The Dispatch Podcast - Does Trump Have the Patience to Win a War?

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Kevin Williamson to discuss the Trump administration's ongoing negations with Iran, FBI Director Kash Patel's alleged excessive drinking, and Justice Clarence Thomas' recent speech at the University of Texas. The Agenda: —Is the end near? —Consequences of Trump's impatience —Bad negotiating strategy —⁠Kash Patel's drinking⁠ —⁠Investigating 2020 election fraud⁠ —⁠Justice Thomas' speech on progressivism⁠ —NWYT: ⁠Tucker Carlson's apology⁠ Dispatch Recommendations: —⁠Online Gambling Is Breaking Containment ⁠—⁠The Son Also Rises⁠ —⁠Overturning Religious Precedent⁠ —⁠The emergency docket’s mistaken birthday⁠ Show notes: —⁠John McCormack's reporting on Tucker Carlson⁠ —⁠Steve Hayes' piece on Tucker Carlson⁠ The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Dispatch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠by clicking here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Because some days call for that espresso kick. And sometimes, a smooth, silky latte just wins. It's exceptional but effortless. Like actually effortless. Simply press, brew, and explore. Nispresso, what else? Keep exploring at Nespresso.com. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss the state of the Trump administration's diplomacy with Iran, FBI director Cash Patel's alleged excessive drinking, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's recent speech at the University of Texas. I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues, Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and dispatch contributor and New York Times writer, David French. Let's dive in.

Welcome, gentlemen. I want to start with Iran. The U.S. and Iran extended the ceasefire. Iran seized two cargo ships. The Secretary of Defense fired the Secretary of the Navy. And President Trump, after saying for weeks the war was won and nearly over, told Fox News, there's, quote, no time pressure to hold new diplomatic talks with Iran and, quote, no timeline for the end of the war. David, it does not sound like the end of the end. is near? No, it doesn't sound like the end is near, and it doesn't sound like we really actually know what the end is going to look like. One of the things that we've seen over the last several days is the president just blurting out things time and time again. Sometimes they're true. Often they're not true. Sometimes about the state of the negotiations that are not true, and the reporting seems to indicate that him blurting out things is actually impacting the negotiations a great deal. I mean, part of the problem here is that you have had years and years and years of boasting from Trump that the Obama deal was the worst thing ever, that all it takes is a good negotiator to walk in

and can absolutely do something better. You had the Obama people saying for years and years, well, the best we could do is this. And if you want war, you could have war, but you're never going to do better than this. And so here we're looking at a situation where it's quite possible we end up with something like a version of the Obama deal after a war. So in a weird way, you end up with the worst of both worlds. You have the Obama deal with its downsides, and you had a war with all of its terrible downsides. And so I'm hoping that whatever emerges from this moment is better than the Obama deal for all of our sakes. I think we should be definitely rooting for something better than the Obama deal. However, they have led us into a strategic dead end at the moment. It

appears. And now, it's possible that the continued blockade of Iranian ports will put enough pressure on Iran, but the question I have is, who has a greater tolerance for pain? Is it the democracy that's accountable to the people, or is it the autocracy that massacres the people? I think the democracy has the lower tolerance for pain and the absence of an unexpected turn of events. So, it just appears to be a mess, just a giant mess at the moment. Kevin, on the other hand, taking all David's points, the Iranian military is severely degraded. We have taken out, we've really damaged their ability to produce new highly enriched uranium. We think we've made progress on their nuclear sites.

So it would be a better time for a deal, even with what David said about the difficulties of war and this confusion that we're in. Would that be an accomplishment? As I read about the diplomacy, I think the third. thing that I find difficult to understand, and I don't know whether this is because the diplomacy itself is so chaotic or because the reporting out of it is so difficult, I don't really know what the diplomatic talks are about. Where are the negotiations going? What's the goal? It's interesting to me that a thing about the straight hoar moves is that this is an international straight. It's not sovereign Iranian territory. But the way the Trump administration now talks

about it is that our goal is to get this thing open and the point of negotiations in part it least is to give to Iran what it wants in some negotiations, so later will agree to open the strait. This amounts to whatever you call it a recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, which is not something we should probably recognize. But it also raises the amusing possibility that Iran is going to be the first country to go into a war and get the crap kicked out of it on every single front that you could possibly get the crap kicked out of it and come out of it with effectively larger territory because it now essentially has sovereignty over this straight that's an important part of international shift being in the international energy industry and all

the rest of that stuff. So other than not having clearly stated war goals or a clearly stated way of achieving those unstated goals or a timeline for doing it, yeah, say things you're going right on track. Jonah, Donald Trump seems to be impatient. I mean, when you look at back at his rhetoric. This just didn't. Yeah. He's impatient about everything. But he's at least judging by his rhetoric, he's been particularly impatient about Iran and this conflict. I think, as we've discussed here, before, he thought this was likely to unfold, more or less, like Venezuela unfolded. Get the bad guys, move in, make a deal, the U.S. runs it, we take the oil.

Obviously, it hasn't happened, but is it notable that his rhetoric seems to have changed here that he has been signaling the end of this, we're moving on, we're getting this done, and now, over the past 48 hours, he seems to be signaling patience. Is there something to be read in? Or is this just like Donald Trump waking up in a different mood the next day? Well, so I think one of the things you got to remember is that whether it's, you know,

the power positive thinking or the prosperity gospel or just his own narcissistic personality disorder, he has developed an understandable conviction that he can intercept into the world the reality he wants by saying it. Right? I just feel that COVID is going to go in the spring, right? My net worth goes up when I feel good about myself. The problem with that

is, like, so when Tucker Carlson called him, there's been some reporting about this, when Tucker Carlson called him about how the Iran war would go badly or something like that, he said, no, it'll all work out. And Tucker Carlson says, well, how do you know that? And he says, because it always does, right? I mean, I think that's how Trump legitimately sees the world. And as someone who's been arguing that he is the millionth monkey banging on typewriters that produces something like Shakespeare because he's just a statistical outlier and that norm breaking doesn't hurt him as much as it has for like everybody else. It's understandable that he would think this way. The thing is that the other problem with this, especially as he's become just an old dude, is he says what he wants

to be true sometimes about his own insecurities. And it's just a real. It's just a real. really bad negotiating strategy. So, like, for years, he will say when everybody criticizes him for his language, he'll say, look, I have the best words, but he doesn't use any. He just, I have them. I could use the best words. I went to the best schools, but I don't use them, right? When he says, I'm not impatient, time is on my side, I'm not in a rush to get a deal. the Iranians hear, man, he's impatient, man, he's in a rush to get a deal. And, you know, as we've been talking about for a long time, whatever Trump may say in public about the negotiations

