The Dispatch Podcast - Defining Infrastructure

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

If it’s a day that ends in “Y” in Washington, it’s probably a day during “infrastructure week.” The gang talks about President Biden’s infrastructure bill and debates whether or not it��s fair to call it an “infrastructure” bill. Plus, what should the U.S. do about the continued aggression coming from China and Russia, and the differences in voting laws in Georgia and Colorado. Finally, the controversy surrounding a 60 Minutes piece on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and whether or not “media bias” is the worst it’s ever been. Show Notes: -POLITICO’s Playbook on infrastructure -What is Starlink? -TMD on Russian aggression in Ukraine -Danielle Pletka’s latest for The Dispatch on Chinese aggression towards Australia -Oriana Skylar Mastro on The Remnant -The Washington Post Editorial on boycotting the Olympics -Atlanta Journal-Constitution Georgia/Colorado voting laws comparison -60 Minutes and Gov. Ron DeSantis - Poynter -Trump donors - The New York Times -“Why Being ‘Anti-Media’ Is Now Part Of The GOP Identity” - FiveThirtyEight Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. This week, lots to talk about. We're going to start with Joe Biden's infrastructure plan. Well, is it? Then we'll move on to China and Taiwan, the Georgia voting bill and the MLB's decision to move the All-Star game and wrap up with the 60-minute segment on Ron DeSantis and why it's causing such a stir. Let's dive in. Steve, the infrastructure plan is getting some real pushback from conservatives and from corporate America. Tell us about it.

Well, I think the proper place to start this discussion is a question, is a discussion of question, what is infrastructure? And that really is at the center of the emerging dispute over the substance of this. You have Democrats in the Biden administration using a rather broad definition of infrastructure to include basically anything that's been on the progressive wish list over the past two decades in many cases. Conservatives, understandably, want to draw that definition a little bit tighter and not include infrastructure. And you're seeing talking points emerge from Republicans that this infrastructure bill isn't

actually infrastructure. Politico had actually a very interesting breakdown in its playbook today, Wednesday, where they talked about what is infrastructure. They said it's a question that will dominate politics for the spring and summer, so get excited. If you look at what the Biden administration has used, they're using statistics that suggest they accept the World Economic Forum definition of infrastructure, which would be the quality of a country's roads, railroads, ports, air transport, electricity supply, as well as the number of cell phone subscriptions and fixed telephone. lines. But if you do that, according to this Politico piece, 821 billion out of the plans 2.25 trillion of this massive spending bill is actual infrastructure. Now they go on to make an argument that

there are a couple places where you can grow that definition. The Biden administration seems eager to do that. I guess the first question I would have is, and we got this in the comments to the morning dispatch today where we talked about the Biden administration's infrastructure bill, and one of the commenters said, if it's not mostly infrastructure, why is the dispatch calling it an infrastructure bill? Sarah, should we be calling it an infrastructure bill? I mean, you have long experience in communications and messaging and these battles over semantics.

Does this really matter? or is this sort of a side show? I have been shocked that the Republicans have not re-labeled it with a different name. That being said, I think from a reporter's standpoint, it is appropriate to call a bill by what it is called. I don't think it's necessarily a good idea to start relabeling bills.

Also, I think that, for instance, in the definition you just read broadband internet was not included, I think that is clearly infrastructure in any, you know, 2021 definition of the term. If you're including cell phones, broadband internet now is more vital than cell phones to me

in terms of the infrastructure of the country. That being said, I don't think the care economy can be put under any definition of infrastructure, although White House economist Cecilia Rouse, I think is how you pronounce her name.

She gave an event defending that this week, which I thought was interesting, to hear how they are explaining why that's infrastructure. And as I see this, like, I don't know, they're kind of not. So here's what she said. So many people said, oh, the 400 billion that are being proposed for the home care workers or the home care sector, that's not really infrastructure. Well, I beg to differ. I can't go to work if I don't have someone who's taking care of my parents or my children. I don't disagree with the second part of that sentence, but it's,

doesn't address why that's under the definition of infrastructure. And if that tells us where the messaging is going to go from the Biden White House, they're not really going to argue that this is infrastructure. They're just going to argue that it's important. Well, it sounds like they want to argue that it's infrastructure, right? That's what she's doing. She's calling everything infrastructure. Well, this home care, child care, that's infrastructure. Anything could be infrastructure. It's interesting. I hadn't given a ton of thought to what we should call it. But to me, if you've got a bill, even if you throw in broadband, you're talking about a bill that is less than half infrastructure, as I think traditionally understood. I do think it's a mistake

to call it infrastructure. Jonah, do you agree with Sarah that if the White House calls this an infrastructure bill, reporters should call it an infrastructure bill? And what if the White House called it a raccoon nourishment bill? Should we call it a raccoon nourishment bill? I tell you one thing you could feed a lot of raccoons with $2.2 trillion. I mean, a lot, a lot. Look, I take Sarah's point

and I think within, as a rule of fun, I think she's absolutely right. But sometimes the naming of things can stretch credulity, let's say. And let's not forget, you know, there are oftentimes where the press,

when it doesn't like what a Republican bill is called, we'll say things like the so-called Born Alive Whatever Act or the so-called pro-life this. I have no problem. I mean, we should probably have these sorts of editorial meetings off air, but I have no problem if we wanted to say the so-called infrastructure bill or what the Biden administration claims is primarily an infrastructure bill. I mean, I'm open to that kind of argument.

But more broadly, I think what the, Biden people are doing, and this is a point my friend Charlie Cook often makes, is they want positive sounding words to include everything and anything that they want, right? So we, you know, that's what social justice does. That's the word social term social justice. Go try and find a agreed upon definition of social justice and get back to me in about 35 years when you find it, because I've spent a lot of time looking. It just basically means the good things. Or, you know, when Charlie is the example of reproductive justice. You know, Naira will come out and say clean drinking water is reproductive justice.

If you say, if you, this thing with the infrastructure, you know, the quote that Sarah read from the White House economist was, I can't go to work if people aren't taking care of my kids. I can't go to work if I don't have any clothes. I can't go to work if I don't eat. I can't go to work if my car is. I mean, at some point, if the standard is what allows me to participate in a free society and a free economy is infrastructure, then literally pretty much everything in my monthly

budget is infrastructure with the exception of maybe Netflix and a couple other things, right? And so I think that the, I think the real failure here is again, sort of a Republican messaging on this, because I think this is quite a pinata to go after and be easy to do. if the Republican Party had bit more credibility on things like spending and debt. And I think it's clear to me that the Biden administration, both on this and on the what we with a dispatch should be calling the so-called pandemic relief bill, said, okay, we want to get to $2.25 trillion, or like with the pandemic relief bill, we want to get to $1.9 trillion. And I think it was Mike Gallagher, as the first guy I saw pointing this out, it's amazing how many things cost exactly

$100 billion, right? I mean, it's almost as if they just came up with the top line number and then said, go find us stuff that adds up to these numbers. And because they're making a bet, as Mick Mulvaney said to you guys on the dispatch podcast last week, they're making a bet that they can cram

as much of this stuff through under these political circumstances and they may not be able to get anything later, So let's expand the baseline, then argue anything that deviates from the baseline is a cut, even though it's just the slowing of the rate of growth. Let's get all our wishless in now and we'll debate the honesty of it later. Yeah, and David, it's even worse, I think, than Jonah suggests in some respects. This $2.2 trillion, quote-unquote, infrastructure bill or massive spending bill, call it what we want, does not include an additional 400, billion dollars in clean energy credits that the Biden administration just decided to leave off

when they rolled this out. So it's actually a much bigger potentially, potential bill or potential hit to the U.S. Treasury. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I think it's almost as if Biden is determined to make the GOP, the fiscally responsible party, not by the GOP being actually fiscally responsible, but by just being twice as fiscally irresponsible as the GOP. In other words, they're both in a bidding war and you're never going to outbid the Democrats when it comes to government interventions in the economy and in the American so-called infrastructure. Yeah, when I look at this, it is really remarkable the scope of the spending effort from the Biden administration. And this is the area where he's actually most likely to get what he wants through.

