The Dispatch Podcast - Disco Ball of Asininity

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

There are no more troops in Afghanistan, and President Biden is telling us we had no other option. The gang talks about all the problems with Biden’s speech from the White House at the end of the war in Afghanistan. Plus, as political violence seems to be ticking up recently our hosts debate whether or not that is something to worry about. And finally, creeping a little bit into Advisory Opinions territory, what’s going on with all of the big cases in the Supreme Court? Show Notes: -Biden’s speech on the end of the Afghan War -McConnell honors Joe Biden in 2016 -David’s latest newsletter on political violence -Sen. Ron Johnson is a closet normal -Eviction moratorium ends -Texas abortion law Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. We are talking about, of course, Afghanistan and the president's latest comments on the end of the war. We will also talk about the Supreme Court, brewing rhetoric of violence on the right and the 2022 retirements on the GOP Senate side.

Let's dive right in. Steve, we watched the president's, well, several hour late speech yesterday. What are we talking about today? Yeah. So this, I'm going to go right back to you on this, Sarah, to start. President Biden gave a speech talking about the Afghanistan withdrawal, everything that we've seen over the past several weeks, the policy going back 20 years. And he did so in kind of a defiant way, saying the policy is right. The execution was sloppy. But this needed to be done, and I'm glad I had the fortitude to do it. It was, in my view, a little awkward once again, because Biden was at once using this speech to celebrate the courage of his own decision

and at the same time cast blame on all those others who made contributions to the decision, the people he blamed for this moment, the Afghan government, Afghan National Security Forces, Donald Trump. Were you, you've, I think, fair to say, you've been most sympathetic to the case for withdrawing generally. Lots of people who are Biden supporters or not Biden supporters, but sympathetic to the case for withdrawing, seemed to rally around the speech and thought it was a good speech, thought Biden made his case well.

Are you among them? No, because I think that actually, you know, we have disagreed on some of the policy aspects of this. But I think from a communication standpoint, there is almost nothing redeemable about what the Biden administration has tried to do from a communication standpoint. Mistake after mistake after mistake. Now, look, there's the obvious ones of Biden coming out and saying things that were either demonstrably not true or a month later proved totally untrue. That I think people are chalking up as like, well, it was a mistake, but he believed it at the time, et cetera. I think that misses the point entirely.

Let me tell you what the correct comm strategy, in my opinion, at least, would have been. It's to go out and say, and repeat yesterday and repeat over and over again for the last three weeks. Here were our choices. Our choices were not the status quo. That was not an option. So I could move 10,000 more Marines into Afghanistan. My experts estimated that we would sustain X number of casualties and Y number of KIA. or we could withdraw entirely.

Now, on the withdrawal, here were the choices. We could try to withdraw slowly, but the problems that we spotted were these. I mean, walk the American people through the hard decision that you had to make, instead of sounding so defensive about it. The American people are very smart. They understand a lot of this stuff. And they certainly understand someone facing a hard decision and making the best one they can with the information that they have.

But instead, again, just from a communications perspective, you have Biden so defensive as to sound guilty, right? If this guy were on the witness stand in a criminal defense, like his lawyer would pull him off. That is terrible. And he's not even under cross-examination because he's not taking questions at any of these things. So politically, and I've said this before, obviously, it's not that I think that people are voting on the foreign policy aspects of this. I'll be interested to see if I'm proved wrong California recall or otherwise but I think there are domestic

policy implications. I've talked about the one the Vietnam-esque one where you just become more cynical in your government, etc. But what I haven't talked about is the Joe Biden specific domestic implications, which is the creation of a new narrative around him. You

had the Republican Party really using foils for the Democrats, whether it's defunds, the police or AOC or Elon Omar or Cory Bush constantly trying to paint the Democrats as their most extreme version because they didn't want to pick a fight with Joe Biden, who was pretty popular and wasn't really saying anything too crazy. He was against defund the police, etc. What this has created is a narrative around Joe Biden of incompetence, defensiveness.

and it feeds the already existing narrative in the GOP base that he's not up to the job which I say with like sort of that asteris certainly the words they would use are senile, too old he's not remembering stuff, etc. I think this feeds some of that.

The overly emotional and defensive response is a bad, bad look under like four different prongs. So that's my answer. So, Jonah, there was a Reuters story published Tuesday afternoon in which the reporters got their hands on a transcript of a call on July 23rd between President Biden and Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan. They also got their hands on a second call that took place later in the day between Ghani and some top Biden administration national security officials. And Sarah talks about the narrative around Joe Biden.

What was striking, I think, both to the reporters and certainly to me, about the transcripts of the call, the way that they wrote those transcripts up, was how concerned Joe Biden was about the narrative. He went back repeatedly to this question of perceptions. And he told Ashraf Ghani, this is, you know, just a couple weeks before we saw the Taliban's march accelerate, that Ashraf Ghani had to do something, to change the narrative. The narrative was bad. The narrative suggests that the Taliban were on the march. The narrative suggests that the Afghan government was weak. And Biden proposed a big press conference with

former President Hamid Karzai and had lots of advice in this 15-minute call focused on perceptions. I guess given what we've seen since, How misplaced was that focus at the time? The problem, it seems to me, was not perceptions. The problem was reality. And Biden promised to continue to provide close-in air support, suggested that the Afghan military would vastly outnumber the 70 to 80,000 Taliban fighters he allowed existed in the country. Why was Joe Biden so focused on narrative in Afghanistan in late July?