and about the offers that he's made or his receptivity to ending this thing and or lack thereof, the Iranians know the actual truth of because they're having the conversation. They're in the room where it happens, as it was. right? And so, like, his desire to gaslight the American public is in direct tension with his desire to negotiate a deal with the Iranians because when he talks to the American public, he sounds desperate. And there's just no way of hiding that. The one thing I will say, like, it's worth pointing out that the stuff we're seeing with the Iranian regime fracturing,

which I think there's real credibility to that. Like, it's not untrue just because the Trump administration is saying it's true. According to the original plan for regime change, that would be one of the first consequences is to get elites within the regime. That's how regime change happens, is when elites break their unity and start warring with each other and start worrying about their own hides and cutting deals to save themselves against the other factions and all that kind of stuff. So it is possible that this quote-unquote regime collapses in some significant way that makes a deal more possible. It's also possible that it collapses in some significant way that instead of dealing with a mollocracy of, you know, theocrats, we're dealing with a terrorocracy of IRGC fanatics,

or dealing with multiple spheres of power in the region, which each little warlord controlling different slices of their, you know, access to the straight of whore moves. It's just impossible to know from the outside. Yeah, David, that would certainly affect the way that you frame the sort of who has more patience, right? Right. The democracy or the autocracy. And what's interesting to me is, Jonah's right, we're reading more and more stories

about these splits and different reporting, you know, puts the splits in different places and describes the factions in different ways. But I think it seems pretty clear that there are these splits. And let's just say for the record, the moderates that they're describing are not actual moderates in this case. Right. There's no moderates to be found here, really.

Exactly. Exactly. I think it's more people who are willing, Iranian leaders who are willing to at least talk with the United States and try to come to some compromise some deal and those who are not, those who are more intransigent. But it is interesting because on the U.S. side, members of Congress, Republican members of Congress, people running for election in a little bit more than six months have been putting some quiet pressure on the Trump administration, sending messages to the White House, we've got to get this done. The president has to give us direction. We need to be able to know what to say. Republicans in Congress do not want to go out these days and blindly support this war if it doesn't appear that there's any real strategy and it doesn't appear that there's any time frame. How much does it matter that Republicans on the hill are getting more and more impatient and the Iranian leaders seem to be splintering? I mean, I hate to be a broken record on this, but I'm going to be a broken record on this. This is one of the consequences of not doing this the right way of going through Congress, getting buy-in, persuading the American people, following that constitutional process.

It's not just an eye-dodding T-cross refrigerator warranty kind of thing that you can just kind of discard and disregard. No, this is put there for a reason, and you're beginning to see the strategic weaknesses that emerge when you don't follow this process in a democratic society. and this is one of them. So you have now your own Republican representatives who are feeling very vulnerable when they go back to their own districts. And when you hear Republican representatives saying they don't want to go back to their districts, just keep in mind, these are heavily gerrymandered districts that they're often not wanting to go back to. So this is artificially created friendly territory for them. And they're facing this blowback. And I think that's incredibly significant. And, you know, look, I fully acknowledge exactly what Jonah said, which is, if you do see these,

cracks emerging, and some of these cracks can widen and eventually create real fissures that could lead to true regime change or something that looks like civil war, which I'm not sure if that would necessarily be in our interest either. I mean, the civil war in Syria was one of the more destabilizing events to our Western allies of anything that's happened in the last quarter century. So that's not necessarily in our interest. But I do recognize that there is a possibility that things could turn out better. It's possible. It's possible. But one of the things I think that we need to consider,

because Steve, you said something, or who was it that said you've kicked the crap out of the military? Oh, it's Kevin. You've kicked the crap out of the Iranian military, and they've kind of weirdly, perversely gotten bigger because they've now claved the Strait of Formos, essentially. To use that term that a lot of people have sort of thrown around restoring deterrence, one of the questions that emerges when you leave a war is,

which party, which of the parties to the conflict is the one saying, let's not do that again. They may both be saying it, but who's saying it more loudly? And I do wonder, I really do wonder, even though we absolutely showed the tactical brilliance of our military, we showed the dominance at air, dominance at least in sea combat, you saw a remarkable rescue operation. I mean, all things that show that just incredible technical proficiency and excellence in the American military. and even after all of that, at least of right now, I'm getting a distinct sense that between Iran and the United States, the party that's saying let's not restart this,

seems to be more us than Iran. And one other thing on the cracks submerging in the regime, you know, one of the things, when we've been opponents of a regime for a while, and we think about Vladimir Putin, or we think about the Ayatollah or Xi Jinping, and we sort of think of them as sort of the ultimate enemy, like that you're going to throw

the emperor down the shaft at the death star, and then everything's going to be okay, when the reality is the next people coming up, if this is the IRGC dominated state, it's probably going to be even more radical than a Mullah dominated state. And if that's what emerges, then it's been terrible for us. But, again, we don't know. And one of the problems here is we're absolutely not in charge of the outcome right now. We are not in charge of the outcome. You have a sort of effective regime change by means of factional dispute.

One of the things, particularly in this part of the world that you see is that's not typically the more liberal, moderate, humane faction that comes out on top of these things. Right. And a good example of that, do you think about Pakistan in the sort of, you know, age of Benazir Bhutto, where you had a government that wasn't very great. It was corruption problems and things like that, but it sort of had some liberal democratic tendencies. You had the ISI, the Pakistani spy agency, which operates a sort of independent parallel state.

then you had the army. And when this sort of cracked up, when, you know, they had this incredible sort of factional confrontation, what ended up being the stronger element that come to the forefront of Pakistan was the kind of Taliban-aligned element. So, you know, Pakistan is in worse shape now than it was back then in many ways. It is possible for things to get worse through regime change of this kind. And that's certainly an example.

And I think that if you're looking at countries to compare around to, maybe Pakistan's not the worst example. That's not encouraging. Yeah, I mean, like throughout the... First couple of years of the Ukraine war, so many people were talking about, well, this could cost Putin, right? It's a disaster. Russian history, military disasters or caused regime change or over the row of leaders and all this kind of stuff. And almost every single Russia expert I talked to said, yes, that's definitely possible.

The problem is the people who would replace Putin, who are lined up to replace Putin right now, are probably worse people than Putin. You know, same dynamic. Yeah, the guy's going to walk into Putin's office and shoot him in the head and declare himself president. It's going to be a worse guy than Putin. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to imagine much worse than Putin, but here we are. Yeah, but there's worse.