And it's no mystery why they choose the word infrastructure, because infrastructure has been popular, and Republicans have been banging the drums for infrastructure spending for a long time. It was infrastructure week for five straight years of the Trump administration. So none of this is any mystery. There's demand for infrastructure spending. And to some degree, not nearly to this degree, there's need for infrastructure spending.

And so, you know, what we've got going is this massive, massive expansion of government spending just as the pandemic is rolling to an end. I mean, I had endorsed a lot of the early pandemic relief because I viewed it less as sort of stimulus than disaster relief. Like this was a 100-year wave of death that had swept through the United States, and we had to take extreme measures to not just keep people healthy, but also to keep the economy alive. And I looked at that much more as disaster relief.

What we have now is just massive public spending at a scale that, as I said earlier, it's almost as if this gives the Republicans some kind of opportunity to sort of peek out from their foxholes and say, maybe a little too much, maybe? Yeah, the interesting question to me is going to be how much of this is going to be able, how much of the spending is going to be able to make it through the Senate

with the filibuster still intact. And this is, again, right, where the Senate parliamentarian is going to be a really important figure. And I just actually don't know the answer to this. This HR one, both HR1 and the Equality Act, yeah, we should debate them. We should have that argument. We should have that discussion.

But in a lot of ways, it's kind of moot so far, so long as the filibuster remains in place. This amount of spending, the spending, a lot of it, how much of it can get through 51 senators or 50-50 with the vice president of Harris tiebreaker? And I honestly don't know the answer to that, and I'm throwing that back out to the field. How much of this stuff can make it through,

Sarah? So actually, I have a very different thing that I want to revisit, which is the name that Steve brought up. I had assumed going into this conversation that the White House had dubbed this their infrastructure bill. But I'm looking at the fact sheet. And the name of this bill is the American Jobs Plan. Here's their first paragraph description of it. This is the moment to reimagine and rebuild a new economy. The American Jobs Plan is an investment in America that will create millions of good jobs, rebuild our country's infrastructure, and position the United States to out-compete China.

public domestic investment as a share of the economy has fallen by more than 40% since the 1960s. The American Jobs Plan will invest in America in a way that we have not invested since we built the interstate highways and won the space race. So look, the word infrastructure is in there, but it's actually sandwiched between jobs and out-competing China. They are calling it the American Jobs Plan. Steve, to your point, I think the dispatch should call it the American Jobs Plan, comma, And then if we need to describe it, what the Biden administration has dubbed their infrastructure plan or however else.

But yeah, they're not calling it an infrastructure bill, which in some ways lets them off the hook because it's not an infrastructure bill. But my point was to call it by what the bill is called. The bill does not have the word infrastructure in the name. One other thing I neglected to mention, on the broadband point, just as Elon Musk is going to get, get us to Mars. Elon Musk is going to kind of take care of this issue. If you're familiar with the Starlink service, every now and then, I don't know, I get it.

I get SpaceX updates because I'm just so fascinated by Starship and the quest for Mars, and I want to put my feet on the red planet at some point, which I know I won't, but I'm still fascinated. And Musk is filling the sky with Internet satellites, filling the sky. And relatively soon, wherever you live, wherever you're going to be able to have

low latency, high-speed internet. Probably at a cost of a fraction of what we're going to spend in a government infrastructure bill. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Since we're picking up the scraps off the floor and throwing them out here before we switch topics.

Two quick things. One, when I went on my rafting trip last summer, you could see the satellite. I didn't realize it's amazing. They're so low orbit. and Musk got so many complaints about the light pollution that he's now just painting them black so they don't reflect light.

Two, I do think it's worth just as putting a pin in it. It's not actually true that we have a crumbling infrastructure in this country. We have infrastructure problems in some places and we don't in others. I'll tell you, having driven cross country at least almost once a year for over 20 years, the roads were in better shape everywhere I went this year than in any other previous year.

I don't think that's like, obviously, I can't see them all, but I think it has a lot to do with something you do see anecdotally all over the place is that the local governments have used the pandemic as an opportunity to do a lot of road work because the roads are more empty. Chuck Lane has a very good column about this in the Washington Post today. We have, this is a massive country with massive infrastructure, and by definition, there's always going to be some of it in a state of disrepair. But just as my, let me put my public choice economist hat on, even though I'm not technically an economist, and can barely explain public choice to you people, level onto myself, I get crazed every time the press treats these report cards from the professional trade association of civil engineers and says we have D pluses and everything, if they are the ones who have the most profound, first order economic interest in a spending on infrastructure. It is astounding. I mean,

it's like it's like getting the free consultation about your rain gutters. The guy is going to say you need new rain gutters, you know, the people who build civil, you know, our civil infrastructure are going to say we're in bad shape and they've been saying the same thing since they existed. It's sort of why they exist. I'm not saying they don't do other good things, but as far as the press is concerned, they only exist to create these report cards to say our infrastructure sucks whenever Democrats are in office. And I think it's sort of nonsense. The, um, I think it's a good point. First of all, just as a point of, uh, of clarification to answer David's question directly, the Senate parliamentarian, at least according to, um, some early

leaks from Chuck Schumer's office, uh, has suggested that a revised budget resolution can include reconciliation instructions on this, on this, uh, this bill. Um, so that's potentially opening a door to, uh, to doing this without having to get rid of the filibuster. Um, I think Sarah's point is, is an interesting one on the actual, what the White House is actually calling its proposed legislation. Um, you know, nobody can be against jobs, right? I mean, that's a, it's, it's in, it's even more than infrastructure. Yeah, in, in the same way as infrastructure, nobody's against jobs. I do think that there are some, some, some, risks here, though, when you're talking about spending an additional 2.2 or 2.6 trillion

dollars, a third or a little bit more than a third of it on infrastructure and calling it a job plan. And then you also have another massive spending bill. I mean, it's funny that we have as sort of an asterisk, this extra spending bill that the White House has said is coming, possibly for another $2 trillion in the next few weeks. I mean, these things deserve more than and then asterisk. But, you know, we just had a jobs report in March, nearly a million jobs. And, you know, certainly doing some reporting around the country, you're hearing more and more, at least I'm hearing more and more from small, medium business owners, that the challenge isn't job creation. The challenge is getting people to fill the jobs that exist. And for the White

House to label this a jobs creation plan, I think carries its, its own. risks, we'll see how accurate it is. 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.