Well, I suspect, not being able to read his mind, but I suspect it's because he was so confident that his position was right that if the perception was going south, it was because it was of, because of bad framing and a bad narrative that didn't reflect reality rather than the fact that he couldn't countenance the possibility that maybe the reality itself was different than he thought it was, and the reporting and the perceptions reflected the truth. You know, Biden, Biden, we forget because he, he, until this episode, Biden had kind of lost this very angry edge that he sometimes had when he was a younger guy. And he really had a very thin skin about his intellect, about his qualifications. There was this amazing video going back, I don't know, 30, 40 years where he just rips into some guy giving him a hard time on the campaign trail about how he graduated.

first in his class. He was the first person to do this, the first person to do that. They were all just factually untrue. And, um, and I think that he has a capacity. He, he thinks very highly of himself. He's got a major insecurity problem, very similar in some ways, very different than others, the Donald Trump's, I think. And this thing, which he has been obsessed with for so very, very long, um, according to some reports, you know, going back to the Obama administration, where he was on the losing side of some arguments. I think he fixated on doing this and, and he's kind of turned a little bit like into Colonel Nicholson from

Bridgen-River Kwai, where he got so fixated on doing it, he lost sight of the problems with doing it and lost the ability to respond in time to it. And you see that in his, I mean, I agree entirely with Sarah, the speech just regardless of the merits just came across as very defensive. He clearly people are in his head. He is doing something that Obama did a lot of, which is responding to these, to straw man versions of criticisms of him in ways that are, I would say, if he wasn't so angry, would be marks of bad faith.

I mean, that's what they bother me when Obama did it, because you could tell he was deliberately distorting what his opponents were saying for rhetorical effect. I think Biden was just spitting mad and embarrassed and on the defensive and in a corner. And so, you know, there's this old rule. Remember, it's a weird reference for this conversation, but the writers for Saturday Night Live, the writers and producers would often say that the people who would get angriest at them among politicians were Democrats. because there is this unspoken assumption among Democratic politicians that the media is supposed to do cleanup work for them.

It's supposed to be a wind at their back, not, you know, in their face. And when it doesn't behave that way, which I think I have to say, the mainstream media has been pretty responsible on how it's covered all of this, it creates this particular anger for Democrats that Republicans don't have

because Republicans always expect to get bad press and um they can they're used to being made fun of and democrats feel like they're been betrayed and you just got a sense that this this old guy who had this idea that he was sure he was right about for 10 years um it was bitter and angry that so far it looks like he was proven wrong about an enormous number of things including things that within his own speech yesterday i mean he talked about how we only have to have we have to have a clear and achievable foreign policy Two weeks ago, he set the clear and achievable foreign policy of getting every single American out. And then yesterday he's talking about, well, 90% is pretty good.

Throw me a parade. I mean, that kind of thing, at some part in his head, he's got to be thinking, gosh, this is lame. I'm having to make this argument. And he's embarrassed about it. David, I think Sarah's right that the Biden White House hopes that this speech yesterday was the beginning of a new focus on Afghanistan. as the case may be less focus on Afghanistan and that people will forget the botched withdrawal and all of the many complications that we've seen over the past several weeks, and I would say betrayals, and that folks will eventually get to the point where they just remember that Joe Biden

is the one who ended the war in Afghanistan. Unfortunately for the White House, there are consequences from what we saw over the past several weeks that are likely to live well beyond this actual decision moment. I'm thinking here of our relations with U.S. allies. There was a report in the Wall Street Journal yesterday talking about relations with our European allies and the journal reported the strains are already real, especially after Mr. Biden rebuffed European requests to extend the August 31st withdrawal deadline so that allies would be able to air left their remaining citizens and Afghan allies out of Kabul, tens of thousands of such people eligible for evacuation remain stranded. And the second question we've talked about this

before, but I think it's worth dwelling on for a moment, is our loss of intelligence capabilities there. There's a second Wall Street Journal, different Wall Street Journal article in which they report, U.S. officials acknowledge the military has lost 90% of the intelligence collection capabilities it had using drones before the drawdown of forces began in May. How much are we going to continue to have to pay attention to Afghanistan because of facts like this? Well, you know, I think there's a few things to unpack there. One is how much do we have to pay attention to Afghanistan? We don't have to pay a whole lot of attention to it from a media standpoint.

The longer we move and the distance we move from this event, in part because it's going to be hard to report from there. I mean, how are we going to know what's happening to women and girls in Kandahar? I mean, is there going to be a viable media presence there? What are we going to know about what's happening? in various parts of Kabul. How are we going to know any of this? This is going to be one of the most dangerous, fraught media assignments in the world.

In a lot of ways, the reality is Afghanistan is kind of going to start to go dark to us. It's going to start to become even more opaque to us. And one of the things that happens is then it often goes out of side, out of mind, right, unless something horrible and dreadful happens. And we don't know if that's, going to occur, especially in the world of international terror. We don't know when that's going occur in the world of international terror. So I do think there is something just from this sort of,

if you're going to take a mercenary media cycle approach to it, this will fade in part in memory of the public because of, quite frankly, after a while, it's going to be hard to report from there. There's not going to be as much to report another account of atrocities, et cetera. So I do think that just as a practical matter, it might fade unless it until something really big and bad happens. I mean, more bad happens, more bigger happens. And so I think that that's just the sort of the brass tax reality of it. Now, the allies piece of this to me, there is something here that I think a lot of people don't get that is what makes this so infuriating to the allies. And that is the way we have constructed our alliance, but all of our allies, including our most powerful

allies, the Great Britain, France, they do not have the heavy lift and force projection ability that we have. They don't have that same ability. And so what does that mean? They are dependent upon our heavy lift capacity to move lots of people from A to B in a short amount of time. doesn't mean they have no capacity. Of course they do. But they do not have our capacity. And so we are built from the ground up to be interdependent. They are interdependent and dependent upon us. And so it isn't like Britain has the force projection capability in the same way that we do to then land, say, Royal Marines at the airport, even if we leave and have total confidence that it's got the infrastructure to protect them in the way that we have. And so,