The counter example seems to be currently Syria, where you have a guy who cut his teeth by being a vicious jihadist. Walking into office and extending basically just vomiting olive branches in every single possible direction. That is not the norm. If you're planning for that, that's on you. That's your problem. That is getting, if it's genuine, if it's real, I mean, we'll see over time. That's getting very lucky. That's getting very lucky.

That could turn quickly. I'm not convinced. Yeah, yeah. It's certainly the way that story is gone. I'm not sure it's the way it ends. Not to inject, just rank punditry into all of this, but there's reports that the people in the administration are now saying it might be six months before the straight-of-hor moves is normal.

right? Right. And like this permanent ceasefire thing that Trump has announced, well, we'll just wait for the regime to get together. Since he said that, you know, basically the traffic through Strait of Hormuz is one day it's 10 ships, one day it's five ships, one day it's no ships. One day, I think it's gotten up to 18, I think, is the highest number, something like that. The amount of cargo that went through that thing prior to the opening of the Strait of Hormuz was 10x of all of that. And if you think, gas and fertilizer prices and all of those things are going to go down when you only have somewhere between zero and 18 ships going through the straight-door moves. It's like a virtual impossibility. And six months from now is the cusp of the midterms, right? So like I think just on the political side, that's, I mean, we always say a month is a year as an eternity and politics, but that six months of sustained $4 up gas prices is just a friggin disaster for the midterm. And that assumes that this unstable status quo thing just doesn't get worse or more chaotic. So I'm not even sure how it's sustainable.

It might be a good question, and maybe, you know, Kevin having the most Texas experience, what is the gas price that is the Talarico line? In other words, versus Cornyn versus Paxton, what is the Talarico line on gas prices? I will point out to you that I reject the premise of this question because it is the wrong question, because your most dedicated, consistent Trump voters in Texas do not buy gasoline. They have diesel trucks. That makes it worse, right? Makes it worse.

I definitely pick the right time to switch my F-250 for a Corolla. And I'm not. It's going to be 200. Wait, Kevin, there is never a time to switch an F-250 for a Corolla. And no hate on the corolla. It's just the F-250 is a magnificent vehicle. If you've ever tried to park an F-250 at my local airport or train station, you would understand why that happened.

This is why David is a backer-inner. It is possible for fuel prices to get a lot worse between now and election day. And my bet on Tala Rico in Texas is I'm pretty skeptical of his chances. I understand why the Democrats picked him and that they were trying to lean in the direction of responsibility.

I actually think Crockett was a stronger candidate in a lot of ways, more a candidate of this kind of moment. Tala Rico is this very, very sort of boring, flavorless kind of character. And plus he brings out, you know what Tala Rico is?

he's kind of a left-wing David French in the sense that the things about him that are actually not things I agree with that are good and admirable or things that people kind of hate the most about him. So, you know, his religious sensibility, I think. I was wondering where you were going with that.

This kind of liberal Presbyterianism is not, you know, it's not my way of looking at the religious world, but I think in his case it's genuine and it really bothers people and particularly people who have more kind of, you know, robust evangelical commitments. If he had been more of a kind of normal, consistent, secular Democrat, rather than being

a kind of a liberal evangelical type, I think that actually might have helped him a little bit because it takes the issue off the table a little bit. But there's this irritating thing about him that's always sort of right there front and center for people who are prone to be irritated by it. And this is a whole David French thing again. But I think that that's not a great place for him. Whereas Crockett was a social media bomb thrower and probably would have been throwing bombs on social media in an ineffective kind of way, I think, in this race. very tempted to just trash the rest of the show and talk about James Taylorico as a left-wing David French. But we should move on. I want to spend a moment on the news this week about Cash

Patel, our esteemed FBI director. There have been many, many stories written about Cash Patel over the past several days, triggered, I think, by a report in The Atlantic by Sarah Fitzpatrick about Cash Patel's sort of drinking and wild lifestyle. He is known to drink to excess at the poodle room in Las Vegas. She reports where he frequently spends part of his weekends. Who among us? Really? Drinks at Neds.

This is a private club in Washington, D.C. And then I want to read a paragraph from this story that I found jarring. On multiple occasions in the last year, members of his security detail had difficulty, waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supply to the Justice Department and White House officials. A request for, quote, breaching equipment, normally used by SWAT and hostage rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings, was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Jonah, you're often extraordinarily intoxicated and we need breaching equipment. Unreachable. And yet you perform at such a high level anyways. It's pretty amazing what he's been able to do. Your reaction to that story and there have been multiple stories, there's a New York Times story that the FBI was investigating a New York Times reporter because she had done reporting back in February about the services that the FBI was giving Kaspetel's girlfriend. friend, sort of one story after another about Calfa Tell, your reaction. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of there's an old joke from the Senate in the 1980s, 1990s, that staffers who would answer the phone and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's office in the afternoon

would say, I'm sorry, the senator can't come to the phone right now. He's on the floor. I, for the record, love Moynihan, but you like this midday wine. So I find all of this unbelievably unsurprising for an FBI director. I mean, like, I find unsurprising, we use this all the time, surprising but not shocking or shocking but not surprising, whatever. Like, it's shocking to have an FBI director who, if reports are to be believed, is a irresponsible drinker who also goes to Vegas. My one criticism of this entire reporting is that my understanding is that right after it never plagiarize and never reveal a source, what happens? in the poodle room is supposed to stay in the poodle room. But I think Cash Patel, I mean, there was this

whole sort of cottage industry of trying to figure out who the most unqualified, most irresponsible appointee at the beginning of the Trump administration was. And I just think if you do the X and y axis of like possible harm to unqualified, you know, that nexus, RFK still wins. But Patel is way up there, right? Oh, man. And the third. fact that he's using this private jet, you know, this government jet to go to see his wife, his girlfriend performed, all of this kind of stuff is just a sign of how, I don't mean corrupt in terms of, there's real corruption, but I just mean sort of ethically compromised and self-serving so many of the people in this administration are. And I suspect that Trump would

be tempted to fire Patel, except it's really hard to find new FBI directors and he loves having a completely irresponsible loyalist in that position. But Trump doesn't like drinkers, and he doesn't like people who create headlines that embarrass him. And Patel is, let's just say, he violates both of those norms. David, I mean, we joke about this. The story was, in some ways, so shocking it was funny. He's the FBI director.

They are very serious. During a war. And a war. Yeah. I mean, the threats against the homeland are up. We've got, you know, investigations. counterterrorism investigations, taking place around the world with FBI agents.

