interesting to see, that shift over time. I, you know, when, when we first were liberated from the mask regime earlier in the summer and it was, I have a couple people I talked to who worked at the White House and it was a big

deal when the CDC put out that press release and everybody in the White House got up and took their mask off and it was a big celebration. And then three weeks later, they're all wearing them again. But it's, but yeah, I think it's, I've talked to a lot of people and obviously DC is a very liberal city, very, it's a bubble, but I've talked to people who don't want to be wearing masks, but say, I'm going to keep wearing it because I don't want people to think I'm a Republican, or I don't want people to think that I'm backwards on this. Jonah's often cited the example of David Hogg, one of the Parkland survivors. Yes. And I think that's a very real phenomenon. I mean, it happened on, I'm sure, in Red

America a year ago, there were plenty of people who were concerned about the pandemic but didn't wear a mask because they didn't want to be seen. I've been yelled at in public for mask wearing. Yes, that's for sure. So it's, it's very interesting to see how it's become. You wear that mask, that Halloween Mike Myers thing, which does creep people out. It's just about life choices. That's it. It's a lifestyle. I heard from a friend recently, by the way, who lives in a rural part of the country. And she and the local sheriff both secreted to the town next door to get their vaccines because it is so tribally frowned upon that you are embarrassing the tribe. So they, yeah, they together eloped to the town next door to get vaccinated. Yeah, it's just, it's a very

strange tribal, you know, I think eventually we will come to a point where, you know, like Jared Pallas in Colorado, I mean, there's an old joke about a drowning man and, and a boat comes to save him. And he says, no thanks, God will save me. and then another boat comes and he says no thanks god will save me and he gets to heaven and god's like i sent you two boats why didn't you those are the vaccines those are this new um paxlovid that that Pfizer is coming out with that uh if it's this oral antiviral pill if taken within three days of symptoms onset even don't take jonah's question you're you're now you're now you're going out of your leg you're way out now we've got to save leave something for dr goldberg all right

go for it doctor well let me let me just frame it this way that the mirage of freedom that we experience that you can attribute joe biden's uh the slough of despair the brokenheartedness to the missed expectation it's summertime what was it going to be hot girl summer it's going to be great everything's going to be awesome the masks are off everything's good how much from a social psychology perspective, how much does that missed moment affect the fact that now as Scott Gottlieb has our colleagues Scott Gottlieb from the American Enterprise Institute has very persuasively argued. And now, as Declan says, with the antivirals, this is the penicillin moment. We're here.

We made it. Is there a refusal to embrace this in part because of the missed expectations of summertime? I think for sure they feel like they screwed that up. And I think, again, this sort of gets to Sarah's point about how the CRT thing, you know, it's funny how at the beginning of the podcast, Chris, you brought up, you know, you said inflation is a lot like CRT, you know, blah, blah, blah. That was the point of my LA Times column, which was that the lead of it was how was inflation like CRT. And the answer is people have a really hard time explaining what it is, but they know it

when they see it. They know it when they see it. And I think that to Sarah's point about like how a big part of the CRT thing was a stand in for people being just generally pissed off at schools and at teachers and not believing the public education bureaucracy had their interests at heart for a very long time. And so then you add in this culture war thing. And people are just like, look, I've seen what my kids bring home, bring home from school, which by which I mean, bring home from their laptop from the living room into the kitchen. And I don't like it. And you can tell me it's not technically CRT. I don't care. That's what people are calling it. And that's the label that we're going to use. And by the way, it includes gender, transgender

bathroom stuff and a zillion other things. Similarly, I think, you know, I think the Biden's sense of drift since the rise of the delta variant, Afghanistan, making what I think was singularly the dumbest call in modern American politics in many ways, which was not to spike the football on the bipartisan infrastructure thing after the Senate vote and call it a first year and just and go back to watching, you know, those reruns of mayor of Hightown like he wants do. And so it's very hard to disaggregate these things. But, you know, as I was talking to Paul Bloom, leading psychologist, diseases make people crazy. We've been talking about this for a long time here. They make people feel like the world is not to be trusted. Weirdly, so does inflation.

