The Dispatch Podcast - David French Is Wrong (Or Is He?) | Roundtable

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Let's talk about voting. Sarah, Jonah, and Megan McArdle get epistemological breaking down David French's column endorsing Kamala Harris and realize they can't even agree on the the purpose of voting. What kind of Democrat will Kamala Harris run as, anyway? The Agenda: —David French: To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris —Jonah: Voting Isn’t A Window Into the Soul —Why Megan is voting for Harris —Jonah has lost Sarah —Can “Obamaism” save Democrats? —Harris’ policy platform will be “light on detail” —Blaming greedy capitalists —“Has the U.S. beat inflation, Mr. President?” —Will the DNC boost Harris? —Should journalists publish hacked information? Show Notes: —Matt Yglesias on greedflation —Eric Levitz on greedflation —Scott Lincicome on greedflation The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isker. That's Jonah Goldberg. And Megan McArdle's here again. Hi, Megan. Hi, Sarah. We have to include Jonah in some of this, all right? We're not just going to ignore him like we did last week. But we can't be. up on them as much as we want. Can I be in your tree for it? No boys allowed.

Actually, Jonah, believe it or not, I want to start with you because you published both a thought-provoking and potentially, you know, physical fight-provoking piece this week about how you don't care about voting at all. What are you doing here? Well, physical fight provoking with who? David French. Eh, well, David, David's like the Amish guy that they rub ice cream on his face in witness. He's not going to, he's not going to punch me.

Didn't he, like, go to a war zone? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he's not going to punch me by something I wrote. I mean, that's just not going to happen. Fair. Okay, so David French writes this piece titled, To Save Conservatism from itself, I am voting for Harris. He goes through how his various conservative beliefs haven't changed.

But I'm going to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, and ironically enough, I'm doing it to try to save conservatism. Since the day Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the MAGA movement has been engaged in a long-running, slow-rolling ideological and character-ological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further and further away from Reaganite conservatism. It has divorced Republican voters from any major consideration of character and leadership

and all the while it has labeled people who resisted the change as traitors. What allegiance do you owe a party, a movement, or a politician when it or they fundamentally change their ideology and ethos? So, Jonah, you hate David because of this? That's why you're so mad? I'm not mad at anybody. I'm trying to gin up this fight. It's going to work.

Yeah. So, look, I think my point was. I actually don't disagree with much of any of that and to one extent or another. I think there's a very plausible argument to be made that conservatism would come out healthier from a Harris administration than from a Trump administration.

Because Trump is a poison pill comes from, he's destroying the thing, conservatism from within. It being the opposition to Harris would be galvanizing and clarifying and the recriminations for the, Jack wads who lost a very winnable race because they went with Trump

would be healthy as well for the GOP. And I don't really have a big problem with David voting for Harris. I have a problem with David endorsing Harris. That was my objection. And my added objection was framing the endorsement as a explanation for why he was voting for her,

which gets to my real problem, my real gripe, which has nothing to do with David, and has everything to do with the way people friggin talk about voting in this country. love democracy. I think it's great. Love Republican government. Think that's awesome. I love talking about politics. I fucking hate talking about how you're going to vote. I hate when people ask me, how are you going to vote? I used to have sovereign contempt for journalists who said they didn't vote because they only need to stay objective. I have much more sympathy for it now because the

problem is you have very complicated arguments are sluiced through the manure pens into a single binary signal called your vote and that somehow people conclude that if I said if I were to say I'm voting for Harris, which I'm not, they would conclude from that, oh, so you support X, Y, and Z that Harris supports. And I don't. And I wouldn't even if I was going to vote for her. If I decided I was going to vote for Trump, it doesn't mean I was in favor of January 6 or any of these kinds of things. Votes are a decision in a moment in time. But we talk about votes and electorates as if they're these static, stable things, and we turn Trump voters or Biden voters or Obama voters into a form of identity politics. And I think it is philosophically, epistemologically, ontologically, and politically and psychologically unserious.

So there you go. One of the most persuasive lines to me was also the point that, you know, David is now going to get endless emails. if there is four years of a Harris administration every time she does something there will be some trend David French voted for this right

David French supported this David French wanted this whatever it may be so Megan I actually also think the journalist not voting has been misunderstood or let me change that

I think that I can see two different things that people mean when they say they're not voting. I think the I'm not voting because I'm not a player in the game. I'm just a ref. I think that is

bullshit because you're an American citizen. You're very much a player in the game. In fact, being a journalist might make you the biggest player in the game because you need those rights more than almost to anyone else in the country to do your job. So I would definitely vote in that sense. However,

it is also the case that human nature is such that When you even make a smallest contribution, money or vote or endorsement, whatever it may be, on one team, you invest a little bit more. You become a little bit more defensive of that team. You become a little bit part of that team and all that comes with that. And that, I think, can be a problem. Where do you come down on the voting, not voting, Megan? I am voting for Kamala Harris.

Sorry, Jonah. That's fine. The truth is that, like... Megan, do you agree with her position on price fixing for grocery stores? No, I'm a single-ish voter. I'm not being Donald Trump. I think Donald Trump is just by character and history, unfit to be president, and therefore I am voting against him. I'm not really voting for Harris, except, you know, in a democracy, that's what you do.

And look, I think that the truth is that a lot of other things dwarf, like, on November, whatever it is, I'm embarrassed to say. I do not know what day, election day falls on this year. But, you know, on the first Tuesday of November, I'm going to go into a booth and, like, press a button or rate an axe or however you vote in your area. for journalists, the much bigger issues are, first of all, that, like, not voting doesn't mean you don't have a preference, right? It's like when parents claim they don't have a favorite kid and everyone knows they do, right? Like, saying that you don't have a favorite kid is not actually prevent you from having a favorite child. But saying that one of your kids is your favorite is worse, right? Sure, but if you... You shouldn't talk about your vote. But, like, you shouldn't claim that by not saying it, you can make it not be true. Oh, I agree with that. Right. And, like, I think the bigger issues for journalists are the kind of cultural, the sociological, who are you with, who do you secretly want in your heart of hearts? But also, like, who have you met? Who do you personally like? This is a thing that always makes me laugh because there's all these people who won't do interviews with me,

either because they think that I am part of the dreaded mainstream media, or because they think that I'm a right-wing hack. And, like, the surest way to not get me to attack you, is to have me meet you because I find it very difficult to be mean to people have met. And so all of these people who are like, I'm not going to do an interview with this person because she will be mean to me, exact opposite. Sorry, I just guess I gave away the hack. But like, that's a thing that happens to everyone. You meet people and it's just harder to be mean to them unless you're a particular kind of person

that I and many other journalists are not. Who do you socialize with? who married, your college roommate's cousin, all of those things matter more than voting. That's like the last thing that is going to influence how you cover a candidate. Is it possible, Jonah, though, that when people talk about Trump voters and Biden voters, it's a little bit like boots on the ground metaphors, there's this English word for that. And this is the second time this week that I've forgotten the word for what it is when you use one thing to stand in. synodecity.