He's supposed to be running this, or at least monitoring this. I mean, there are very serious national security implications for what he's alleged to have been doing. Oh, for sure. And by the way, doesn't the reporting cast in a different light

his little journey into the men's hockey team, locker room? I mean, that was out of control behavior that you were watching when he was running into the men's hockey team, a locker room, like he belonged there as FBI director to celebrate with them. Very strange. It was like giving off this kind of energy, you know, you've kind of maybe felt at a corporate retreat or something where like, what's going on with Doug over there? Like, is he had a little too much?

Thank you for saying Doug. But one thing that I think is important to sort of think through is look at the this, look at Cash Patel in context. So, Joan was talking about RFK Jr. Crazy story after crazy story. We just had a Labor Secretary go away. We've had our Homeland Security, Attorney General, all of them with wild controversies and often in stories of really erratic and often just very personally corrupt behavior. And, you know, for a long time, I would talk to some of my more mag of friends and I would talk about that kind of the constellation of clowns that orbit at Donald Trump. And the argument again and again was, no, these people are fine. They just know what it

takes to sort of suck up to the king. And so, you know, he's still surrounding himself with good people who just have, they play the game. Well, might I suggest to you if part of the game is doing children's books about like King Donald, the game is gone awry. I mean, and what you're doing is you're actually betraying something about yourself. that how much you're willing to already be debased to be in that position or to be in orbit around the king. And we have not replaced. These guys walk around strutting all day long that they have replaced DEI and wokeism. Well, whatever they have replaced, they have not replaced it with a meritocracy by any stretch. So they're doing probably the one thing that would be most guaranteed to

restore DEI in that regime, oddly enough, and that is replace it with something worse, replace it with something even less beneficial to the public good than, say, race-based affirmative action. Instead, it's sycophancy-based affirmative action, which was, by the way, often the norm and institutions, you know, before the modern era. So people are kind of getting a glimpse of what the before or before times were like, the, you know, pre-civil rights era, all of this, where it was all about who did you know, who was your relationship, who were you, it was not some sort of golden era of meritocracy in America before those days. And we're kind of getting a glimpse of that right now. But nothing about this should surprise anyone.

Cash Patel was radiating these signals before he got into office. Yeah, I mean, he was sort of Devin Nunes's sidekick on the Devin Nunes. Pondez podcast. He was the Ed McMahon to Devin Nunes Johnny Carson. How dare you compare? Use those names. Hey-oh. Those are great names in American history, Steve. How dare you? That was the highlight of Devin Nunes' career, such as it was before this. You know, what's been interesting to me is after this story broke in the Atlantic on Friday night, and then there were, again, several sort of follow-up stories in rapid succession. Usually somebody in Cash Patel's position would respond to a story like this.

It had the Atlantic story. It had lots of details, lots of sources. By hunkering down, hoping to weather the storm. That was not Cash Patel's reaction. He filed a lawsuit, $250 million against the Atlantic, against Sarah Fitzpatrick. He's done this before. They haven't been successful. And then he went on Maria Bartaromo's Sunday morning show to give an interview.

And I want to read part of their exchange because I find it so fascinating and telling potentially about what's to come. She asks Cash Patel from sort of Donald Trump's position about investigations that the FBI is doing into the people who supposedly stole the 2020 election. Dangerous territory, I would say, for Fox News to be doing this, $800 million later, but she did it anyway. So she asked him about this. and he responds, we've got all the information we need. We're working with our prosecutors at the DOJ under acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and we're going to be making arrests. It's coming, and I promise you it's coming soon.

Maria Bartaromo is skeptical. She's heard this before, so she pushes back, and she says, whether or not you have any information to verify what President Trump says all the time, which is the election was rigged, that's what I asked you, Cash. and he says, we have the information that backs President Trump's claims, but because it's an ongoing prosecution investigation, I can't get ahead of the DOJ and the president. So here's Cash Patel, in my view,

going out and giving an interview to save his job by giving the president what he wants. Is there any other way to look at this, Kevin? Well, yeah, there's electoral way to look at it, I think. You know, you've got Patel out there essentially trying to revive of the little QAnon energy. You know, the storm is coming. We're going to go out there and arrest a whole lot of people and expose his fraud. You've got J.D. Vance making weird comments about pizza and talks and stuff. I'm sort of touching on another conspiracy theory, some weird things. So that's kind of how I read it. I mean, I have to assume that Patel feels like he's on the ropes because he is embarrassing the Trump administration. It's really hard to embarrass the Trump administration, which goes out and hires people like Cash Patel and then gets embarrassed by them. But it is possible to embarrass the Trump administration. They love to sue, you know, media outlets, of course. And, you know, suing the Atlantic is,

I'm all in favor of suing the Atlantic because I once signed something that says I wasn't allowed to sue the Atlantic. So I'm glad someone's out there doing it. But no, in all fairness, I don't think that they make stuff up over there. And I think that Patel, if this thing ever goes to the court, which, of course, it probably never will, would not enjoy the discovery process very much. And it would go probably pretty badly for him.

You know, there are better places to drink in Vegas in the Poodle Room, incidentally. Just that's a real touristy kind. It's a rich guy touristy thing to do. I don't know about that. There are better places to drink in D.C. than the net, too. But my Vegas references are like 20 years old. Like Mandalay Bay was the fancy thing when I was there last. And I think that's probably no longer the big place to go.

We have to remember you're talking to someone who actually moved to Las Vegas in part because he thought he was drinking too much in New York where it's really easy to walk to a bar. And it's much harder to walk to the bar in Las Vegas. You can get ubered around, that sort of thing. So first person in the world ever moved to Vegas to drink less. But it kind of worked. And yeah, I don't think Patel is very long. for this position. Although in terms of people who are, like, you know, super embarrassing,

it's, it is funny what presses the administration's internal buttons and what doesn't. Like, you know, you'd think that Bobby Kennedy would have been sort of top of the list because he's been really embarrassing in office. But I guess he hasn't been embarrassing in a way that's imposing a lot of political costs on the administration. Whereas maybe Patel is, I think that there are some people out there in the kind of broader, you know, Republican coalition who still take things like the FBI seriously? And also, like, I mean, who wants the FBI guy at the party anyway? I mean, you're not. drinking at the, you know, poodle room. Do you really want the feds in the house? It's just