And weirdly so does a really old president who can't finish sentences reliably. And you can add a dozen other things to make people feel like the current leadership is adrift and that if I can imagine being inside the bunker of the White House. And these guys are so deep inside the bunker. You know, you could have the Dresden bombing above them and they could still successfully play a game of operation and pull out like the thigh bone without sitting off the nose. That was Dennis Malarian in the amount of arcane reference, the amount of Arcana that you were able to pack in. to that one wreaths um you know you know what you call a um someone who uh a stand-up comedian who wants to immunize the eschaton dennis millinary and all right so anyway i don't know where

i was going with this uh this is what happens when steve isn't around is just things go off the rails and i think that's the politics of all this oh the white house is in the bunker they're second-guessing all other decisions they screwed up a bunch of things they know they screwed up but they don't know why they screwed up they and so that causes you to second guess yourself and double down on your priors rather than sort of get out of your bubble. And I think that's their primary problem. All right, Jonah. You're up next. See, I was setting myself up for my topic.

So on this point of sort of the White House off the rails, not really fully grasping the situation at hand, we've had this hilarious Washington Post. ABC poll that has the worst results for looking at midterms for Democrats since they started asking the question in 1981. You have, you know, what is it, two weeks ago, the New York Times editorial page lambasted the Democrats for moving too far to the left, which, you know, is somewhere in the book of revelation is a major sign of the apocalypse. And, but I think the sort of the, the most interesting thing going on right now are these

stories about Kamala Harris's team leaking, particularly to CNN, that maybe the guys running the Biden White House are racist because they're not treating Kamala Harris the way a world historic figure like her should be treated and that everyone is to blame for her having what was it we thought it was Sarah like 28% approval rating

which for a vice president who isn't involved in any major scandal as far as I can tell is just unprecedented so how do we if we're gonna do instead of just pure rank punitry but rank criminology punitry

of what's going on with the White House how do we connect all of these things together and what does it possibly mean for the future of the Democratic Party for 2024? I ask you, Chris Darwold. Everything and nothing. No, the line that in the CNN piece

on this that tickled me in its absurdity was and this is supported with no evidence and implicit racism and sexism have been constant Now, I don't know how they do it in the Biden administration, but I kind of doubt that racism and sexism are constant everywhere within the Biden administration. You know, what do you do with Kamala Harris, the most overrated, formerly the most overrated politician of her generation? Vice presidents should either be effective outreach to a subgroup.

This would be the Mike Pence model. Send Pence out to go talk to the churchy people and calm them down after Trump does something heinous. Or what Bush wanted Dan Quayle to be. Somebody that can soothe your coalition but doesn't play a substantial role. The other thing that a vice president can be is a potted plant, right? You go over there and don't say anything, right? You go over there and we'll let you know if the president dies, and then you can, and then we'll holler.

The problem with Harris is she is not competent. She's a terrible politician with terrible political instincts. She took this super bedouper opening and the support from all these Obama knots and all of these people for her candidacy in 2020. and in the course of six weeks trashed it totally wrecked the car and so she's not good enough to put forward neither will she be a potted plant because she has to be and we have to all understand this through the lens of the knowledge inside the White House that even among the most ardent even Jill Biden even the ones who love the president the most would have to admit that

there is a non-zero chance that he will not be the party's nominee in 2024. And so she needs visibility and will resent people who are denying it to her. But I think we just see another example of a politician whose ambition, who's overweening ambition, outruns her capacity. So, Sarah, were you a fan of West Wing? You feel like you were a fan of West Wing. Of course I was. Yes, okay. Lemon, Lyman, guys.