they are dependent on us and this is yanking the rug out from under them. It's not quite the same as saying, well, France, if you want to stay, you can stay or Britain, if you want to stay, you can stay because they literally are not built to stay in the same way that we are. So that's why it's not just our partner left. It's the partner that allowed us to be there to rescue the people we wanted to rescue. And that is a bitter pill to swallow. And, you know, all of this is reminding me why I'm having these flashbacks to 2008 to 2016. And it's reminding me why, of the Obama-Biden pair, I preferred Obama to Biden. And, you know, there was always this aspect of Biden that was kind of puzzling to me as an outsider. It was a lot of people in Washington seemed to have a lot of

affection for him. And Mitch McConnell famously, remember, choked up when he left the Senate at the end of Obama's second term. And when he was as vice president, he presided over the Senate and he was leaving and McConnell just famously choked up. And I remember being mystified that as imperious as Obama could be, and he could be pretty imperious, almost nobody could rival Biden for his sneering condescension. And it was this weird kind of sneering condescension because it was paired with no readily apparent titanic intellectual ability. And sort of the paradigm of that was the debate with Paul Ryan, the vice presidential debate with Paul Ryan. And I think that what we saw was the reminder over the last couple of weeks that, yep, it was Joe Biden who became president of the United States.

It's the guy that we've always known. and the guy that we've always known has always had these particular weaknesses, and these particular weaknesses have been highlighted and amplified in the last couple of weeks, and I think that a lot of people will remember. Yeah, I agree with that, and I would just make one final point on that issue and sort of more broadly the likelihood that we're going to continue to pay attention to this. I do think the fact that Biden administration officials, including the president himself have said so many things that are so at odds with reality, journalists will not be able to help themselves, but to call attention to that. I mean, you have Ned Price,

the State Department spokesman yesterday, once again, issuing a strongly worded statement, insisting that the Taliban respect the basic human rights of people in Afghanistan. Literally, as that statement goes out, they're engaged in targeted killings, they're keeping women from going to work, they're abusing their critics. I mean, there's no world in which the Taliban is going to do what the Biden administration keeps suggesting it might. And I think, you know, my concern about that primarily is the long-term national security implications of that misjudgment and miscalculation. But there will be many others. And I think it'll be apparent on a daily basis just how badly they misjudged the Taliban.

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Get your free quote at ethos.com dispatch. That's E-T-H-O-S dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. All right, David. You want to talk about some rhetoric on the right. Yeah. So, okay, well, let me, let me start by triggering Sarah, because I'm going to say the name Madison Cawthorne. And Sarah's already shaking her head. She's already shaking her head. So anyway. And so Madison Cawthorne starts a little Twitter, Tempest, but by saying, you know, and I'll just read part of it, if our election systems continue to be rigged, continue to be stolen, then it's going to lead to one place, and that's bloodshed.

And I will tell you as much as I'm willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there is nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American. And so again, you know, this pretty clear statement of, you know, bloody intent from Madison Cawthorne. Okay, big deal. Backbencher. Everybody knows he is crazy. Who should pay attention to him? But then you're also having this other thing that is popping up that is a continuation of a lot of the pre-January 6th behavior.

And that is threats towards public officials. There's an escalating threat environment. now for school board officials. It seems like every day you see a new video of threatened violence, threats to kill people at school board meetings who are for masks. You have this rising sort of rhetoric on the right that is casting January 6th defendants as political prisoners that J.D. Vance tweeted approvingly. That's been sort of a theme that you've heard from Tucker Carlson as he's been questioning a lot of the January 6th prosecutions. And so, let me, since I went ahead and triggered Sarah, let's start with Sarah. Are you worried? Oh,

and also there was a crazy guy who went to the Capitol, claimed he had a bomb, appears to have been non-functioning, thankfully, had a standoff for the police outside of the Supreme, of the Library of Congress, if I'm not wrong. So anyway, Sarah, worried, not worried? I want to distinguish what you're talking about from domestic terrorism, though I think that the line is is not black and white always. But the rise of actual domestic terrorism in this country is something I am worried about. The rise of people on the right, both sort of these elected backbenchers trying to get attention and their voters, I think that's a special symbiotic relationship and each is causing the other.

Right, there's this idea, I think, on like the lefty Twitterverse that Fox News causes this. And instead, I could, I think, make a far more persuasive argument that this is causing Fox News the other way around. So is Madison Cothorn, whose goal here is just to get attention? Is he saying stuff like that to gin up the base? Or is he saying stuff like that? because he knows that's what his base wants to hear right now. I think it's deeply concerning that that's what the base wants to hear. And five years ago, I would have told you

that it was an infinitesimal percentage of people in the country and they were getting outsized attention from the media. I no longer think that. However, I do think they get outsized attention. It's just, you know, maybe not magnifying 1% to much, much bigger. It's, you know, I don't know what the percentage is, but it's a lot larger than I want it to be. That being said, am I worried that that itself will lead to specific violence? Not the way it is right now.

But it's a whole lot of kindling out there. And David, you wrote a whole book about potential matches and what that would lead to really quickly. And so that's the concern is that you just have a whole lot of dry leaves. sitting around, very both bored, angry, looking for, looking to burn. But Madison Cawthorne isn't going to do it. Madison Cawthorne is not going to lead the violent revolution, you're saying. No. He's not leading anything. Lead is not a word that I would use to describe. He is Madison Cawthorne truly, and like I don't even think you have to like make many distinctions.