I would say also one thing. Like, I don't think the lawsuit against the Atlantic, sorry, Kev, is going to go very far. But like, Cash Patel is one of these guys who used to top five people to bitch and moan about the deep state, right? That was one of his main things. And as we've all written, read and talked about before, the deep state is a very promiscuous term and elastic term that can mean some real things. It can also be a complete conspiracy theory, BS nonsense term. There are people at the, I just know this from actually talking to people, right? Like, there are people at the FBI, there are still sort of like in Game of Thrones, the North remembers. There are still people at the FBI who remember, who like the old reputation of incorruptible, untouchable,

just the facts by the book, Serious People. Led by Jay and Uber. address. Yeah, the dress thing was a lie, by the way. We can debate that another time. It was a good story. Yeah, it was one of the perfect examples of too good not to print. But the point is that they liked that reputation, right? They cultivated that as an institutional thing. Some of those people have to be pissed that friends of theirs were fired simply because they were following the letter of the law and doing what their supervisors told them. And now you have the acting attorney general saying recently that bragging at CPAC, which is outrageous that he was even attending Seaback saying, you know, the fact that every single person who worked on those

investigations and everybody from January 6th was pardoned is proof that Trump protects his base and cares for his base is so friggin outrageous. And for some of those, including very hardcore conservative FBI guys, they just got to be so mortified and so pissed about it. The amount of leaking that will happen about Patel's behavior is inevitable, right? And so like this stuff is just going to come out. and they're going to relish doing it, and Patel is going to go on which hunt's trying to find it, and he's going to find out.

It's like everybody, because everybody hates him. These send your news tips to Kevin at the dispatch.com. But, Jonah, you raise a great point, that there are in all of these institutions, not just in the FBI, but in the military also, in the DOJ, there are a lot of people who are right now furious because what has happened is they've seen colleagues fired, lose their jobs, be demoted, etc., punished in some way for really nothing other than doing

what their prior bosses asked them to do. Right. That's it. And they are now losing their jobs. They're being fired. And so they're looking at this world where, wait a minute, if I do what my current bosses say, does that mean that the next team is going to fire me when I just did what my bosses asked me to do? In other words, performing exactly the role we ask of civil servants to be lawful tools of the elected government, is that now creating job insecurity. Right. I mean, we're moving towards a system where it's becoming almost like a de facto spoil system. And so what happens next?

Does the Democratic president walk in and say, well, the permanent bureaucracy was cleaned out and replaced with maga loyalists? Well, now I got to clean out the maga loyalists. Well, then we're on this cycle all over again. I mean, we are breaking things, and I think this is really important for people to understand, we are breaking things that you just can't fix with the next election. Yeah. And that's not even counting national security.

People do care about the reputations of their agencies, especially if they've given, you know, 25 or 30 years of their lives. Yeah. During the lowest learner stuff at the IRS, I talked to a guy over the IRS, who was sort of an IRS lifer. And he was like, look, nobody likes us. Like, no one likes us, thank you for your service for working for the IRS. and it's not like being at the EPA where there's like, are you doing something that people think's important to the world or whatever? Everyone hates us anyway.

The one thing we had was our reputation that we did our job and we did our job in a good way. And now we don't have that anymore either. Surely didn't get into it for the money. Not getting into it with a love. You don't go to a dinner party and say, I work for the IRS. You know, people just like walk away from you and don't. But he cared about, you know, what his agency was, how it was perceived in the world and that was perceived as being professional and competent and good at its job.

And it's got to be 10 times that sort of dynamic. military institutions and particularly at the FBI and places like that. Yeah. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. This episode is brought to you by Tell us Online Security. Oh, tax season is the worst. You mean hack season?

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You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. Before we wrap up, I want to spend a few minutes on what I thought was an extraordinary speech by Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court Justice, at the University of Texas Civitas Institute last week. He gave a long speech about the Declaration of Independence tied to America's 250th. And I found this speech extraordinary for a number of reasons and very compelling. He talked about the declaration and quoted the lines that were all familiar. with, but said that his favorite line of the declaration was the last line. And it reads, and for the support of this declaration, with a firm alliance on the protection of divine

providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. It was also my favorite line, I think the most compelling line of the declaration, and then talked about how easy it is to use words that means something. And I'm much harder it is to be devoted to seeing those words put into action. And I thought it was a really extraordinary message. Then the speech took a turn, sort of in the middle, and he focused on the ways in which the United States and those who have led it have moved away from the principles of the declaration. He talked specifically about progressivism. David, I wanted to just get your impression generally of the speech. And there's been some debate about whether it's appropriate for

a Supreme Court justice to give such a speech? Well, you know, we talked about this on advisory opinions, and a point that I made is... Advisory opinions for people who don't know, it's just a legal podcast, sort of niche legal podcast. Yeah, our little niche legal podcast. Yeah, yeah, very highly bespoke audience. And so we are, we're talking about this, and the coverage of it was coverage as if he was talking about progressivism like, say, somebody who votes for Bernie Sanders would describe themselves. Like, I'm for single-payer health care or no. That is not what this was about.

This was about Woodrow Wilson-era progressivism. And I know Jonah has cornered the market on the Urukai theme at the mention of Woodrow Wilson. But he's talking about a specific ideological movement in the same way that you would talk about liberalism, small-level liberalism, is different from calling someone a liberal versus a conservative politically. And so he's talking about this concept, an ideological concept of progressivism. He's not talking about left-of-center people in the U.S. right now. That's not what he's talking about. So I think that was a lot of the confusion. And look, I thought it was an interesting,

very interesting speech. And on America's 250th, I actually like to see some of our leading public figures thinking through the philosophical basis of the American experiment. I think I like it. We just went through, think about how much better this conversation is. We just talked about the poodle room and maybe somebody's too drunk to be woken up unless they've got like a battering ram at the door. Now we're talking about an intelligent speech by a public figure talking about big ideas. And I'm sorry, that's great. Let's have that conversation and debate the ideas and debate, But as far as is it acceptable for him to do this, 100% yes, absolutely. It's absolutely acceptable.

And in fact, I would like to hear Elena Kagan thinking through some of the philosophical bases of the founding. I would like to hear it from Justice Jackson. I mean, I would like to hear it from Gorsuch. He's got a book coming out that's going to be dealing with some of the themes of the 250th. So I'm very interested. I'd like to hear these things. This is what it looks like to me when you have a functioning branch of government with thoughtful people. They give thought-provoking speeches about big ideas and great.

Let's have more of it. Kevin, I mean, I was reminded watching the criticisms or the backlash about Justice Thomas's speech of the criticism from conservatives about Hamilton. And my view is basically the same as David's. If we are having a national discussion about the principles of the founding, even if I, you know, I could pick nits about Hamilton and the way things were portrayed. This is great. Like, my kids can all sing songs about the things that led to the founding. Now, they also sing songs about some made-up romance in Hamilton, but this is a good thing for

everybody. Shouldn't we want people, justices, elected officials to be giving speeches like this so that they're engaging these ideas? And we can have a debate about whether we've strayed too far from the founding, as Justice Thomas argues. Yeah, let me give my impersonation of 80% of the response to this speech. Progressives only believe in nice things. I mean, that was basically what everyone said.