Yeah, synecity? I don't know. Okay, something like that. Please don't everyone email us this. Put it in the comments. So that like, when we say the terms Trump voter and Biden voter, we don't literally mean people who voted for Joe Biden or Donald Trump were actually using that as a stand-in for a whole bundle of sticks for my lawyers out there and law students.

What, what? And like voting for Trump or Biden might be one of the. those, you know, sticks in the bundle, but really we're talking about all these other things that come with that personality. So of all of the Trump voters who, like people who voted for Donald Trump, when we say Trump voters, maybe we're talking about half of those people who we actually describe as Trump voters. Could that be your beef, Jonah? Or is it really? Well, look, I mean, we're speaking in broad generalizations, but I'll give you a concrete example of what I mean. after January 6th, I heard Harry the 1, 4 trillion people say that impeaching Donald Trump

would be an insult to the 74 million people who voted for him. Fact check, no, it wouldn't. Because first of all, no one voted for Donald Trump to do what he did on January 6 because January 6 had not happened yet. But what we do is space time continuing. and how does it work? And so there is this way of trying to boil down stuff into archetypes, into what Walter Lippman would call stereotypes, right?

And I understand that some of it's just journalistic laziness. This is the life we've chosen. You've got to use words for certain things or terms, and you understand their exceptions to the rule. But my bigger problem is with it on a personal level. Is this idea, like, I can't tell you how many people are furious with me for the last going on eight years when I say, look, I don't care how my vote doesn't matter. I live in Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., like in 2020, went for Joe Biden with 92% of the vote.

I've never lived anywhere where my vote wasn't outnumbered, like, five or six to one. So why should I, but who are you going to vote for? Who are going to vote for? It matters so much. It's a symbol. It's significant. No, it's bogus. But it can't be both, Jonah.

Like, what matters is the arguments I make and the positions I take and the facts I bring to bear. And who I vote for isn't a thing. And there's a weird kind of bullying that a lot of people do. Not normal people, but political people, very engaged people, you know, primary voter types who think that with this one cool hack, I can see everything in your soul and it's figuring out who you're going to vote for. And I just don't buy it. With this vote, I the wed.

But Jonah, you're sort of trying to have it both ways here, right? on the one hand, your vote doesn't matter at all. It's a totally pointless exercise that makes no difference in who becomes president. But also, you're voting, which means at least to you personally, it has some symbolic meaning. And if it has symbolic meaning to you, why can't it have that symbolic meaning to others? I'm not saying it has no symbolic meaning. Voting is good. Purple thumbs in Iraq.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get all that, right? Wow. Democracy. Fine. my point is is it's it sends it's a signal right it's like a price it sends it conveys some information you can make some judgments if you vote for robert f kennedy i can make some inferences about you i might be wrong about some of them but like it's some evidence towards a conclusion

about you um if you vote for harris or for trump it tells me something about you it just doesn't tell you all that much. And it doesn't mean that everything else you have to say is no longer, you don't really mean it if you ended up voting for Harris, right? You don't really mean your criticism of Harris if you voted for her. No, I'm like, Megan's out of work if Harris wins. And she's also not allowed to criticize what a Harris administration does, you know? Wait a minute, wait a minute, Jonah. What? Breaking news here. Let's talk more about this. Well, no, my point is, like, if you're not allowed, if no one has to take. anything you have to say seriously because you voted for Harris, then like you're going to have a lot of blank columns on the next, you know, if Harris wins because it's like she's going to do a lot of things you're not going to like. She's going to do some things that Sarah might not like. And so like whether you voted for her or not doesn't, it doesn't negate your actual arguments. But what people do is they want to argue on psychological terms rather in the sort of the arena of facts and logic and reason and all that kind of stuff.

and they want to put people onto teams, and the way we talk about voting puts people on teams. That's what frustrates me. Part of my problem with David's op-ed was that he was making it an endorsement, but the endorsement took the form of defending his vote, which I think muddied the water. The other problem I have with David,

David's column, is that if you actually want to send a signal to help the GOP and to help conservatism, I think the better signal for a voter living in Tennessee is to write in the kind of candidate that you would like. Boo! Either voting matters or it doesn't. Either this is symbolic or it's not, Jonah.

The writing in is the ultimate defining oneself with a symbolic gesture. The very thing that you just spent 15 minutes saying isn't a thing. No, you're, this is my, your evidence of my complaint is you think, you know the motives of other people by how they vote. No, no, no. I actually agreed with your whole column and I loved your column and your defense of it now makes me disagree with the whole thing. I went into this on your team and you have lost me, sir.

I will endure nonetheless. What's for you, sir? So like, Sarah, let's put it this way. All right, so David French votes for Kamala Harris in Tennessee. So Trump loses, I mean, Harris loses Tennessee. by one less vote than she otherwise would, right? So Trump wins Tennessee by 59%, let's say, instead of 6%. Okay?

Yes, I'm aware of how voting works. So now when you're looking at... You may be art based on this conversation, but... Hold on a second. So... Jonah just used a rude gesture, everyone. So if you're some sort of Monday morning cephologist studying the tea leaves or writer and all that kind of stuff about the election,

And you would just say, look, Harris did it a little better than you would have expected in Tennessee, you know, because all these David French people voted for Harris. What if there was a line, if the returns had 1%, 2%, 3%, voting for writing in, you know, Mitt Romney, Nikki Haley, take your pick? The signal there is, ah, there are these getable voters for Republicans. If only the Republican Party hadn't been so clownishly stupid by renominating this guy, they might have got. gotten. That's a clear signal. The signal David is sending to the political, to the punditocracy is very muddied and very, you know, the signal in the Times column is very clear. The signal of his vote is completely obscure. How am I, how is that like narcissistic, you know, self-loving preening to make that argument and to make, to vote that way? Because I'm going to do it. I know you. So

some of that's going to just be baked in. But look, okay. The transit of property. if Jonah's personality creeps into his arguments. Is that what you're saying? Okay. That's right. Yeah. But look, I don't want to belabor this because I want to move on to Harris. Shush.

Your mouth. Megan, I'm sorry you have to see this. I'm enjoying every second. Okay. So here's how this segment is going to end. I will tell you that right now. One, I hear your point on the protest aspect of voting. But in that sense,

the right-in doesn't matter any more than the drop-off because when I, a former political operative, I'm going to look at what that protest is. Frankly, the drop-off vote is much easier for me to see the people who voted in the Senate race and didn't vote for president at all because it's just a numbers game. But fine, you're reminding me that I should also add in the write-ins to that protest. But the problem, to your point about muddled, some of the right-ins, like, write in their girlfriend, right in Mickey Mouse, or, you know, more butts. And so, like, they're not doing it for any symbolic reason. Whereas the drop-off voters, at least something went on there.