uh, Madison Cawthorne, Matt Gates, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Bobert. They have their exact equivalence on the left. Elon Omar, Cory Bush, AOC. These people have outsized media attention compared to their political power, which is zero, except for the media attention, which drives their political power, which I find so frustrating, which is why I did not want his name mentioned on this podcast. The end. okay so i'll just note for the record that sarah talked about all of those people more than i did in the question um now moving moving over to you jonah you have said i think quite eloquently and correctly that on top of the political there is an underlying degree of tension in this country

uh and you see it in the escalating attacks on flight attendants for example example, road rage, etc. And I guess my question is, is this just that? Or is this that plus? In other words, is this a kind of, is this just politics reflecting and increased background tension? Or is this maybe politics driving and enhancing a background level of increased tension. In other words, I guess what I'm trying to ask, is this something that's going to fade, the more we come out of a pandemic, hopefully, and life starts to return more to normal, which sadly keeps not happening? Or is this something that is an ominous turn that could endure past this moment of tension? I think it's pluses all the way down. I think that, I mean, look,

I mean, we saw a lot of this stuff bubbling up long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. You know, the stuff that you and I were subjected to with the sort of the social media stuff in 2015 and 2016. That wasn't pandemic-induced. That was pre-pandemic. And I think that, you know, I mean, I hate the perfect storm analogy. but I think that Twitter and social media has broken a lot of people's brains for all sorts of ways in all sorts of ways.

I think Trumpism, both among his opponents and among his biggest fans, has done a number on a number of people. We'll just put it that way. And then, so you already have all of this, these these you know what was the russian writer who called it you know fires that uh fires that lit the line the minds of men and you have all of this stuff already going on and then you have a pandemic and our brains get even weirder um and our responses to weird stuff becomes all the more

weird you know that sort of catalytic thing i always quote from orwell where he says a man can feel himself a failure and take to drink and become all the more of a failure because he drinks all of these things in combination become a cocktail. And I think you just see it all over the place and the problem is you know at least they used

to say that the number of people who were driven to violence by violence and movies in television was something like one in 10,000 or one in 100,000 let's just assume those numbers are the same for all of this nonsense. in a country of 330 million people,

that's enough people to do real bad things. You know, and you've written a lot about the contagion factor with mass shooters. They're very, very, very few people. I mean, you know the percentage is better than I do. People who own guns who want to become free killers. But if you have a million, if you have 10 million people owning guns, and we have more than that, and 0.001% of them, decide to become spree killers, you've got a massive epidemic of mass shootings on your hands.

And so the numbers, the scale is, is something I think to worry about. I also think that there's a general problem. I agree with Sarah's general point that the business model for people like Cawthorne and Marjor Taylor Green is the same as that for AOC and those kinds of people. But the squad types, I have to say, are having more success affecting policy. And when we say that they have no power, if they're the leading fundraisers and they can get money for other politicians, they can leverage their power. But why are they leading fundraisers? Why do they have that power?

It's all feeding. It's a little cycle feeding itself. I agree. But my point is that we have all sorts of, we live in an era illuminated by a disco ball of ass and. and everything is reflecting off of everything else. And the mere fact, I agree with you entirely. The reason why these people have this power is because the media gives them this power, but the media gives them this power, so therefore they have this power.

And we can lament it, but it doesn't change the fact that it's going on. And I should just say that the things that AOC's base or Elon Omar's base who want to hear are different substantively from the, the things that MTV's people want to hear. And then I also just think, I don't know, but Elon Omar, I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not as smart as she thinks she is, but I think she's pretty savvy and smart. I think that we should not forget that Madison Cawthorne is probably a complete moron. And it factors into a lot of the things that he says that he thinks are smart, that he thinks are sophisticated,

that he thinks he's taking this philosophically bold position and he doesn't even realize he's spewing boob-bait. And I think part of the reason why we're getting this crop of of Cothorns and Boberts and Greens is that institutionally,

the conservative movement in the Republican Party have completely abdicated their role as screeners and filters and gatekeepers. And basically, they hand the keys to the car to the loudest drunks they can find. And that's a real problem.

I see it in conservative media every day. I'm kind of obsessed with it. And so I just think that at some point, it's a numbers game, we're going to have something really terrible happen. And then a bunch of people who should be the ones condemning it are going to validate it,

much like they did with January 6th. That sends a signal that, oh, this kind of behavior is okay, wink, wink. and then someone goes even further. And so I do think we're going to get violence. And I think that the, even though it's not the intent of many of these Republicans and conservative leaders to have violence, I'm sure it's not. They are greasing this kids for it.

Hey, Steve, close your ears real quick. Did anyone else think boob bait, like for their first initial reaction, meant something else because I definitely was somewhere else on the boob bait. And was very confused how Madison Cawthorn was boob bait and hadn't. But I get it now. It took me a second. It's an old Daniel Patrick Moynihan phrase. Yeah, yeah, no, but it's 2021.

Yeah. So, yeah. Hey, you know, some of us are not afraid to share the benefits of our years of wisdom and experience. Anyway, go on. So, Steve, one of the more compelling things that I've heard is I was talking, and this is something that sort of bubbled up in the discourse, is what would you think, if you were hearing reports about the United States, but it was another country. In other words, you were tracking what was going on in, say, Spain,

and you had had the Spanish Parliament overrun. You were seeing calls for violence echoing in small towns across Spain. You had seen plots and other disrupted events to kidnap or assassinate people, what would you be thinking? You would be thinking, and the answer is pretty darn obvious that this place has some inherent instability to it,

and that it's, as we were talking earlier, kindling. And I'll just share, and I'll end with the same question I asked Sarah. I'll share sort of where I am on this, and I can't remember if it's this podcast, or maybe when I was filling in for Jonah on the Remnant, talked about a concept of somebody goes bankrupt slowly and then suddenly, or an army can collapse

slowly, then suddenly. And I think a culture reaches a crisis often slowly and then suddenly, and that's what I'm worried about. Steve, how worried are you, are you worried? Very. I think political violence on a much larger scale than we've seen is inevitable. I don't think it's a question of whether it will happen. I think it's a question of when it will happen and where we are on that continuum. I mean, I think we're closer to the suddenly than anybody should be comfortable with. And I think, well, first a point on leadership, then I'll address Sarah's point, because I think there's an interesting sort of intra.