He's out there talking about Wilson and Dewey, and he goes from the Harry Joppa speech to the Jonah Goldberg speech there in the last third of it, or he's hidden on some themes that are very much associated with our friend and colleague here. And I thought it was an extraordinary speech. I've argued for a long time that, you know, Clarence Thomas is, if not the most important and consequential public person in American life in his lifetime, certainly in the top three or four. I think he's just an enormously consequential figure we'll be talking about and analyzing 100 years from now. There are a couple lines in the speech that really jumped out at me, particularly when he was talking about growing up in Georgia in the conditions he did where he says, I won't get the quotation exactly right. He said,

people could treat us unequally, but they didn't have the divine power to make it so. And that's hidden in the Declaration of Independence, which I thought was just enormously well put. And there's this wonderful kind of, you know, patriotic, inspiring story in his life where he's talking about sitting with his grandparents, that kitchen table in 195 where they tell him and his brother that we're taking over your lives at since they're going to be the ones who raise you. And he goes from that table in 1955. But the Supreme Court, it's a pretty good American story. Not a lot of people have stories like that. Not a lot of countries have conditions where stories like that happen. And Thomas, given any other set of politics, you know, if Thomas has sort of conventional liberal politics, conventional liberal jurisprudence, here I mean liberal in the sense that we almost never use it, but, you know, kind of progressive Democratic Party aligned, he would be, they would be putting him on Mount Rushmore.

I mean, he is such a great inspiring American figure, but he has a different sort of politics and an unsparing way of talking, I think, too, which doesn't necessarily win him a lot of friends, although I love it and it makes me happy to hear it every time. he does it. So I think that everyone should read this speech, watch this speech, talk about this speech. I think it's good for the country. And of course, it's appropriate for a Supreme Court Justice to give a talk like this. I think it would be sort of inappropriate for him not to. You know, he's sitting on top of this really useful and inspiring and worthwhile and illuminating body of knowledge and personal experience and history that he's been a part of it. You absolutely should share with the country. Although I think if UT is going to be naming institutes in Latin, we should pronounce them in Latin, so it's the Kiwitas, civitas, but...

Thank you for the correction. I appreciate that. Like those Latin pieces, because it just sounds so much less, and so much less tough, you know, when Julius Caesar says, whiningly to wiki. True, so true. You pronounce in Italian, it sounds cool. I want to play a clip, Jonah, about, I, like Kevin, heard echoes of liberal fascism in the speech. There's also a lot of suicide of the West in there, too. But anyway, because I listened to the whole thing this morning.

No tyranny of cliches. No tyranny of. You're very underrated second book? The most underrated second book. Yes. If we can play a clip of Justice Thomas on progressivism. Progressivism was not native to America. Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck's Germany,

whose state-centric society they admire. Progressives like Wilson argued that America needed to leave behind the principles of the founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated system of relatively unimpeded state power nearly perfected. He acknowledged that it was a foreign science speaking very little of the language of English or American principle. which offers none but what are to our minds alien ideas. He thus described America still stuck with its original system of government as, quote, slow to see the superiority of the European system. Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement, with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries,

on the eve of the Civil War to openly oppose the principles of the declaration. Jonah, as David says, that's not whining about Bernie Sanders' lefty stuff. That's a profound point about the drift from the principles of the American founding that we saw in the progressives. You have spent some time writing about this, talking about this.

Yeah, so Thomas is absolutely right. You know, I mean, he shorthands a bunch of stuff, but it's a speech for a general audience. And it's still very highbrow. So, you know, I could beep-bop and scat on all sorts of things here. And he's right. You know, people really just don't understand how much Germany, which was, got to remember, at the end of the 19th century, Germany was considered far more intellectually advanced and serious

than the United States of America was. And if you go and when you look at, say, the first people to get, you know, Woodrow Wilson's the first president with the Ph.D. He goes to Johns Hopkins, which is the first major. research university model on the German model. You look at the founders of the American Economic Association. Just hundreds of people who trained in Germany, learned in Germany, came to the United States with this idea that sort of married, you know, Darwin, not that much Marx, but married these ideas of that relativity and what, you know, in the scholarship we would call

historicism. And Wilson is the guy who encapsulates this stuff by being the first president of United States to actually openly campaign against the Bill of Rights and the founding to say that they're holding us back. He says they need to be there that they're two Newtonian. Checks and balances is stupid. We need to be, I have a Darwinian system. I mean, I can get into all this all day long, but it suffice it to say strong agree with Clarence Thomas, where I think a lot of people, I'm thinking about writing of this. So if I repeat myself in the Friday G file, that's the price you have to pay. I think a lot of people are missing bigger point here. This isn't just owning the Libs or the Prague or whatever.

When Clarence Thomas talks about the disdain European intellectuals had for the Lachian arrangements that we have here of a mixed regime and that we're the first, really only country to have checks and balances in a system that is driven around the sanctity of natural rights, which he gets, a lot of this stuff is hardcore Harry Jaffa stuff. But Harry Jaffa... Harry Jaffa was a major intellectual. He was Estraussian. He was basically the founder of Claremont McKenna before Claremont McKenna, got into all sorts of craziness.

And he's one of the guys read a wonderful book. Everybody agrees is a wonderful book. Crisis of a House divided, where he basically makes the case, as David often will say on A.O. That the Declaration of Independence is sort of the mission statement

of the United States and the Constitution's the user manual, right? And so that's why you have that. Once you read that book, you can't see it any other way. Like a reframing book. And Thomas sees the Constitution in that light.

And this is like the culmination of 40 years of his thinking about all this. You know, there's this thing going on on the right right now that seems to have missed gone by over everybody's heads in the conversation about this, when he's talking about not giving up on the Lachian framework of this country, who the hell is he owning if not the post-liberal Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneene those guys are the ones who want to embrace an older European model of governance. They're the ones who are rejecting the Enlightenment principles that Clarence Thomas is out there standing

for. And the, I mean, I get why, you know, people that daily beast for Christ's sake, took the bait and thought this was all about owning the libs. But like I want to see, where's the deafening silence from the first things crowd, from the anti-liberal, post-liberal, neo-monarchist, all of these incredibly stupid, pernicious, anti-American ideologies that are all overplace on the right. These guys are all like, oh, Clarence Thomas went up to progressives, isn't that great? Or they're just not saying anything at all when he is offering just a massive indictment. And if you read some of the stuff

he talks about having courage, I think he's talking, you know, like it complies to lots of people in different contexts and different people can think, oh, is he talking about me and all the kinds of stuff? I think he's talking about a lot of people who gave up on all these principles, the Fox News crowd, and all the rest, or at least they should hear it

that way. The one place where I'm going to disagree with them, at least for now, is I love the sacred honor, you know, our mutual pledge, or lies, or fortunes. That's all great. That's wonderful stuff. That's the crap. You say when you're launching a violent revolution. It is not the crap you say when you disagree about a piece of legislation or a court case. True. And he constantly mixes this metaphor where he

takes, talking about you need the courage to fight for your life to uphold these principles in American domestic politics. And I believe you should have courage and you should fight for him, but it's a different kind of courage. And I think he makes a mistake talking. And I think he makes a mistake talking about it the same way. I forgive it because a lot of it is poetic license, but I just think it's worth pointing out. Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't hear it that way. I heard him praising the framers, the signers, for having that level of commitment and lamenting the fact that so many people in modern politics don't share that level of commitment. I didn't hear him saying, you know, so pick up arms and let's...