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Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's E-T-H-O-S dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. And with that, let's move to another thing that the Biden administration has said is a top priority of theirs. They mentioned it in what I just read, out-competing China. But it's not just out-competing China, David. There's a underside to that album track. Yeah, you know, I'm, maybe I'm alarmist. Maybe I'm too worried about this. But I've talked too much to folks in the know, in the defense establishment. I've looked at this too much, not to be worried about this. And let me, let me just look at a couple of things that we've covered, for example. One is in the dispatch, in the morning dispatch yesterday, we had a piece about Russian troops.

buildup near Ukraine. We have covered the strong arming of Australia by China. A National Review had a very good editorial several days ago, noting that a Chinese attack on Taiwan is getting closer that Chinese jets have been, Chinese jets have been intruding into Taiwan's air defense identification zone with increasing frequency so frequent that Taiwan said it was no longer going to scramble its own planes and response, which is a common tactic, which not at this scale, it's a small scale so far, but a common tactic as a prelude to an attack is sort of a continual military exercise, is one after the other after the other until

you're lulled into believing that these things are routine. And so, and one of the things that I keep hearing when I talk to folks about our military superiority is that, yes, we have qualitative and quantitative superiority, no, we don't necessarily have regional qualitative and quantitative superiority. And in fact, many times in war games, we're unable, if we were to try to stop China from taking Taiwan, we wouldn't be able to stop it. And so one of the questions that I have is, are we, is this era of where we've been, this country has been mercifully free in the world, has been mercifully free of great power, conflict for a long time now, a long time. So long, I mean, the, you know, sadly we're losing

so many of our World War II veterans every single day is a world that has been blessedly free of great power conflict. Can we continue to take that for granted? And will we look back on the political arguments of this moment in sort of the way that we have trouble remembering what was really dominating politics on September 10th, 2001? That's, you know, that's, you know, might sound alarmist, but I'm a little bit worried. Steve, you, you take long looks at foreign policy. Where's your head on this? No, I'm where you are.

I think there's lots of reasons to be concerned. And, you know, setting aside the, I mean, the contrast you paint, I think, is notable, given the smallness of our politics in so many ways, I mean, the things that we are spending our time arguing about and have spent our time arguing about over the past few, years, I think, paints this in sort of stark contrast. The conversations you have with people who study China, both on the military side, but in particular also on what China's doing financially are alarming. And it's why I don't think your alarm is to raise this. You look at the

moves that China's been making in competing with our banks, in making. In making, in making available loans to companies, to countries around the world at rates that are far more competitive than what our banks are allowed to do, our private banks are allowed to do, gives them just tremendous advantage and leverage in all these parts of the world in a way that's not being covered in sort of day-to-day media. And then you look at what are very clearly provocative moves. know, China has moved over the past 20 years from sort of a faux partnership. And the United States, of course, on the other side of this, embraced that framing, that we would be competitors, but not adversaries.

We would be friendly rivals. And China very clearly is no longer a friendly rival and isn't particularly nuanced about it. Their propaganda efforts are strong and consistent, not just in the U.S. media, but around the world. And the provocative moves that they've made that we know about are concerning. And there is a, you know, I think that we are likely to learn over the coming months that there is a lot that China has been doing with respect to preparing for. expansion that we do not know about. The public has not been discussing. Our military and

intelligence folks, I think, have a window on some of this, but there's a lot that's not visible to us and not visible to our leaders. So, Jonah, you have had China experts on your podcast. You've written about China. Are you in a state of escalating concern about China? Or are you, where's your head at this moment? Yeah, I mean, I'm, I've always been less concerned with the idea of economic competitiveness with China than a lot of people are, in part, because I think as a normal economic matter, nations don't actually compete with each other. I hate to say this, but Paul Krugman in the 1990s was quite persuasive on all of this, but that was a different Paul Krugman at the time. But, you know, the stuff that Steve is talking about with using banks and leverage, I am very concerned about China as a geopolitical competitor, which is a different creature.

And I'm also, I mean, I guess the thing that, you know, the two things I always think about. One is something that this Chinese scholar who I had on the Remnant, it was a great episode. people should still listen to it. Oriana Skyler Mastro, she's very real politic about all of this. And the point she always makes about about Xi in the Chinese regime, but particularly Xi, is just that

Xi's mindset is if he can succeed at doing something and success will be good, he will do it. If there's a chance that he won't succeed because failure is incredibly losing face in Chinese political culture, particularly against the Americans is disastrous, he won't do it. And that's how we should think about, you know, Taiwan is if he thinks he can get away with

taking it, he will take it, if you can convince him of that. And that used to be they think he wouldn't be able to do it, the China wouldn't be able to do it in 10 years. They now think they can do it either now or in the next two years. And so if we don't make that look more painful, they're going to take Taiwan. And if we don't, and I don't want to go to one. war with China. But if we don't go to war with China overtaking Taiwan, then our treaties and alliances mean nothing. And that's not good either. So the best thing to do is figure out a way

to deter China from doing it in the first place. And the other thing I think about, which ties into some of the Georgia stuff that we're talking about, every year, at least now, for a long time, I've been writing about how all these people in America who talk about Jim Crow in America really should look at China. China practices Han supremacy. And that's not just me saying that the economist has written this. The Guardian has written this. Lots of places have pointed this out. They are an ethno-nationalist state in an empire over their own domain

where minorities are second-class citizens. They need internal passports to get certain jobs. They can't go to the best schools. They are barred because of their race or their ethnicity or their religion. We now have outright cultural genocide in Jinjan. We had cultural genocide in Tibet. and if the people who claim to be, and they actually still have slave labor in China, and all of these cultural touchstones, which people use as cudgels to demonize white supremacy

or the Republican Party or their political opponents here at home, become invisible in our moral discourse when we're talking about China. Now, that doesn't mean that we have to play the never again card and go to war with China to get them to treat their own citizens better, though if we could do that really cheaply. I wouldn't have any first order problems with it. But it would help if we talked about China at least as harshly as we did about South Africa in the 1980s. And yet Major League Baseball, the NBA, they've all sold their souls while they refuse to and while they virtue signal and posture about stuff that is well within the 40-yard lines of political disagreement in a democracy here at home, they use,

identity politics stuff to say, how dare you bash the Chinese, that's bigotry. And that really offends me. And I would get more outraged by it, but it's such a constant steady state feature of our politics that you can only make this point so much before you seem like you're the deranged one. And so when I have the opportunity to make the point and then I just move on. You know, one thing that I think war with China would be nearly inevitable if they took on Taiwan, simply because if you're China and you're attacking Taiwan, why would you leave the most powerful military force that could interfere with you intact in the course of that attack?