I mean, you know, we are the media, so we can talk about how we're handling this. But I think one of the fundamental problems is, you know, Madison Cothorn is a backbencher from North Carolina. Marjorie Taylor Green is a cook from Georgia. You have a number of these people. They obviously have developed the power that they have, and I do think they have power, because of the media attention that they're given. But there's another element here.

I'll get to the media attention question a second. There's another element here that really, really matters, and it is the total collapse of leadership on the right, particularly among elected officials, to police this stuff. Not only is Kevin McCarthy not speaking out against the idiocy that is Madison Cawthorne, in many ways he's encouraging it. He's encouraging it either by just looking the other way and shrugging his shoulders, or he's encouraging it by refusing to step up when somebody like Paul Gosar, a representative

from Arizona, does a full public embrace of this. this, whatever we want to call him, alt-right provocateur, white nationalist, hate spewer, Nick Fuentes. McCarthy, we've contacted his office, I don't know, half a dozen times more, to see if he will do the very minimum, which is to say, yeah, you know, I'd prefer it if my members didn't truck with bad white nationalist types. And he won't do that. You know, he'll go out of his way to lambast Liz Cheney any time he has an opportunity.

but he won't even take the basic steps of condemning the kinds of rhetoric, the kinds of behavior that will lead, I think, inevitably to violence. So I put this on Republican Party leaders. They're encouraging this in many ways, and I think they deserve the blame when it happened. Now, on the media, I mean, we've had this discussion just to bring sort of our listeners into the discussions we've had internally at the dispatch. We've had this discussion basically since the dispatch launched. There is a media model that gets attention, gets listeners, gets viewers, gets clicks,

by focusing on every one of these moments. And I think there are many in the mainstream media and on the left who do that. Every time Madison Cawthorne says anything, doesn't have to be this, which I think really was worth some coverage. You can say anything, and they will pay attention to it

because they know it will rile up the left. And the left can say, see, look at those idiot right-wingers. And the same thing prevails on the right. Is that it's also easy to talk about. Everyone can talk about being outraged. You don't need any expertise. It's very different than talking about Afghanistan and ISIS-K and Al-Qaeda. Absolutely.

No, 100%. That's 100%. And the reverse is true, right. This is what happens on the right. You know, Rashida-Talib says something outrageous, and it's wall-to-wall coverage on the right. you know, the way that we are approaching this is basically not to spend a ton of time covering these things. We don't. You know, we don't have many pieces about the squad. We don't have a ton of

pieces about Madison Cawthorne or Marjorie Taylor Green. When it comes up, we have exactly this kind of a conversation. How much does this actual issue deserve coverage because the issue deserves coverage versus how much are we just giving them additional attention that we don't want to so that we're contributing to the problem. And I think there's a reason that we sort of collectively have come to the broad editorial judgment. We don't want to contribute to the problem. We don't spend a lot of time covering this. Having said that, it's really important to cover it some. I would argue that a lot of what we saw in the lead up to the election of Donald Trump was this kind of agitation and provocation on the part of people like the Gateway Pundit and

Breitbart and some of these others. In some cases, just making stuff up, right? And it was allowed to go totally unchecked. Very few people paid much attention to it. And I think a lot of people, myself included, thought, this is the fringe being the fringe. And it turns out actually that that's not the case, that this is more people than I'm comfortable with. I think more people than most of us are comfortable with. And that if you don't give people an alternative, if you don't tell them, no, hey, by the way, this is wrong. What these people are saying is, wrong. People don't have any choice but but to to to follow it. And I, you know, David had a terrific newsletter that we sent Tuesday evening. We've made it public for everybody to read and share

in which he goes on and on about, you know, people who fall for sort of one conspiracy after another after another after another. And it takes you to this point. And I think unfortunately, it used to be the case that you had these people who followed these conspiracies, sort of had conspiracy mindset. They lived in the proverbial basement. They didn't have a lot of people to socialize with. And now they have a lot of people to socialize with because the internet makes that that easy. And you can create the misimpression, particularly if we don't ever cover this, we don't ever weigh in, that in fact those people and those issues in that mindset is the sort of what most people believe. And that I think is really dangerous. Yeah. I mean, I think

just, it's worth emphasizing a point that kind of sound like maybe you're glossing over that's part of David's argument, and I agree it was a great newsletter, is that this sort of thing is contagious. It's not just that, yeah, we've all, I mean, look, as someone who has been the subject of hate storms from the fever swamp, right, for 30 years, you know, I was somehow, you know, like, guys of VDAIR, started in the 90s calling National Review, Goldberg's review because I was there. And it was very much a, put a Jewish, Hebraic stink on Goldberg, trust me.

And the, it's not subtle, actually. I know, but it was like when you actually read it. Thanks for explaining. But no, but when you actually read it, it kind of sounded, you can almost hear it in a, in a German accent. It was really strong. And, um,

Good birds review. Anyway, um, they, uh, There have always been fever swamps, you know, going back at the John Birch Society and all that kind of stuff. But ideas are contagious, right? I mean, that's actually originally before memes became these cutesy things on Twitter and whatnot, this was a real study of sociology where ideas spread memetically. And that's where we get the word meme from. And the number of people, which is, I think a big part of what David's newsletter is about,

is that none of these people were normals 10 years ago and they're not anymore and then this gets my point about I was saying before but the gatekeeping so much of the media now particularly the conservative media infrastructure with a few honorable

exceptions spends a lot of its time highlighting the people who feed this stuff and minimizing the people who don't if you look at I mean just to take a random example of this if you look at the news stories that are linked on the homepage of real clear politics these days. It is very

rarely is it ever national review or even the Wall Street Journal and it is almost almost always there are you know I you know they also there are sites that are now part of that infrastructure on there. You know American greatness is probably linked to their ten times as much as National Review is and And the message that that sends, because they then link to liberal columnists for the New York Times and the Washington Post and liberal pieces in the New Yorker and that kind of stuff, the sense that you get from that. It's a very small example, but it is that it's creating this equivalence that these are the climate makers, the influencers of the right, and these are the ones of the left, and they are both of equal stature. and it's a real false equivalence thing. And you find that kind of stuff all over the place.