No, I don't think he's... I'm not saying he was inciting violence or anything, But if you actually, some of those sentences, I think were a little ambiguous. And if I were like a January 6 guy, I could be like, I'm not saying, and again, I'm not saying that, Daniel Thomas deliberately is trying to inspire those people. His wife was. But I think that there was more nuance needed on some of those points. Yeah, I think the way he engages the Declaration of Independence, and he said this in the speech and some other contexts, I think, too, is that he's either not so much as a expression of a list

to philosophical principles, but the encapsulation of a way of life. And I think that's, you know, why he talks about it in that particular kind of way. So he wants to take this sort of, you know, the courage and virtue that's expressed at the beginning of the revolution, which, of course, is a violent, you know, military conflict and a violent, well, revolutions are violent by nature. And say we can extract out of that, you know, certain virtues, including the courage to live as a citizen in a certain kind of way. You know, I'm so glad you said that about the post-liberals on the right, on it because the speech really reminded me of the George Will book written a couple of years ago, of essentially arguing the essential goal of conservatism is to preserve the founding. It's to

conserve the American founding. And I took that speech in that spirit and where are the threats to the American founding? Well, absolutely from the sort of far left, like the critical theory left, a lot of critical theory, you know, is taking on and attacking the liberal founding and the liberal foundation of American government. But he's also, when he's talking about, John Locke is a trigger name. He is a trigger name for the post-liberal right. I mean, whether you're talking about sort of the Catholic integralist right, which I think is now having a real crisis, is there's a President Pope fight, or you're talking about the theonomous, like the Doug Wilson, Protestant, Christian nationalist. You know, Locke is a trigger word. This is not what they're about at all.

So this was a speech really truly in sort of the great mainstream of American legal and political philosophy against the fringe. And if you're progressive and you're upset at this, I mean, you're associating yourself with Wilsonian progressivism. And I'm not sure you want to do that because this is the dude that resegregated the federal government. This is the dude who threw hundreds of his political opponents in jail. this is a guy who for the life of me, the more I learn about him, the more I'm just genuinely stumped as to why my entire life I was taught he was one of our great presidents, which I just don't get it. And also we should point out that some of the new nationalist guys have openly sort of said

maybe we need to reembrace Woodrow Wilson in the last few years. Like, it's one thing to embrace Woodrow Wilson when all you've heard, like David's talking about, is the myths about Woodrow Wilson and the misunderstandings about, you know, the print the legend version of Woodrow Wilson that endured for so long. It's another thing after 15 years of revisionism about Wilson, which I was a big part of, I'm proud to say, about his racism, his support for eugenics, his antipathy towards democracy,

he's antipathy towards the Bill of Rights and say, hey, we'd make a second look at this guy, right? I mean, like, that's... Eugenics reconsidered. Tell me more. You know, like, that's a weird thing. It is weird. Before we take an ad break,

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for in-demand fields like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. So I want to, before we move to not worth your time, get from each of you a recommendation of something that you have read in the dispatch. Could be last week, could be recently. Go back further if you like. David, do you have a recommendation for us? Well, I'm going to, I'm just going to be kind of harping on something I've been harping on for a bit, and that is gambling. I wrote a piece recently about sports.

gambling at the times. I debated Chris Christie about it. And so I'm going to point to Charles Layman's piece, online gambling is breaking containment. I really think we're at a moment where this is one of those things. It's one of these sort of emerging, I'm not going to say 80, 20, but it's emerging 6040, 70, 30 kind of issue where the real world result of all of this online gambling is really impacting American families. There's a real increase in demand to do something about this. And I thought the piece was great. I thought it was timed in the right time. There is just, there is a building movement that says, like, we are making vice way too easy for people. And we're making virtue harder. And so that's a bad combo. That is a bad combo in this country. And so I would

urge folks to read that piece. Kevin? Well, that was my choice as well. So I guess if I I have number two that was a very, very fun read. It's Catojillo on Don Jr. The move toward dynamic politics. I've been writing about gambling for a long time. Do you? And I think it's just absolutely pernicious in all sorts of ways. But including aesthetically, you know, if, again, I'll say this is the one who lived in

Vegas for a while. If casinos actually were like James Bond movies, guys in dinner jackets playing back rat and things like that, I'd have a whole different feel about it. But it's guys on their phones. You know, I live in a college town and I spent a lot of time with, you know, undergraduate age men, you know, and talked to at the gem and stuff like that. And just the prevalence of gambling in their lives is that gambling and weed, two things that I spend a lot of my life working to liberalized attitudes toward and that

the, you know, consequences of wins have been worse than expected. 52% of 19 to 44-year-old men have an online sports gambling account. 52%. That is, and 31% of all online sports betters have had someone talked to them in their life to say, you're doing too much, dude. Yeah. I mean, that's wild. And compare that to the community who have IRAs

for something like heterosexual. We are on the front end of those problems, for sure. Jonah. So I'm doing this for two reasons. One, on the merits. When the New York Times came out with its expose about the conspiracy that led to the secret dark partisan origins of the emergency docket,

I was just like, you know, I am not even going to read this until the episode of A.O. comes out explaining their take on it. And then I'll go back and look at it because I just, I don't think, you know, it's an ironic thing because David also works at the New York Times. And so I will be gentle about this. But I just was so deeply suspicious to paragraphs saying, I was like, eh, I'll hold off. And the AO discussion of it was exceedingly useful contextualizing. David valiantly, you know, tried to defend his paymasters a couple times, and that was fine. But the other reason I'm bringing this up is I thought it would provide me was something of a segue to congratulate our friend and colleague, Sarah Isger, host of A.O. Who debuted at number five on the New York Times bestseller list this week, and we are all very happy for it. Very proud of Sarah. As I said in my note to her, after we heard the news, now Jonah will start making fun of you for only having had one New York. The New York Times best side, because that's his favorite thing to do to me.