I mean, you don't leave the American Pacific Fleet intact when you're taking on Taiwan. But that's hopefully... Unless the Pacific Fleet gets out of the way, you know, which would be a problem, you know. That would be a problem. Sarah, Washington Post editorial board said that American corporations should boycott the Beijing Olympics. It seems to me, depending on the day, that there is some sort of building consensus that corporate America's newly discovered, or not necessarily all that newly discovered, but corporate America's sense of social responsibility needs to start extending. to the People's Republic of China, and I see this sometimes from, I see this frequently from

the right. I'm now seeing this sometimes from the left. Is this, is it, do you think politically there is momentum here that corporate America can become part of the solution in putting pressure on China? Or is there just too much money at stake and that ship has sailed? So first, let me address some nuance in what Jonah said about the hypocrisy aspect of this. On the one hand, I do not think it's hypocritical to be more, to be tougher on your own country and its problems than a foreign government. I think that's fine. Jonah, to your point, I don't think you can defend what China is doing and then criticize

the United States. But I think it's fine, for instance, to say what China is doing wrong, but I'm here in the United States. This is my country that I'm proud of, and we need to fix this problem, whatever it may be, however important it may be. I'm not saying that's not what you were saying, but... No, I agree. We obviously, we hold ourselves to a higher standard than we have to hold China to. But to use the mannequin, black and white, good versus evil language that we use about everything from the legacy of slavery to Jim Crow, to the way we use. use apartheid as this exemplar of how we should conduct foreign policy, and then all of a sudden

have black NBA stars going out talking about how to criticize China shows your ignorance, there is a disconnect there. I mean, there's a difference in degree that exceeds a difference in kind. And I'm going to then compare your exact point, which is how apartheid was talked about in this country compared to China. And what the actual differences, of course, is the There simply was not the money at stake in a small country with limited markets for American goods in South Africa, the way that China's billion plus people and buying power is for United States corporations. So then we get to the Olympics. I am incredibly torn about what the U.S. should do about the Olympics and our Olympic athletes. I spent a lot of time this morning, David. reading about 1933 in the run-up to the 1936 Olympics in Hitler's Germany. It's fascinating, right? So the decision to give Berlin the Olympics was in 1931. Hitler doesn't come to power until 1933. But the second he does, everyone realizes the problem. It wasn't like they just

showed up to the Olympics and they were like, oh, what? Hitler, Nazis, huh? There was a lot of talk about whether to boycott those Olympics. There is a book on this called Triumph, the Untold story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics that has just great, great stuff in it. There's good guys. There's bad guys. There's stuff that's a little unbelievable. There's a lot of anti-Semitism in the United States. But I think what's stuck out, it actually still gets kind of to Jonah's point in an odd way. So you have people wanting to boycott the Olympics. A lot of of people. In fact, the vote, so the U.S. government at that point really didn't have much to do with the Olympics. It was left up to the U.S. Olympic Committee and the Amateur Athletic Union. So anyway,

the vote is like three people. I mean, it's incredibly close when they hold this vote to not boycott. It was 5-825 to 5575. So, so. sorry, 5.8.25 to 55.75. If three more delegates had voted to boycott the games, the Nazis would have presided at a meaningless event. That's how close we came. At the same time, what at that point we knew that Germany was doing, they had not even yet passed the Jewish laws by 1933 at least to sort of strip Jews of citizenship and some of those laws, though that did happen before the election. Olympics happened. But Crystal Noct hadn't happened. Some of, you know, the violence had not really happened at that point. What we knew at that point was that Hitler didn't like Jews. There was certainly a lot of talk about Jews being excluded from participating in the Olympics. Various folks had been, you know, taken off, for instance, the Olympic boards and stuff like that because, like, one guy's dad,

his dad was Jewish and his dad was born before Abraham Lincoln was president, you know? Like, okay. and you're taking him off because he's Jewish, like, this was bad. But as should be pretty obvious, in 1933, in the United States, Jim Crow was at its zenith in a lot of ways. The hypocrisy was so, so ripe. And again, remember, we're just talking at this point about Hitler discriminating against Jews, treating them as second-class citizens,

not wanting them to be the public face of Germany or to be able to compete next to Aryan athletes. The United States was still incredibly discriminatory. So at that point, to boycott the Olympics, I'm surprised the vote was as close as it was. Now, we go to the Olympics. Jesse Owens just destroys everyone, becomes super-duper famous,

and it sends a message to the world in some respects, at least about black athletes, what America was going to look like, decades away. And it didn't do anything to deter Hitler. It didn't prevent World War II, obviously. I am left wondering at the end of this, would the boycott have made any difference? Because I think it is important as we talk about boycotting the Beijing Olympics, including even corporate boycotts, although I think those are very different in both their impact on our athletes and on the world stage, but also just on the bottom line for China.

pulling out, does it prevent Jesse Owens's from their awesomeness? You know, it was a huge mistake to give Hitler the platform, the first televised Olympics to tout his ideology to the world. But we know from contact that that's what brought the aliens to us. But we do. But if that hadn't happened, I don't think it would have changed the course of history. is what I'm left with. So that's a long-winded answer to your question, David.

I would love to see corporations do more, say more, pull their money from the Beijing Olympics. I don't think it will change the course of what you are talking about with Taiwan. Or with the Uyghurs in concentration camps. Would be awesome if we had a couple Uyghur track and field stars. Truly, it actually would be. It would be fantastic. Yeah, no, I mean it too.

I mean, it'd be funny, but it'd be true. It'd be awesome, you know. Yeah. You know, I think from this Washington Post editorial, which I thought was very effective, it says those participating in the Elite Olympic Partner Program, that includes companies like Airbnb, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Visa. They fork over $1 billion for exclusive marketing rights. Then at the same time, as the State Department has found, 1 million Uyghurs are in prison last year. Some are forcibly sterilized, raped, and tortured.

another $2 million are given daytime-only re-education training. There's the overhaul of Hong Kong's election system. I mean, what's happening is horrific in China. And, you know, I don't know about whether it will make a difference if you don't fork over that $1 billion in the big sweep of history. Probably it's not even a rounding error in the sweep of history, but that's still $1 billion. you shouldn't be forking over to these people? Look, I mean, we're leaving out a big, I think a big consideration in this discussion, and that's Joe Biden.

That's our government. I mean, beyond what corporations can do, what is the Biden administration going to do? You had a briefing yesterday in which administration officials suggested that they're openly considered, they're actively considering boycott. They have since walked that back. Oh, have they really? Yep. They said there has been no discussion about boycotting the Olympics.

Well, that's interesting because that is a direct contradiction of what was said yesterday. Correct. Yes. But we've seen the power of the presidency on full display in the past week. Joe Biden, in an offhanded comment in an interview on ESPN, suggested he would be okay if the All-Star game was moved from Georgia for, um, what he has called Jim Crow era voting restrictions. We saw corporate America leap. Now, I don't think that that's necessarily the model.

But if you look at the language that the Obama administration, I mean, the Biden administration has embraced on this, like the Trump administration before them, they are calling what's happening in China genocide. They've embraced the label. I don't see how if you've embraced the label of genocide, you are accusing the Chinese regime of committing genocide, you can shrug your shoulders and say, yeah, we're going to go play some sports there.