And so when you have people who aren't close students of the media and news and information and stuff, they see that their people, including their congressmen, validating crazy stuff, it makes that stuff uncrazy in their minds, you know? And that's why I love this video, the secret video of Ron Johnson, where he is where he doesn't know he's being recorded and he's actually revealing that he's not insane. And he starts saying things that, you know, he's a closet.

It turns out he's a closet normal. And like, Stephen and I've talked about this for a long time about what happened to Ron Johnson. It turns out there's still Ron Johnson in there. He's just not willing to be Ron Johnson in public. And I think that's a fascinating part of the incentive structure we got. And we're missing a really important part of why this has happened,

which is ICRA, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which changed how all of this was funded and y'all have heard various versions of this rant I will do a longer version if anyone wants it at some future date but the short version is you get rid of large donors and large fundraising events that we used to have and instead you have small dollar online fundraising which means

everything is fundraising you know from the Lego song everything is awesome this is everything is fundraising so Ron Johnson everything he says has to meet with that online digital fundraising effort and the people who are giving money online are not representative of voters writ large. Same as by the way the large dollar donors weren't representative either. I'm not actually pro that quat that. But those people, very small percentage and the thing that motivates them is fear and anger. And so what you're going to see more and more

is that because it works. It's, yes, that whole media point is absolutely correct. But the reason that electeds are doing it is because it is working to both give them power and keep them in power and get them reelected and have them raise more money. And more money means they're more of a power broker and you know who's not a power broker, the R&C.

And even to a large extent now, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, they don't control these folks because the party structure was knee-capped by Bikra. Okay, that is actually the short version of the rant. So two things real fast. We should start this where we say longer version of Sarah's rant on the bonus Patreon episode. Those are coming.

They won't be Patreon, but they're coming. Number two is in my newsletter, I created a sort of a fictionalized depiction of a person, I called him Bill, who in 2010 was handing out pocket constitutions, and 2021 is swallowing ivermectin by the gallon. And you wouldn't believe my inbox today. The number of people who said, my uncle is Bill, my dad is Bill, my aunt is Bill, my just these reports are flooding in. And, you know, that's the thing that I have noticed in my own town. I mean, look, I'm in Williamson County, Tennessee. People who don't know

Williamson County, Tennessee, that means nothing to you. I moved there from a pretty rural county. It is one of the most prosperous, nice suburbs in America. I mean, it is, it's also very, very, very, very Republican. And we went viral. President Biden mentioned us because people were threatened, nurses and doctors were threatened after testifying in support of masks and schools threatened. And it turns out then, of course, one of the people threatening was a former Christian rock star, who I believe now does a Christian worship newsletter, was one of the people threatening these doctors. And there is a difference in my community. There is a difference. Not to say that there's still lots, tons and tons and tons of great people, and a lot of them

are pulling away from all of this. But amongst the people who are deeply engaged, there is a difference. and it is ominous and it is contagious. Hey, you know how, actually, you listening do not know this. Sometimes before Jonah or Steve go on Brett Baer's show and there's like winners and losers of the week, they'll sort of crowdsource and ask us who we think the winners and losers of the week are. You know who the real losers of this week are, Steve?

It's the worms because everyone's now taking this dewormer and like, where are the poor worms supposed to go? Well, aren't they the winners, though? I mean, yeah, they'd be the winners, right? Because we're not going to have enough. They're having a hayday in the horses. Right. Yeah, but also it leaves out the fact that during a pandemic,

we've been known to have toilet paper shortages. And given the number one result of taking horse dewormer, it's causing another run on our bash. Exactly. That's so bad. That's so bad. That's a strategic paper stockpile. David with hayday, Jonah with run on toilet paper.

We should probably just move on. Calling all book lovers. The Toronto International Festival of Authors brings you a world of stories all in one place. Discover five days of readings, talks, workshops and more with over 100 authors from around the world, including Rachel Maddow, Ketourou Isaku, and Kieran Desai. The Toronto International Festival of Authors,

October 29th to November 2nd. Details and tickets. at festivalofauthors.ca. We're only going to do three topics today, and we're going to finish with the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court is big in the news today. The Texas abortion law has gone into effect at midnight central time.

The Supreme Court did not issue a stay yet. They could at any point. But Jonah has something broader about the Supreme Court to talk about and how both sides are using the Supreme Court to flim-flam around. Well, I mean, we can bring in the abortion stuff because I'd like to hear you guys talk about that a little bit since that's more on the newsy side. But just very briefly, so Sarah's rant about Bikra and all that is also my rant about weak parties and how Mitch McConnell was right in 1990s when he said that McCain-Feingold wasn't going to take money out of politics. It was going to take the parties out of politics. And I think that's happened. I think that same sort of phenomenon. is across the political spectrum where our institutions are

incredibly weak because they're not for both structural and psychological and market incentive reasons they're not willing to do their jobs. Which brings me

to the Supreme Court ruling on the eviction moratorium. The Supreme Court and you guys have talked about this chapter and verse on AO, your really excellent

niche podcast. Flagship. You met flagship. I think, Isha is French for flagship, actually. Fake news. I think flagship is French for rarified and select. Anyway, so the, the,

Brett Kavanaugh and the majority of the Supreme Court told the administration, you can't do this using the CDC. You gotta, if you want to extend a moratorium on evictions, you got to write a law. Congress has got to do it. And Biden said, yeah, the bulk of the scholarship says that this is not constitutional.