So, one of these ideas that's being banning around, and you can take this anywhere you want to go, but I just, as the resident A.O. guest here, one of these ideas you see banding around is very West Wing, you know, which is funny because we have such a veep, veep. And it is that Biden people is a rumor, which you think apparently has to keep getting shot down, that what Biden's going to do to get, to cut the Gordian knot here is just go ahead and put Kamala Harris on the Supreme Court. As if that's like a super easy thing to do. Right? It's like on Monday, hey, I know what we can do. Let's give her

a spot over the Supreme Court. Like it's like a spotted HUD. She's second in line behind Barack Obama if you read conservative media. Oh, there you go. Yeah. So anyway, What, Sarah? What am I supposed to make of this? Yeah, I think that is a total silliness. And even though the Republican Party has the beefiness of the Federalist Society that would throw an all-out fit to not have a true intellectual conservative on the court, even though that doesn't really exist on the left in the same way, there will still be enough of an outrage.

look at what Elena Kagan has been able to do on the court Ruth Bader Ginsburg Kamala Harris simply would not have the legal chops to do that not because she's not a smart person or a lawyer Sonia Sotomayor

And what senators are going to be voting for to confirm her? I mean, like it's just anyway. Okay, but What's your bigger picture on all this? I thought the most interesting part of the CNN

Anonymous source hit piece on Harris was the feeling within the Naval Observatory staff that Pete Buttigieg is getting the love and defense from senior White House officials, but when Harris is in trouble, she doesn't get any defense, to which the same anonymous White House officials were like, yeah, because Pete Buttigieg didn't do anything wrong, and your person did. So here's the interesting thing to me. While I agree that Harris's political instincts are not, you know, Bill Clinton's, for instance. A lot of people's political instincts aren't Bill Clintons, and yet they make very successful politicians. I think the problem here is her staff. I think that she has not had, I know,

I know, I'm going to do it. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectation. Jeez, Louise. She's good. She's just not well-staffed. She just needs to be herself. Yes, that is what I'm going to say. Wait for it. Wait for it. It's coming. Sarah, that's what a White House staffer told me yesterday. So a message. That now the White House isn't going to like where I take this, but that, yeah, she has not had long-term staff. She doesn't keep staff around. She doesn't have experienced people around her. In part, I think the White House as a whole suffers from some of this where they're so interested in having examples of diversity. They've put people without the necessary experience into positions

where they are set up not to succeed. Nevertheless, the Let Harris be Harris model that the White House does not want, but that I think would work very well for Harris, is that a lot of the times her gaffs are her saying something she actually does believe, finding out, you know, her staff then freaks out because they're not politically popular,

the White House doesn't like it. And then they scramble around trying to apologize, without apologizing and be defensive without being defensive. So let me take the student at that town hall who says, you know, Israel's committing genocide and she doesn't correct the student. Because she agrees.

So if you're, if this were in the Obama era or even in the Bush era where you had vice presidents who in fact were more experienced in Washington than their presidents they were serving, they were brought in to provide that sort of relationship log-rolling aspect. They also said what they meant.

And when they said it, they were like, yeah, that's what I think, is what it is, man. Now, the difference is they weren't trying to run for president. Well, except it turns out one of them was. But in this case, Harris actually, I think, believes that Israel is a bad actor. Maybe she even believes they're committing ethnic genocide. What Joe Biden would have done in that situation or Dick Cheney

is to say, yeah, that's not the position of the president. But it is mine. Don't know what to tell you. That would have pushed people back so much further than what, in fact, the Harris team did, which is, oh, my God, we're so sorry. We'll meet with shoes. What? And it became both insincere and a gaff and that she had no political instincts. Huge staffing problem. The vice president's staff does not have the self-confidence to tell the West Wing staff to push off. And so the problem is then, the West Wing doesn't trust the Vice President's staff because they shouldn't.

And you've got like the JV team. It's not the way it will work if you want to be president. Not to belabor the point. Then why was she so terrible at running for president? If the problem is, she didn't have, she doesn't have people. No. No. She doesn't have the staff that has the self-confidence to say push forward, push through it.

People, you know, the initial reaction might be unpopular. But actually people don't care so much about whether you share their exact positions. as they care that you mean what you say, that you're not flim-flamming around as a politician. And Harris is Twitter-bound in that sense. All right, so I want to get Declan in here. But I just, just for the record, I'm open to this, the staff is part of the problem thing.