I mean, this is where I think it's different from the good example you gave earlier, Sarah. You'd make a pretty compelling argument based on the historical record that we, you know, we certainly couldn't anticipate what was coming. And we didn't, you know, the kinds of things that we eventually saw. saw later in the decade were not yet evident at the time these decisions were made. Well, that's not the case now, right? We know what's happened. A million people in these camps. We are calling it genocide. And I think to say, particularly with two years ahead of the games, to, in effect, shrug our shoulders, where's American leadership on this? Why is Joe Biden not

on the horn with our allies. I mean, this is an administration that has consistently touted bringing back American leadership, bringing back American alliances, using soft power to achieve the outcomes we want. We've got two years. Go and do it. Make the case. Bring our allies along. I think that is the key. Having corporations pull a billion dollars or even having U.S. athletes not show up. I don't think changes the course of history with Taiwan, with the Uighurs sitting in concentration camps. Being subjected, by the way, to forcible rape as a way of ethnic cleansing, we have been told. What does is exactly with Steve what you just said. Get together with all of the other countries and just move the Olympics yourself. If everyone doesn't show up to the China

Olympics, that is a history-changing course of events. Now, it may precipitate events. It may not you know, but it will change them. Look, and you don't have to be, you know, a neocon or a humanitarian to make this case either. I think there's a pretty significant real politic case to be made based on what Jonah said just moments ago. I mean, she is somebody who has very effectively consolidated his power internally and for whom presenting his regime as strong is absolutely crucial to its continued success, to its continued growth internally. This would be a blow to his regime. I mean, he would lose face if this happened in a way that I think would potentially weaken the regime. We don't know. We shouldn't be

fatalistic about these things. But I think there are, there's a, in my view, a very persuasive humanitarian case to do this. It's, it's, it's, I feel, feel like that as a country, to the extent that we're having this debate, we're sort of not having it on, on the right terms that we have acknowledged that they are committing genocide and we're considering participating in their Olympics anyway. Um, but there's also, I think, a pretty strong real policy case for, for doing this. With MX Platinum, access to exclusive AMX pre-sale tickets can score you as far track.

So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca.ca slash Yannex. Let's talk about Georgia.

We did not get the chance to talk about the All-Star game being moved yet. I just want to run through some politics and some facts. Last week, Joe Biden, quote, strongly supported the MLB moving the All-Star game. This week, he said, quote, it's up to the folks who decide where the Masters is. But he noted that the people who are going to be hurt most if they move the Masters

are the people making hourly wages who this bill affects. He has referred, though, continuously to this bill as the Georgia law as Jim Crow on steroids. This is Jim Crow on steroids, what they're doing in Georgia. Mitch McConnell, by the way, I thought this was, I mean, if you can't laugh at this, My warning, if you will, to corporate America is to stay out of politics. It's not what you're designed for. I'm not talking about political contributions.

Oh. Shut up and give. I get it. Okay, so let's walk through some of what the Georgia law does. And then they've moved the All-Star Game to Colorado known for its voting there. So, and thank you, by the way, Atlanta Journal Constitution because they wrote up a pretty great side-by-side here.

Colorado automatically mails ballots to all registered voters before each election. By comparison, Georgia prohibits the government from sending unsolicited absentee ballots to voters. In Colorado, vote centers are open for 15 days and available to all registered voters in their county, regardless of home address. In Georgia, there's 17 days of imprompturess. In Georgia, there's 17 days of in-person early voting, but you must show up at your precinct. There is no real out-of-precinct voting. Ballot drop boxes are available 24 hours a day

with video surveillance in Colorado. Georgia will limit drop boxes to being inside early voting locations and only available during voting hours. So Colorado has the second highest turnout in presidential election. 76% voting eligible population voted in the last election. Trailing only Minnesota, fun fact, Georgia had 68% voter participation, the 26th highest turnout in the nation in the last election.

So there's been a lot of Republicans making the point that Georgia actually has more early voting, which is true. They have two more days of early voting, four more days of mail-in voting, optional Sunday voting, and free voter ID cards, all things that Colorado does not. have. On the other hand, 99% of people in Colorado vote by mail. So early voting, not really a thing in Colorado is the big difference. Steve, I will start with you. Does the Biden administration and Major League Baseball think they've made a mistake at this point? Or did they think they're winning this battle? No, you know, what's pretty remarkable is that they, I think very clearly don't

think that they've made a mistake. They are, Jen Socky and her press briefings at the White House doubling and tripling down on these claims. They're defending, in effect, the labeling of Georgia's laws as Jim Crow on steroids. They are refusing to back down from false claims that Joe Biden has made about ending times for voting. And they, I think, feel good about where they are on this. It's hard to tell exactly where this is going to shake out. It's the kind of thing that I think could come back to haunt them in some respects. They are now beginning to take some grief for their hyperbole and for claims that just aren't true that they continue to stand by. But I don't think that this is something that,

that is particularly troubling to them. I mean, they have seen, they have seemed far more comfortable with Joe Biden being a, a leader and a divider than I think most people would have imagined who listened to his election speech, the speech that he gave when he won the election, and who listened to his inaugural address. This was a very divisive thing for him to do. It was divisive thing for him to reach down and, in effect, sanction this, in effect, approve this. And they seem fine with it. David, what am I missing here? Why the All-Star game and not Augusta?

Why not the Masters? Huh? I don't get it. Well, you know, look, I mean, we have some history here of major, the major sports leagues. taking dramatic action in response to local legislation. I mean, the NBA moved the All-Star Game from Charlotte, which was, you know, even more than moving MLB, the All-Star game from Atlanta,

where the stadium is sort of been more in a suburban area of Atlanta these days. But moving the All-Star game out of Charlotte was moving the All-Star game out of one of the darkest blue areas of the whole state to punish North Carolina for the actions of the legislature that were overwhelmingly opposed from the very jurisdiction that they moved the NBA All-Star game. I think that a lot of these leagues,

they react to pressure from players, and players are overwhelmingly, by and large, and less so in MLB, but certainly in the NBA, they're overwhelmingly on the left, disproportionately African-American, and extremely sensitive to voting changes.

and perceptions of voting changes. So I think one of the things is you have different constituencies in play with these different leagues. And so on the one hand, they might be, they might risk some degree of public backlash because they don't want player backlash. I mean, these are things that are not easy for them to navigate. I still think it's a big mistake. I think it was a mistake that was made on the basis of, and I don't agree with everything in that, in that, in the Georgia voting law. I think some parts of it are negative. But I think it was a mistake made on the basis of mischaracterizations of the law.