Why he couldn't himself make a judgment on this, this was the former chair of the Judiciary Committee, and if he doesn't think it's constitutional, then he has a bound by oath obligation not to send something to the Supreme Court he thinks is unconstitutional or not to put into action, something that's unconstitutional.

So anyway, the court says to Congress and to the administration, you guys figured out, write a law. Nancy Pelosi thinks it's too hard, Joe Biden thinks it too hard, so they do it by executive, order. The Supreme Court says, we told you you couldn't do this. And so they shut it down. I don't think they told them nearly forcefully enough or angrily enough. I think the Supreme Court should

have been in a Bambi versus Godzilla moment on that. But be that as it may, the response from members of Congress was, this is outrageous. How dare the Supreme Court impose its policy preferences, yada, yada, yada. And I got pages of quotes. I had my RA and it just goes on for pages these people how outrage they are and disappointed they are and, you know, Bill de Blasio calling the majority of the Supreme Court right-wing fanatics who want to kick people out into the streets. And literally, the Supreme Court decision says, you can do this, which I don't think they should be able to do, but that's a different issue. You can do this if you just write a law, but Congress doesn't want to write a law. It's sort of like when Corey Gardner ripped Jeff

Sessions, your old boss, for his, for not continuing the Obama administration's position on on marijuana enforcement, and Gardner was like, this is outrageous. I was made promises by the executive branch and you have to uphold them. And you would get the impression that Cory Gardner at the time wasn't this thing called a legislator who could have written a law to do what he wants to do. And so instead, we've turned Congress into a bunch of lobbyists who lobby the Supreme Court or lobby the executive branch to do their jobs for them. And then they denounce those institutions

when they fail to do the thing the way Congress has the power to do it but refuses to do it because it's too damn hard. And that's why we have so much dysfunction. That's one of the main reasons why we have so much dysfunction in our politics and it feeds into the stuff that Sarah was talking about with the parties

because the incentive structures for all these Congress people to be pundits and not actually parliamentarians of any kind. And it makes me cross. So with that, Steve, Let me just jump in. I mean, you know, it's the same incentive. It's the same incentive structure because they can go and rant about it and wave their arms and pitch a fit.

But as long, you know, when they take steps towards solving the problem, even if Democrats and Congress would have attempted to take steps towards solving the problem in a manner I don't like, and I think it's deeply problematic as it relates to property rights, then they can't, then they don't have the issue. Then they can't run around and wave their arms about it. I think that contributes to this, you know, this broader problem that we talk about a lot on here that we're talking about specifically in this conversation that we talked about in the last segment. I mean, the other thing I would say about this particular episode is the extent to which property rights are sort of met with a shrug. You know, I consider property rights sort of the

first and most fundamental right, the first and most fundamental human right, all other rights in effect flow from property rights. Well, but right after the right to life, right? Like, I mean, like, the right to be alive. I mean, I would say that that, that, that you have that right in your own property. Fair enough. Yeah. The, the, but you have Democrats in effect arguing that homeowners,

landlords don't have the right to use their property sort of indefinitely. I mean, I think there are huge problems with the eviction moratorium in the short term, but you can understand the case for it on a, you know, on a temporary basis in the midst of a pandemic that is, you know, a crisis of governance, of economics, of, you know, of potentially of life. But Democrats seem just unconcerned with property rights in general. And there's a great irony that, the Biden administration, Joe Biden as president, pushed for an extension of a moratorium. He himself acknowledged was almost certainly not permissible by law, then made another argument to expand that in effect. And he did so at a time when he spends most, his White House and Joe

Biden spend most of their time arguing that the crisis is coming to an end in terms of economics. They tout their jobs numbers all the time. So many more people are employed. So many more people have jobs. The economy is booming and growing. But we still have to deny landlords the rent that they might charge because this is a momentary crisis. There's just sort of hypocrisy all around on this. And I guess it shouldn't probably be the wake up call that it is. But the extent to which Democrats and I'd say even Republicans who haven't been nearly as I've spoken on this, as I would have hoped, just don't care about property rights, don't think about property rights is, I think, problematic as we enter this weird phase of failing institutions.

David, this entire podcast has been an advertisement for advisory opinions episode tomorrow, I feel. I feel exactly the same way. I'm excited about this episode. And so I'm going to save most of my bonus rant for advisory opinions tomorrow. But a couple of points. One is non-legal. Okay, so if you, one of the big, one of the largest sort of brass tax problems we have in the entire United States of America is a lack of affordable housing, especially in a lot of our

most potent economics, most potent economics centers in the United States, the Bay Area. places like L.A., New York, places where that are really driving the driving engines of our economy, we have a major, huge problem with affordable housing. Well, what's about one of the best ways I can imagine to create economic disincentives for housing? It would be to deprive owners of housing of the ability to reap economic rewards from their property. I mean, what incentive is there to build new housing if you're going to be depriving people of the ability to receive an economic benefit. This is unbelievable. Look, I can imagine in a short burst of time in a disaster situation taking an emergency measure, but we prolonging this, moving this, it's horrible

policy apart from, apart entirely from the fact that it was an unconstitutional policy. It was the perfect storm. One thing about Steve's right to life. and property. I will say, Steve, I assert a right to life even when I'm in my neighbor's property, just to be clear about that. And then we also have, of course, this really interesting unfolding situation in Texas that we're going to talk about where the Supreme Court, so far, so far has refused to stay a very, very quirky abortion law in Texas that reports to ban abortions very early in pregnancy, but does not make the state the enforcer of the law. So in any news article you're reading about this that doesn't lead with that in the opening

paragraph is a badly written news article, because that's one of the really strange quirks of this law. It's not that the Supreme Court has said in any way, shape, or form that this is constitutional. I think one of the issues that we're facing is the court's trying to figure out what to do with this statute, which is drawn in a very, very quirky way. I don't know if the court, we've expressed our opinions, Sarah and I,