But like, the problem with saying, having that monocausal explanation is that it doesn't include the fact that Kamala Harris's inappropriate laughter is among the most brutal things in American politics. And it's in poker, it would be the equivalent of getting a hand where your high card is an eight. And that's all you've got. And laughing uproariously about how you're going to beat.

It's the weirdest tell of, I don't know what to say. I feel very awkward. And that is why I'm going to laugh as if we're all agreeing on a joke here that none of us think is funny. It is weird. That's not staffing. That is a weird subroutine that somehow some Al Gore-like virus infected her androidness. And I, Declan, settle this for you.

I know you don't like it when mom and dad and dad fight. So where do you come down on all this? I disagree with Sarah. I think the, I think that the staff problems are real, but they are ultimately Kamala Harris problems. And that is because one, who is, who is choosing her staff for her, obviously in the transition, some of this, you know, some of the Biden team folks get shuffled over there.

And, but she's been with a lot of the same people dating back to her first Senate run in California. Who? Her sister is very involved. Yeah, her sister first and foremost. Her sister is not on staff, Declan. No, but she's clearly, you know, she's clearly still taking advice from a lot of the same people. I will also say, you know, we talked about the laugh. We can't make it through this entire segment without mentioning the most hilarious

moment of her vice presidency thus far, which is her walking into a room that's supposed to be a surprise birthday party for her and her yelling surprise before anybody jumps out because it was so choreographed in advance. And I'll ask Caleb to put it in the show notes. It's the funniest thing that I've ever seen in my entire life. But I think Democrats need to be very, very concerned about this growing. It's the staff problem with Harris because otherwise you're going to end up with a coronation of her in 2024 or 2028 where there's just not a like I think there's a very similar problem that she has to what Trump had in that he cannot fail. He can only be failed.

And we're seeing that with Harris here. but she has a much, much smaller base than Trump ever did. One, my girlfriend lives like three blocks from the Naval Observatory. I bike by there all the time. Nice brag. You slipped in there. I've got a girlfriend. He just wants to let you know.

It's pretty sick. And I bike sometimes. So. A cyclist with a lady. That's any man's dream. But when I go by there, there have been protesters out there nonstop for months. and they're from the left. They're not, and it's very upset, or they're very upset with Harris for not doing more on the border, not doing more on voting rights, all these other things. She doesn't

have this bedrock of support in the Democratic Party that is translatable to kind of a broader coalition, I think. And part of the problem is, you know, I do think that the Harris people are kind of understandably upset that the issues that they've been saddled with is, hey, go fix the border and passive voting rights bill when we only have 50 votes in the Senate. Chop, chop. And, like, those are both losing hands that Biden obviously didn't want to take on for himself. But at the same time, if Harris wants to be president one day, there's going to be a lot of issues that she's going to have to handle that are unpleasant. And so, you know, there were background quotes in this saying, complaining about that kind of delegation of like, well, they're just giving her

all the things that Biden doesn't want to do. And it's like, yes, but. Welcome to the vice presidency. If you're auditioning to be the president, those are all going to be your issues one day eventually. And so, you know, it just strikes me as a very, very dangerous road to go down that Kamala is actually okay. People are just misunderstanding. She has this great personality that, you know, you just can't see. But when she runs her president in two years, it'll be there. I mean, any Republican candidate that isn't currently on trial for murder or something would beat her in 20.

The Donald Trump, the Donald Trump, Kamala Harris election is actually the election American deserves. That is what we have wrought upon ourselves. For sure. Trump Gosar versus Harris Sanders. Trump Gosar definitely sounds like a syndrome. With Amex platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside.

So being a fan for life turns into the... the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca.orgiax. The jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial has started day two

of deliberations. We could have a verdict, of course, at any point. They are being asked to decide whether the prosecution has met its burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Kyle Rittenhouse and the moments before he pulled the trigger

did not have a reasonable fear for his life. And yet, boy, have I not heard that explanation of what the jury's deciding on either side of the political spectrum. So, Jonah, my question to you is, why does America have an obsession with sort of taking a trial that our criminal justice system is built to be fact-bound about the person themselves

and their actions. Our whole system is based around this. And yet we are so obsessed as society of taking that and making it into a narrative. And we've done this throughout our country's history. Why? Tell us.