And by drop-off voters, you just mean the people who voted Republican for down-ballot and Democrat for drop-a-the-vout? No, no, no, didn't vote. But that's fine. I'm talking about just protest voting, right? So in Georgia, for instance, I believe it was, is it 12,000, 18? thousand drop-off votes, people who voted in the Senate race and did not vote at all in the presidential race. That's fine, too. That's sending a message. So I'm sort of agreeing with you in the

sense that, like, there is a thing called protest voting. It can take the form of right in or dropping off or whatever else. I don't think right in, though, is like the only way to do that or somehow better or more. That's fair. That's fine. Leaving it blank works for me too. And at the point that you think that voting itself, your single vote doesn't make a difference, which is just sort of, you know, factually true, but that nevertheless you should vote, I think you have to acknowledge that there is clearly some personal symbolism for you for voting.

Now, I think you're exactly right. This is the part I liked about your column. Other people reading into that, what that symbolism is to you, is a waste of their time because they're not going to know and be most likely wrong. As in my vote for someone in November, is not going to be about them at all.

Otherwise, I absolutely would stay home. I vote because the symbolic nature to me is my participation. I have a civic duty to go do this as much as I hate it. And I think, though, that you have made a really impressive case against your own case.

But we're moving on and you can't defend yourself. I'll take the win. 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.

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That's ETHOS.com slash dispatch. Supplication times may vary. Rates may vary. There was a piece by Jonathan Shate in New York Magazine, and it said, yes, she can. Bidenism brought Kamala Harris and the Democrats to the brink of catastrophe. Obamaism can save them. And it is this really interesting piece, and I highly recommend it for those who are on the right side of the spectrum, because I think there can be this sense, whichever team you're on, that you're on, that you're Your team has all of the internal fighting and power struggles, but their team is like a smooth, placid lake of all rowing, you know, in the same direction.

The rowing lake, okay? Yes, the lake itself is rowing, Megan. Shush, everyone today. I'm just trying to go out. I'm just trying to hold this in my head as we move forward. Go with a gestalt, not the specifics. And his argument actually sort of has the same vibes as David French is. So if David French's argument was, I'm voting for Harris because it will do less harm to

or might help conservatism find its way, this argument is something like Harris needs to abandon Bidenism so that liberalism can find its way politically, again, not on the policy side, but rather on the being a politically viable party. And I'll just read a couple things here. whatever the merits of the underlying analysis of American politics, the theory of change laid out by its funders of neoliberalism, neoliberalism is a term of art that has infinite permutations. In general, it is employed as a form of abuse, very few people describe themselves as neoliberal by the left to describe shared ideas of liberals and conservatives. The implications

is that the New Deal liberalism that used to dominate American politics and that favored workers and government intervention gave way to a more conservative system dedicated to free markets above all. Trump's 2016 victory, they believed, was a long-brewing backlash against the neoliberal regime. The failures of the system were multiple. Neoliberal's elites were unduly reverential of market forces. Even democratic pressures to expand government were too market-based. The economy had grown too slowly because neoliberalism placed too much weight on holding down inflation. Another failure of neoliberalism, one that came into tighter focus after the George Floyd murder was its habit of using race-neutral policies. The anti-neo-liberal diagnosis contained some elements of truth. The Kenzian New Deal

consensus that once ruled American politics had disappeared and the intellectual center of gravity and American economic policy did move rightward from the 1970s to the end of the Obama era. The parties did agree on free trade, and they often overlooked the harm it did to communities that relied on manufacturing. However, the theory has serious defects. It exaggerates the progressive of the old Democratic Party, which even at the height of the New Deal, carefully balanced business interest against labor and visibly vigorously expanded, free trade. A fact, anti-neoliberalism has even more difficulty accounting for is that the two parties moved further apart, not closer together, during the so-called neoliberal period.

The Keynesian consensus eroded because the Republicans abandoned it. The premise that they have been joined in a neoliberal consensus can't explain why Republicans and Democrats have fought an increasingly vicious terms over everything, especially the role of government. A model that envisions a political divide pitting Elizabeth Warren and Sanders on one side with Obama and Paul Ryan on the opposing side can explain very little of what has happened in modern American politics. So they've got these, you know, funders who are these anti-neo-liberals, and the plan devised by one of their funders and his allies explained how anti-neo-liberal fought would be disseminated. It makes sense to begin with the academy and

think tanks, though we will not want to confine ourselves exclusively to even to these even in the beginning and to work out from there in subsequent stages, a strategy document explained. Hewlett poured 140 million into grants to writers, magazines like the Atlantic, Washington Monthly, and the American prospect, among many others, conferences, podcasts, academic centers at universities like Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown, and think tanks. The Roosevelt Institute's budget more than tripled. The massive upsurge in demand for essays, columns, and lectures, assailing neoliberalism was met rapidly with a booming supply. Whatever the merits of their underlying analysis of American politics, the theory of change laid out by its funders was

fully vindicated. The surge of anti-neo-liberal thought transformed conventional wisdom within the elite ranks of the progressive movement. It rendered Obama's legacy an orphan and created the expectation that the Democratic Party was racing into a bold new era in which the political and fiscal constraints that had operated within had disappeared completely. But he goes on to explain how this has been a total political failure for Democrats. And then in fact, the last deeply popular candidate that they had, of course, was Barack Obama, and that somehow these anti-neo-liberals think that it was just a, you know, accident of fate, that he was easily elected in 2008, easily re-elected in 2012, and that it had nothing to do with his so-called neoliberal policies,

et cetera, and that Harris, if she were wise, would go back to that Obama-era politics instead of the Biden-odd marriage with these anti-neo-liberals. Megan, this sounds a whole lot like what's been going on on the right with different permutations, obviously different actors and some different levers that are being pulled. But what is most meaningful to me is for them, for the anti-neo-liberals, all of this, their worldview explains why Trump gets elected. Because Hillary is neoliberal and the voters rejected neoliberalism.

and that's why Trump gets elected. So they need to move further to the left if they want to beat Trump, which is so funny because the same version on the right is also how they explain how you get Trump, which is Romney was too, you know, Reagan conservative. And so he needed to move further to the right. And so we needed to have Donald Trump.

The fact that that irony is lost on both sides who are so sure they are right and see the other side is so stupid for thinking that on their side, side is really interesting. It is interesting. I mean, I, like, I was tempted to tweet yesterday after reading a Chate's article that, like, all base turnout theories of elections are wrong, and they're all also just maneuvers in intra-party factional wars. Right? At the end of the day, you need swing voter, as we talked about this last week, about the, you move a swing voter,

you get two votes. It's a net of two votes. You move, you know, you get one of your people to the polls. It's won. It's just, it's a very hard way to win an election. And I think that we are seeing within both parties, for a bunch of reasons, these factional disputes getting really hot in part because like the partisanship is now so bad that the only thing left is partisan and fighting. But I have to say, I think Chate's prescription is more plausible than David's for all that I love David. I have long thought that, look, I am voting for Kamala Harris because I don't want Donald Trump to be president. And I think that supporting, like,

voting for Kamala Harris is an effective way to not make Donald Trump be president. I do not think it is an effective way to make the Republican Party do what I want. Because, like, if you are trying to change a party, what you do not do is say, I am voting for your opponent, because it just makes people mad.