But we also have to note that, you know, one of the things that's really interesting here is that it's been really hard to cut through. And I think our dispatch crew has done a really good job of sort of cutting through all the fog and the haze to get to the heart of what's going on. But there's a lot of here that is, if you're not drilling into it, If you're not drilling into the details, it's easy to see why there's a lot of smoke here because you just had an election where the Republican president was pounding on the fact or the allegation that he had, this election was stolen from him in the state, lots of claims of shenanigans and improprieties combined with a lot of early proposals that didn't make it into the final law that were really much worse, for example, the early proposal that would

have banned the Sunday vote or Sunday early voting, thus eliminating the sort of soles to the polls, turnout method that a lot of black churches use. So there's all this smoke. The overall media coverage of this was abysmal. And then part of it is that, frankly, because this big voting measure is undertaken in response to a hoax, in response to a hoax, this idea that there was something wrong with the Georgia election in 2020, it was just so difficult to penetrate through figure out what was going on. And honestly, very few people were doing it. Let's just be honest, very few people were doing it. Can I pick up on that last point just for a second? Sarah, and your excellent performance on ABC,

where you are now a political Puba Grandmaster, whatever the correct title is, Major Domo, they, Ram Emanuel for the, I don't know, the third, fourth week in a row said, if it weren't for the big lie, we wouldn't have had these changes to the law. I heard Nicole Wallace go on about this last night on MSNBC. it is whenever you have pushback about the claims that this law is like Jim Crow,

they fall back on this sort of in this Motten Bailey style argument. They fall back on, well, none of this would have passed if it hadn't been for the big lie. To which I say, you are correct. But look, I think there's nobody on this podcast and a few people in media who have been more robust in criticizing how Donald Trump reacted to losing the election than the four of us and more forthright about it. But that said, if you have millions of people who think that the system is rigged, that think that there isn't, you know, the voter integrity is a problem and all these kinds of things, even if they think it for the wrong reasons, the idea that

somehow reasonable reforms. That doesn't mean you have to agree with all of them, that you're reasonable. Like, reasonable people can differ about them. Reasonable reforms to the voting system intended to reassure voters that the system actually is fair and works are defensible on their own merits,

even if we are in this crappy situation because Donald Trump lied. And even if some of these Republicans are desperate to show that they're doing something to deal with, you know, something that actually wasn't really a problem. We are where we are. And taking steps to reassure voters that the system works in this fair,

even if it is, quote, unquote, based on the big lie, doesn't mean the actual laws are bad. You have to judge them on their own merits. That's politics. And this attempt to say, you fall back on saying, whenever somebody says it's Jim Crow and then you say, well, no, it's actually not because it does this and this and this. and look, New York is different, and Delaware is actually tougher

and blah, blah, blah, blah. They say, well, but we wouldn't have had any of these things unless it were for Donald Trump's big lie. To which you say yes, but that doesn't make it freaking Jim Crow. And then the second only other point I would make about this is that I wish

people who talked about Jim Crow, you know, like one of the problems with the Georgia laws, everyone says it's like Jim Crow. And most of the debate is how, well, then you don't really understand what the Georgia law says. Or Jim Crow, it seems.

Well, that's my point, is that maybe you should go back and find out what Jim Crow was. Because, first of all, under Jim Crow, you could lynch people. You could, you know, you could rape people and get away with it. You could do hate, you could torture people. You basically had a caste system where a large group of fellow Americans didn't have due process rights. Moreover, the Jim Crow laws were at their core, I'm not saying the most evil thing about them, but I'm saying the thing that drove them were economics, was that you suddenly had large vested interests in the South who lost a vast free labor pool.

And the one thing that they were terrified of was that African American laborers would actually form a labor market where competition would bid up the price of their wages. And so they set up all sorts of internal systems that prevented black people from being able to migrate easily. They had vagrancy laws that made it impossible basically to be unemployed without facing huge problems. They made it illegal to advertise in neighboring states for jobs because they didn't want people moving. And so it was all predicated on keeping the labor value of black labor as low as conceivably possible, basically subsistence or slave wages. and the economic stuff, the political stuff flowed from that,

denying them the vote, denied black majorities in various areas to organize in order to be able to change those laws. That's not the system we have at all anymore. Thank God. You know, people can, first of all, the coalitions that would overflow any of those economic laws are vast and not just all black,

but you also have free migration in the same. country, you have all sorts of things. It's just, it's apples and oranges to talk about Jim Crow in the context of almost anything that Republicans are trying to do, even if what Republicans are trying to do are evil and wrong. I mean, I'm open to, like, Republicans doing bad things, but that doesn't make it Jim Crow. And I wish people understood what that was. This is Joe Biden, this is put y'all back in chains, Joe Biden. Yes. Yeah. This is, this is the worst aspect of Joe Biden right here. This is the race-baiting, extreme rhetoric.

And look, the fact that there was an avalanche of lies and extreme rhetoric out of the White House for four years does not mean that Joe Biden has licensed to do this. Exactly. I mean, this was put you all back in chains rhetoric from 2012. I remember that that was disgusting at the time. It was disgusting. And Jim Crow on steroids, it's just wrong.

It's completely wrong. It's a disgusting allegation. Georgia election laws are in line with other states' election laws. Again, there's parts of it I don't like. Parts of it, I think, are good, but they're in line with other states now. But here's one thing I do want to point out, this hard punitive turn of the GOP towards corporate activism, I think the GOP needs to slow its role on that because it is. is flipping around on the First Amendment.

And I'm old enough to remember when Chick-fil-A was banned from airport, like that was at the San Antonio Airport, is Texas Airport. That case is actually going up to the Texas Supreme Court when conservatives were outraged when Chick-fil-A was banned from airports, from banned from universities, when the Hobby Lobby case and many progressives were scoffing at the idea that a corporation could express religious values. It's amazing how all of this is flipping around, which is why you got to have some core of people who are sitting there going, you know, First Amendment, the First Amendment

is still there, it's still valid, it still protects expression, even expression we don't like. And interesting thing about the Georgia situation, the Georgia GOP won. Corporate America lost. Okay. So the MLB pulled out the All-Star game. The Braves are still there. Georgia has its law.

And all of these other corporations are critiquing Georgia. But so far, they're not taking any action against Georgia. And people in the GOP are freaking out that they're being criticized by Coca-Cola and others. I mean, grow up. Grow up. This is robust, rough and tumble discourse over contentious issues. This is what happens. But this idea that now we're going to start to vote to yank tax breaks from corporations, you know, as they critique us, is just snowflakeery.

There's no economic reprisal in Coca-Cola critiquing Georgia. Get over it. And this flip-flop on the First Amendment is from the GOP is getting increasingly alarming. Hobby Lobby, I will note, was 2014 Citizens United, just over 10 years old. how quickly people forget corporations are people too. Do you ever finish listening to this podcast and want to talk about it with someone? Members of the dispatch, which produces this podcast,

are carrying on the conversations we start each week over on the site. And those conversations are, unlike so many of the discussions on the internet and comment threads, remarkably civil and thoughtful. It's a smart and quickly growing community of people who want to talk about politics, policy, and culture, but at a lower decibel level.

If you'd like to join them, you can easily get to our little corner of the dispatch universe by typing in the dispatchpodcast.com to your internet browser. It's easy to remember, the dispatchpodcast.com. And right now, it's a good time to give a dispatch membership a try because we're offering a 30-day free trial on a dispatch membership. Cancel any time, no long-term obligation. Join us for free without any risk. You can join us and tell Jonah you think his points were unsupported. You can join us and give Sarah a pat on the back for putting David in his place. Let us know what you think about the actual issues we talked about and join the conversation.