I agree. Do you ever read Pilgrim's Progress, the John Bunyan? It's considered like one of the first novels in Western civilization. It's not a great read. Um, and, uh, epic of Gilgamesh is where it's at. Um, and it's, but it's funny because it's, it's, I think the literary year and for it is allegorical in the sense that like, the characters actually have names that are their motivations, right? So it's like, I'm doing this, I'm making this up, but it's like, Mr. Strives to climb uphill. It's like a dude's name, you know, that kind of thing. And, um, and I think

we do a lot of this with our politics. We definitely saw it like with the Kavanaugh thing, where we, you literally had, you know, senators saying that I believe he's a rapist because just look at his judicial opinions. And you have something similar going on where you just have this craving to impose clean narratives of your tribal truths on this stuff to the point where, I mean, the ones that really stick out to me that I just find fascinating about what the implication is, like the Ben and Jerry's guy tweeted this. I've seen, but I've seen a dozen of these different things saying, imagine if Rittenhouse were black. Does anyone think he would have gotten justice? And the weird thing about that argument is if you take two seconds to

think about it, what they're saying is if Rittenhouse was black, he would have been treated unjustly and unfairly. So therefore, it is unjust and unfair to treat, to deliver actual justice based on the facts of the case to written house, which is like the most convoluted two wrongs make a right kind of argument, imagine. I'm all in favor of treating black defendants justly, but if you're going to say hypothetically or allegorically that black people don't get justice, therefore we shouldn't give white kids justice either. Well, that's just very stupid. That's like we should all jump off the bridge because

your friends are jumping off the bridge kind of stupid. And I think we try to avoid media criticism around here. But the desperation of people to make them into a white supremacist, I just think it's very, very telling. I'm not saying that you can't possibly make that argument because he was there to defend property against, you know, BLM riders or whatever. I get it. But like, if you read some of the headlines out there, you read some of the lead paragraphs out there, you would think he went and shot, that he went there to shoot deliberately three black people, that he shot three black people. And that's why he needs to go away when, in fact, he didn't shoot any black people. And I'm not a big written house stand by any stretch of imagination. But it's weird, how we,

we want reality show plot lines to apply to reality. And that's just not healthy. So, Declan, the Ahmed Arbery case has also gone to trial against the people who shot and killed him. I see this, I think, a little differently than you. And why the written house trial is getting a lot more attention. I think it's because the written house case actually is harder. So there is, I think, good evidence that written house maybe did not have a reasonable fear for his life, the fact that the guy next to him walked away, like turned his back, clearly not scared for his

life. And then, of course, you have testimony that Rittenhouse didn't raise his weapon until a weapon was raised at him, a loaded weapon at that. And so it was just a harder case. It's a more complicated case. And therefore, people can snatch it up for their various narratives and ignore the other side of it. Whereas I think the shooting of Ahmed Arbery, there's really no one arguing that this was self-defense. There's no one arguing that, like, this was... Except for the defendant's lawyers, obviously. Except for the defendant's lawyers who, I mean, you want to talk about some malpractice, not in the legal sense, I'm saying, but in the sense that we all use it. Oh, the Sharpton thing? Yeah, that he would like the judge to ban black preachers

from the courtroom? What? Uh, so that's a... my take on why these are getting very different levels of attention, but you maybe had a more a higher level take. I don't think your take is wrong. I think that there's obviously some truth to that. It's a much more legally interesting case on the written house side. At the same time, I think that they fit very, very different narratives, meta-narratives that we've been having these debates on over America, racism, and kind of where we are as a country that we've had on the right where, you know, America was a racist country or there were, you know, slavery. Then there was the civil rights movement. We've come so far. There are still individual bad