They think you're a traitor. People do not take advice on policy from traitors. And it is one thing to say, like, look, I'm not voting for this person and I don't think you should be president. It is another thing to say, like, I am voting for this person to kind of punish you, teach you a lesson, like try to force you back.

I think that doesn't work. I think that whole theory of how we were going to save the party from Donald Trump has failed miserably. Whereas the theory that like you could just be more like a very popular president and unfortunately the groups are going to have to, a very popular Democratic president and the groups are going to have to cool it is a completely viable theory

of how to win elections and in fact move the party. That's what the Clinton's did in the 90s. And I think it can totally work again. And I think that that asymmetry, for those of us who would really like to vote for a viable, healthy, you know,

Republican candidate of decent Republican candidate, that that asymmetry, is sad. There's a lot that's too nerdy, even for this podcast, to get into about where I agree and disagree with Chate on some of the stuff. But I think, and I don't want to, I don't want to get in trouble with you, Sarah, by revisiting the whole vote thing. But this does get at this thing, which is that the normal voter out there, the median voter, no Republican and no Democrat considers them traders. They consider them someone they want to win over. The debate is what they're willing to do to win them over. The problem is the base voters just think all we need to do is, well, I guess that's

wrong. The hardcore base types don't care about the meeting voter because they're convinced there's this lump and proletariat army, this secret army of more people like us that will just turn out. But even so, when the median voter goes for Republicans, they're like, hey, we're winning these people. See, we're popular. All of the Trumpy types are bragging about how they're winning over Hispanics and blacks, and they want them, right? They say, you have to convert to us, but that's great. See, we're popular. We're winning these people over. And it's different with people who are in the, let's just use the phrase public intellectual, right? The people in the, those are the public intellectual space, when we talk about our positions and all this kind of

stuff. It's more like you're hoisting a flag in Game of Thrones, and you were a bannerman for one lord or another. And to switch flags freaks people out, how dare you betray your master? Yada, I'll like garbage. But for actual voters,

you know, like, you can switch sides all you like and they're happy about it. The Obama Trump, Biden, Trump voter exists. It's a fascinating creature. I saw a nature special recently. David Admirone. It was beautiful.

When they kill the gazelle. I hear they care for their young. And so where I find, and I sort of what I find most intriguing about the shape thing is I agree with you, Sarah, is the fault lines on the left that do not get discussed. You know, partly because right-wingers talk about their fault lines a lot and partly because we are on the right for the most part. and partly because the media covers us like we are in an alien population living amongst them, we know a lot about the fault lines on the right. And I spent much of my life writing about the fault lines on the right.

The fault lines on the left, I can tell you a lot about the fault lines on the left in the 1940s, right? I have much less visibility to the fault lines on the left today, in part because the facade that they put up, and part also because the Democratic Party, the left has always been more coalitional than the right.

And so the sort of popular frontism makes it harder to pierce some of that stuff. But the interesting is the Hewlett Foundation is wreaking havoc on the right too

and related things because they are trying to convince right-wingers to be anti-neoliberal as well and create this new sort of consensus. And I think this gets

into something we've talked a lot about on here. It explains some of the higher-brow versions of horseshoe theory that we're seeing, right? J.D. Vance and, and those guys and American Compass, and they like Lena Khan and Elizabeth Warren. Tucker Carlson says that, you know, Elizabeth Warren's

platform in 2020 was socially conservative and when social conservatives should support. That new fusionism of sort of anti-liberal or illiberal stateism, command and control stuff, is an interesting threat, and it'll be interesting. to see where it forms new alliances between right and left, where neoliberalism is still, and neoliberalism is such a stupid, freaking term, where sort of free market economics. Obamaism. Can we like... You're not going to get me to switch from neoliberalism to Obamaism. That's just, that's part of my problem with shade. And for those who actually want to hear Jonah discuss this more in his

conflated, logical mess of a brain, he and David French are going to do a special skiff on this for the members of the dispatch in which he and David can hash this out, arm wrestling, slap fighting, whatever they choose to do. So members of the dispatch, look out for that skiff coming soon. Okay. To me, though, this also explains why Harris is going to have a lot of problems rolling out any policy proposals of any substance. Now, we've talked about why she can't really take questions, and there's some amount of why the policy proposals are the same problem, right? Anytime that you define yourself, you're excluding, right? So some voters have poured themselves into whatever they see as Kamala Harris. And so answering questions might

burst that bubble, rolling out policies could verse that bubble. But there's another reason, right, that if your party is fractured along policy lines with the anti-neo-liberals being the sort of progressive elites that are going to be overrepresented in DC policy pundit world, sort of by the way, like how we on the conservative side are way overrepresented in policy pundit world, then you have some problems. Because if you want to roll out those sort of popular Obama-ish policies, even though the majority of your party will like that, there's going to be a real number of people who don't think that's sufficient. And those people are the loudest voices with the most sort of access to the megaphones, we still don't have a lot of

policy from Vice President Harris. She is supposed to, we're taping this on Thursday, August 15th, and she is supposed to roll out her economic agenda to some extent tomorrow on Friday, but the New York Times has already previewed that by saying it will be, quote, light on details. In the meantime, we've gotten her price gouging plan where she wants to prevent price. gouging from grocery store retailers, which to me is that that way every time someone says inflation, she can say corporate greed. Inflation, corporate greed, inflation, corporate greed, like a call and response. Because the reason that bacon is expensive, Megan, has nothing to do with the price of anything. It's just profit-driven. Yeah. No, it's just gouging. Yeah. The Biden

administration, by the way, has been pushing this line the entire time. It has never made any sense. They have been obsessed with concentration in the meatpacking industry, which explains precisely none of the variance in meat prices. They are, they like simultaneously would claim that it was all supply bottlenecks and also that it was corporate greed. And the fact is, like, it didn't work. Forget, you know, the argument for this. from anyone who knows anything about economics is like, okay, so sure it's not price gouging. And sure, if you actually did anything to address, I am putting, I want to use scare quotes for listeners, the price gouging, that would involve shortages of any good that you tried

to suppress the, again, scare quoted price gouging, because that would actually be, is a price control and price controls create shortages. But, like, she's not actually going to do anything, and this sounds popular. People like it. They don't like price gouging. And it's true people don't like price gouging, right? If you see, like, after hurricanes, every time people are charging a lot to bring, like, ice and generators into disaster areas, you get complaints about price gouging. And it's like, the price gouging is what makes the generators and the ice be in the disaster area. And if you didn't have price gouging, the prices would be lower on the things you couldn't buy, right? But that she's not actually going to do anything. And as long as it sounds

popular, why not? The important thing is to defeat Trump. But in fact, like, Biden tried this over and over and over again. And it did not have any measurable impact on people blaming his administration for inflation. Now, some of that blame was, in fact, unfair. A lot of it really was just supply chain stuff. It was some of it was money that had built up in banking. counts under Trump all coming out after the pandemic ended. But at the end of the day, like politically it was not an effective slogan. And it signals to me both an uns seriousness about economic policy that worries the hell out of me. But more broadly, it, it sort of signals that she is willing to say dumb things that promise really bad policies on the assumption that

You won't have to do anything about it. And in fact, like, that has not always turned out to be true. Sometimes you promise a dumb policy. And then if you don't do it, voters get mad. And so you do the dumb policy. And you have, you know, you have seen this with things like Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness. I promised this thing. It is bad policy.