There was also a very good SCOTUS blog post pushing back on the New York Times reporting. From a professor of Bradley, I'm scrambling to look it up here. We will put that also in the show notes. My recommendation is, I think, for the second week in row, the morning dispatch had a terrific report out Thursday morning on the economic fallout from the Strait of Hormuz closure. and what that might mean in the near future. We'll put all of those in the show notes. And finally, today, not worth your time. We need to go back, I think, to our old friend,

your old friend, Jonah. Tucker Carlson. Tucker was never my old friend. Tucker Carlson had an epiphany this week, it seems. He put out a video discussion with his brother Buckley Carlson. in which he apologized for his role in making Donald Trump the president, Tucker said, I do think it's like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences,

which I thought was news that Tucker still thinks he has a conscience. He says, you know, we'll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say, I'm sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional. He goes on to say, it's not enough to say, well, I changed my mind or like, oh, this is bad, I'm out. It's like in very small ways, but in real ways, you and me and millions of people like us for the reason this is happening right now.

Jonah, what do you think of your old friend wrestling with his conscience in such a public way? Yeah, you're going to have to stop with that. You're friends, you've described him that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough. Yeah, I like that. You're going to have to stop that. a very subtle. Okay. So I think the bovine excrement particulate content is very high on all of this. And I don't think that we have time and a not worth your time segment for me to get into all the reasons why I think that.

But whenever I hear this, right, first of all, this whole idea that Trump, you know, it's changed or betrayed MAGA and there are smart versions of it and there are very dumb versions of it, they're still all wrong, right? I mean, this is the same president we've seen for, you know, a decade now, the same guy we've seen for a decade. In 2015 and 2016, when David, Kevin and I in particular were like saying this guy's character is obviously flawed and this will end badly no matter what. What do you mean David, Kevin and you in particular? Where was I? That's a great question. Where were you? Trump is, who are you, Sarah Longwell?

What are you, Sarah Longwell? Well, when Trump was attacking me from the stage, man. When David, Kevin, and I pledged our mutual honor and our fortunes, our fortunes such as they are. Yes. Our piggy bank. You keep calling my old friend. You're going to get this kind of treatment.

And so anyway, like, the argument was, you know, before anything else was his character, right? And like, and his character is not such that everything he ever does is always wrong or always bad, but his character is such that he's unreliable. he is self-interested. He is a deeply flawed human being in ways that exceed normal parameters. And to me, when I hear people say, oh, this is a betrayal, it is like saying, I love this bowl in a China shop that for a decade has smashed and destroyed things and dumped on the floor.

But, whoa, not that vase. You know, you can't break that. You know, when we knew that when he was saying, how he was like grabbed women by their privates or take the oil or a thousand. Like, it's not even a foreign policy argument from Tucker. It's about Israel because he was fine with the Venezuela stuff, right? Marjor Taylor Green was fine with the Venezuela stuff. Megan Kelly was fine with the Venezuela stuff.

Fine with bullying NATO allies to take Greenland. The only thing that upsets them is that, my God, we might have done something to help the Jews. And for that to cause a crisis of conscience, tells you more about the dude's conscience than it tells you about the seriousness of his arguments. David, go ahead. There's real IRGC turning on the Ayatola vibes here. Like that, this is not, oh, Tucker is seeing the light. This is the kind of thing where you're talking about the right being shanked by the further right.

Like if you're talking about somebody hard right turning on Putin or the IRGC turning on the Ayatola, which is why I am looking at a lot of this commentary, the sort of I'm beginning to see the glimmers, you know, of the strange new respect phenomenon. And it's exactly what Jonah was saying. This strange new respect, they've broken with Trump. Not because of the violence. Yeah. I mean, I honestly think that they'd stick with Trump

if he bombed Ukraine. Right, sure. These guys hate Ukraine, many of them. And so it's not the violence of it all. It really is. I mean, it's the Israel of it all. And you just don't give credit to that kind of mindset. Kevin?

Tucker wrestled his conscience. Tucker won. You know, I used to be a pretty good wrestler. I had one undefeated season in high school. I think I had 11 consecutive pins or something like that, and I wrestle my three-year-old in the evening sometimes, and that's Tucker wrestling his conscience. Conscience does not have much of a chance.

If conscience is going to win, you have to let conscience win. That's how that works out. Yeah, I don't think there's anything. else to say about that? I don't think there's any danger of being swept away by conscience. But even when he's like, and this is what, I will say this about this, he's one of these people who can't actually apologize. So he, I apologize for this, but I didn't mean to do it. I wasn't aware I was doing it at the time. So there's no real culpability for me at it. So I'm saying the word apology while exonerating myself from actually being morally culpable or any way for

the things that I've done and said. And I hate that kind of apology. God knows I've made many of those apologies in my life, and I apologize for those apologies. I regret them. I'm sorry you feel that way. Yes, I'm sorry you feel that. I didn't know it would hurt you feeling so much when I punched him in the face. Yeah, she's just the worst. I won't go on. David was talking about broken records earlier and talking about obsolete technological references will stop talking about broken records one of these days, but we can talk about, you know, dispatch audio story reader going, hey, wire and people will get the reference sometimes. But Tucker, to be a broken record on the subject, she just said,

a mystery to me. Like, I understand people who do things for certain kinds of reasons. Like, I understand people who sell out just for financial reasons and stuff like that. Like, there are people out in sort of Trump's world who are clearly just doing it for the money. That's not honorable, but I get it. Tucker is doing something else. I don't think it's just about money. I don't think it's even just about being famous and trying to stay relevant to the conversation and all that and being in people's heads. There's something else going on with this guy. And I do not know what it is. I don't know him as well as his good friend, Jonah. used to hang out with him a lot. But I didn't know him a little bit. And I never saw any glimmer of

this particular kind of madness in him. But then again, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't, as intimately acquainted with him, Jonah Goldberg. Well, without thinking that we've provided the answer to your question or solved the mystery that you mentioned, Kevin, we will also post John McCormick's very fine piece about Tucker Carlson, profile about Tucker Carlson. And my much less fine review of Jason Sangarly's book about Tucker Carlson. We will include those in the show notes. Thank you all for joining today. This was a fun discussion, and we will see you again next time. And finally, if you like what we're doing here, you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And as always, if you've got questions,

comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from old friends of Tucker Carlson. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey and Peter Bonavich. Thanks again for listening.

Please join us next time.