actors who hold really hateful and racist views. And we need to, you know, obviously, do everything we can to stamp that out, but it's not a systemic nationwide crisis that you see in some of the rhetoric on the left where racism is much more systemic. It's built into all of our institutions. And there's really nothing that individual actors can do to escape this kind of inherent racism that is, you know, we're either born with or quickly acquire living in America. And so I think it's interesting that the Arbery case fits much, much neater in that first camp

where, okay, we can all agree these guys, two old white guys or a dad and a son from the south go chasing after a black man who's jogging and kill him. This is, you know, it's a story that dates back hundreds of years to different lynch mobs, the KKK,

things like that. It's very recollective of those kind of stories that we've heard throughout history and it's much easier for people to say okay that those guys are obviously racist let's let's just throw them away and what they did is horrible

the written house case and I think it's interesting Jonah you mentioned that there's been this rush to declare him a white supremacist that it's I I forget who it was but there were some people who came out the other day and said we didn't know that his victims were white It was just assumed that the people that he shot were black in these riots.

And, you know, it's, there's a more meta-narrative of how did this 17-year-old kid end up in the situation where he felt like he had to go defend these protesters or defend these stores in Kenosha from Black Lives Matter protesters, rioters, whatever you want to call them. And that's a more nuanced and more controversial take that I think fits more firmly in the left's camp on America and racism. And Steyerwald, I do feel like part of this also is that there's this assumption that Rittenhouse will get acquitted. You know, talking to legal prosecutors ahead of this, they were surprised there was even a case brought and said, but for the political pressure, they did not think that a different prosecutor would have brought this to it. a jury. And so from the beginning, there's been this assumption that he'll get acquitted, which I think is part of why there's a narrative on the left trying to make this something else. Because underlying all of that, even what Jonas said, like, you know, imagine if he's black. Well, to be clear,

if Rittenhouse gets convicted, then their point sort of falls apart in that sense. So there's this assumption that he's going to get acquitted. If he gets acquitted versus if he gets convicted. We have National Guard standing by in Kenosha. The jury isn't sequestered. I don't know. Where does this leave us based on where we were last summer, which was a pretty dark place? And George Floyd or Kenosha or even going back to Ferguson, are we just setting ourselves up for more of these? Well, I mean, sure, yeah. It is the human condition, I suppose. We are always set up for more of these. There is a cabinet in my kitchen that has a burl in the wood that looks exactly like the face of a corgi.

And every time I do the dishes, I look up at the dog face and it pleases me. Our brains are designed to see people and animals and objects where they are not. It is a very important survival skill capability that we evolved because it's far better to, see a corgi that is not there, then to not see a wolf that is. So we are, our minds are really good at leaping to these conclusions and painting pictures where they are not. And that also relates to the coalitional instinct. And it also relates to seeing your people, even when they're not your people. This explains how Americans got so excited about Brexit. American right-winger got so excited about Brexit. You're like, well, that doesn't have anything to do with you, but they liked it.

They liked the feeling. We're now with, what's his name, the lunatic in Hungary, Victor Orban. You're like, what are you talking about? What does that have anything to do with you? So the co-oitional instinct sees Corgi's as well. We will always do this. We will always continue to do this. What we have to hope is that our legal system, and this is where respect for the courts, respect for the law, respect for these things is so important. The saddest numbers that I read this week by far were the numbers, I think it was Monmouth, that did the survey on trust and confidence and institutions. And guess what? It sucks. People do not. And that includes increasingly the criminal justice system and the legal system. So we will always do this. The question is, will we at some point

use up the credibility that we have the respect and esteem we have for the criminal justice system. It certainly worked in the case in Minneapolis with Derek Chauvin, right? It worked. Things turned out the way they were supposed to turn out. And it worked. Whatever it's supposed to be this time, I hope people will honor the result. Can I add one more point? I know this differs state to state, but I think it just stinks so much that this trial has been televised. It makes the proceedings so much worse. And you talk about, you know, people not knowing that the victims were white, for example. That's like a very, very basic level of knowledge needed to have to understand a trial.