So what if I did it in an unconstitutional way and then made courts roll it back so they get blamed instead of me, right? That is like, that's actually civically corrosive. It's bad policy. sets people up to believe things that aren't true and then and to make plans based on promises that aren't true. And then they find out they're not true and it's bad. Like, this is a really bad way to make policy. And I would really like it to stop in favor of saying things that make sense. Speaking of being greedy, Megan, look at you. I do want to read some of the actual experts on this question. So the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco economists found a little level.

evidence that price gouging was the main culprit. Aggregate markets, the more relevant measure for overall inflation, have stayed essentially flat since the start of the recovery. Rising markups have not been a main driver of the recent surge and subsequent decline in inflation during the current recovery. That was from this year, going back to 2003, Eric Levitts in New York Magazine. In 2019, U.S. industries were roughly as concentrated as they were in 2022. Yet in the former year, inflation sat at near 2%, a low level by historical. standards. In the latter year, by contrast, prices rose by 6.5%. So why did corporate concentration yield historically low inflation throughout the 2010s, only to suddenly produce exceptionally high

inflation following the pandemic? Matt Iglesias, greed is a constant in the economy, not a variable. And therefore, it doesn't explain why inflation was so much higher in 2022 than in 2019. And our own Scott Lincolome, he has a chart, because of course he does. So you'll just have to trust me and what the church shows. Corporate greed, irm, profit, was actually a little lower

during the 21, 22 pandemic recovery than in previous recoveries. So, Jonah, I know this is a weird topic to discuss where politicians use facts that don't appear to be true to push policy that gets them out

of an unfortunate reality about maybe their policies causing inflation because if if the greed of the corporations and the concentration of the industries didn't cause it, what did? I'm a little sympathetic, not to the price gaugging,

that's all garbage, right? I mean, it's, it's total nonsense. And my blood pressure just spiked and is now slowly working its way down. I think the Biden's spending was bad and I think it probably contributed to inflation. But I don't think Biden was to blame for the bulk of the inflation.

we saw, it was a global phenomenon, was it throughout the West, there are defenses that the Biden world could offer other than the scapegoating grocery stores for raising their prices during a time of supply chain bottlenecks and high inflation. And they'd rather not do that. And I think that's stupid. And I think that there are ways in which, like, there's all this chatter, again, we're talking on Thursday about how Harris is trying to find ways to separate from Biden. This seems like one of these areas where you could have a nuanced separation, but they're not going to do that in part because as much as we can sit here and talk about how stupid all of this is, it focus groups really well. And this is one of the problems that we have in economics

is that, you know, as I often say, the free market system is the most cooperative system ever conceived of by humanity for improving prosperity and reducing poverty. It just doesn't feel like it. It's so cooperative that the cooperation is invisible. And so we like to impue, we like to invest or infer intentionality, behind bad things. It's the same part of our brain that finds plausibility and conspiracy theories. And so when prices go up, we want to blame people. And the Biden administration knows this, and the Harris people know this. And so rather than receive the blame for it, which I don't think

they deserve entirely, they would like to entirely put the blame on the intentionality of greedy capitalists, which is just stupid, you know, just to put a cap on this for people who don't get why like surge pricing, which people call price gouging when they don't like it, makes sense. When it rains in Manhattan, when it's sunny in Manhattan, it's very difficult to see any African immigrants selling umbrellas. The moment, but if you find one, you can buy one very cheap. The moment it starts to rain really hard, they're everywhere, and the umbrellas are more expensive because they know that people need umbrellas when it's raining and don't when it's sunny, and so they can charge a profitable price for it. It is not zero-sum. You are not being

gouged. You get an umbrella when it's raining, something you have high utility for, and they get U.S. currency, something they like. And it's win-win, not zero-sum, but we do not like to talk about win-win scenarios and politics. We like to, you know, I mean, look, we talked last week. J.D. Vance tried to, you know, turned child tax credits into a form of punishment. That's the sort of stupidity of the age that we're in. Indeed. 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, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace is cutting your,

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And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. What are the new technologies that will change aviation? Well, hydrogen would be one for sure if we got there. I mean, hydrogen is not just a alternative fuel. I mean, hydrogen would change it significantly if we ever managed to break the back of that. Today, I'm speaking with Kalyn Rovinescu, the former president of Air Canada, and a trailblazer in global aviation. Join me, Chris Hadfield, on the On Energy podcast. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

So you have Harris. Interestingly, she really hasn't flip-flopped on anything yet. Her staff has blopped her for her. They've just put out a series of statements from campaign staff saying she no longer believes certain things. But we're kind of waiting to hear it from her, especially on this fracking issue that is going to be important in Western Pennsylvania, certainly. And Pennsylvania, I think, will decide the election.

So goes Pennsylvania. So goes the White House. At the same time, you have the White House press secretary just so helpfully from the podium saying there is, quote, no daylight. between Harris and Biden on policy. I'm sure the Harris campaign loved that moment. And yesterday, a White House reporter, Gabe Gutierrez, full disclosure. I went to college with Gabe and, in fact, took him to a sorority formal.

So I'm pretty biased. Best reporter in America. And I was so hoping you were to say, worst support, worst reporter in America. And then we could hear the story. Aw. Or at least worst prom day. I really, guys. no I have this incredible like I he didn't even remember that he went which is insulting but we do have this incredible photo where it's like wind-swept hair on this lake in Evanston and it's like one of my favorite photos from me being you know 19 or whatever so that's really the main memory is that there's like a hot photo of me from it he's irrelevant to this so he asked yesterday isn't AI can clip that out for you now you know you could memory hole him

erase him from history. Mr. Man. Gabe, I'm so sorry this is happening to you. So the president was leaving an event, and Gabe shouts out, I might get the wording of his question wrong, but is inflation over after these new economic numbers came out? And the president answered, yes, yes, yes. You know, I told you my policies would result in a soft landing.

My policies are working. Another thing the Harris campaign probably does not want is a clip of President Biden saying inflation is over. Really weird answer from a president just politically. That's really odd. Megan, what happens now policy-wise for Harris? How does she give Biden the Heisman when he's going to be headlining the first night of the Democratic National Convention

and she's his vice president? Let me phrase this a different way. What will you be particularly looking for in next week's convention. Kamala Harris to say anything other, speaking anything other than the vaguest possible generalities, it would be nice. Look, I think she's in a tricky spot, right?