You can get more from Jonah and his G-File newsletter and from David in his French press newsletter by being a member of the dispatch. And more from me too in my weekly campaign focused newsletter this week. So go to the dispatchpodcast.com. and join our conversation. Jonah, last topic to you. Yeah, so the corporations are people too thing. This drives me crazy. The left always says the right is crazy

for saying corporations are people and corporate person it is evil. And yet every single 12 minutes, they anthropomorphize corporations by calling them greedy. Either they're not people or they are people, but you can't ascribe emotions to them if you think they're not people.

Unless you think they're like lower order vertebrates or something. I don't know. Do you describe lower order vertebrates, though, as greedy? Like, is that lizard greedy? That's not fair. That amoeba isn't being greedy. That amoeba is, you know, doing its amoeba thing. Is an amoeba?

I moved to invertebrates. Yeah. Yeah. Classic, classic Isgar move of sneaking invertebrates into my absurdist vertebrates into my absurdist vertebrate analogy so um uh yeah so we can take this a couple different ways i'm i think i'm running the g file about a part of this today um but we can start with the big with the thing that's in the news this i would argue atrocious 60 minutes piece on ron de santis um governor of florida where they basically selectively edited it as answers to a the central question of the thing

They made it seem like it was that he was basically politicizing the rollout of the vaccine program to reward rich donors and his base and his voters. And they just, the 60 Minutes piece, I would argue, just didn't deliver the goods. And I have no problem in our culture with media organizations. it would be better if they didn't claim to be non-partisan, objective, dispassionate media organizations but the time-honored tradition of hit pieces is fine by me, but if you, it's sort of like if you set out to take Vienna,

take Vienna, if you set out to kill the king, don't miss. If in this cultural war climate, if the goal was to destroy Ron DeSantis, Ron DeSantis was, it's sort of like in the Japanese, in the Godzilla movies where the Japanese army He tries to lure Godzilla into biting the electrical cables, thinking it will kill him, and instead it only made him stronger. 60 Minutes has basically turned Ron DeSantis into the frontrunner for 2024 because of its

lame hit piece on him. And so there's one, there's the question of the 60 Minutes piece itself. But then two, it feeds into this growing conversation on the right that the media has never been worse, that the media is the enemy. They no longer call them the mainstream media. They all of them call it corporate media. and I would contend that there's a certain amount of recency bias here in the sense that people have forgotten all the terrible things that the media has done in the past

and gotten wrong in the past. But I'll leave that for maybe later in the conversation and just go to David. What did you make of the 60 Minutes piece? Do you think the hullabaloo is warranted? and where do you come down just sort of generally on it's worse than it's ever been? Well, I think the 60 Minutes piece was dreadful. It was, I mean, I thought you put it pretty well. I mean, there is a room for a hit piece.

I mean, if you have the goods, if there is corruption, if there is, if somebody has done something genuinely bad and wrong, well, discovering that and bringing it to light is a completely appropriate role of the media, but they just didn't have the goods. And worse than that, I mean, in some ways, the whole premise was a little bit, the whole premise was a little deceptive. A $100,000 campaign contribution in the context of all of the other public's contributions that it's given to all kinds of different causes is not a huge amount of money. And oh, by the way, Publix is everywhere. It's everywhere. The idea that it's somehow scandalous to distribute the vaccine through a trusted brand that is everywhere.

And that was prepared to do it, unlike a lot of the other big chains in the state. And that was what the health people. So if you zoom out, even if you just look at it and say, oh, the governor distributed, you know, was part of a plan to distribute the vaccine through Publix, says, hey, the governor's being competent because they're everywhere and they were ready and they're trusted and people will know where to go. And so, and, you know, adding in that, you know, the allegations about the, about the campaign finance contribution, you know, if you know this stuff, none of it even seems shady. And then they go ahead and they cut and edit his answer. And his answer,

while aggressively delivered, because, yeah, if I was accused the way the reporter was accusing him, I'd deliver the answer aggressively. The answer was compelling. He gave a compelling answer and explanation for why he did what he did. So yeah, it was, it was a dreadful report. Is it worse than it's ever been? I don't think so. I mean, I remember, oh my goodness, you remember Dateline and the exploding gas tanks. I remember 04 and the Bush AWOL allegation that was broken apart, that was exposed by. But the difference there is that people lost their jobs. Now this is like no one's going to lose their jobs at 60 minutes for that piece. They're defending it. Well, they're defending it. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's terrible. That's terrible.

Absolutely. That's terrible. I think there's a, is it worse? I don't know. I do think it's easier now because we have a much broader media environment to identify these scandals and expose these scandals and highlight these scandals. I think that there's a more, there's a greater ability to immediately critique a mainstream media report, especially one that's so transparently, as transparently bad as this. Jonah, can I point out another one, though, that we're not including in this conversation about 60 minutes, but it also happened last week. And I think it is nearly identical. It's the New York Times piece about the Trump donors who lost everything because they, They accidentally were put into an opt-out when they donated to Donald Trump for these recurring

donations that were attached directly to their bank accounts. They didn't know that they had signed up for recurring donations because the box was automatically checked when you filled it out. And then, you know, week by week, $500 was getting withdrawn. Their bank account is emptied out. The Trump campaign was asked for a record number of refunds at the end of all of this. nowhere in the story does it mention that the DNC, the DCC, the platform that Stacey Abrams uses all have an automatic checkbox for recurring donations. Now look, and I even think they could have said, like, while that's true, the refunds requested from those organizations afterward were far lower.

Like, you can explain the context, but to never, they, all it said was this is a tactic being used increasingly by Republicans. it's seen as shady, it's, you know, done to boost donations. No mention of the fact that Democratic candidates, party organization structures, and private platforms like Act Blue, all are doing it as well, even to explain that away. I was stunned by how irresponsible that was. No, I agree on that. I mean, when I first saw the piece, I was outraged by it.

I still think there are specific reasons to Trump that you can be outraged by it because he's the guy who says he's a champion of the forgotten man and all that stuff. But, you know, the fact, and it does sound like the way the win red, which is the firm that did this thing, really made it hard to find the opt-out button. They did. It was harder. It was more reoccurring. There were things about this that were worse.

Right. stronger if they just said, by the way, the Biden people have similar problems, but look, they only had a tenth of the refund problems that the Trump campaign did. Instead, they just didn't want to mention it because they want to make it uniquely evil about Republicans, which I just think was indefensible. I agree with you on that. You know, I'm going to be interested to see how this 60 minutes thing plays out over time. So we're what, about how many days into this? You mean, other than wildly helping Ron DeSantis in his run for president? I think I mentioned this before, but he's number one in the echelon poll for if Trump doesn't,

he'd gone up nine points in the last month in that poll. This will add another five to ten. Yeah. I mean, we're three days into, what, three, four days into the 60-minute scandal? What was the state of play, three, four days into the Bush-A-wall scandal, for example? I mean, this is something that the story isn't over. I'm deeply discouraged at 60 minutes of standing by it. I mean, like, the idea that they're standing by it even right now, I think, is, I find that,

I find that ridiculous. But on the Ron DeSantis point, you know, look, I mean, what they're doing right now is they're creating, they're helping him so very much in a way that's quite particular because on the one hand, they're attacking him unfairly when unlike Trump, who is often attacked unfairly, DeSantis has an actual good story to tell relative to a lot of other governors in the in the pandemic. Florida, in spite of a heavily senior citizen population, with some cities that are quite dense, I mean, not as dense as New York. We have to obviously acknowledge that is 27th in the country in deaths per million. So it's in the bottom half of the country in deaths per million. It's in the bottom half in cases per million. And it has a much. lower and unemployment rate and a much more robust economy.