And now all these, you know, all these commentators, pundits, what have you, are looking at 15 second clips of a judge commentary or, you know, six seconds out of context of something that, the defendant set on the stand and jumping to these sweeping conclusions about how the criminal justice system works and, uh, you know, making all these points that have literally no basis in legal. And it's happening on, you know, whether you're pro or anti-written house. Um, but it, it just, I think it does so much damage to the point that Chris was talking about, uh, about this trust in institutions where you have these bad actors jumping, uh, to conclusions based on out of context snippets that clearly they don't have any understand. I'm not pretending to be some trial lawyer expert, but I'm also trying not to come to any hot takes here. So it's a problem in Congress.

It's a problem in so many other areas of political life. But these cameras, I would be so in favor of replacing them all with transcriptions. And I hope the Supreme Court never, ever, ever adds cameras to their arguments. Well, I agree with that. Interestingly, I think the, prosecution has also made some arguments that are not actually legally relevant. Like, you can't claim self-defense if you're the one who brought the gun. No, that's not the rule. That's not the law. Oh, no.

Well, also, like, embassy drives me crazy. I can't remember the name of the reporter, but I've started. He loves this framing and he says it every single time. I caught him at least for a couple days where he stands in the streets of Kenosha and says, you know, tensions are high. as people are split between viewing written house as a murderous white supremacist

and others see him as a patriot who was only trying to defend his property. He was like, really? Those are the only two can't? The only views possible. There's no other circle for the Venn diagram that includes, you know, most of us. Our esteemed colleague, David, wrote a piece yesterday, basically saying he's not a murderer but he's not hero

and everybody was mad about it because in our dumb tribal team A team B world you have to pick a lane and run with it and any nuance introduced disrupts kind of the cognitive dissonance

there and so I mean the prosecution trying to prove that he was a chaos tourist he was and that has no relevance of whether in the moments before he pulled the trigger he had a reasonable fear for his life, you know, except to the extent that you're showing that, in fact, he's lying about fearing for his life because, in fact, he went there for the purpose

of shooting someone. But that's not quite the same as being a chaos tourist. I 100% believe he was a chaos tourist. He had no business being there. He shouldn't have been carrying a gun. All of these things, I believe. And they are all totally irrelevant to whether the prosecution met its burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Kyle Rittenhouse and the moments before you pulled the trigger did not have a reasonable fear for his life. The end. Yeah. If you look at the Dinesh Dinesh D'Souza's attacks on David. Oh, no. It's sort of so simply perfectly symbolic of the have your cake and eat it to Jackassery of some of these people where he said, David says basically what Declan just said, you know, he's neither a hero nor a villain or whatever, you know, whatever the framing was,

but he shouldn't have been there. And Dinesh's response was, The only way to translate this, I interpret to this tweet or something, I'm paraphrasing, is that David is trying to tell the world that he is morally superior. Meanwhile, this brave young man is fighting to defend his country and his community while he sits on the sidelines, treating as if he is self-righteous and better than all of it. Well, now, here's the problem. David doesn't think that taking a gun to a riot is a defense of Western civilization. Dinesh does, and he's the pansy-ass culture war chicken hawk sitting on his ass while letting some other little kid go fight according to his logic, not according to David's logic. And that is the weird thing about so many of these sort of right-wing dunkers on people who say he's neither hero nor a villain is that they want helter-skelter, they want race war, you know, the Kurt Schlichter, you know, Jack Wads out there saying all of these things. but they want someone else to do it

and then they want to sort of performatively you know, leach off of it like a suckerfish on a Great White on Twitter while actually risking nothing for themselves because they're just doing fan service and they don't actually believe what they're saying. And with that, we here at the dispatch will continue to not

Ramora on anyone else's shark. No sucker fishes for us. Thanks for listening. Definitely tell your friends about this podcast part of how you can do that is rating this podcast wherever you're getting it. It helps other people find it. Appreciate it and appreciate Declan and Chris coming in today. Liked it.

This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your site and email campaigns to stay connected with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design.

You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience, with a single hub for managing your work. without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.