He's really unpopular. But the way that they kind of want to ease him out for both coalitional personal reasons is that they want to be like he was the best president ever, time to pass the baton to carry forward your amazing legacy rather than to carry forward. But the problem is, like, trying to carry it forward his amazing legacy also risks carrying forward

his, like, you know, really underwater approval ratings. And doing that delicate dance is really difficult, especially because, like, you know, he's not a master political... He was never really a master political strategist, but he's really not now. And I actually think you've seen this in the way the Harris campaign is acting, right? These are mostly the same people.

And what is fascinating is that, like, for, I mean, years maybe, but definitely the long months, I have been saying stop with the democracy stuff. This is not what people vote on. People are not voting. Like, you're not going to be like, well, inflation sucks and I'm worried about my job, but democracy. I mean, I might, but that is not how most people vote. And it was really clear that this was not a great message, that a lot of the stuff he was saying were not great messages. and that his excessive pandering to the progressive side, also not a great message.

And Kamala immediately took over and just stopped it. Right? Now they're not talking about democracy. They're like backing off every single dumb promise she made to try to get the progressive base in 2020. So clearly the operation was capable of doing this. And Biden was the problem. Right?

Biden is the reason that they kept saying democracy is on the ballot, not the campaign staff being done and not sort of understanding how to pivot to the center and run a more effective campaign. Honestly, given how much they're hiding Kamala, who is a much better public speaker at this point than Biden, clearly Biden was the one who was forcing them to let him do a debate that ended in his demise as a viable candidate. And I think that, so I am going to be looking for how, when you have to have them both at the same convention, how they're going to manage that tension, how that's going to cash out in policy and how that is going to cash out in like the speeches of the people around them. I have no idea. It is a really hard problem. So I have a question about that. Just real quick. Megan, entirely plausible. You're right. You may be right. No, no, no, no. I just need.

explaining why I'm wrong. No, no, it's that natural question. Because, like, another possible explanation about why they stuck to the, it's all about democracy stuff, which I agree with you, was really flawed. Not because it's not right on the substance, but it's just politically flawed. That they saw something in the polling that said, or in the focus groups, or in the entrails of doves, that said, the only way you can get people to vote for Biden over Trump is to scare the living crap out of right that you can't come up there's no other he doesn't have the

the gas in the tank and he doesn't have the profile and he doesn't have the record to go on all any other sort of vibe than trump's super scary and this is how we won the last time and it doesn't mean both can be true but that's that's sort of how i always sort of thought about it was that it wasn't so much that they really believed this, although I think they did. But like if you could have, if they were sure that running on some other vibe would have been more successful, they would have done it, I think, in a heartbeat. But I think that they just thought either through a lack of imagination or a lack, they polled and focused groups like hell over there. So I think maybe they took from the 2022 midterms and the dark brand and stuff that like that was the only

argument they had left, it hit diminishing returns pretty quickly. But anyway, that's just my only question. I mean, like, I think that that is potentially fair, but let me explain why I think it was Biden and not just that that was, that there was a vacuum there. And like, look, I think part of it, right, is that it was probably very difficult to define a new direction with a candidate who can't get up and give a speech that isn't on a teleprompter, right? That is true. I think that's part of it. But I also think that there were messages, and Harris is using some of them, right? Her, like, she is not saying, well, he made a lot of mistakes. So there was stuff where he could have said, like, here's the new direction, here's what we're, you know, like, I mean, look, he's doing a lot of, I hate it.

I, like, as I warned my husband this morning when I saw that the new, like, sorry, negotiations slash price controls on Medicare drugs, were out. I was like, I'm going to go upstairs because my head's going to explode and I don't want you to have to clean it off, wipe it off your face, the brains and the blood. Right. So they have, but that stuff is popular. People love it. I think it's economically bad, but people love it. I recognize that those are not the same thing. I also think that something we're seeing with Trump too is that like older candidates for a bunch of reasons have a tendency to want to focus on their greatest hits. I don't know if anyone, if either of you tuned in, to the Musk interview on Monday night,

but I spent two hours of my life that I will never get back listening to it. Call him on this in the Washington Post. One up yesterday. Excellent. Recommend that you subscribe. Fantastic value. We're running summer specials right now

all over the place. Anyway, the thing that is notable, right, is that he can't help himself. Yeah. He's got a candidate. Kamala Harris is not a great candidate. But he completely, flubbed the critical moment to define her because they just kind of hadn't prepared for it.

And then he's still not doing it. He is, like, he's so mired in his own personal grievances, his own past history. Like, Musk is gamely trying to have a conversation. And he's just like, and, you know, and like, I won in 2020. And it's been very unfair with a lawfare. And it's like, fine, it's been very unfair. That's not how you're going to win swing voters, Mr. Trump. But he can't, right? Like, he's kind of like, a record that's just the grooves are too deep. It can't move on to the next song anymore. And I think that that was also true for Biden. He had one campaign message in 2020, and he just was not really able to go out. I think he was just like, well, that's how I won before.

And that's how he tried to win again, because that's what he knew. And it really is clear that he was exercising quite a lot of control, including doing that debate. His staff, did not want him to do that debate. He wanted to do that debate, right? And so I do tend to think that, like, he was the person who was deciding the direction and that the direction was wrong. So I'm oddly going to defend the Trump campaign's utter failure

for the last month, at least in terms of the reason, the idea behind it. It is true that if you can define your opponent as bad slash evil, et cetera, that is going to be way stickier for voters. Look at 2016 with Hillary Clinton. You're saying they're doing it because it's how they won, but I think getting to like a digging into that a little bit more,

there is an actual strategy behind that in that if every time your voters look at your opponent, they have a visceral reaction, that is going to be stickier, and that stickiness will help drive them to the polls, make sure they don't become persuadable voters, all of that. policy doesn't do that for people it's just not as sticky

it's like one step removed right this person supports a policy that I hate but I don't have that that visceral reaction to them so they're trying to find the stickiness with Harris what I find egregious is how bad they've been at that

like they needed to define her I agree with this and they've been terrible at it but I think there's a lot of people out there criticizing them for you know not sticking to the policy I think they should do that, but I see why they've tried to go this other route. I blame them for not being better at it. On the Harris side,

it is fascinating that it's the same staff for the most part. However, this gets to my curling analogy, which becomes more and more true every single day, that you can have nearly the exact same staff and have a 20-point swing on favorability for her, in some states, 10-point swing in swing states toward her away from Trump, I think speaks to the fact that campaign staff matters on the margins.

So as in the staff that has stayed the same, and look, I've gotten some pushback from Democratic operatives. Yeah, sure, the ground game staff has stayed the same, but it's not like the senior staff is the same, like the inner circle kitchen cabinet folks. No, they're not the same. The campaign managers overseeing the budget, the field team, comms to get the message out. The problem wasn't that the staff wasn't getting

Biden's message out, much as he might have thought that. The problem was they were getting it out and nobody liked it. Uh, so yes, you have this again, 40 pound rock or whatever going down ice and you've got the same people sweeping. But now the rock is going in a totally different direction and it's a different rock with, that's much younger and knows where it's going. And so, uh, they're still doing the same sweeping and they're getting her message out as effectively as they were getting Biden's message out, but her message is better. Jonah, what are you looking for at the convention? What will be your biggest takeaway?