about whether the court will overrule row. I'm not sure that this case is going to tell us one thing or the other, and Sarah's shaking her head about that as to whether this is going to be a case that will overrule row. So everyone freaking out on Twitter and on the op-ed pages

of all the major publications, I note that many of them fail to mention the defendant problem or if they do, they brush it off and say they should just issue the stay and work it out later. Okay, that's not how this works. Yes, the Supreme Court could just stay the law and say nothing else. But they need to know why they're staying it and how they're staying it and against tomb. You have to sue against someone. And in this case, they sued against the state. So long story short, this is the Supreme Court's summer break. You know, they're out and about not hearing cases. And for the third time in as many weeks, someone has come with an emergency

to the Supreme Court. That's how the eviction moratorium got up there. That's how this is getting up there. And so people are complaining that the Supreme Court is doing this all under the quote-unquote shadow docket when they're the ones bringing the case under the shadow docket. They could wait until someone enforce this law, try to enforce this law, a private party who then sues someone who performed an abortion. That would, easily go. It wouldn't need to go to the Supreme Court. The district court would strike it down as unconstitutional under Roe and Casey. The Fifth Circuit would have to uphold the strike down under Roe and Casey and the Supreme Court would deny cert because they don't need to. But that's not why

this case is going to the Supreme Court. It's about who you can sue. It has nada to do with Roe, except that the law has gone into effect today and so people are losing their minds. But it goes exactly, Jonah, to your point of both sides using the Supreme Court as their political battering ram against the other side and leaving the Supreme Court holding the bag. So if the Supreme Court doesn't do what you want, you have someone to beat up on someone to blame and a way to raise money on it. Because now you can say, see, it's those people over there. They are the enemy. Let's go get them. And that's absolutely what the left is doing. And I think it's hilarious now to see the right

do that when they have six appointees on the court but my God, do you see it plenty as the Supreme Court doesn't do exactly what they want and no, I don't think they'll overturn row this fall when they hear the Dobbs case and we will see plenty of it then as well, including more calls for the end of legal

conservatism as we know it. Can I ask one quick question on this stuff for the legal people? So my understanding from the stuff I read up on this because I wrote my column about it is that um the assumption is is that roberts switch sides so that he could write because it's an unsigned ruling so that he could write it because the chief justice gets to write it if he's

with the majority in order to prevent cavanaugh from ripping the administration a new one for taking advantage of his generosity with his last ruling um question i so the question is like A, do you think that's true? And B, why wouldn't Justice Roberts want to, as a matter of protecting the prerogatives of the court, want to say, hey, don't play these games with us. It's not going to work out well. Do your job. And I guess C, I just, in case I can't abuse the privilege.

Justice Breyer's dissent to me was actually terrifying because he basically was. saying that let short of Congress explicitly telling the executive branch, you can't do something, the presumption is they can get away with it. They can do it. And that basically the CDC director is, is, you know, the king of the United States of America, unless Congress preemptively precluded it. This makes me very much want Republican judges on the court of this stripe going forward. Anyway, any one of those three things, if you guys could just answer for me

informationally, that would be great. I don't think Kavanaugh or Roberts have the temperament to do what you want them to do in terms of what they could have written in the opinion, you know, with some tongue wagging. Is that tail wagging? Does it make you miss Scalia? Yeah, neither of them are just a Scalia and temperament at all.

There are justices who would do it. I think it came up on an emergency basis. You don't have a lot of time to write these. we have plenty of history of unsigned opinions at the court. So I just wasn't overly, like, I don't, I think all of the shenanigans people are guessing about, probably not is my guess. Certainly not that he took it away from Kavanaugh

so that it would be less aggressive. I don't believe. I don't buy into that. I agree with that. And just, you know, to note, though, that there are justices who can be spicy on the among the GOP nominated six and I'm speaking of one Justice Alito

who has been called spicy many times on our podcast but yeah I agree with Sarah that that's not really the judicial temperament of Roberts or Kavanaugh for that matter yeah and and the Breyer opinion I mean look I mean this is this there are reasons why and Breyer And Breyer has written some opinions that I've actually kind of liked. I mean, angry cheerleader, for example, was a Breyer opinion.

But this is bad Breyer. This was bad, bad Breyer. And again, I just keep going back to putting the legal merits aside for the moment. This is just such bad policy. It is such bad policy. And look, the progressive world's got to reckon with a lot of the housing problems. It has in its own backyard. This is a big problem in some of America's most progressive areas is how difficult it is for a gainfully employed family to even live in a

community is a remarkable problem in some parts of America. And I can't think of a policy better calculated to make that worse. And by the way, it means that they are basically not taking any refugees from Afghanistan. There's all this big talk about how, like, please send them to California. And they're like, we can't. You don't have affordable housing. So, you know.

All right. That'll do us for today. Fun ending is that we are starting up a dispatch fantasy football league. So think about whose horse you want to back. Will it be David French, who only watches college football, Jonah Goldberg, who made.

may not be able to name multiple football teams. Steve Hayes, who is like the hair and the tortoise in the hair when it comes to fantasy football. I mean, a lot of talk, a lot of racing around. Or me, the tortoise, who y'all are going to underestimate and who is going to win the race. That's the question for listeners to think about. I can name most teams, by the way.

I can't name most players. I mean, I can name all the teams probably, but I can't, like, the players now. Well, that's how fantasy works, Jonah. Just pick the teams. You'll be fine. No, and she took a shot at me saying I couldn't even name the teams. I can name the teams. That much I remember.

But like the QBs, no, probably not. All right. That'll do us. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again next week. Are we not going to see David for the whole podcast? Is that the plan? I guess not. Oh, what happened to me?

Your video is not on. Oh, is it now? Hi. Yeah. Hi, David. That's better. Hi. Okay.

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