Ron DeSantis has the ability to walk in and say, I was unfairly attacked while I was doing a good job. And that's a much more powerful message than, you know, essentially Trump, Trump reeling around from incompetent scandal to incompetent scandal saying, you know, I was unfairly attacked while I was failing, which was one of his, which happened to be true, there were times he was unfairly attacked while he was failing. Ron DeSantis has a different narrative. I was handling one the worst crises this country has faced in 100 years with a senior elderly population. I made some key good decisions early on. And by the time this is all said and done, my track record

stacks up against anybody else's track record. And I still got attacked relentlessly and unfairly. And, like, Sarah, you, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, this is wildly helpful to him. Steve, last word. I, what 60 minutes did was so fundamentally dishonest and it was deliberate. To me, that's the mistake. It's unclear whether the New York Times omission was deliberate as possible that he had just, for the reporter, had just been so focused on what the Trump campaign had done that he

failed to account for or failed to do reporting on on democrats although a good editor should have said hey doing similar things correct i agree with that um but with the 60 minutes example the reporter asked a question desantis gave an answer that was i think a minute and 30 seconds long and it was as as david said a substantive response to the question and the framing as posed he answered the question and explained it in such way that anybody, even a DeSantis critic, couldn't fault him for what the 60 Minutes reporter was implying. So to cut that, I think, suggests a deliberate targeting of DeSantis or deliberate portraying him in this way, which is just inexcusable. And you can't do that. And the 60 Minutes response or the 60 Minutes explanation

that, you know, this is how we edit things for time, just doesn't work. If your edits make the exchange, render the exchange, present the exchange in the way opposite the way the exchange actually occurred in reality, then your edits suck. Then that is bad journalism. And that's what 60 Minutes is standing by right now. I will say, part of me thinks that 60 Minutes, as they look at this further and as CBS takes grief and as undoubtedly good reporters inside of CBS get pissed about this, I will be surprised if 60 Minutes doesn't offer another comment on this or at least try to accept some of the

blame because it's so bad and it's so obvious. On the broader question of whether things are worse now than they ever have been. I don't have a solid answer, but I'm not sure it really matters because the perceptions are that things are so much worse than they have been. Gallup does a poll about trust in the media and looks at it in terms of Democrats, independence, and Republicans. And there's a graph shared by 538 this past week. charting the number of respondents by party who said they trusted mass media either a great deal or a fair amount from 1997 to 2020. And for Republicans, the trust in mass media, a great deal or fair amount starts a little bit north of 40 and ends today at 10%. For independence, the trajectory

is the same but not as steep. It starts slightly over 50% and ends at 36%. It's a self-declared political independence, 36%. Say they trust mass media a great deal or a fair amount. But for Democrats, who are the real outlier here, the trend goes in the other direction. They start a little bit north of 60 and end up at 73%. So what that suggests to me, is this is not just a Republican perception that the mass media are biased against Republicans. Democrats see the media presenting reporting and information that's more sympathetic to their worldview. They think that this is fair, more than Republicans do in a pretty dramatic fashion. That is a crisis for the country. I don't like to overuse the world crisis, but if you have half

of the political spectrum that doesn't believe that the mass media can be trusted really at all, uh, that's a, that's a huge challenge. I think you can look at the, the way that the Trump administration attacked the media, Donald Trump calling the media the enemy of the American people, you can look at conservative complaints about the media, critiques of the media going back years and suggest that it's because of those complaints that trust in, in mass media is so low. And I think that's a partial explanation. But the bigger explanation, in my view, is that the mass media have earned that skepticism through things exactly like what we are talking about. The Dan Rather story comes to mind, which was also 60 Minutes. And these are sort of the biggest and for a long

time most trusted institutions of the mass media. You have the New York Times pushing basically a a fake line in the 1619 project and standing by it stubbornly, you know, embracing that argument. And even in its spin to cover itself against conservative critiques of the 1619 project, I think it's engaging in sleight of hand. It's sort of deliberate dishonesty. Yeah. You look at, you know, there's an example that I point to a lot back in 2004 where the New York Times reported in the weeks before the 2004 presidential election between George W. Bush and John

Kerry on the Bush administration, the U.S. military's failure to secure a weapons depot called Al-Kaka. And there were something like three dozen mentions of this. There was the report on the failure itself. There was the report on the Kerry administrations using the failure to attack George W. Bush. It was the story. And of course, the New York Times did it. So everybody else in the media did it. The election happens. John Kerry loses, and the New York Times, if memory serves, reports on Al-Qa-Qa this weapons depot twice in the years since. Why do you think it mattered so much in the two weeks before the election, but didn't matter at all after the election? It wasn't because it didn't matter. It was because it wasn't helpful. And that is such a, I think,

a clear indictment of the media and the way they approached these issues. And this is why you have that 10% among Republicans as much or more than the ongoing critiques. So let me. All right, Jonah. Last word. We got to leave it there. Yeah, no, and I'll do it at greater length than the Juval. But let me just push back on it slightly.

I agree with all that. And I've been doing media criticism for a gazillion years. The thing that it does matter, though, you say it doesn't matter because the perception is sort of the reality. And I get the point. The problem is that that perception creates when you catastrophize things and you think that the media is this omnipotent force that is controlling our lives and keeping us oppressed and all that gives you all sorts of incentives to do things you otherwise wouldn't do if you thought that we just lived in a normal political time and had to have and do politics. and while I am entirely open and actually undecided

about whether the mainstream media is worse than it's ever been because you can go all the way back to Walter Durante you know whitewashing the genocide in Ukraine and I can do chapter and verse going forward

but the difference between now and then isn't the quality of the journalism per se it's that the power of the mainstream media is a fraction of what it once was and you know 30 years ago people used to talk about

how incredibly important the New York Times and the Washington Post and Time Newsweek and U.S. News and the three broadcast networks are. New York Times and Washington Post are still powerful and still important. They're not nearly as powerful and as important as they were 30 years ago, never mind 50 years ago. And, you know, LBJ said, you know, allegedly believed he couldn't run again because he lost Walter Cronkite. Does anyone, I like Norodontal. I've known her for a long time. Does anyone believe that a president today would say, well, I've lost nor O'Donnell, therefore I can't run again. I mean, the relative power of these mainstream media institutions is so much smaller than it used to be. But because of this victimology complex that

we've got on the right, people need to inflate it with so much more importance than it actually has in order to justify the persecution narrative and to justify the kind of politics that they want. And I got a problem with that. And their own existence in many of these center-right groups. Thank you. No, we're done. Thank you all so much for joining us. We will see you again next week. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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