Since CNN and its infinity wisdom has decided not to bring me to Chicago, I'll be looking for less at the convention than I otherwise might be. No, look, I think I'm curious to see whether they actually just have access to the language that allows them at scale to talk to the median voter without pissing off the base. I mean, I'm also going to be looking to see if, you know, the pro-Hamas crowd turns this into 1968, but that's not really in the Democrats' hands

to a certain extent. What about the bump, right? So generally, conventions are sort of the halftime show, right? And you can go in the locker room and everything before that sort of Labor Day is the first half. I think post-Labor Day is the second half. But there's a few problems with that for this cycle,

which is that, of course, the Republicans had their halftime huddle in the locker room before they knew which team they were playing. Oops. And the other team, you know, didn't play the first half of the game. Let's say they switched out their quarterback or something like that. And so the... This is going to be a great Disney movie. The quarterback, everyone's really excited.

about them. Normally you'd get that bump after the convention because everyone is really just kind of excited that they were done with the first half of the game. They're like, oh, thank God. And, you know, partisans come home and all of that stuff. Here, I wonder if she'll get a bump at all because she already kind of got the bump that you get from everyone paying attention all of a sudden. Everyone's already paying attention. They know she's, you know, they've gotten excited about her. Is there more bump to get from the convention? My gut says no, probably not. Yeah, so this brings me back to the thing I wanted to say when you brought up the whole switcheroo stuff. I think the lesson is less about whether or not the campaigns matter, more about whether or not it is folly to make straight line predictions from current polls.

Everybody who was in favor of dumping Biden, who's opposed to dumping Biden, everyone, Republican, Democrat alike talked about it. Well, Harris is the most unpopular, you know, vice president in history. She's more unpopular than Joe Biden. All this thing, looking at these polls as if these polls were indicative of a permanent reality rather than the fact that the second you switch her packaging and put her at the top of the ticket and give this unbelievable release valve to people about who are all working. up about Biden, they see her differently. And I think this is a lesson for a lot of things is about you can actually leap outside of the Overton window on all sorts of things and events

will, and people will catch up with you in a certain way. And I just keep thinking about how, you know, we need more dynamic scoring and how we think about politics. And so you might be right that she's got all the bump that she's going to get. But what that leaves out is the possibility that Trump, as he's known to do, tries to counter-program the Democratic Convention and does something that be clowns himself or that freaks people out or says to people, geez,

enough with this guy, we want to change. And you could see, you know, a bump coming from Trump's reaction to the Democratic Convention as much as you could see one coming from the convention. That said, I still, I'm very curious to see what, they can speak a language that doesn't, that isn't full of shibboleths that causes

nodding solely in the editorial rooms at MSNBC, but actually get, like, will they say Latin X a lot? Will they not? Will the phrase defund the police ever come out of anybody's mouth except to condemn it? How much will they talk about transgender stuff? You know, the discipline required for that kind of thing. Will they say Israel has a right to exist? And who will say it? like the things they don't say, that's what I thought was most interesting for the first three nights of the Republican Convention was the things

that weren't set, right? There's no talk of January 6, no talk of the January 6 hostages, that kind of stuff, no stolen election stuff. What are the things that Democrats have learned that they shouldn't talk about?

Will there be an outbreak of popularism to use the David Schor phrase? And I honestly don't know. And I think that's really, it's complicated because, I mean, part of, I will say, I think part of Kamala's boost, first of all, is that it happened at a very specific time. I do tend to think that the people who thought she was a bad alternative were correct and that it really was, she's not like a great public speaker.

She's really bad extemporaneously, right? When she's asked a question she hasn't prepared for, including things like, what do you think of the Russian prisoners coming home? She just defaults to this incredible word salad. she like consistently in 2020 made a lot of just when she doesn't know have like she doesn't have a sort of hard inner sense about policy and when she doesn't her instincts are often bad she embraced every bad progressive idea in 2020

as chape pointed out as I pointed out at the time and so she's going to have to get up and give a speech now I'm sure her speech writer has seemed to be fine I'm sure the speech will be fine but what is she going to say in that speech that is not going to be a two minute clip that people who were terrified about Biden losing the election

can circulate among themselves and talk about how great she is. What happens when it's like an hour long speech? Is she going to be inspiring and awesome or is she going to be kind of meh? And I think that that's going to be like broadly what landmines

will she try to skirt around? Will she have to sit down for an interview at some point? And I think that the thing is, if she She had not been swapped at that particular moment. She would have had to go through some vetting, give some speeches, sit for interviews. And there was a really high chance, based on her performance in 2020, that those would have gone badly.

Right? Every, every lot like serious profile she's sat for since becoming vice president has gone badly. None of them went well. And so I think that there was actually a real sense. didn't foresee that, you know, things would be so bad with Biden, there would be this weeks of terror that she would finally, blessedly end that would give people this just swelling, heartfelt gratitude that would spill over into liking her. I tend to, like, I don't know if there's any bump left to have. And I think it, like, unlike most people, there's a risk at least

that it's actually downhill. It's like, now that she is not, we're not seeing her only in two-minute increments, like, it seems less exciting than it did when I was just like, look at this clip of this person speaking in complete sentences and not tripping or wandering off in the middle of their speech. I am excited about this, right? I don't know. So I will just be using this as an example of all of my polling hatred. Again, not hatred for the polling, but how people talk about the polling, to your point, Jonah, Kamala Harris's numbers should always have been taken with a grain of salt. And I think we can prove now that when you ask people what they thought of the vice president, a lot of them were just giving the answer of what they thought of the

administration. They didn't like the administration. They don't like the administration's policies. And so that's why her numbers tracked so closely to Biden's. And then once she was seen as separate from Biden, doing a different thing from Biden, her numbers skyrocketed up. And that's not because a whole bunch of people change their minds. It's because they were answering a different question in their minds. So it really bothers me when people, sort of to your point about voting, to go back to the beginning, don't assume you know what that poll actually is telling you. You probably don't.

All right. Last, is it worth our time? There is reporting that there is hacked information from the Trump campaign circulating. particularly vetting finders on potential vice presidential candidates, including the one that they picked, J.D. Vance, and what the campaign was looking at for those. That information was given to several large news outlets, including yours, Megan,

and so far they have all declined to publish it. One, they have said that it is believed to be hacked by the Iranians. Two, they have said that it's not newsworthy in their views, though they reserve the right to find it newsworthy. later. Mark Caputo makes the case that this is insane and of course they should publish it and he uses one

not persuasive example to me and one persuasive example. In the not persuasive bucket he of course talks about the fact that in 2016 the Russians hacked the Clinton campaign and that everyone published that material. I don't know why we can't learn from mistakes on that

so that's not particularly persuasive to me you know in non-hacked information. You know BuzzFeed published the steel dossier, the salacious parts of which were not true, could not be verified. BuzzFeed couldn't verify it at the time, but they published it anyway, and it did make a difference. I don't mean electoral difference necessarily, but it certainly got into the bloodstream. Okay, but here's the part that was persuasive to me. It was believed that the Hunter Biden laptop might be a foreign disinformation campaign,

and so there was a lot of hesitancy on whether to, talk about that at all, stuff was taken off of social media, and the right was really upset about that. And I think for good reasons, as it turned out, because it was real. So, Jonah, it'll really bother me, obviously, if the right that complained about the not reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, because it turned out not to be foreign disinformation and election interference, then complains vociferously if they report on the Trump PAC documents, though I expect this to happen. But just from a journalism standpoint, what is the right answer here? Do you need to wait to find out whether it's, you know, hacked by Iran? What if it's hacked by Iran, but also authentic?

Like, it's real. How are we, how does one make this decision journalistically? What's responsible? Yeah, no, it's a good question. And before I answer what journalists should do, I'll just give some advice to the Iranian hackers. Try to get it in the Washington Post and the New York Times and Politico. And when they all publicly say, we're not going to run it, and it creates a controversy, and then other journalists come forward and say, well, I would run it and they should run it, then send it to them. This is how you out the people who will run it.

So, like, they should send Mark Caputo the stuff and problem solved for the Iranians. Now, would the dispatch run a problem? Mark Caputo says his only test is whether it's newsworthy. There's no test of where it came from. He would authenticate it. And true, presumably, right? Yes, it needs to be authentic and newsworthy.

But other than that, Honeybadger, don't care. Yeah, I have some sympathy for that. It is not the job of journalists. Like, if you don't lie, you know, people say you shouldn't run stuff that is from government leakers. Well, if newspapers didn't run stuff from government leakers, they wouldn't run very much stuff, right? Because that's basically a huge chunk of what they get. Every background source is essentially a leaker. And so there's some distinctions here.

That said, given that Iran doesn't like. Donald Trump, not for the reasons that I don't like Donald Trump, or the reasons that Megan doesn't like Donald Trump, but because Donald Trump ordered the killing, the justified killing of a terror master, being their useful prop is kind of creepy. And I think at the very least, you should think longer and harder about the moral hazard of doing this kind of thing. I think Wikileaks and Julian Assange were bad actors. I have a lot of friends who think they're good actors, and it doesn't mean I think they're bad people.

I just think they're wrong. And you don't want to be in the position where you're a dead drop for America's enemies. And so my inclination would be barring something massively newsworthy that you think the right of the need, forget the right, because the right of the American people to know is, the need for the American people to know

is so great I would probably say let this let this great opportunity go to some other outlet but it's a judgment call Megan should newsworthiness be the only test

and also Megan what's actually in this stuff since you've seen it at the post first of all to clarify the news side is separate from the opinion side I have not seen these documents

I know nothing about them I have not talked to the pew whoever has them at our team I don't know anything speaking only as sort of my assessment of as a journalist, I think the main sticking point is not that they were hacked by Iran. I mean, if you look at, for example, all of these billionaire tax files, the ProPublica kept publishing, they were stolen by a guy who's doing years on the pokey

for illegally accessing tax data. And I actually think illegally accessing personal tax data for political purposes is really bad and should not be encouraged. I also would have published if there had been anything newsworthy in it and I always thought that the main problem with that story was that there was actually nothing newsworthy in finding out that like billionaires

whose companies lose a lot of money then don't pay taxes for a few years or the billionaires who give a lot of charity give a lot to charity don't pay a lot of taxes right and I suspect that the again with no personal knowledge but a bunch of people have of course asked me about this like why aren't they and I think that the most parsimonious explanation to me

is that there is salacious stuff in there that's personal and has nothing to do with anything, right? Is that they're not like, these are not outlets that break news of people's affairs that aren't like with staffers or key members of committees that do oversight. They don't do that. They'll print it if it comes out somewhere else.

And it is worth noting that the leaked DNC emails in 2016, they were leaked to a website. They were out there and then people reported on them. And I think that in general, like, probably what is actually in there is just stuff that would be personally hurtful to people without advancing the public knowledge of anything other than kind of purrurient interest. Again, I don't personally know, but that would be my guess about why they're not publishing is that there's not anything in there. right like i remember one you know one person one outlet that is talked about this they're not publishing they were like you know the new like contain embarrassing revolutions about jd vans saying bad things about don't trump like he sat those things in public he compared donald

trump to hitler right like there's not anything after after the hitler comparison you have pretty much hit the peak of saying bad things about your president and so that was autobon Hitler. That was German Shepherd having Hitler. Yeah, sure. Fair. Setting up many of the National Health Services in Europe. This is a dirty little secret is that many in the parts of Europe that Germany

occupied. Germany had a National Health Service, so they set one up in those places. And that was, like, that's where a lot of those services have their roots. To be clear, not saying that that, like, therefore they're Nazi, you know, this is like the Holocaust. No.

It's just, you know, the, the, the, the, birth of national health care is complicated in a lot of places. I will say just from how vetting memos are put together in 2024, I'm really surprised if they put the unverified salacious stuff in the vetting memo anymore for this exact reason. Things leak. Oh, interesting. Okay. So maybe I am. Maybe I take it back. Because there's sort of the three clumps in vetting memos generally, there's all the financial stuff. They're going to go through every public record available on your mortgage, land deeds, any business holding type stuff,

and then go level deep. If you have stock in this business, what's the stuff about that business? You know, stuff like that. The second one is going to be all your past statements. So someone should have gone through all of those transcripts and almost made like a hot docs of anything that could be taken out of context, et cetera, like childless cat ladies. And then the third one,

in theory is you go and talk to a lot of people and say, have you ever heard a rumor that he's cheated on his wife or whatever into having sex with inanimate objects? And in theory, you would have like someone said that they heard whatever, but you as the vetter

aren't going to be able to verify that anyway. And I would be shocked if they're putting that in vetting memos these days because that would be like, again, if it leaked, it's not out there publicly that anyone could have found it anyway. But we'll see.

I think we will see. I'll put it that way. I think this will get published one way or the other, no matter where it's from. And that maybe that's the answer. It's not that Mark Caputo is right, that you just authenticate it, and it's newsworthy, and that's enough.

But it's the inevitability aspect of something like this that doing the work of authenticating it by a real publication actually is an American service, if you will, rather than just letting it go up on some website, a la Steele dossier. Although, I mean, from what you're saying, right,

if the salacious stuff isn't in there. And so I take it back. I have revised my opinion based on that. Then, like, what's the point? I mean, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio's financials are already. Well, then there's nothing newsworthy in there. Yeah.

And then there's nothing newsworthy in there except that, except like an exhaustive catalog of all the times that J.D. Vance said bad things about Donald Trump. And, I mean, not news. And with that. Megan McArdle, thank you so much for joining us. A treat, as always.

Biggest fan. Biggest fan. Thanks for having me. And Jonah, Hope David Slaps the shit. You know,